Thriller Archives - Page 8 of 67

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.

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

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 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.

Total Recall (1990) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

December 9, 20201990s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Mexico, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, Thriller

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

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Ronny Cox
screenplay by Ronald Shusett & Dan O’Bannon and Gary Goldman, based on the short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Bryant Frazer Before watching Studiocanal’s new restoration of the 30-year-old science-fiction adventure Total Recall, I had only vague memories of seeing it on opening night. I mean, I remembered that I hated it, but I wasn’t sure why. I was already a Paul Verhoeven fan based on RoboCop, though I didn’t know anything else about his work. I know I was put off by the scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger puts a bullet in a woman’s head and then yuks it up with one of his trademark murder jokes. Sure, the screenplay has taken pains to establish the character’s unforgivable duplicity, but that’s the problem: She’s disposable, and she’s a punchline. (No wonder Sharon Stone jumped at the chance to play a serial murderer of men in Verhoeven’s next film.) And I recall that I was annoyed beyond reason by the film’s climax, which involves a very sudden change to the environment on Mars. The science behind it struck me as insultingly preposterous. Still, I think what I really objected to, what actually offended me, was the light tone. After RoboCop, which struck me as an appropriately sick joke about fascist tendencies in American law enforcement (still in the news!), I guess I expected Verhoeven to treat Philip K. Dick’s epochal ruminations on human consciousness, thought, and identity with some gravity (cf. the similarly Dick-inspired Blade Runner) instead of turning them into a wildly overblown comic-book complete with an absurdly-ripped muscleman as the self-doubting superhero at the centre of the action. That’s on me; Looking back on Total Recall after three decades, I can see it more clearly. For Verhoeven, the cartoonishness is the point.

Possessor (2020) + Freaky (2020)

November 13, 2020****/****, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Esoterica, Horror, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

Possessor Uncut
****/****
starring Christopher Abbott, Andrea Riseborough, Rossif Sutherland, Jennifer Jason Leigh
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

FREAKY
**½/****
starring Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Katie Finnernan, Alan Ruck
written by Michael Kennedy & Christopher Landon
directed by Christopher Landon

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

by Walter Chaw “You’ve gone strange on me,” Ava (Tuppence Middleton) says to her boyfriend Colin (Christopher Abbott) one morning when he, frisky in the kitchen, reacts to her rejection of his advances with an expression that’s impossible to read. Colin has gone strange. He really isn’t himself. Ava is the daughter of a wealthy and powerful man, John Parse (Sean Bean), who has earned wealthy and powerful enemies, and though he’s surrounded himself with all of the things wealth can buy, including a reasonable level of separation from the rabble, he’s vulnerable to the mistakes he’s made as the bad father he knows himself to be. I appreciate that his name derives from a word meaning “parts” or, colloquially, a deconstruction of a whole into the small, individual components of which it is composed. Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor has both nothing and everything to do with Ava and John and Colin; it is a multitude I haven’t been able to shake for days, and so I watched Possessor a second time to try to exorcise it from me. I don’t think it worked. Time will tell. Possessor is a science-fiction film the way Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a science-fiction film, and a horror movie the way Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a horror movie, but what it most resembles is Kathryn Bigelow’s nightmare chimera of the two, Strange Days. All of these movies make you sick (heartsick, soulsick, sick-sick), but Possessor has about it the massive, impersonal nihilism of Philip K. Dick. We are cogs in a machine, and the machine is broken. But also it never worked in the first place. The picture is a true fable of our deconstruction.

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.

