Authors: Walter Chaw Archives - Page 2 of 145

Terrifier 3 (2024)

October 14, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Horror, Theatrical

***/****
starring David Howard Thornton, Lauren Lavera, Elliott Fullam, Samantha Scaffidi
written and directed by Damien Leone

by Walter Chaw Damien Leone’s Terrifier films are empathy tests for a culture, for a creature, that has amused itself to death. No longer able to discern the line between reality and the media we consume, we are presented with these Voight-Kampff tests designed to replicate the social conditions of our steady dehumanization. You see, I’m sick. I’m afraid it’s mortal but I don’t know–I mean, every second is a second I will never see again, so isn’t everything mortal? I have, for over a year now, watched Israel gleefully, defiantly wage genocide on the Palestinian people and consumed images of the human body in various states of dismemberment, violation, and humiliation that before this I had only glimpsed with horror in grainy photographs smuggled out of Nanking during WWII–that I had only imagined while reading war stories written by men destroyed largely by just the act of bearing witness. This is the shape of my astonishing privilege. If I didn’t want to see it, I didn’t have to. Something changed.

Apartment 7A (2024) + The First Omen (2024)

October 5, 20242024, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Horror, Italy, Serbia, Streaming, Thriller, UK

APARTMENT 7A
***/****
starring Julia Garner, Dianne Wiest, Kevin McNally, Jim Sturgess
screenplay by Natalie Erika James & Christian White and Skylar James
directed by Natalie Erika James

THE FIRST OMEN
***½/****
starring Nell Tiger Free, Tawfeek Barhom, Sônia Braga, Bill Nighy
screenplay by Tim Smith & Arkasha Stevenson and Keith Thomas
directed by Arkasha Stevenson

by Walter Chaw The sense of dread in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Richard Donner’s The Omen originates from the sacrifice of anonymous young women, dead before the stories proper begin. They are the black grasping soil, the damned ritual cycle from which feelings of claustrophobia and destiny extend backwards into an infinite past and forwards into an inevitable future. These dead girls give the stories a sense of eternity, in other words, and the feeling of inescapability. I love that the latest entries in these peculiar franchises are by women. About a third of the way through Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen, two concentric circles of novitiates sing and dance around troubled young Carlita (Nicole Sorace) like pagans around a maypole while above them a nun, Sister Anjelica (Ishtar Currie Wilson), sets herself on fire after promising her immolation is “all for you!” For whom, it’s not clear. Possibly Carlita, the red herring of the film’s first half and the obvious source of demonic visitation at the Italian convent in which the film is set, where inexperienced Sister Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) is assigned, fresh from America like Suspiria‘s Suzy Bannion. Or maybe Sister Anjelica’s messy end is meant for Sister Margaret as a strange welcome or a dire warning. “Ring Around the Rosie” was created to teach us about the symptoms of the Black Death. I don’t know what sort of death the circling children are teaching in The First Omen, though it doesn’t matter nearly so much as Stevenson’s absolute command of the unsettling, uncanny image and the ineffable gravity of archetype.

Robot Dreams (2023) + The Wild Robot (2024)

September 30, 2024****/****, 2023, 2024, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Family, France, Music, Sci-Fi, Spain, Theatrical

ROBOT DREAMS
****/****
based on the graphic novel by Sara Varon
written and directed by Pablo Berger

THE WILD ROBOT
**/****
screenplay by Chris Sanders, based on the book by Peter Brown
directed by Chris Sanders

by Walter Chaw Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams, an adaptation of Sara Varon’s graphic novel, has about it the sadness and loneliness of Harvey Pekar’s work. Set in a zootopia of anthropomorphic animals that’s actually New York City circa 1984, it’s about a woebegone, chonky grey dog named Dog who resorts to buying a robot for companionship in this cold metropolis. They go on walks, horse around; in an affecting moment, Robot sees lovers holding hands and takes Dog’s paw in his. He grips too hard, Dog pulls away in pain, and then, just before the scene cuts away, Dog reaches out and takes Robot’s hand again. It’s perfectly timed, sentimental but subtle, a gag paid off with a lovely grace note that doesn’t draw attention to itself–that, indeed, could be missed if one weren’t paying attention. They go to the beach together, the introverted Dog and the exuberant, animated Robot, where Dog picks out a quiet spot to put down blankets while Robot does a full back-flop into the water between a group of kids. Dog is horrified by Robot’s audacity, but Robot has won fast friends. Robot is Dog’s social confidence, his fresh outlook on the possibilities life has in store for the bright-eyed and courageously optimistic. Robot is the part of us that has died in most of us, the victim of cruel experience, and the wonder of Robot Dreams is how it doesn’t patronize the viewer with a world that conforms to the sunny expectations of a newborn. After their bucolic day at the beach, Robot rusts solid, and Dog is forced to abandon him on the now-shuttered boardwalk for an entire season.

