Telluride ’21: Spencer

September 8, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Chile, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, Telluride, UK

Tell21spencer

***½/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Sean Harris, Amy Manson, Sally Hawkins
written by Steven Knight
directed by Pablo Larrain

by Walter Chaw The last 12 minutes or so of Derek Jarman’s excoriating, experimental The Last of England is just Tilda Swinton armed with garden shears, framed against a stark background, ripping through her wedding dress in a rapture of rage–a resounding rejection (or a prophecy of the inevitable fall) of the tradition and ritual, the future and hope, that marriages represent. The whole film is scenes of atrocity and decay intercut with home movies of the child this bride was, the couple this bride is a part of, and the calamity of the union into which society has forced her, culminating in this exorcism of these ties that bind. It’s one of the great exits in Jarman, and The Last of England‘s afterimage is all over Pablo Larrain’s impressionistic Spencer, a biography of three miserable days, from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day, at the end of Princess Diana’s tenure. It seeps through especially in a sequence where Diana (Kristen Stewart) dances by herself down the empty halls of Sandringham, an act of rebelling against the norms and controls imposed on her by the misfortune of her station. The scene would play perfectly against the mute wanderings of a grief-stricken Jackie Onassis in Larrain’s previous examination of a woman encased–and left adrift–in a patriarchal system of power and exchange, Jackie. They are complementary portraits of the suffocation of empire. Both can be unpacked by Jarman’s takedown of Thatcher’s England, and all three left me a mess.

Telluride ’21: King Richard

September 6, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Sports, Telluride, Will Smith, ZERO STARS

Telluride21kingrichard

ZERO STARS/****
starring Will Smith, Jon Bernthal, Tony Goldwyn, Dylan McDermott
written by Zach Baylin
directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green

by Walter Chaw You know what this movie is. You know the major beats, you know the resolution, and in those rare instances when something happens you maybe don’t expect, you know immediately how it will resolve. There is no surprise to movies like Reinaldo Marcus Green’s King Richard by design, not misstep–they are by their nature for the least discriminating audience, the ones desperate to avoid challenge, thinking, reconsideration, discomfort. It is Taco Bell on vacation. You go there for a reason and none of it has to do with the quality of the food. It’s the disgusting robe you’ve had since college that your wife begs you to throw away, but you don’t. King Richard is garbage that people like, machine-extruded pap, hardwired and cynically engineered to garner a certain level of prestige. It’s the uplift picture multiplied by a minority voice. It’s ugly manipulation, more horse-betting than art–though the gamblers would argue that what they do is science rather than just venal calculation.

Telluride ’21: The French Dispatch

September 5, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, Telluride

Tell21frenchdispatch

The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun
**/****
starring Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Jeffrey Wright
screenplay by Wes Anderson
directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw Out of three sections, not including a framing story, there is one that gets what it’s after with the soul of wit and a tug of the heart along the way. It’s the middle section, the one concerning a brilliant modern artist incarcerated in a French prison for dismembering two bartenders who falls in love with one of his jailers. He is Moses Rosenthaler (Benicio Del Toro) and his eternal Beatrice, his jack-booted muse, is Simone (Léa Seydoux), and the pas de deux they perform together encapsulates a range of lovely nuance that crystallizes what it is that Wes Anderson does very well, if only occasionally these days, in brief flashes glimpsed between the metric ton of artifice and affectation. For many, the chantilly is the point of Anderson–those gaudy elements that make him one of the most satirized filmmakers of his generation. For me, and up through The Darjeeling Limited, what I liked best about Wes Anderson was his sometimes shockingly effective grappling with absent fathers and broken families. His twee quirk used to be a delivery system for emotional squalls. Now, if those crescendos are there, they’re gasping for air.

Telluride ’21: An Introduction or, the Train Doesn’t Stop at Any Stations

September 4, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride

Tell2021

by Walter Chaw I use these trips to the Telluride Film Festival as year-markers: summaries and confessions sometimes filled with hope for the new year, although I find I live almost entirely in the past, in fear of the future, neglecting the present. I don’t think this is an unusual malady (indeed, it might be the common malady), and shaking loose of it may be the pestilence that finally ends us and not any other. This year, I took a different route to Telluride, not through the canyon, but straight across the I-70 to Grand Junction, then south to the sheltered valley where Telluride sits. Partly I did this for the novelty of it (I haven’t driven over Vail Pass since an accident I had there…can it be a decade ago already?), and partly out of wanting to pick up my friend Katrina from the Grand Junction airport to drive her down to meet her husband at the festival. Every time I go through the Eisenhower Tunnel, I remember that particular passage from The Stand and how, several years ago, I listened to its audiobook on the way up to a different Telluride. It was the first time I’d made it to the end of the novel. A die-hard fan of King’s, I nevertheless find his fantasies difficult water to tread. Colorado is a beautiful state, though I worry that the lakes and rivers are looking as low as they’re looking right now. I doubt I’ve ever seen them quite so dry.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Prisoners of the Ghostland

