****/**** Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Fantasia Festival ’24: Kryptic; The Beast Within; Vulcanizadora; Animalia Paradoxa

July 30, 2024****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Chile, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller, UK, Werewolf

KRYPTIC
*½/****
starring Chloe Pirrie, Jeff Gladstone, Jason Deline, Ali Rusu-Tahir
written by Paul Bromley
directed by Kourtney Roy

THE BEAST WITHIN
*/****
starring James Cosmo, Ashleigh Cummings, Kit Harington, Caoilinn Springall
written by Greer Ellison & Alexander J. Farrell
directed by Alexander J. Farrell

VULCANIZADORA
***½/****
starring Melissa Blanchard, Joshua Burge, Joel Potrykus, Solo Potrykus
written and directed by Joel Potrykus

ANIMALIA PARADOXA
****/****
starring Andrea Gomez, Daniela Ossa, Javiera Reyes, Hormazábal Rocío
written and directed by Niles Atallah

by Walter Chaw The problem with Kourtney Roy’s Kryptic is that its subtext is text. It’s well-shot, well-performed, even has some nice Yuzna-esque goop effects, but it’s so didactic that all that hardly matters. When the message becomes exposition, it indicates a lack of faith in both the audience and the material. I’m as tired of writing about this as you are of reading about it, I’m sure, and I must confess it takes a lot out of me nowadays to finish films like this, however well-made and however promising its director might be, should they ever get out of their own way. Kryptic would be less frustrating if it weren’t so good in so many ways. It opens with shy, socially anxious Kay (Chloe Pirrie) on her drive to a guided cryptid hike, repeating positive affirmations to buck herself up for meeting new people and maybe making new friends. In the woods, she strays from the group and encounters the terrifying Sooka (glimpsed only in flashes), sending her into a fugue state wherein she forgets who she is and what she does. “I’m a dentist?” she asks. “I’m a veterinarian?” Most likely, she’s a cryptozoologist named “Barb” who has been missing in these woods for some time. Also likely is that Barb went missing because she was fleeing her abusive husband, Morgan (Jeff Gladstone).

Fantasia Festival ’24: Oddity

July 23, 2024****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Ireland, Thriller

****/****
starring Gwilym Lee, Carolyn Bracken, Tadhg Murphy, Steve Wall
written and directed by Damian McCarthy

by Walter Chaw Damien McCarthy’s Oddity is the perfect campfire story: self-contained, tantalizingly high-concept, and terrifying as fuck without necessarily carrying any existential baggage or greater stakes than, “Hey, some fucked up things happened to these people once, gather ’round while I tell the tale of a night just like this.” It’s the kind of story I’d love to hear while camping on the moors–the kind of thing Harlan Ellison used to write in the front window of Dangerous Visions bookstore in Sherman Oaks as a parlour trick: give him a prompt and watch him go. In Oddity, the blind proprietress of a cursed oddities shop (curses removed upon purchase) seeks to discover the murderer of her twin sister. That’s it, the long and the short of it, but what McCarthy conjures from a one-sentence pitch is an exercise in unbearably ratcheting tension, with tremendous performances and impeccable filmmaking craft. Consider a prologue that, in the first minute, establishes the existence of a motion-activated camera documenting the movements of a lone woman in an isolated location. Its shutter clicks once when she crosses before it, and then again when nothing crosses before it. I mean “nothing” in the Goodnight Moon sense, the Wallace Stevens sense, where the camera captures a nothing we can see and a nothing we can’t. The woman leaves the relative security of her home twice, and both times, McCarthy offers us a point of view on her that isn’t attached to anything. She’s being watched, see, and it’s awful. The second time, at night, she makes it to safety, but before we can relax, the pitch-black outside tests the doorknob as soon as she locks it behind her. I thought of the scene in Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton’s The Leopard Man where a mother tarries in unlocking the door for her terrified daughter, who is given to crying wolf, and then the pleas stop, and a slow pool of blood begins to spread under the door.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) – 4K Ultra HD

July 15, 2024****/****, 1980s, 2024, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, FFC Must-Own, John Hughes, Teen