My Old Ass (2024) + Omni Loop (2024)

September 26, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Time Travel

MY OLD ASS
**½/****
starring Maisy Stella, Aubrey Plaza, Percy Hynes White, Maddie Ziegler
written and directed by Megan Park

OMNI LOOP
**½/****
starring Mary-Louise Parker, Ayo Edibiri, Carlos Jacott, Harris Yulin
screenplay by Bernardo Britto
directed by Bernardo Britto

by Walter Chaw Writing in the time of John Donne and Andrew Marvell, who both had takes on his “once was horny, now reformed” shtick, Robert Herrick was an Anglican cleric who came upon his piety late in life, as many of us do. Herrick’s most famous work is a “to his coy mistress” bit about “gather[ing] ye rosebuds while ya may,” which, while not as vivid as Marvell’s version threatening a woman that worms will take the frigid object of his pursuit’s virginity if she doesn’t lose it before she dies, is nevertheless a come-on passing as wisdom. As advice to a younger self goes, though, getting laid as much as possible seems the standard, along with more flossing. (It says something that Billy Joel offers the same carrot to his Catholic inamorata in “Only the Good Die Young.”) As we collectively advance into the winter of our sour regret over the calamities we didn’t avoid that have led us to a dark and dimming future, find two films about going back in time to warn, provide guidance for, and essentially function as a mentor to our younger selves before it’s too late. I think it’s touching that we’re having this idea at the same time–strangers, I mean, scenting great change carried on the same foul wind and offering up signal fires from their respective, isolated bunkers. It’s like the last exhalation of a drowning man: it won’t make a shred of difference, but it does trouble the water for a second. Besides, at this point, “touching” is all we got left.

She's a small wonder, brings love and laughter everywhere

Subservience (2024)

September 25, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Bulgaria, Sci-Fi, Thriller

*½/****
starring Megan Fox, Michele Morrone, Madeline Zima, Jude Allen Greenstein
written by Will Honley & April Maguire
directed by S.K. Dale

by Walter Chaw You could make a domestic robot servant look like anything. A spider or a dog, for instance. It could look like Michael Gough as Alfred the Butler or like Michael Caine as Alfred the Butler. It could look like ceramic Mrs. Potts and be voiced by the ghost of Angela Lansbury. It could look like a child or an old crone, a handsome young man or a beautiful young woman. What you decide you want your domestic robot servant to look like says a lot about a lot. I read that pedophiles are already buying robot children. I remember when Paulie got a robot in Rocky IV that was the spitting image of Rosie from “The Jetsons”; Paulie was, without question, fucking it. When M3GAN came out, I had a hard time believing there wasn’t at any point a serious conversation about who the target audience for a robot that looked like that, dressed like that, would be. Probably not little girls needing playmates, is what I’m saying.

TIFF ’24: The Substance

September 15, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, TIFF, UK

***/****
starring Margaret Qualley, Demi Moore, Dennis Quaid, Hugo Diego Garcia
written and directed by Coralie Fargeat

by Walter Chaw Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance starts as David Cronenberg’s The Star before transitioning into Frank Henenlotter’s Black Swan. Toss in a pinch of Paul Verhoeven as well. Yet even at that, the picture suffers not for a lack of conviction but for a lack of breadth. The Substance carries a message warranting righteousness, no doubt, lamenting how women, especially in Hollywood, are valued for their sexuality and little else and how this trope eventually metastasizes within the victim as self-hatred and self-harm. But once eloquently expressed in the first (mesmerizing) 20 minutes, The Substance, in its dedicated mashing of its single outrage button, misses a few opportunities to broaden its scope, losing sight of its high concept. At least with Revenge, Fargeat’s straight-line rape-revenge flick (which ends with the pulverizing shotgunning of one antagonist’s scrotum), there’s no elaborate pretense it will engage in a broader dissection of male sexual violence. Its eventual bloodbath is less liberating and uncompromising than it is a shrine to the tradition forged by genre predecessors like I Spit on Your Grave and Ms. 45. Fargeat seems like a genuinely gifted filmmaker with a sense of humour skating on the outer edges of good taste. She wears her influences on her sleeve. She is, in other words, awesome, but her films so far are largely just slick celebrations of her Letterboxd favourites.