August 28, 2021Posted in2021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Nicolas Cage, Thriller

Fantasia21prisonersofaghostland

*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Sofia Boutella, Nick Cassavetes, Tak Sakaguchi
screenplay by Aaron Hendry, Reza Sixo Safai
directed by Sion Sono

by Walter Chaw A theory I’ve been kicking around about certain pre-made, fast-fashion auteur demimondes like, say, Sion Sono: there are those who are anointed cult filmmakers because they have idiosyncratic tastes; and there are those without any real taste who aspire to be cult filmmakers because they’ve figured out that idioscyncracy can be marketable and have thus taken it on as an affectation. The former make films the only way they can make them, driven by a purity and persistence of vision; the latter make stuff like Prisoners of the Ghostland, because they’ve seen films by the former and wonder what could be so hard about that? It’s why Sono’s work is only spoken of in reference to other films and filmmakers, or even to earlier entries in his own filmography, back when he was doing what he felt was right rather than what he thought he should. Prisoners of the Ghostland is a facile affectation, in other words, a slapdash collection of somebody else’s cool without a genuine, native bone in its body. Douglas Adams includes instructions for how to fly in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books: you fall and miss. You can’t fly on purpose, you see. You can’t make a camp movie on purpose, either. It took me three tries to get through Prisoners of the Ghostland. 102 minutes of someone not meaning it is incredibly boring.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Dreams on Fire

August 23, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Japan

Fantasia21dreamsonfire

***/****
starring Bambi Naka, Akaji Maro, Ikuyo Kuroda, Masahiro Takashima
written and directed by Philippe McKie

by Walter Chaw I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a film quite like Philippe McKie’s Dreams on Fire. Not for its story of a young dancer looking for her big break while jumping from humiliating job to humiliating job; Flashdance and Fame are two of the picture’s obvious touchpoints, although the Step Up franchise is the obvious headwater. Rather, Dreams on Fire is distinctive because of its focus on how each failure is a gift if you can manage somehow not to quit. The movie opens in a familiar place as young Yume (Bambi Naka) declares her dream of being a dancer to the violent disapproval of her tradition-bound grandfather (Akaji Maro), her mother (Ikuyo Kuroda) hiding to avoid the conversation. I’ve learned something, hopefully not too late, after thirty-some years in corporate America: that everything my parents taught me was a measure of success was a lie. Education, climbing the ladder, home-ownership, money as the end-all/be-all of happiness–lies, obvious lies. I have achieved everything I was supposed to achieve and it didn’t make me happier for even a moment. No one comes to the end of their life wishing they’d worked more. I made the decision to be happy, and my worst days now are better than my best days then.

Fantasia Festival ’21: When I Consume You

August 22, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery

Fantasia21wheniconsumeyou

**½/****
starring MacLeod Andrews, Evan Dumouchel, Libby Ewing
written and directed by Perry Blackshear

by Walter Chaw Living with addiction, Daphne (Libby Ewing) and Wilson (Evan Dumouchel) are siblings on the perpetual edge of destitution. They are each other’s only means of emotional and occasionally material support. As writer-director Perry Blackshear’s When I Consume You opens, Daphne spits blood and other viscera into a sink and yells through the bathroom door that she just needs a minute. She has a secret to hide, and her brother seems to be having a rough time of it, so maybe that’s why she’s not telling him whatever it is that’s going on with her. A lovely early scene that won me over, as it happens, sees Wilson having a panic attack and Daphne talking him through it. This depiction of the sibling relationship is intimate, empathetic, and authentic-feeling. There’ve been a few compelling sibling relationships anchoring horror films–I’m thinking of the brothers in The Lost Boys, or the brother/sister in Jeepers Creepers, and how those films similarly use threats to that relationship as empathy engine and maybe even as a metaphor for growing apart. A flashback in When I Consume You to, if not “happier,” at least earlier times, shows the pair working on a project together in a tight physical space talking about shared burdens and possible futures that we know are insurmountable on the one hand and doomed on the other. Affecting stuff, and it proves to be the central concern of When I Consume You after all the sound and fury burns off: It’s your siblings who know what you’ve been through; and maybe it’s your siblings who, for as much as they’re responsible for you holding on to your demons, will help you get past them, too.