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Matthew Broderick, Alan Ruck, Mia Sara, Jeffrey Jones
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers I often begin these autopsies of John Hughes’s oeuvre by regurgitating some lore about how the film in question came to be. In the case of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I want to correct a faux pas I made on Twitter. “I find it fascinating,” I tweeted, “that in test screenings they all hated Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend and John Hughes figured out it was because of one line where she criticizes him. They cut it and her likability quotient skyrocketed.” (“Fascinating and depressing,” I added in a follow-up.) In actuality, the line had nothing to do with Ferris’s girlfriend cutting him down to size. I should’ve refreshed my memory of the incident beforehand, say by rereading this passage from A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away (reviewed here), the 2019 memoir by the movie’s editor, Paul Hirsch:

The Bikeriders (2024)

June 27, 2024****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Michael Shannon
based on the book by Danny Lyon
written and directed by Jeff Nichols

by Walter Chaw It’s hard to feel sorry for men, because the tragedy of so many of them is that they are only able to express themselves through violence. Our culture fetishizes violence, genders it male, and admires men who enact it while pathologizing those incapable of expressing themselves productively. Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders is another of his films about men trapped inside repressive systems: punished for their intuition, for tenderness and kindness, for love, for heaven’s sake. His films aren’t complicated, but in their romantic simplicity, they can be dazzlingly, emotionally complex. What causes brothers to fight at their father’s funeral? A man to mortgage everything he has to build a storm shelter? Another to ferry an unusual boy he fears he can’t protect across the country to the care of people who can? Nichols’s films are the stories of us all as victims of our hardwiring, whether it’s you who stands before me or me who can’t get out of my own way. They are elegies because there are few happy endings for men who choose violence or the people who would like to forgive them even when they’ve done nothing but keep the gentle parts of themselves encased in sinew and rage. I wanted to disappear inside The Bikeriders.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

May 22, 2024****/****, 2024, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, Tom Burke, Alyla Browne
written by George Miller, Nico Lathouris
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw In matters of vengeance, the Greeks had it all figured out. Their God of such things was a tripartite Goddess: Alecto (“unceasing”), Megaera (“grudging”), and Tisiphone (“avenging murder”), collectively called the “Erinyes.” Hesiod gave their parentage as the Titan Ouranos and Gaia: When Ouranos was castrated by his son, Cronos, three drops of Ouranos’s blood fell to the fertile soil of Mother Earth, impregnating her with his resentment and rage. Other sources describe the Erinyes’ parentage as Night and Hell. The Romans renamed the goddesses the Furiae, and now George Miller houses them in the slight frame of his Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy). Furiosa, who births herself from the dirt and, over the course of a too-short 150 minutes, pursues her vengeance like the “darkest of angels” her nemesis, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), dubs her. He asks her, “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” He already knows she does. Furiosa is the very definition of epic. It’s a treatise on how archetype remains the blueprint for our behaviour, and in its absolute simplicity, it has a sublime power. Furiosa is born of our rage to avenge the death of the world. She reminds me of a Miyazaki heroine, and the film itself is as obsessively detailed, thought-out, and functional as a stygian Miyazaki fantasia. If it’s opera, it’s Wagner. As a film, it may be George Miller’s best.

Or did they see Prince's ghost? (Stars of I Saw the TV Glow bathed in purple,)

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

May 9, 2024****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Theatrical

****/****
starring Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Helena Howard, Danielle Deadwyler
written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I have a summer evening inside me, a particular one, a purple one. It’s almost dawn, and the sidewalk is warm beneath me. I’m lying there staring at the sky pushing into dawn; it’s the last day of my life. I feel like I’m still there sometimes. I left enough of myself there that I’ll always be there. I’ll never leave. I don’t remember much of my life up to and including high school. It was a confusion of sensation and shadows. I hold shame and sadness in a cage with my heart and won’t let them out. But I remember this night, because it was the day I tried to kill myself. There are times I think I didn’t fail and that all of these decades since have been a moment between breaths. I can smell the moss phlox growing by the street if I concentrate. What if this ends soon? I will blink awake and be there on the warm concrete, waiting for the last sun to rise, and maybe that would be alright. Maybe it would be alright when the stars fade into the blue of day. Maybe it would explain why everything, all this time, has felt so strange, and why that clean, wide-open night has always been so close to me.