Stephen King: 5-Movie Collection – Blu-ray Disc

October 13, 2020****/****, 1980s, 1990s, 2019, 2020, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: David Cronenberg, Disability, Drama, Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi, Stephen King, Television, Thriller, Werewolf

THE DEAD ZONE (1983)
****/**** Image C Sound A
starring Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Herbert Lom
screenplay by Jeffrey Boam, based on the novel by Stephen King
directed by David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw Michael Kamen’s score for The Dead Zone sounds so much like Howard Shore’s work that if I didn’t know better… Maybe something about Cronenberg inspires doomed Romanticism in his collaborators. What’s sometimes lost in the focus on body-horror in his pictures is how like opera they are–so like opera, in fact, that The Fly was eventually turned into one. Each is in some way about the loss of the self to love and all those elevated metaphors for love like body transformation, breakdown, decay, death. He is a poet of liebestraum. His films are suffused with it, as well as–here’s another German term for you–overwhelming waves of Weltschmerz. The Dead Zone was the first Cronenberg feature since 1979’s Fast Company not scored by Shore; the two would never be separated again. In a CINEFANTASTIQUE article published at the time of The Dead Zone‘s release (1983), Cronenberg tells of producer Dino De Laurentiis desiring a “name” composer and discarding Shore before landing on Kamen, then fresh off Alan Parker’s Pink Floyd: The Wall. I don’t think Cronenberg gave up that kind of control again. The Dead Zone is an adaptation of a Stephen King bestseller and home to one of only a handful of lead roles for Christopher Walken, who’s idol-handsome but, you know, off-tempo. A curious affliction for a trained, gifted hoofer, you’ll agree. I used to refer to Cronenberg as an insect anthropologist, an alien observer, and that’s true, I think. But as I grow older and, minute-by-minute, devastation-upon-devastation, immensely, geometrically wearier, I’m seeing Cronenberg as afflicted by a certain Proustian lost time. The more I know of grief, the more I hear that edge in Cronenberg’s voice echoed in my own.

TIFF ’20: New Order + Fauna

September 18, 20202020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Mexico, Thriller, TIFF

Nuevo orden
*½/****
starring Naian Gonzaléz Norvind, Dario Yazbek Bernal, Mónica Del Carmen, Sebastian Silveti
written and directed by Michel Franco

FAUNA
***½/****
starring Francisco Barreiro, Luisa Pardo, Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez, Teresa Sánchez
directed by Nicolás Pereda

by Bill Chambers I’d heard that Michel Franco’s New Order was the new Parasite but from the rich people’s P.O.V., and I’m here to tell you that Parasite from the rich people’s P.O.V. wouldn’t be Parasite. Still, I did find the basic premise of New Order quite promising as social commentary: In Mexico City, mounting class resentments spark an uprising against aristocracy on the same day a local heiress is due to be married. I imagined a modern-day storming of the Bastille, but this is a film, for better or worse, of 21^st-century ideas, and it introduces a wrinkle into our eat-the-rich fantasies–military intervention–that becomes a tsunami. An elderly man (Eligio Meléndez) who used to work for the family of the bride, Marianne (Naian Gonzaléz Norvind), shows up at the wedding claiming his sick wife needs money for an operation. (If you watch HBO’s “Succession”, you know the kind of territory he’s wading into.) The mother (Lisa Owen) wants to help but is cowed by the guests’ stinginess, while Marianne’s brother (Diego Boneta) tips him like a bellhop and expects him to shoo. They’re unwittingly justifying the fury of the vandals and looters advancing on their home; only Marianne is truly sympathetic to the old man’s plight, going so far as to leave her own wedding (with one of the help in tow) to pick up his wife and drive her to the hospital. But during her absence, the military hatches a diabolical plan to manipulate the situation so as to solidify the caste system rather than see it evolve: they will abduct any wealthy citizens who’ve strayed from home–mostly the younger set, which leads to a lot of youthful flesh being exploitatively displayed as hostages are stripped naked and hosed down–and ransom them back to family members, pinning the responsibility for these kidnappings on the protestors.