Fantasia Festival ’21: The Sadness

August 20, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Taiwan

Fantasia21sadness

***/****
starring Regina Lei, Tzu-Chiang Wang, Berant Zhu
written and directed by Rob Jabbaz

by Walter Chaw Canadian expat Rob Jabbaz has had it. His hyphenate debut The Sadness is one of the bleakest, angriest films I’ve seen in a long time, made rarer still by being carried off with obvious chops. Its focus is to unequivocally cut through the bullshit of this, our shitty timeline. The first real conversation of the film is between our hero, Jun (Berant Zhu), and his neighbour across adjoining balconies, concerning how a virus causing some doctors concern is a hoax perpetrated by big business and the media. A talk-show host in the background speaks over a virologist who warns of the potentially world-ending evil of politicizing a pandemic, and…well, you get the picture. The scariest thing about The Sadness–a very scary picture–is that it’s the product of a Canadian filmmaker working in Taiwan, which confirms that Trump is a symptom not the cause of whatever the good fuck is wrong with us. In my darker moments, I like to say that we’re just monkeys in clothes, and every minute we’re not killing each other over protein and access to women is a miracle. The premise of The Sadness is a thought exercise in ironic magnification, one where you make the point by exaggerating the scenario slightly. The premise of The Sadness is that we’re all monkeys in clothes, and imagine if we stopped pretending that we aren’t.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Don’t Say Its Name

August 20, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror

Fantasia21dontsayitsname

***/****
starring Julian Black-Antelope, Samuel Marty, Sera-Lys McArthur, Madison Walsh
written by Rueben Martell & Gerald Wexler
directed by Rueben Martell

by Walter Chaw Colonialism is the monster in Saskatchewan (and Cree) filmmaker Rueben Martell’s Don’t Say Its Name, the “that which must not be mentioned” in a story set among Indigenous Peoples, battling the loss of its people to an inexorable malignancy. The Great Evil manifests as two things: white energy employee Donny (Tom Carey), representing European skullduggery through the fetishizing of Aboriginal women and the committing of all manner of atrocity upon the land and its people in the name of manifest right; and an invisible golem that announces itself with the cry of a crow and a vile stench before disembowelling the isolated residents of a remote Canadian backwood. The victims both bad guys claim are the people in this place–the one because he’s a representative murderous asshole, the other because its sense of outrage over Indigenous Peoples who have if not fully participated in the annexation of their land, are at least sympathetic to a policy of appeasement rather than resistance. Powerful, timely stuff in this age of the Keystone Pipeline and the discovery of scores of dead Indigenous children buried in Catholic schoolyards, made even more powerful by its centring of police officer Betty (Madison Walsh) and her new deputy, a former game warden and army vet named Stacey (Sera-Lys McArthur). Don’t Say Its Name isn’t fucking around.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes

August 18, 2021Posted in****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Japan, Sci-Fi, Time Travel

Fantasia21beyondtheinfinite

Droste no hate de bokura
****/****
starring Kazunari Tosa, Riko Fujitani, Gôta Ishida, Aki Asakura
screenplay by Makota Ueda
directed by Junta Yamaguchi

by Walter Chaw Junta Yamaguchi’s directorial debut Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is zero-budget high-concept done right, a fastball-down-the-middle of a time-travel movie landing right when the concept seemed to have been wrung dry. Logging in at a lean 70 minutes, it doesn’t have a trace of fat on it. More, it manages in that brief span to paint fully-fleshed characters, conjure and pay off a romantic-comedy subplot, and juggle a couple of sharp tonal shifts. It’s so good because it’s so…simple. A strange thing to say about a premise that’s kind of mind-breaking as a pair of connected, closed-circuit monitors accidentally creates a temporal wormhole across the span of two minutes, but there you have it. This little masterpiece proves the truism that whatever the plot might be, as long as the characters and their motivations remain legible and relatable, baby, you got a movie. Simple.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Hotel Poseidon

August 15, 2021Posted in****/****, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Comedy, Esoterica, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror

