Drama Archives - Page 11 of 120 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Sundance ’21: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

February 15, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Sundance, Teen

***/****
starring Anna Cobb, Michael J. Rogers
written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun

by Walter Chaw We spend our teen years–and, if we’re not careful, our entire lives–imagining ourselves a player in a grand, romantic storyline where everything that happens has meaning, every misdeed receives justice, and every moment of grace is returned in kind. We need to feel like there’s more to this than just chaos and meaningless suffering. Most of all, we need to believe that we have some control over how things turn out on both a personal level and a cosmic one, too. The alternative, after all, tends to be despair. I suspect the reason Boomers are the majority demographic in the Q-nonsense is their fear of a world in which they suddenly understand nothing requires some sort of recourse, no matter how tortured.

Judas and the Black Messiah (2021)

February 11, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Streaming, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Daniel Kaluuya, LaKeith Stanfield, Jesse Plemons, Martin Sheen
screenplay by Will Berson & Shaka King
directed by Shaka King

by Walter Chaw Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah is a fantastic Vietnam War movie that is not simultaneously a fantastic biopic of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. It reminded me a lot, and directly, of Brian De Palma’s moral opera Casualties of War, which first challenged me to reckon with the American military not as a source of global good but as the perpetrators of atrocity at the whim of an inexorable capitalist, expansionist empire hiding behind the cowl of religion and white supremacy. In that film, ’80s emblem of white, “compassionate” conservatism Michael J. Fox plays a green soldier who turns whistleblower as the witness to the misdeeds of his rapacious, brutal company commander, (Sean Penn). Based, like Judas and the Black Messiah, on true events, Casualties of War, again like King’s film, sees white America as engaged in war crimes against minority populations. Alas, like De Palma’s indisputably powerful piece, King’s film is a better cultural self-excoriation than it is an examination of whatever’s embedded in the American character that sees the flaying of Black (and Asian) bodies as both inevitable and isolated throughout our short history. In each film, there is the implication that justice of a sort has been served: in the one with trial and imprisonment for the malefactors, in the other (Judas and the Black Messiah) with the reported real-life suicide of the rat in Fred Hampton’s cupboard. Neither movie really reckons with the growing silence of minority voices in our discourse.

Sundance ’21: Violation

February 8, 2021****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Sundance

****/****
starring Madeleine Sims-Fewer, Anna Maguire, Jesse LaVercombe, Obi Abili
written and directed by Madeleine Sims-Fewer & Dusty Mancinelli

by Walter Chaw Just the image of a man, naked, fighting for his life against a clothed assailant after a sexually-compromised engagement feels by itself something like rebellion. Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer’s Violation isn’t the first in the struggle, but it’s a powerful addition to a fulsome rape-revenge subgenre that, with classics like Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45, Lars Von Trier’s Dogville, and Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave leading a to-this-point male-dominated field, has always had something on its mind about the way women are brutalized in a society that sees them mainly as appendages for male desire. What I like best about Violation, though, isn’t its similarities to modern examples, but rather its relationship (not unlike Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring) to ancient examples such as Medea and Atreus. Indeed, the film lands somewhere between the two: the House of Atreus cursed because of a rape and playing out through the rendering and surreptitious cannibalism that Violation makes distaff through Medea’s vengeful filicide (at least in the Euripedes telling). Violation is ancient Greek, too, in the pulling of atrocity into the immediate comparison to not the indifference of the natural world, but the transformative viciousness that animates it. Things are always in a state of violent flux; it’s nature’s lone promise. And this cosmological tendency towards equilibrium is only achieved through the passing through of distant polarities. The road to “fine” leads through bliss and blood.