Ghost in the Shell (1995) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

September 9, 20201990s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Japan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller, UK

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

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
screenplay by Kazunori Itô, based on the manga by Masamune Shirow
directed by Mamoru Oshii

by Bryant Frazer I’ll get this out of the way first: the soul is the ghost and the body is the shell. The title is a reference to Arthur Koestler’s book The Ghost in the Machine, which itself refers to a term coined by philosopher Gilbert Ryle to describe the duality of mind and body. The writer and illustrator Masamune Shirow borrowed and altered the phrase for his serialized 1989 manga “Mobile Armored Riot Police”, which bore the subtitle “The Ghost in the Shell.” I haven’t read the manga, but the animated feature it inspired is positively heady with ideas. Ghost in the Shell is a cop movie about robots with human souls. It’s science-fiction about the human rights of artificial intelligence. And it’s a fantasy about a sexy cyborg who knows how to use a gun. It’s all of those things, and it’s a disquisition on human consciousness, a meditation on urban loneliness, and also, maybe, a poem about unrequited love. It’s extraordinary.

Fantasia Festival ’20: The Five Rules of Success

September 1, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Thriller

***/****
starring Santiago Segura, Jonathan Howard, Isidora Goreshter, Roger Guenveur Smith
written and directed by Orson Oblowitz

by Walter Chaw X (Santiago Segura) is just out of jail, looking for a fresh start and finding an “essential” entry-level job in the service industry in the employ of restaurant owner Avakian (Jon Skarloff) instead. He cleans up, shows up, refuses drink and drugs, and does his best to steer clear of the malign influence of Avakian’s wayward kid, Danny (Jonathan Howard). Though he’s successful for a while, the system is wired for him to fail. His parole officer (Isidora Goreshter) is corrupt and opportunistic, sure, yet the real problem facing X is that this culture promises happiness in the form of material acquisition and public adulation and nowhere else. So X wants more and goes about getting it the way he’s been conditioned to: by any means necessary.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Wildland

August 30, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Denmark, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Thriller

Kød & blod
***½/****
starring Sidse Babett Knudsen, Sandra Guldberg Kampp, Elliott Crosset Hove, Besir Zeciri
written by Ingeborg Topsøe
directed by Jeanette Nordahl

by Walter Chaw Opening like a film from the New French Extremity, what with its phantom images of a deadly car accident set as a framing event for everything to follow, Danish director Jeanette Nordahl's Wildland (originally Kød & blod, or "flesh and blood") resolves as a domestic implosion in the vein of David Michôd's Animal Kingdom. The accident has claimed the mother of pretty, taciturn 17-year-old Ida (Sandra Guldberg Kampp), leaving her at the mercy of social services, who deem in their wisdom to place Ida with her Aunt Bodil (Sidse Babett Knudsen). Bodil has three grown sons who, at her direction, are involved in a criminal enterprise of sorts, and Wildland's MacGuffin is the collection of a debt from a recalcitrant client. What the game is is never terribly clear, but it's obvious that this is not an ideal environment for Ida following her recent trauma. Neither is it clear whether Ida was complicit in the fatal accident, though her dreams and fantasies–and the claustrophobic way Nordahl shoots her film in general (and Ida in particular) in long, unbroken closeups–certainly suggest Ida feels guilty about something. I don't mention these opacities as a detriment: far from it. Nordahl's picture isn't interested in the sundry details of its MacGuffins because they are MacGuffins.

Fantasia Festival ’20: Lucky

August 27, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

*½/****
starring Brea Grant, Hunter C. Smith, Yasmine Al-Bustami, Kristina Klebe
written by Brea Grant
directed by Natasha Kermani

by Walter Chaw When you make the subtext the text, you have text and no subtext. I’m uncomfortable saying that things like Natasha Kermani’s Lucky (from a script by star Brea Grant) are not good, because sometimes that’s taken as a comment on the text rather than the execution of the text. More often, and I’m not even sure this isn’t fair to say, it’s taken as evidence that men can only review films made by women as men would see films made by women. That’s literally true. When I watch something like Sophia Takal’s Black Christmas, the second reboot of Bob Clark’s seminal slasher, I’m starkly confronted by the divorce between what I’m watching and my knowledge of what its messages mean to so many. I think it’s imperative that women speak out about men and have the means to do so. That said, Black Christmas, the reboot of Rabid, and now Lucky move me only as intellectual exercises and not as calls to action. They’re rally speeches, not poetry. At least, they’re not poetry I can understand.