Nina Hoss in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023)

April 19, 2024****/****, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Croatia, Esoterica, France, Luxembourg, Romania, Theatrical

Nu astepta prea mult de la sfârsitul lumii
****/****
starring Ilinca Manolache, Ovidiu Pîrșan, Nina Hoss, Dorina Lazăr
written and directed by Radu Jude

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is now playing in Vancouver, Montreal, and Winnipeg. Opens in Toronto on May 4 at TIFF Bell Lightbox and on May 29 at the Carlton Cinemas.

by Walter Chaw I know this film. I know the anger that drives it… No, it isn’t anger, it’s incredulity and exasperation, the kind I’ll hold when I’m led to my pyre for the crime of reading a book, or holding a merciful opinion, or wishing for a reasonable solution. It’s the realization that Yeats was right about the worst and the best of us: the one will summon the will to bend the world while the other will fret and demur until the noose is tight and the platform drops away. I have my wit and am able to dunk on inconsistencies with the best of them, and I will do this even as I know there is no profit from shaming the shameless–from pleasuring stunted masochists who pull strength from their collective humiliation. It is my only defense, so I deploy it. I think about all those horror movies where people empty their guns into things that are not injured by bullets. “Deplorable”? At last a term of derision that can unite them like the “n-word” they pathologically want to wield. They are immune to me. I know this. I am Cassandra. Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is, like his previous Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, a nervous breakdown of a movie–a wildly careening meltdown of a tantrum raging against the dying of all our lights, led by a woman who has reached a place of radical callousness where surprise and horror are disguised beneath a cocksureness as thick and sensitive as scar tissue.

Civil War (2024)

April 5, 2024****/****, 2024, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Nick Offerman
written and directed by Alex Garland

by Walter Chaw Haskell Wexler’s seminal 1969 film Medium Cool opens on a car accident. A woman in a grey-and-black striped dress has been thrown from the passenger side and is lying in the road. The car horn is stuck and blaring, and in the rearview mirror two figures approach: a man in a tight black T-shirt toting a 16mm camera, and his soundman, trailing behind with a directional microphone. They stalk around the wreckage. They find the best angles. The guy with the camera–the hero of the piece, John (Robert Forster)–spares a moment of pity for the woman after getting his footage. He and the soundman leave, and we hear distant sirens. They’re travelling, John and his colleague (Peter Bonerz), across a country torn by unrest at the end of the last progressive period in the United States–the wasteland our season of assassinations left behind, in which any vestiges of hope would soon curdle into the filth of Altamont and the Manson Family. They’re chroniclers, not participants. What is a single human lifespan compared to the life cycle of the perfectly eloquent photograph? What if you could keep telling your story after you died? What if the Democratic National Convention in 1968, where the party fractured over disagreements about how to handle an unpopular war and sent Chicago’s stormtroopers to beat students and protestors… What if this happened and no one was there to record how far we had fallen? What if the powerful were allowed to operate in the dark?

"What would really get me hot is a ceasefire." K-Stew and Katy O'Brian in Love Lies Bleeding

Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

March 16, 2024****/****, 2024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Jena Malone, Ed Harris
written by Rose Glass & Weronika Tofilska
directed by Rose Glass

by Walter Chaw Love is like a lamb and love is like a sledgehammer. Love crawls into your head and fills the empty spaces, the canyons and tunnels and holes in between, making it so full of noise it makes you fucking nuts. It’s too big, but it keeps growing. It kills you, but it won’t let you die. Love makes every love story a tragedy. Everyone writes about love, but the only person to ever do it right was Maurice Sendak, who wrote a survival guide for the fury called Where the Wild Things Are. Therein, a little boy named Max threatens to leave his friends, monsters on an island where they all jamboree. They beg him to stay: “Please don’t go. We’ll eat you up we love you so.” And they will, you know, because they have fangs and dangerous desires and horrible appetites. Love growls and gnashes its teeth. Love’s claws rattle like castanets. Love roars. Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding is a love story about two terrible women and two terrible men who do bad things to one another and for one another because love is the fire in which, happily, we burn.

Dune Part Two (2024)

February 29, 2024****/****, 2024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Denis Villeneuve, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw

“And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of they life:”
–Genesis 3:14

Fanaticism is a closed circle, maddening because it’s impregnable, maddening because it destroys everything in the process of building itself. It’s a riddle without a solution, and once you’ve drunk deep the plasma spring, it’s a long way back–if you ever get there. There are people who “deprogram” cult members, but I don’t buy it, you guys. I’m of the belief that when you’re gone, you’re gone. You went by choice, after all. You denied your ears the beeswax but didn’t tie yourself to the mast. My mom bought into a cult for the last several years of her life. She held on to it tightly, and it gripped her right back. I suppose that’s one of the appealing things about cults: when you find the right one, you join the company of a great many people who agree with you. If you’re broken in some way, if your awareness of that has made you lonesome and alone, that must feel good. I take a little bit of the blame for her susceptibility to such things. I was a terrible son to her. Maybe she needed something to hold that would hold her back; I did, too. I found it in a wonderful wife and kids. She found it, some of it, in a cult that finally accepted her. I don’t know if I believe that. I don’t know what I believe. Maybe this is just narcissism–mine or hers, I don’t know either. But she’s dead now, and I’m the only one left to wonder about what happened between us.