Malcolm & Marie (2021) – Netflix

February 6, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Streaming, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Zendaya, John David Washington
written and directed by Barry Levinson’s son

by Walter Chaw An eight-minute diatribe is the noxious centre of Sam Levinson’s intolerable ego trip Malcolm & Marie, distinct neither for the obnoxious volume at which it’s delivered nor for the hollowness of its content, but because it manages to stand out at all, coming as it does in the middle of the other shouted invectives that form the rest of it. In this diatribe, flavour-of-the-moment, hotshot movie director Malcolm (John David Washington), on the night of the premiere of his well-received debut, reads a glowing early review by “that white lady at the L.A. Times” and rails on about “woke” culture and how he, as a Black director, is only compared to other Black directors as opposed to people like William Wyler and Billy Wilder? Does he mean real directors, or does he mean white directors? Does he mean that he doesn’t like to be compared to John Singleton and Spike Lee because they are not good, or because they are Black and what he does, what Malcolm does, is entirely independent of his identity as a Black man? Is he suggesting that he has no identity as a Black artist? And if he’s not suggesting that, is Levinson, the unimaginably-privileged white son of Hollywood royalty (Oscar-winning Barry is his dad)? Why is either Levinson or Malcolm complaining about this straw lady also talking about how Malcolm’s film addresses trauma, recovery, and violence towards women? Is this not the one area in which she should be “allowed” to opine?

Sundance ’21: The Pink Cloud

February 1, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brazil, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Sundance

A Nuvem Rosa
***½/****
starring Renata de Lélis, Eduardo Mendonça, Helena Becker, Girley Paes
written and directed by Iuli Gerbase

by Walter Chaw Iuli Gerbase’s stunning feature debut The Pink Cloud owes a great deal to the insular psychodramas of J.G. Ballard, landing somewhere in the vicinity of a more specific High Rise in which the fall of society is focused through the decay of a relationship forged in quarantine. It works best as allegory, allying itself with something like Lorcan Finnegan’s recent and similarly-pre-pandemic Vivarium, using science-fiction as a launch point to test the tensile strength of the tenterhooks tethering us to one another. The details of the corruption matter less than how we change when our environment changes–or, more specifically, how we fail to.

The Little Things (2020)

January 28, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, Jared Leto, Natalie Morales
written and directed by John Lee Hancock

by Walter Chaw For a film aspiring so desperately towards a kind of shimmering, sublime, existential opacity, John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things would have done well to be not quite so gaffed and on-the-nose. The epilogue even features someone tying all of the film’s alleged mysteries up in a literal bow (well, barrette), which could be sly and knowing postmodernism but, in the hands of Hancock and composer Thomas Newman, his confederate in pabulum, is almost assuredly just as obvious as it appears. I’ve liked a couple of Hancock’s films–especially The Rookie, because it was heartfelt pap. And I’ve disliked the rest of them for being the same heartfelt pap. Saving Mr. Banks, for instance, is egregious in its Vaseline-smeared defanging of P. L. Travers, the better to pay proper tribute to an at-least-ambiguous Walt Disney. Which is still a far sight better than what Hancock did to infantilize Michael Oher in that completely irredeemable, appallingly paternalistic celebration of White Evangelical Christianity, The Blind Side. I guess I don’t mind pap in the tale of an old person getting to play baseball and like it less when it’s in the service of making strong women appear weak and Black men appear slow and affable. I guess I don’t enjoy heartfelt pap, either, in a long, dark teatime-of-the-soul ’90s throwback serial-killer procedural.

The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (1990/2020) – Blu-ray Disc

January 27, 20211990s, 2020, 2021, Al Pacino, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Drama, Gangster

Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone
*½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras D
starring Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Talia Shire, Andy Garcia
written by Mario Puzo & Francis Ford Coppola
directed by Francis Ford Coppola