The Rental (2020)

July 29, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Thriller, VOD

**/****
starring Dan Stevens, Alison Brie, Sheila Vand, Jeremy Allen White
screenplay by Dave Franco & Joe Swanberg
directed by Dave Franco

by Walter Chaw The good version of The Rental, Dave Franco’s directorial debut (which he co-wrote with Joe Swanberg), reminds a lot of Paul Etheredge-Ouzts’s exceptional Hellbent in how it addresses prejudice through the application of genre conventions. The bad version of The Rental is the one that isn’t about any of that and is maybe a little bit racist in that well-intended way people who would be horrified to be thought of as racist are a little bit racist. The good version finds a quartet of friends, lovers, and brothers away for a weekend of privileged R&R at an extravagant Airbnb to celebrate the closing of some big deal that will make them richer with more time and disposable income than they already have. The brothers are unctuous Charlie (Dan Stevens) and pugnacious Josh (Jeremy Allen White). Charlie is married to irritating Michelle (Alison Brie) and business partners with Iranian-American Mina (Sheila Vand), whose main character trait is that she is obviously Iranian-American. That part is from the bad version of The Rental. The good version finds them away on their weekend holiday, met at their rental destination by creepy good ol’ boy Taylor (an exceptional Toby Huss), who has apparently rejected Mina’s attempt to rent–only to go with the white applicant immediately.

The Invisible Man (2020) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

May 25, 2020****/****, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Australia, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

****/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras A-
starring Elisabeth Moss, Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid, Oliver Jackson-Cohen
screenplay and screen story by Leigh Whannell
directed by Leigh Whannell

by Walter Chaw Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man is a masterpiece–an adaptation not so much of H.G. Wells’s book or the James Whale film of it, but of Gavin De Becker’s indispensable The Gift of Fear, a guide for how women can learn to trust their intuition, overcome their denial, and identify signs of men on the verge of becoming violent. Men murder the women they want to possess every day and often bring harm to others in the process. As Margaret Atwood infamously summarized, a man’s greatest fear is that a woman will laugh at him and a woman’s greatest fear is that a man will kill her, and this has shaped our behaviours as a society. Men, as it happens, tend to support other men who are brought to answer for their actions, while women who speak out are castigated, cast out, and blamed for their own victimization. Virtually the only thing the “me too” movement has brought about is false confidence that it’s safe for women to speak out without fear of losing their position or reputation. The world is a foul sty and the bad sleep well.

Lock Up (1989) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

April 15, 20201980s, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, Prison, Stallone, Thriller

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

**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras C+
starring Donald Sutherland, John Amos, Sonny Landham
screenplay by Richard Smith and Jeb Stuart and Henry Rosenbaum
directed by John Flynn

by Bryant Frazer Lock Up came out in 1989, but for much of its running time it feels like it could have been made at least 15 years earlier. Shot mainly on location at a real state prison (with real prison inmates serving as extras) in Rahway, New Jersey, it isn't exactly gritty, but it's convincing enough. Director John Flynn knew what kind of movie he was trying to make–a straightforward vehicle for star Sylvester Stallone, who was restlessly seeking new roles that would help sustain the first post- Rambo and Rocky stage of his career. And despite his relative anonymity in Hollywood, Flynn was a good pick for the project, having a body of work that included taut cult classics like the 1970s pulp adaptation The Outfit (featuring Robert Duvall as Donald E. Westlake's favoured screen version of his iconic Parker character) and the revenge drama Rolling Thunder (with William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones as Vietnam vets tracking down a gang of small-time thugs), as well as 1987's critically acclaimed Best Seller, starring James Woods and Brian Dennehy. Flynn earned a journalism degree from UCLA, and his deceptively simple directorial style evinces what strike me as sound reportorial instincts: he finds the kernel of every scene and assembles the fewest and least fussy shots required to get the point across.