Dafoe and Bob in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

September 9, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, Fantasy, Horror, Theatrical

**/****
starring Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Willem Dafoe
screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar
directed by Tim Burton

by Walter Chaw Somehow lugubrious at under 100 minutes, overburdened by five or six storylines and an unnecessary new lead character who dominates its first half, Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice leans hard on Burton’s established weaknesses while largely ignoring his established strengths. It treats women like shrill caricatures, for instance, saving its deepest contempt for Monica Bellucci’s Mrs. Beetlejuice, Delores, a bride so ‘Zilla she reconstitutes herself from her violently dismembered parts for the sole purpose of reuniting with her lost love and murderer, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton). Lydia (Winona Ryder), the little girl lost from the first film who, by the end, discovered adoptive parents in the now-absent Maitlands, has grown into a ghost-hunting television charlatan engaged to unctuous workshop SNAG Rory (Justin Theroux). As Rory, Theroux appears to be doing Phil Hartman doing Glenn “Otho” Shadix and is asked to carry the comedic load of this thing for far too long. (It’s like showing up for Patti Lupone and getting fucking Florence Foster Jenkins for an hour.) Then there’s young Astrid (Jenna Ortega), Lydia’s kid, who resents her mother for being a nutjob and her dad (Santiago Cabrera) for becoming piranha food early in her life.

Strange Darling (2024)

September 2, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Willa Fitzgerald, Kyle Gallner, Madisen Beaty, Barbara Hershey
written and directed by JT Mollner

by Walter Chaw Defenders will say that JT Mollner’s Strange Darling exists, in an ancillary way, in the Martyrs universe, but it isn’t playing the same game. It lacks that movie’s meanness, for one; for another, it lacks the discipline required of ecclesiastical curiosity, the doom and fear and loathing that comes with any honest spiritual examination of the biological roots of fear. I want to call it “Martyrs for Dummies,” but that’s not exactly right, either. The only things Strange Darling ultimately shares with it–and with Christopher Nolan’s Memento–are a destabilizing narrative and an unreliable protagonist. It lacks the rigour of Martyrs and Memento, too, a clear grasp of what it’s after and how. When all’s said and done, Martyrs, which has nothing to do with Clive Barker, remains the truest adaptation of Barker’s marriage of atrocity and communion that I’ve ever seen. Strange Darling is mostly a life-support machine for a twist given away by its title. It’s like handing someone a ukulele in wrapping paper. Surprise! A gimmick tied to a high concept. A Shyamalan flick shot like a series of 1970s grindhouse trailers, featuring a lot of good work in the service of a disappointing puzzle box. Worse is that one of its red herrings involves consent and BDSM, which, you know, are serious and personal issues dangerously marginalized in horror movies that want to treat kink like a moral issue in need of correcting. Imagine the version of Strange Darling that follows through on the idea that a perfectly normal person might like to get stepped on between the sheets. Even better, imagine the version of the film interested in asking: If there is a line, how hard would one need to push to turn a “nice” man into a violent rapist?

Danny Huston and Bill Skarsgård in The Crow

The Crow (2024) + Blink Twice (2024)

August 26, 20242024, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Fantasy, France, Horror, Mexico, Mystery, Romance, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

THE CROW
***/****
starring Bill Skarsgård, FKA twigs, Sami Bouajila, Danny Huston
screenplay by Zach Baylin and William Josef Schneider, based on the comic book series by James O’Barr
directed by Rupert Sanders

BLINK TWICE
***/****
starring Naomi Ackie, Channing Tatum, Christian Slater, Alia Shawkat
written by Zoë Kravitz & E.T. Feigenbaum
directed by Zoë Kravitz

by Walter Chaw “Eric, I had this dark dream,” she says. She doesn’t know these are their last moments together, here and for eternity–that she’s been dead and that her lover has bartered his life for hers, and that whatever there is of mercy in this blighted place has briefly reunited them as they pass each other in purgatory. It certainly doesn’t feel like mercy. It feels cruel. Cruelty is all there is. When I was a depressed, moony kid, I believed in my heart there was a grand melodrama in which I had a part to play. A delusion of grandeur, a symptom of narcissism (should one fail to outgrow it): you dressed the part with eyeliner and black trenchcoats, Doc Martens and clove cigarettes–the borrowed identity, the illusion of disaffection in language affected by quotes pulled from Shakespeare, Wilde, and our patron saint Morrissey. Most of my childhood and adolescence was a dark dream. I lived in a fugue. I lived in the spaces where my brain needed to mature, and I didn’t know what I was doing from one moment to the next, not really. I believed I was responsible for not only the feelings but also the fate of others. I was always performing. I was never performative.