by Bill Chambers I wasn’t a fan of 2019’s Apocalypse Now: Final Cut, but I’m OK with it existing because Apocalypse Now is Francis Ford Coppola’s Great American Novel, and I don’t think he’ll ever truly finish writing it. I don’t care that he recut The Cotton Club, either, especially since his intentions with that one were to give the movie back to its Black performers, who got marginalized in the theatrical version of a film designed to celebrate the Roaring Twenties from inside the Harlem jazz scene. And I enjoyed the bloat of The Outsiders: The Complete Novel, though I’m bummed it knocked the original cut out of circulation–the real scourge of these variant editions. Alas, The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (hereafter Coda), Coppola’s shortened remix of the famously flawed conclusion to the Godfather trilogy, finally tested my patience for his compulsive tinkering. The Godfather Part III‘s problems were always foundational, the result of a studio’s impatience and parsimony and a filmmaker’s baffling interpolation of his own dynasty into the fictional one he helped create, and these are bells that can’t be un-rung. To believe that a new edit was the magic bullet is to blame the heroic Walter Murch–who discovered the movie hiding in The Conversation‘s hot mess of footage back in the day–for the picture’s shortcomings. (Patently absurd, in other words.) It’s interesting to me that in 1991, The Godfather Part III was upgraded to a so-called “Final Director’s Cut” in which Coppola and Murch tried to solve the issue of too much Sofia Coppola by adding more of her, reinstating most notably a rooftop heart-to-heart between Michael (Al Pacino) and Mary Corleone (Sofia) that resurfaces in an abridged form in Coda. (Sadly, the 170-minute Final Director’s Cut permanently resigned the 162-minute theatrical cut to the dustbin of history.) Sans Murch, Coppola sentimentally snips a few of Sofia’s more girlish line readings, as if it’s not too late to spare her from ridicule–as if those weren’t the endearing parts of her uncomfortable performance.

Minor Premise (2020)

January 20, 20212020, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller, VOD

***/****
starring Sathya Sridharan, Paton Ashbrook, Dana Ashbrook
written by Justin Moretto, Eric Schultz, Thomas Torrey
directed by Eric Schultz

by Walter Chaw The engine driving Eric Schultz’s Minor Premise, already tangled and the highest of high concepts, is in fact deceptively simple: What would happen if we could map every individual personality trait we house in our heads and then, once mapped, what would happen if we tried to isolate the one we liked? Jerry Lewis did a variation on this with his The Nutty Professor, a film that is, among other things, a withering assessment of former partner Dean Martin and his single setting of sociopathic charm. Lewis indicts himself as well as buck-toothed and bumbling, brilliant but pathetic, yearning for some Dino blood to stiffen his backbone. Minor Premise posits that “Rat Pack” is just one of nine settings for us; brilliant, troubled scientist Ethan (Sathya Sridharan) wonders if his productivity might be elevated by cutting out all the noise and letting “intellect” take the wheel.

Sputnik (2020)

January 19, 2021****/****, 2020, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Russia, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Oksana Akinshina, Pyotr Fyodorov, Fedor Bondarchuk, Anton Vasilev
written by Oleg Malovichko, Andrey Zolotarev
directed by Egor Abramenko

by Walter Chaw It should come as no shock that there were so many superlative horror films in 2020–not because 2020 was a year of horrors, but because horror films have always been the canary in the coal mine. That a few of these warnings are arriving in the middle of the end carries the added melancholy knowledge that none of this is was unexpected. I think I even said something that November night in 2016 about how we were about to get some real bangers in genre cinema the next few years. It didn’t take a genius to figure it out. Clearly. Once the dust settles and whatever’s left of us finds a moment to compare notes, a few of the worst will try to say that no one could have seen this coming. But everyone knew, everyone knows, and yet here we are anyway. Tiresias posed the rhetorical question a few millennia ago, “How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise?” It’s terrible, Terry. The fucking worst.

Minari (2020)

January 10, 2021****/****, 2020, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama

****/****
starring Steven Yeun, Yeri Han, Youn Yuh-jung, Will Patton
written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung

by Walter Chaw I didn’t like my grandmother, either–the way she smelled (mothballs, I think)–but I always equated it with Taiwan and foreignness, you know, the parts of myself I was trying to burn away so the kids would accept me at my predominantly white school. If I recall correctly, all the way through high school I was one of maybe two or three Asian students. A great-aunt of mine visited one year. She fantasized about killing the geese at the park and eating them. It made me crazy when she spoke this way. I was mortified, embarrassed to be out with her; I walked apart from my family as if the distance would make people forget I wasn’t white. My grandmother would tell me about how stupid Americans were and how different my parents were here, how they didn’t used to fight like they do now that worry over money dominated our lives. My dad was a brilliant guy, a grandmaster Go player with a Ph.D. in Geochemistry. Or he would have had one, but he didn’t get along with his professors–and, he would tell me, he was very bad at German. (For a while, the only textbooks for what he was studying were written in German.) So he opened stores, learned silversmithing, and created jewelry. And he made a lot of business investments that were mostly failed that served to alienate him from us, strain his marriage, and rush him to the grave when he was 54. That’s seven years older than I am now.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020) – Netflix