Rambo: Last Blood (2019) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

April 12, 20202019, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Stallone, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Oscar Jaenada
screenplay by Matt Cirulnick & Sylvester Stallone
directed by Adrian Grünberg

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Rambo: Last Blood, hereafter Last Blood, became irresistible to me the moment John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) decided to score his own climactic bloodbath with The Doors‘ “Five to One,” flooding his homemade tunnels with it to taunt and ridicule the small army hunting him. A Kevin McAllister move, one might say. Lyrics-wise, “Five to One” is a little on the nose (“Five to one, baby/One in five/No one here gets out alive, now”), but it’s still a deep cut from a band in many ways synonymous with the Vietnam War’s acid-rock energy, making it a loaded choice indeed. This was probably the soundtrack to Rambo losing his innocence; what matters is that it could’ve been. There’s a certain frisson, too, that comes with hearing a pop song in a Rambo movie for the first time, at least diegetically. It makes for a set-piece that is, in the context of le cinéma de Rambo, unusually exuberant, and one begins to suspect that without music it would be merely nauseating, maybe unbearable. Indeed, the slickness of Last Blood is the only thing keeping it from being a snuff movie.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 26, 20201920s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Drama, Mystery, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

THE LODGER: A STORY OF THE LONDON FOG
***½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A
starring Ivor Novello, June (née June Tripp), Malcolm Keen, Marie Ault
scenario by Eliot Stannard, from the novel by Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

DOWNHILL (1927)
When Boys Leave Home
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Ivor Novello, Robin Irvine, Isabel Jeans, Ben Webster
scenario by Eliot Stannard, based on the play by Constance Collier & David L'Estrange (née Ivor Novello)
directed by Alfred Hitchcock

by Walter Chaw Alfred Hitchcock's fifth time at the plate produced his third completed picture, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (hereafter The Lodger), based on a 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes that was itself based on the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders, which still would have been in the immediate cultural memory of 1927. When first screened, distributor C.M. Woolf proclaimed it incomprehensible, jeopardizing its release until London Film Society founding member Ivor Montagu was enlisted to clear up the mess. In truth, Montagu liked what he saw, advised the reshooting of the darkest scenes, and, with Hitchcock's approval and assistance, discarded a good number of title cards to, in effect, leave the storytelling to the visuals. Producer Michael Balcon, already a supporter, called it good, and the picture allowed the British film industry to finally boast a product that could compete with not merely the artistically-dominant European cinema (France, Germany, and Russia), but also the commercially-dominant American dream factory. Just in time, as it happened. The passage of the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act stipulated that distributors would guarantee at least 7.5% of their total output be British: a number that would increase in increments until it hit 20% in 1936. The skeletal British industry boasted few stars. On the strength of The Lodger and his earlier The Pleasure Garden, Hitchcock was something of a known quantity before much of the British public had even seen any of his films.

Black Christmas (2019); The Grudge (2020); Color Out of Space (2020)|The Grudge (2020) – Blu-ray + Digital

March 11, 20202019, 2020, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Christmas, Horror, Malaysia, Mystery, New Zealand, Nicolas Cage, Portugal, Sci-Fi, Thriller

BLACK CHRISTMAS
**½/****
starring Imogen Poots, Aleyse Shannon, Lily Donoghue, Cary Elwes
written by Sophia Takal & April Wolfe
directed by Sophia Takal

THE GRUDGE
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Andrea Riseborough, Demián Bichir, John Cho, Jacki Weaver
screenplay by Nicolas Pesce, based on the film Ju-On: The Grudge, written and directed by Takashi Shimizu
directed by Nicolas Pesce