Alien: Romulus (2024)

August 15, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced
written by Fede Alvarez & Rodo Sayagues
directed by Fede Alvarez

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It’s at least an hour before the fan service begins in earnest, and until it does, Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus is a sterling example of how to tell another story in a familiar universe without regurgitating what came before. Although I’m a sucker for Rogue One, I can’t really defend its exhumation of Peter Cushing and a young Carrie Fisher to live as zombies in digital eternity. It feels infernal, a punishment invented by Dante. In space, no one will let you die. But, oh, that first hour of Romulus, in which we’re introduced to Jackson’s Star, a miserable, exploitative, blue-collar mining colony teeming with poverty and indentured servitude. (In a nice touch, these exhausted 22^nd-century schlubs still carry canaries in cages and black lungs in their chest.) Orphaned miner Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her adopted, Black, android brother Andy (David Jonsson) dream of starting a new life in an off-world colony (time to begin again!) but find their entreaties to the company store falling on corporate’s deaf ears. The films in the Alien universe are at their best when they’re invested in the working class: first miners, then soldiers, then prisoners. Though centring Romulus on miners again demonstrates a lack of imagination and should have been a red flag, after the strained mythopoetics of the last couple of Ridley Scott pictures, it actually ratcheted my hopes up high. I mean, even Rain’s ship is named, again, for an element of a Joseph Conrad novel, the “Corbelan”–just like the “Nostromo” of the first film, the “Sulaco” of the second, and the “Patna” of the third. Hearts of darkness, indeed. Capitalism will destroy us all.

Borderlands (2024)

August 11, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Jamie Lee Curtis
screenplay by Eli Roth and Joe Crombie
directed by Eli Roth

by Walter Chaw Borderlands is what happens if you stop evolving as a human being when you’re a privileged, 16-year-old, cis-gendered, heterosexual male. When you are a mess of hormones and your prefrontal lobe has not finished growing–has barely even started growing, truth be known. Remember the uncontrollable and inexplicable boners? The constant fear and self-loathing that results in your actively seeking out groups you perceive to be vulnerable in order to predate upon them and make yourself bigger? You are violent and emotional and wrapped up in your melodrama. You might pretend that you wrote that song by Counting Crows because you are well aware you’ve done nothing of note and, based on the emptiness inside, probably never will. Yet you believe the world is for you, since you’ve never learned any differently from Dad, the doctor/professor, and Mom, the artist. I read somewhere that dolphins stopped evolving because there was no need: the food was plentiful, and they reached the top of the food chain. I believe certain people stop evolving in the same way because interpersonal and professional success was handed to them, so they didn’t need to develop curiosity, empathy, or humility. I’ve heard that dolphins, incidentally, are assholes, too.

Trap (2024)

August 3, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: M. Night Shyamalan, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK, Yemen

½*/****
starring Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Hayley Mills
written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan

by Walter Chaw I try sometimes to put myself inside the mind of the creator, to imagine the route they took to the art they made. Maybe M. Night Shyamalan was at a concert, looked around, and imagined what it would be like if everyone there was searching for him. How he would have trouble blending in, but someone who looked like, say, Josh Hartnett, might have an easier time of it. He kind of took a run at this with the football game in Unbreakable, right? But why would Night imagine people were looking for him in the first place? Did he want that? Did he want the discomfort of being recognized in public, the struggle and obligation to be magnanimous towards strangers while remaining present for his family? Was the sacrifice of it appealing, a chance to display unusual charm and grace and build on the self-mythology he started in SPORTS ILLUSTRATED reporter Michael Bamberger’s hilarious, bathetic The Man Who Heard Voices, which begins: “Night’s shirt was half open, Tom Jones in his prime.” Not Henry Fielding’s fortunate foundling, for sure, but the Welsh sexy beast notorious for the amount of ladies’ lingerie tossed in his general direction on stage. Maybe Night was feeling the burden of being semi-famous in a specific location that night at this theoretical concert. Maybe he was feeling the burden of not being more famous.