Perfect Days (2023)

February 1, 2024****/****, 2023, 2024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Japan

****/****
starring Kôji Yakusho, Tokio Emoto, Arisa Nakano, Tomokazu Miura
written by Wim Wenders, Takuma Takasaki
directed by Wim Wenders

by Walter Chaw Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho) notices little things. Like the sunlight dappling the trees. Or the doomed sproutling, too close to its mother to survive, pushing its way out of the ground. He gestures at the park’s caretaker, asking if it would be all right for him to rescue the plant, and carefully transplants it to a piece of newspaper he’s folded into a cup. Hirayama works for Tokyo, cleaning its network of public toilets. He listens to his collection of ’60s and ’70s music on cassette tapes in his municipal van–dark blue, same as his jumpsuit, the colour playing counterpoint to The Velvet Underground’s “Pale Blue Eyes,” which provides the soundtrack for our first ride home with him during magic hour. (I have to imagine the character of Niko (Arisa Nakano) was not accidentally named.) Once he returns to his spartan flat, he plants the sapling in a pot and puts it in a room full of its spiritual brothers and sisters at various stages of thriving. Hirayama goes to his favourite restaurant stall in the subway, then a bathhouse, where he soaks and listens to other men converse. Then it’s off to bed reading Faulkner. The first lesson of Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days is that it is possible to live a full and beautiful life, at least for a while, in a small space: watered, fed, warm, cared for…and wanted, though it isn’t clear at first that anyone is thinking about Hirayama.

The Holdovers (2023) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code

January 9, 2024****/****, 2023, 2024, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Paul Giamatti, Da’vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa, Carrie Preston
written by David Hemingson
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw It was never like this, but it’s how I remember it: snow on the ground, ice in patches, a well-appointed office wall-to-wall with books, a fireplace, and me and a classmate, a dear friend, doing an independent study with my favourite professor. I have looked my whole life for my people. I think sometimes they are the fragments I shore against my ruins, that thing T.S. Eliot said to describe the whole of Western civilization informing his writing–but thinking of them as fragments seems wrong. Just as how their spark in my life is not the holding me up but the giving me a reason to want to persist. It would be so much easier not to. I saw an old friend the other day, and he told a story about how I said something to him once that aided him when he was at his lowest point. I didn’t remember saying it, though I remembered the feeling of fear I had for him at the time and was moved to tears that I had helped him as he had so often helped me. You can’t really know the wake you leave behind as you go. My favourite poem is William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, particularly for how it speaks of the “best portion of a man’s life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.” This line has meant different things to me at different times in my life. I wonder what it means to me now.

The Holdovers (2023)

December 4, 2023****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Paul Giamatti, Da’vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa, Carrie Preston
written by David Hemingson
directed by Alexander Payne

SDAFF ’23: Monster

November 5, 2023****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Japan, San Diego Asian Film Festival, Thriller

****/****
starring Ando Sakura, Kurosawa Koya, Nagayama Eita
written by Sakamoto Yûji
directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda

by Walter Chaw Hirokazu Kore-eda is a keeper of secrets, a guardian of hidden things and a priest of the ritual of childhood. Watching his stuff feels like an invitation into intimate spaces, and I can’t shake the feeling, however impossible, that they’re places I’ve been before. I recall, for instance, a little half-loft built into the silversmithing store my father used to own. When I was too young to work or too tired from working, I’d climb up into it to read, or sleep, or peep down onto the sales floor, where customers would mill in and out. I hadn’t thought at all of that tiny vantage, a crow’s nest floating above a turgid sea of confused nostalgia, until I saw Kore-eda’s new film, Monster, which, of course, has nothing to do with silversmithing stores or fathers who have journeyed past the horizon or boats unmoored and lost in listless seas.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) – 4K Ultra HD + Digital Code