Fantasia21hotelposeidon

****/****
starring Ruth Becquart, Steve Geerts, Anneke Sluiters, Tine Van den Wyngaert
written and directed by Stef Lernous

by Walter Chaw An art director’s fever dream, Stef Lernous’s Hotel Poseidon is a sequel in spirit to Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessen and a film that would comfortably complete a trilogy with Jeunet & Caro’s City of Lost Children. Here, Lernous says that we’re all the product of our shadows, those unexamined parts of us shoved into the crannies of our unconscious, and he packs every frame with florid, fulsome, grotesque manifestations of this idea, which is matched by a genuinely exciting dedication to going for it. It’s not unlike a David Lynch film in that way, and like Lynch’s work, its unpredictability and willingness to do anything make it both very funny and occasionally existentially horrifying. Sometimes in the same moment. Hotel Poseidon is set in a single building bathed in a sickly sepia palette and suffused with themes of submersion. It follows a vignette structure of sorts that finds a different psychodrama, a different element of the subconscious, played out in each room of a decaying apartment hotel. The film is a tour through the unconscious–a Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in which each new horror plumbs personal depths of grief, guilt, and shame most of all. (Its closest analogue may actually be Barton Fink.) Hotel Poseidon, in other words, is difficult to describe.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Giving Birth to a Butterfly

August 13, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Road Movie

Fantasia21givingbirth

*/****
starring Gus Birney, Annie Parisse, Paul Sparks, Judith Roberts
written by Patrick Lawler & Theodore Schaefer
directed by Theodor Schaefer

Fantasia Festival runs from August 5 to August 25, 2021. For more details, visit their website.

by Walter Chaw Theodore Schaefer’s Giving Birth to a Butterfly is in love with doubling and other broad metaphors deployed to speak, Kieslowski-like, to the winsome possibilities of unlived lives. Trapped in a loveless marriage with oaf Daryl (Paul Sparks), Diane (Annie Parisse) is mother to wry Danielle (Rachel Resheff) and a dreamer of a boy (Owen Campbell) who has just brought home a girlfriend, Marlene (Gus Birney), pregnant by another. Marlene needs a place to stay, and against Diane’s wishes, everyone’s planning to impose Marlene upon Diane’s household. It’s weird, you know, because Marlene doesn’t even seem to want to be there. That’s the essential premise of Giving Birth to a Butterfly: that women aren’t in charge of their own fate–ever, but particularly when they’re in the process of expressing their biology. That is, when they’re mothers. The best part of this film is the first part establishing a tense family dynamic, with Diane maybe the only adult in the room. The men and the pre-motherhood teen girl are silly and unmoored to the cold realities of existence.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Baby, Don’t Cry

August 11, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Romance, Thriller

Fantasia21babydontcry

*/****
starring Zita Bai, Boni Mata, Vas Provatakis, Helen Sun
written by Zita Bai
directed by Jesse Dvorak

Fantasia Festival runs from August 5 to August 25, 2021. For more details, visit their website.

by Walter Chaw Zita Bai stars in and scripts Baby, Don’t Cry, a film by Jesse Dvorak that follows a rough few weeks in the life of troubled teen Baby (Bai). Unsuccessfully navigating a dysfunctional home and hostile high-school environment, she meets bad boy Fox (Vas Provatakis) and, in the tradition of stuff like Badlands and Gun Crazy, falls in love and engages in some very bad things–not necessarily in that order. The promise of the piece is that Baby initially seems unfamiliar: a heavily-accented Chinese-American who consoles her loneliness with a habit of filming people and things–perhaps to contextualize them, though more likely to hold them in digital amber, thus negating their immediate threat. The problem is that this promise is largely squandered in a series of repetitive conflicts and resolutions punctuated now and again by hints of magic realism (like her mother sprouting pig ears, or a cartoon fox pacing a car) that, again, are suggestive of a deeper exploration of alienation and loss without the muscle to provide an adequate reckoning with them.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Agnes

August 10, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror

Fantasia21agnes

***½/****
starring Chris Browning, Mary Buss, Sean Gunn, Ben Hall
written by Mickey Reece & John Selvidge
directed by Mickey Reece

Fantasia Festival runs from August 5 to August 25, 2021. For more details, visit their website.

by Walter Chaw Agnes (Hayley McFarland) and Mary (Molly Quinn) are young nuns at the tightly-run convent of Mother Superior (Mary Buss). The two are friends, and they both have terrible stories about their lives before they, separately, sought out this place–less, we think, from a desire to be wed to the Almighty than to find shelter from the sorrows of the big, wide world outside. One night, Agnes calls all of the other sisters “whores” over dinner while the table shakes and a coffee cup hovers around. Of course they strap her to her bed and call Rome, and of course Rome responds by sending an old/young priest pair in Father Donaghue (Ben Hall) and soon-to-be Father Ben (Jake Horowitz). Trouble is, Father Donaghue has been recently accused of being a pederast (a charge he has not denied), while Father Ben has just passed his coordination period as Deacon and is not nearly prepared enough to be in the company of an entire nunnery, much less perform an exorcism. They’re being set up for failure. Perhaps Father Donaghue dying during an exorcism will save the Bishop the trouble of transferring him to an unsuspecting diocese.