Fantasia Festival ’24: Cuckoo

August 2, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

**/****
starring Hunter Schafer, Dan Stevens, Jessica Henwick, Márton Csókás
written and directed by Tilman Singer

by Walter Chaw For the most part, Cuckoo is the species of movie people who don’t like Yorgos Lanthimos accuse Yorgos Lanthimos of making. It’s a deadpan, mordant, deeply affected comedy of bad manners that distills human interactions to their component, lizard parts. In Cuckoo, marriage is merely a state-sanctioned reproductive arrangement designed to secure the reproductive potential of women; children are evolutionary guinea pigs for rogue geneticists; and love is a label for a biological reaction rather than a spiritual one. The picture’s main selling point, and what lends it depth, is star Hunter Schafer, fresh from HBO’s “Euphoria” and, from what I can tell, a capable and empathetic actor. But what serves this film particularly, perhaps cynically, is her identity as a prominent transgender activist. For me, a horror/sci-fi flick about a kind of human/cuckoo bird hybrid that, with the help of a secret cabal of mad scientists, implants their fetuses in the womb of unsuspecting hosts, is primed to be read as a trans parable. Being born in the wrong body? Feeling alien in one’s skin? Ostracized by family and dependent on doctors? I get it. Indeed, even in an age in which a woman’s reproductive choice is up for grabs again in the United States, seeing Cuckoo as a metaphor for the trans experience is the only way I could read it. I’m still trying to parse whether that’s to its benefit–because it gives it purposeful subtext–or an unfortunate distraction too unsubtle to be subtext, thus making the film feel didactic at best and like an exploitative vanity project at worst. Probably, it’s a “me” problem.

Fantasia Festival ’24: The Silent Planet

August 1, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/****
starring Elias Koteas, Briana Middleton
written and directed by Jeffrey St. Jules

by Walter Chaw Jeffrey St. Jules’s The Silent Planet, despite a small detail about hypoxia, doesn’t appear to be the long-awaited franchise adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s “Space Trilogy.” Rather, it occupies a space with Duncan Jones’s Moon, Walter Hill’s Supernova, David Fincher’s Alien³, and especially Jack Smight’s “Twilight Zone” episode “The Lonely,” in which poor James A. Corey (Jack Warden), a murderer sentenced to solitary confinement on a remote asteroid, is suddenly given a mysterious female companion (Jean Marsh) to ease the horror of his days. The aging murderer sentenced to Life in The Silent Planet is Theodore (Elias Koteas). Terminally ill and convinced that “alien gas” is making him revisit unpleasant episodes from his past, he carves out the monitoring device embedded in his chest, triggering an automated system to presume him dead and ship out his replacement: convicted terrorist Niyya (Briana Middleton). Niyya, orphaned as a child and raised by an alien race called the “Oieans” (who look vaguely like how C.S. Lewis described his pfifltriggi–but again, the film is not based on his Out of the Silent Planet), is understandably embittered about the human government sanctioning the oppression and genocide of her adopted people. Resigned to her fate, she’s unhappy to learn she’s sharing her interstellar oubliette with some nutsy old dude who’s clearly Going Through Something.

Fantasia Festival ’24: A Samurai in Time

July 31, 20242024, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Japan, Time Travel

***/****
starring Makiya Yamaguchi, Norimasa Fuke, Rantaro Mine, Yuno Sakura
written and directed by Junichi Yasuda

by Walter Chaw Jun-ichi Yasuda’s A Samurai in Time is a lightweight, nostalgia-streaked, deceptively sad little flick in which a bedraggled Edo-period samurai named Kosaka Shinzaemon (Makiya Yamaguchi) finds himself, at the moment of his most meaningful duel against the evil Kyoichiro Kazami (Ken Shonozaki), finds himself transported to the present and mistaken for an extra on a samurai television show. Guided by old-world decorum and generally astonished as a fish-out-of-water, he falls under the kind auspices of script supervisor Yuko (Yuno Sakura), who takes him under her wing and helps him get progressively better roles as the sort of fight extra–a kiraeyaku–who “gets slashed” in jidaigeki productions like hers. A Samurai in Time doesn’t break any new ground, but it trods those worn boards with a spring in its step. I loved a moment where Kosaka tastes a little dessert and, in horror, asks if they made a mistake giving it to someone as lowly as he. When told that anyone has a right to eat such miracles in modern Japan, he weeps and declares his relief that a country he left in war and on the brink of collapse would become such a generous, egalitarian society as to treat all its citizens, from top to bottom, as royalty. I appreciate science-fiction that’s aspirational rather than apocalyptic. It’s hard to see sometimes how far we’ve come.