November 3, 2023****/****, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Espionage, FFC Must-Own, Thriller, Tom Cruise

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

****/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B
starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny
written by Christopher McQuarrie & Erik Jendresen
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw I’ve liked every film in this series to some extent, the last few very much. Yet, pressed, I couldn’t tell you what any of them are about. If you ask me to recount the plot of this latest entry, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (hereafter Dead Reckoning), I would have a tough time only a few minutes out of the screening. This isn’t an inherently bad thing. If you were to ask most people who’ve seen North by Northwest, they wouldn’t know it’s about microfilm being smuggled in South American figurines, just as they will not question whether a crop duster is the best way to kill someone waiting for a bus in the middle of nowhere. They wouldn’t remember that Notorious is about radioactive ore hidden in wine bottles, or that Psycho is about a petty embezzlement scheme. That’s because it doesn’t matter. You’d probably even get pushback about how that’s not really what those films are about anyway, which is correct. Hitchcock called those things that matter a lot to everyone in the film–and almost nothing to anyone watching it–the “MacGuffin.” The Mission: Impossible films are the quintessential modern example of an old concept: if you do everything well enough, if you understand how to keep things snappy and populate the story with characters who feel like real, live people (thus imbuing all the noise with stakes), well, it doesn’t matter what the picture’s about, because what it’s actually about is so instantly relatable. Will they survive? Will they fall in love? Archetype and craft. There’s nothing simpler and nothing more complex.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

October 22, 2023****/****, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

****/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, Ruth Gordon, Ralph Bellamy
based on the novel by Ira Levin
written for the screen and directed by Roman Polanski

by Walter Chaw Rosemary is everything. He’s just Guy. It’s that tension–between a woman fully actualized and a man forever frustrated, the Grail vs. the Knights of the Round Table–that serves as the tightrope in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. As portrayed by Mia Farrow, Rosemary is precious and flawed, full of life and surrounded by death. She is the venerated object, the cathedral she imagines the night she’s drugged and violated; the most precious thing, the sanctified earth planted with the pestilential corruption of masculine ambition. Rosemary’s Baby opens with a lengthy consideration of the buildings that surround Central Park like vultures in their priestly black, voracious and solemn, gathered around a carcass that is, in this configuration, the sole hint of life in a metal savannah. Polanski is a genius of architecture and the consideration of it. His spaces are predatory, or at least become so: “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown” and the apartment that sprouts hands from its walls and, here in Rosemary’s Baby, the “Black Bramford.” He puts pretty blondes into the maw of his constructions–sacrifices to the Minotaur wandering through his Labyrinth–and watches them get swallowed by the Stygian black. He is the Minotaur. The pitch is his, along with the appetites. Rosemary’s Baby is his masterpiece, as well as one of the greatest films about what women endure in a world that sees them as seed incubators, nesting fowl, and finally trophies: meek and pretty. But Rosemary isn’t meek, simply outmatched, surrounded, flanked by the men she’s supposed to be able to trust.

When Evil Lurks (2023)

October 8, 2023****/****, 2023, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Horror, Theatrical

Cuando acecha la maldad
****/****
starring Ezequiel Rodríguez, Demián Salomón, Luis Ziembrowski, Federico Liss
written and directed by Demián Rugna

by Walter Chaw I felt like there was a hand pressing down on my chest during Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks, a horror film so vicious and uncompromising I wasn’t always sure I could finish it. I’ve seen it three times now, not because I’ve become desensitized to its lawlessness, but because it’s so well-constructed that I’m drawn back to it despite the anxiety it inspires. There’s comfort in the thrall of an artist who’s in complete control of his medium. When Evil Lurks is Rugna’s fifth film, and I don’t think it’s too soon to declare him an important filmmaker and a true innovator. I’ve never seen what he does in the horror genre before; I’d call it experimentation, except that it works on a more than theoretical level. Between this and his previous picture, Terrified (2017), he has deconstructed the familiar, reconstituting it into a beast that feels new and dangerous. When I take a shower now, it’s not Psycho or The Seventh Victim that comes to mind, it’s the long opening sequence of Terrified in which a man traces the source of a strange thumping in the middle of the night to something unspeakable happening to his wife in the bathroom for what must have been hours. There’s nothing new about locating terror in intensely personal private spaces, but there’s a revolution in having the idea to mate Martyrs with Poltergeist.