H.P. Lovecraft’s Color Out of Space
**½/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Tommy Chong
written by Richard Stanley and Scarlett Amaris, based on the short story “The Colour Out of Space” by H.P. Lovecraft
directed by Richard Stanley

by Walter Chaw The horror genre is one that’s particularly suited for remakes. At their best, scary stories deal in archetypal images in pursuit of exorcising essential concerns. They’re fairy tales, fables. They’re warnings carrying lessons for the survivors. I think they’re how the bulk of human culture was transmitted and instrumental in our species’ survival, offering explanations for why sometimes people don’t come home if they’re caught out in the night or wander off the trail or split up from the safety of the pack. They talk about outsiders, alien threats, and other invaders infiltrating from without and within: the dangers of transgression and the failures of denial. They are Jungian shadow projections made grotesque by their repression. They grow like obscene toadstools in the soft earth of our subconscious. A good horror story should be remade for every generation. Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a prime example of a premise made fresh across several decades–each time, each new film adaptation, a different social anxiety grows into its central metaphor, so it becomes a touchstone evergreen in the development of our understanding of the dangers of the greater world. Horror movies, good ones, have something to say. If you listen.

Swallow (2020)

March 5, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, VOD

**½/****
starring Haley Bennett, Austin Stowell, Elizabeth Marvel, Denis O’Hare
written and directed by Carlo Mirabella-Davis

by Walter Chaw Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller ends with our Mrs. Miller on an opium trip, absorbed in close contemplation of the smooth, alien landscape of a trinket that’s caught her eye. We go on that trip with her, zooming in as she zooms out, skating along the polished curve of some uncharted dimension in an undiscovered country. Meanwhile, out in a snowstorm, the idiot who loves her dies alone. In Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s debut feature Swallow, lonesome, abused young wife Hunter (Haley Bennett), because she’s trapped, isolated, and miserable, swallows a small glass marble that is the colour of Mrs. Miller’s bauble and, as it happens, serves a similar function of distraction, providing a similar illusion of control. Hunter has “pica,” a medical/psychiatric condition that causes its sufferers to swallow items that are not edible–in many cases, not even biological. I don’t know anything about this disorder beyond what the Internet tells me, but how it functions as the outward expression of Hunter’s loss of agency is fascinating and on point.

Le Samouraï (1967) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 4, 2020****/****, 1960s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, Italy, Mystery, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Le samouraï
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Alain Delon, François Périer, Nathalie Delon, Michel Boisrond
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

by Walter Chaw Jef (Alain Delon) is an assassin, and while he’s objectively terrible at it, he seems to be sought-after for his services. Maybe there’s a shortage of killers; maybe he lives in that bubble where handsome people exist without knowledge of the advantages they’re given for the fact of their attractiveness. Hired to assassinate some guy who owns a nightclub in Paris, Jef steals a car by trying out a lot of keys on this giant key ring he has and goes to the club to do just that. Everyone sees him: the guests, the bartender, and most notably the club’s unnamed, featured chanteuse (Caty Rosier), who catches him walking out of her boss’s office after hearing gunshots. Jef pauses when he sees her, and for a second you wonder if he’s going to kill her to eliminate any witnesses. I mean, that’s what a hardened criminal would do–but he doesn’t. It’s not that Jef isn’t smart, exactly, it’s that Jef is a cipher, and Le samouraï is less noir than it is a commentary on American genre films and, along the way, a satire of them, too. Jef’s affect is blank and pretty, perfectly turned-out in his neat suit and overcoat, a fedora perched on his head just so. Melville spends a lot of time watching Jef look at himself in the mirror, fiddling with his collar and smoothing down the crease in his pants. Not unlike a Robert Bresson film, Le samouraï is obsessed with gestures. It’s a story told by hands at rest and in motion.