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: The Dead Thing

July 27, 2024Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror

***/****
starring Blu Hunt, Ben Smith-Petersen, John Karna, Katherine Hughes
written by Webb Wilcoxen and Elric Kane
directed by Elric Kane

by Walter Chaw There’s a scene in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse where one of the last surviving citizens of an apocalyptic Tokyo stumbles into a forbidden room–the sort of room Tarkovsky locates in his wastelands now and again–and meets a phantom who tells him that death is “eternal loneliness.” The Internet has become the kind of trap divers warn about: a technological rapture of the deep that presents a sanctuary for the wayward spirit, the parts in everyone that are lost, never mind that there’s no air in there and the pressures of continuing to exist as a version of yourself are obliterating. Elric Kane’s The Dead Thing has similar thoughts on its mind, 23 years down the electric road from Pulse (a gap which, if measured in terms of gadget generations, may as well be millennia ago), in considering what happens to the soul when courtship and physical touch is primarily, if not exclusively, mediated through viewscreens and algorithms. The Dead Thing wonders what would happen if you invested so much of yourself into an electronic web that when you died, an echo of you lived there forever. I mean, is that even science-fiction? It’s a good ghost story, in other words, but it’s an even better spiritual piece about the nature of eternity.

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

July 26, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, Superhero

**½/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Matthew Macfadyen
written by Ryan Reynolds & Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick & Zeb Wells & Shawn Levy
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw What’s legitimately fascinating about Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine is how much of its humour is based on idiotic producer’s notes and franchise-killers. It’s essentially the manifestation of the concept of irony, and it relies entirely on an individual’s knowledge of the last twenty years of “Access Hollywood”/TMZ culture: the public and private failures of the rich and famous, like who Jennifer Garner’s ex is and how Marvel hasn’t figured out how to launch another Blade movie even though Wesley Snipes and Guillermo del Toro are both right fucking there. You don’t need to have watched all of these latex flicks and their television spin-offs or to have read the comics, but it helps in appreciating the Shrek-ness of it all, I suppose, absolutely the lowest form of endorphin-mining. We have reached tentpole filmmaking as micro-transactional phone game: 99¢ to unlock a new costume, another $1.99 to play as Lexi Alexander’s Punisher–you know, the good one. It works to the extent it works because you’re like me and you watched the X-Men cartoon in its first run and have always lamented that they couldn’t figure out how to make Gambit cool in the live-action universe. The entire midsection of Deadpool & Wolverine, in fact, takes place on The Island of Misfit Toys for nerd detritus (remember that appalling multiverse sequence in The Flash? Like that, but with living actors), more or less, and manages, against every expectation, to be a little bit touching. The film works like a roast/eulogy for thinking we wanted a Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s as if we’re all Regan waking up with a bad Pazuzu hangover. What the fuck did we do? What the fuck is wrong with us?

Fantasia Festival ’24: The Soul Eater

July 25, 20242024, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Crime, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Thriller

Mangeur d’Âmes
*½/****
starring Virginie Ledoyen, Sandrine Bonnaire, Paul Hamy, Cameron Bain
written by Annelyse Batrel, Ludovic Lefebvre
directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo

by Walter Chaw Alexander Bustillo and Julien Maury’s first film, 2007’s Inside, is a prominent member of the brief but incandescent French New Extremity movement, and so fucking good it reverberates still, 17 years later, showing up in the fetus reaction shots of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part Two and contributing to the slight feeling of dread I’ve come to feel about changing lightbulbs and getting into fender-benders. Inside‘s stylishness, lawlessness, and formal gamesmanship left such a mark on me that I found an all-region release of Bustillo and Maury’s follow-up, Livid, before it secured an American release and did the same thing again with Among the Living. Neither was as good as Inside, but both were slick enough to suggest there might be more live rounds in the barrel. I was thrilled when they landed a prequel to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Leatherface, and disappointed when it failed to push any boundaries–a running theme, as it turns out, for their follow-ups: the monster film Kandisha and the underwater haunted-house flick The Deep House. They’re still promising filmmakers, but after setting the world on fire, their work has lacked danger and urgency.

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.