January 6, 2021****/****, 2020, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Streaming, Thriller

****/****
starring Jesse Plemons, Jessie Buckley, Toni Collette, David Thewlis
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, based on the novel by Iain Reid
directed by Charlie Kaufman

by Walter Chaw The thing I say about Charlie Kaufman films is that I never really understand them, but they always seem to understand me. I suppose there are many ways to unpack his work, but it always only means one thing to me, and I wish I could articulate what that one thing is. If I were able to, I would know something important. Then I wonder if I don’t know it already, and I’m just protecting myself from articulating it because the thing that is important to know is also very painful to know. I’m Thinking of Ending Things tells me what it’s about when Jake (Jesse Plemons), on an interminable drive home to the family farm with his girlfriend Lucy (Jessie Buckley), tries in vain to recite the first few lines of Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode. Lucy interrupts him as he starts to make fun of the long title (“Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”), asking if he’s sure that’s not the body of the poem and generally souring the atmosphere enough that Jake gives up. The first lines of the Immortality Ode are:

The Midnight Sky (2020) – Netflix

December 26, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Thriller

½*/****
starring George Clooney, Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Caoilinn Springall
screenplay by Mark L. Smith, based on the book Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton
directed by George Clooney

by Walter Chaw Of late, I’ve wondered what my madness will come up with when it reaches the point of conjuring metaphors. Will it be a house of peeling wallpaper, rats in the spaces between the upstairs as a reference to me falling apart? Will it be the phantom of the ghost of a memory of something I regretted doing as a child, made manifest as a foundling I must take care of but can’t ever quiet? Maybe it’ll be the manuscript I write obsessively in spirals on the floor, or the way I wipe down every surface, exposed and hidden, in a Lady Macbeth-like compulsion to erase the indelible stink of a lifetime of creeping moral corruption. Maybe it’ll just be three ghosts telling me it’s not too late. It is too late for Dr. Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney), who sits by himself in an abandoned arctic research facility in 2046, three weeks after THE EVENT that has caused Earth to become uninhabitable for humans–though not so uninhabitable that Dr. Augustine Lofthouse doesn’t have time to eat cereal and give himself blood transfusions. Metaphors have survived, too.

News of the World (2020)

December 20, 20202020, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Streaming, Western

*½/****
starring Tom Hanks, Elizabeth Marvel, Ray McKinnon, Mare Winningham
screenplay by Paul Greengrass and Luke Davies, based on the novel by Paulette Jiles
directed by Paul Greengrass

Please take every precaution if you insist on risking your health and that of others to see this movie in a theatre. Wear a mask (over the nose, too, sport), practise social distancing, and don’t be a dick.

by Walter Chaw It’s a “Spongebob Squarepants” gag, maybe, or something from “Phineas & Ferb”. Some smart, post-modern cartoon. There’ll be a bunch of quick-cuts, several different angles, self-conscious camera movements, and whooshing noises to reveal, at the end of it all, a snail or a sloth moving along glacially. Maybe the punchline is a frog giving out a bored ribbit. This is how Paul Greengrass starts News of the World as well, with Tom Hanks as Captain Jefferson Kidd the bored frog in question. So much sound and fury in the opening moments of the piece, ending with the exciting reveal of Captain Kidd packing his horse to go somewhere. The movie doesn’t get better as it goes along, but it does calm down a little, settling into the comfortable cadence of a frictionless, awards-season prestige piece so aerodynamic it’ll pass right through you without leaving a mark. Like magic. Call it “The Road to Perdition, Anti-Western Edition” and you’d know enough about it to save yourself the fat awards-season runtime.