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

February 15, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Sundance, Teen

Sundance21wereallgoing

***/****
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.

Sundance ’21: Strawberry Mansion

February 10, 2021Posted in****/****, 2021, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, Sundance

Sundance21strawberrymansion

****/****
starring Penny Fuller, Kentucker Audley, Grace Glowicki, Reed Birney
written and directed by Albert Birney & Kentucker Audley

by Walter Chaw Strawberry Mansion is very much like a live-action “Adventure Time”, perhaps doomed, like Pendleton Ward’s existentialist/surrealist masterpiece, to a long road to appreciation as something emotionally incisive rather than something especially but merely unconventional. Of all the antecedents it boasts (add eXistenZ, Alphaville, Tom Schiller’s Nothing Lasts Forever, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Douglas Adams’s work, and, um, Laura to the mix), however, Strawberry Mansion finally reminds me most of the Oliver Stone-produced miniseries “Wild Palms” in both its literal execution and the low thrum of underlying paranoia about the commodification of dream sleep. The danger is great that a stew as heady as this will be ponderous at best, indecipherable at worst, but it’s delivered with a confident, even light touch by co-writers/co-directors Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney. As odd as it seems on the surface, the picture, again like “Adventure Time”, has easy-to-argue themes and is guided by what feels like real, cathartic pathos. Strawberry Mansion‘s aggressive artifice actually enhances its emotional authenticity. I love this film.

Sundance ’21: Violation

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

Sundance21violation

****/****
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.

Sundance ’21: Cryptozoo

February 2, 2021Posted in2021, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Esoterica, Fantasy, Film Festivals, Sundance

Sundance21cryptozoo

*/****
written and directed by Dash Shaw

by Walter Chaw I rail a lot about how animation is a genre in the United States instead of a medium, how the Japanese have it all figured out and we Americans are at least a generation behind. Now here’s graphic novelist turned animator Dash Shaw, following up his better–or at least more focused–My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea with the oddly blissed-out eco-adventure flick Cryptozoo. What’s clear is that this, more than his previous stuff, is an attempt to ape Japanese director Ujicha’s hand-drawn nightmare/cutout style from stuff like the indelible The Burning Buddha Man and Violence Voyager. What Shaw hasn’t successfully ported over is Ujicha’s kineticism–that sense of propulsive, compulsive, nightmarish energy that confers upon his films a weird, repulsive energy. Watching Ujicha’s films is like accidentally touching a sea cucumber. I reached into an opaque bag of Wonder Bread that I found in a cabin once and drew back, in revulsion, a hand covered in bright green slime. That’s Ujicha. Cryptozoo is a movie that feels like it was based on one of the breathless stories Juliet and Pauline would have made up over a lazy summer’s day in Heavenly Creatures. Just a long string of terribly important things tied together by “and then and then and this and also this” narrative exposition.

Sundance ’21: Knocking

February 2, 2021Posted in2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Sundance, Sweden, Thriller

Sundance21knocking

Knackningar
**½/****
starring Cecilia Milocco, Krister Kern, Albin Grenholm, Ville Virtanen
written by Emma Broström
directed by Frida Kempff

by Walter Chaw Frida Kempff’s Knocking reminds me a great deal of Matthew Chapman’s underseen Heart of Midnight, in that both are about troubled young women recovering from some recent trauma, given autonomy over themselves and their environment and then mistrusted when things, perhaps insidiously, start to go pear-shaped. Where they diverge, however, is that Chapman’s film is deliciously sleazy–the peril therein largely housed in the tension between sexual repression and expression and the lengths to which a male-dominated society is interested in manipulating women. It’s no accident an inciting moment in Heart of Midnight involves an apple dropped from a peephole bored through the heroine’s ceiling. In Knocking, the tension is whether Molly (Cecilia Milocco) is hearing ghostly knocking coming from her ceiling–maybe in Morse code, maybe not–or imagining it. That’s it. Unless the knocking is attached to some tangible anchor, it can exist only as a metaphor for Molly’s flashed-back-to but oblique trauma, for her sexual identity as gay (though no one seems interested in her one way or another), or for a more general sense of societal systems designed around not believing women. All are important in a social sense and tedious in a metaphorical sense. If the message is women get shafted, well, this is true and terrible. But if that’s all you have to say about it, there’s nothing left to consider in the subtext.