Telluride ’23: All of Us Strangers

September 19, 2023****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Telluride, UK

****/****
starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, Claire Foy
screenplay by Andrew Haigh, based on the novel by Taichi Yamada
directed by Andrew Haigh

by Walter Chaw What if I could? What if I did and they were there, my parents as I remember them when I was 12, and I was not so fixed in time and grief? When I was a child and needed them even though I thought I didn’t, but now, as the old man who knows I still do. What if I went to the place where I grew up and rang the bell and they answered it, and I could tell them the things I had done that would make them proud of me? And the things I never could tell them because I was afraid they’d reject me again for everything I could’ve helped and everything I couldn’t. I can see them in the living room. I can see them in the kitchen. What if they, knowing how short the time had gotten, could tell me what was in their hearts so I didn’t have to wonder? Was there love there that had hardened? Or had it retreated to an armoured place to protect it from breaking? In Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, a man tells his new lover how something awful happened to him once, but it’s okay because it was a long time ago. His lover corrects him: “A long time ago” doesn’t matter when you’re talking about terrible things. “Oh,” the man says, and quieter, “oh.”

Telluride ’23: The Zone of Interest

September 11, 2023****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Poland, Telluride, UK, War

****/****
starring Sandra Hüller, Christian Friedel, Freya Kreutzkam, Ralph Herforth
screenplay by Jonathan Glazer, based on the novel by Martin Amis
directed by Jonathan Glazer

by Walter Chaw A real sense of evil permeates every nook and cranny of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which is an adaptation of the Martin Amis novel in the same way Glazer’s Under the Skin is an adaptation of Michel Farber’s novel. That is to say, one of tone and mood that discards all but the broadest strokes of the original premise. If Glazer applied the same process to this film as his previous one, he let the mysterious currents of his intuition guide his hand across the text. He is the philosopher as artist, an anthropologist locating himself in a human blind and documenting the mysterious movement of the dark as it oozes from one crooked and low place to another. I don’t know how he finds the threads he pulls, but his fingers must be more sensitive than mine. I also don’t entirely understand how he sneaks toxins past my defenses, desensitization, and tolerances: the draft you can never locate after the first freeze of a long winter locks you in place. Glazer isn’t interested in moralizing, in trying to understand, even contextualize, how an ordinary, upper-middle-class military family in The Zone of Interest can owe their existence to mechanized genocide and feel no call to conscience. He doesn’t see his characters as so complex they defy binary judgment; he sees them as so mechanical and simple they defy binary judgment. The universe tends to comfort. It’s a fool’s mission to impose systems of understanding on the ant Isserly beholds at the beginning of Under the Skin. Trying to do so could drive one to madness. Trying to do so says more about you than it does the ant.

Telluride ’23: Poor Things

September 5, 2023****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Ireland, Romance, Sci-Fi, Telluride, UK

****/****
starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef
screenplay by Tony McNamara, based upon the novel by Alasdair Gray
directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

by Walter Chaw Ex Machina by way of Anaïs Nin, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things is a libertine exercise-cum-fable about the hypocrisies of politesse and the occasional eruptions of collective sexual hysteria designed exclusively for shackling women to proverbial bits and millstones. It is the final of three films in 2023 that use Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a launchpad for progressive genre explorations, locating in the novel’s stitched-together creature a fulsome metaphor for the indignities afforded the spirit encased in prisons of rotting flesh. Rather than quibble about the merits of one over the other, watch all three (Bomani J. Story’s The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster and Laura Moss’s Birth/Rebirth being the other two) in any sequence to witness the unfolding of an extended treatise on gender and racial politics delivered with brio, invention, wicked intelligence, and bracing creative courage. It’s possible to make a movie of a lecture, but it’s more effective to make dangerous, even experimental, art from which all manner of lecture and examination will eventually be constructed. The former is the province of creators limited by their fear and ignorance, the latter of mad scientists inordinately confident in the ability of their cinematic children to find a way through the rubble of a drowned and ruined world. I don’t know that these three films are the best three films of the year, but they’re among them, and certainly, they comprise an uncanny trilogy for a period in which the United States has stripped women of their bodily autonomy at the moment of a suspiciously-timed rise in fascist white nationalism and its handmaiden, Puritanism. They’re doing it in the open: raising a flag of moral panic waved by Evangelical fucknuts pushing hard for an Apocalypse they hope will consign everyone else on this burning Earth to a damnation born of their perverse, onanistic fetishism.