On the Rocks (2020)

December 16, 2020****/****, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Drama, Romance, Streaming

****/****
starring Bill Murray, Rashida Jones, Marlon Wayans
written and directed by Sofia Coppola

by Walter Chaw Of all the people making them, Sofia Coppola makes Sofia Coppola movies better than anyone else. Her body of work is remarkable for its consistency–such as that of a Japanese master like Ozu or Mizoguchi, frankly. So the chief complaint of nepotism levied against her strikes me as something of a mixed blessing. I don’t know that many creators have ever had the cachet to make exactly the films they want to make. Every single time. And the ones I can think of for which this is also true, it either wasn’t always true, hasn’t resulted in the level of visibility that Coppola’s films earn, or tend to be the province of men exclusively. I wonder about the resentment of some critics towards Coppola for somehow not being representative enough, as though any one artist can or should be expected to check every box. Best, often, not to try. I think of another woman and filmmaker with a similar amount of creative single-mindedness, Claire Denis, scoffing in an interview with Jonathan Romney of THE GUARDIAN when asked about the Hollywood #MeToo movement: “That’s a discussion that’s only being had in rich countries. The world is not just the United States and Europe. It’s a debate of spoiled children. I couldn’t care less about the Weinstein affair.” Where Denis is indicated mostly by how little she cares what you think, Coppola is branded as a figure mortally wounded by her time in the public view. That vulnerability, real or only perceived, inextricably infuses every frame of her movies with just a little extra trembling pathos.

Promising Young Woman (2020)

December 14, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Revenge, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie, Connie Britton
written and directed by Emerald Fennell

by Walter Chaw Hyphenate Emerald Fennell’s feature debut Promising Young Woman trails the same kind of buzz that accompanied David Slade’s Hard Candy 15 years ago. Here, that buzz says, is a film that will turn the tables on predators in a meaningful way; it purports to put the bad guys on notice that things are about to change for them: the hunters will now enjoy a bitter draught of their own medicine. Delicious! Unfortunately, like Hard Candy, Promising Young Woman is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, a mousetrap made out of wax, good intentions, and the right politics that pulls its punches in absurd, and absurdly consistent, ways. It doesn’t help. It doesn’t discover a new way to have an old conversation. And at the end of it all, it manufactures an ending in which the authorities it’s spent its entire thesis crucifying as ineffectual are relied upon to be the cavalry coming to save the day. Promising Young Woman is the punk that wants very much to be acceptable to the system against which it’s rebelling. At least it has some effective performances.

Mank (2020) – Netflix

December 5, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: David Fincher, Drama, Streaming

**½/****
starring Gary Oldman, Amanda Seyfried, Lily Collins, Charles Dance
screenplay by Jack Fincher
directed by David Fincher

by Walter Chaw I thought a lot, as I am wont to do from time to time, of the 1996 adult film Shock: Latex 2–directed by an interesting artist working in a devalued genre, Michael Ninn–while watching David Fincher’s new film, Mank, based on the life of Hollywood Golden Age screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. Both films are fetish items, anchored to a specific time and aesthetic, and both deal with eroticized figments of active, sometimes onanistic, imaginations. They even use the same techniques to imitate mediums, the better to replicate sensations attached to genres, cults of personalities, periods of time. The former, the literal porno, has transitional scenes involving a Marilyn Monroe lookalike who serves as a sort of phantasmagoric guide loosely tying together a series of otherwise largely-disconnected vignettes. (Clive Barker uses this rampantly eroticized icon to similar effect in his short story “Son of Celluloid.”) Fincher, meanwhile, uses screenplay-text chyrons to announce sequences involving an entire cast of cunning simulacrums of objects of that same fetishistic–at least for the cinephile–significance.

Catching Up (2020) – VOD

December 5, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disability, Drama, Romance, VOD

**½/****
starring Bill Crossland, Francesca Carpanini, Isabella Pisacane, Johnathan Fernandez
screenplay by Bill Crossland & Patrick Morris
directed by Bill Crossland

by Angelo Muredda Disabled men finally get that ’80s-tinged coming-of-age dramedy they ordered in Bill Crossland’s Catching Up, which feels at once like a hyper-niche genre exercise and something a bit too user-friendly for the masses to really say what it needs to say about its subjects’ sexual hang-ups. Appropriately, given the light representational twist of the premise and the title’s suggestion of something overdue, the film’s protagonist, Frank (played by Crossland, who also co-wrote the script with Patrick Morris and co-conceived the project with Mindy Beach), isn’t a high-school student on the verge of adulthood but rather a teacher, albeit one who still lives at home with his parents, who relate to him as both caretakers and friends. Along with Crossland’s uniquely specific casting–to the chagrin of this disabled writer and probably the filmmaker, too, it’s still a novelty to see a physically disabled actor playing a physically disabled character, let alone one they’ve written and directed–that quirk in the narrative trajectory makes Catching Up pretty novel despite its less convincing efforts to court a wider audience.

Requiem for a Dream (2000) [Director’s Cut] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

November 26, 20202000s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Darren Aronofsky, Drama, Esoterica

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

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans
screenplay by Hubert Selby Jr. and Darren Aronofsky, based upon the book by Selby Jr.
directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Bryant Frazer Few films are anywhere near as well made–as fierce and committed–as Requiem for a Dream, which stands as a 20-year-old landmark in an especially fertile era of New York indie filmmaking and one of the most expertly executed feel-bad narratives in the history of popular culture. Darren Aronofsky is a hell of a director, but he’s always been a little, well, intense for my taste. He’s got vision and passion to spare, and he clearly inspires dedication and devotion from his actors, yet I always feel there’s something critical missing from the films themselves. If π is David Lynch without an angle on the truly bizarre and Black Swan is David Cronenberg without the painful psychological acuity, then Requiem for a Dream is John Waters without the sense of humour. I know Waters is friendly with Aronofsky, but imagining him watching this in a dark theatre and positively cackling at its most painfully outré gambits is what helps get me through its pitiless final act.

I’m Your Woman (2020)

November 3, 2020****/****, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Thriller

****/****
starring Rachel Brosnahan, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Arinzé Kene, Bill Heck
written by Julia Hart & Jordan Horowitz
directed by Julia Hart

by Walter Chaw She’s talking to a stranger about her miscarriages and how her desire for a child burned a little more to ash with each of them. The embers were cold and black until one day, her husband brought home a baby and told her it was hers. I think she’s surprised how quickly something kindled inside of her. In many ways, her story is the story of how things you thought were dead in you can surprise you with their life. She tells the stranger that the baby laughs whenever she sings a particular song to it, him, in a particular way. She gives a demonstration. She doesn’t know where her husband is now and the stranger doesn’t either, of course. And then we’re outside the diner where she’s sitting, the kind designed to look like an old Airstream trailer. Hell, maybe it is an old Airstream, but anyway, the rounded edges of it dissolve into the curved underside of a bridge right at the same time the first notes of the song she sings for “her” baby fill the soundstage like it was conjured from some hopeful place. Like some other miracle.

Come Play (2020)

November 2, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Gillian Jacobs, John Gallagher Jr., Azhy Robertson, Winslow Fegley
written and directed by Jacob Chase

by Walter Chaw It’s difficult to know whether writer-director Jacob Chase’s feature debut Come Play means well or means ill; whether it’s an earnest attempt to discuss autism using a horror premise as metaphor for its impact on a family, or just a cheap rip-off of the already-cheap “Jung for Dummies” flick The Babadook. Even its execution vacillates between “super clumsy” and “surprisingly effective.” It’s like Come Play is at odds with itself–almost as though there were compromises made to get it made, and so what results is a possibly compelling premise with a couple of nice moments reduced to a derivative stock chiller that’s all the more frustrating for that promise. A horror movie about a creature haunting our various screens is at least timely, right? A Ringu update, perhaps. A Mercury Rising redux swinging drunkenly from unintentionally hilarious to probably-unintentionally offensive likely wasn’t the desired outcome.