FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

December 13, 20222022, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet
screenplay by James Cameron & Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver
directed by James Cameron

by Walter Chaw The discourse leading up to James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water (hereafter Avatar 2) has been largely about how although the first Avatar is the second-highest-grossing film of all time, it hasn’t left much of a mark on popular culture. It’s a take derided for the evidence of the numbers and the emergence of a theme-park attraction, though I do wonder if its cultural impact isn’t like that Song of the South ride “Splash Mountain,” which is only just now, finally, closing in early 2023. I don’t know that the vile myth of the happy enslaved person made much of a mark on popular culture, either, insomuch as it is, itself, already and essentially popular culture. Maybe Avatar didn’t make much of a “cultural impact” because it didn’t introduce any new ideas into the ecosystem while profiting from a few antiquated ones. In the interim between Avatar‘s release in 2009 and this first of four promised sequels, a lot has changed in terms of cultural tolerances–even if, systemically, things have not only not improved but regressed. Maybe the problem with Avatar is the same one that any stories about first contact with a technologically less sophisticated alien culture share, given how our historical templates for these narratives involve genocide and the pillaging of natural resources. When a white person tells a story of a white man saving an indigenous culture from other white men, however, I start to worry about what kind of fetish is being indulged, and to what purpose/at what cost. What’s not in doubt is that Avatar 2 will make bank, because whatever kink is being indulged in white-saviour narratives has proven a durable and profitable one in a white nationalist state. That’s one way to look at it, anyway.

The Whale (2022)

December 6, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Darren Aronofsky, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink, Ty Simpkins, Samantha Morton
screenplay by Samuel D. Hunter, based on his play
directed by Darren Aronofsky

by Walter Chaw The Whale is the first Darren Aronofsky film that lands for me the way his work often lands for others. It feels like much ado about very little, and though there are obvious things to recommend it, its central message, however well-taken, seems poorly served by the substance and execution. Most of the blame goes to screenwriter Samuel D. Hunter, author of the same-named play on which the film is based, for writing a trio of women characters meant to represent the mother, whore, and virgin but who mostly represent a uniform wall of shrill, lacerating rage. The Whale feels like the product of inexperience: a song by The Smiths turned into a movie in all its grandiloquent, hyper-literate (to the point of self-parody) self-pity. It’s about the last five days in the life of online English comp teacher Charlie (Brendan Fraser), a morbidly obese, largely couch-bound shut-in suffering from congestive heart failure brought on by years of unchecked food addiction incited by the suicide of his partner. If that were all (and certainly that’s enough), we’d have ourselves a classic. But it’s not all. There’s an evangelical missionary named Thomas (Ty Simpkins) who comes to the door to sit with him as he’s popping off the first of what appears to be a series of heart attacks; Charlie’s estranged daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), who is quite possibly Satan himself because this film is at some level about how anyone can be redeemed and so provides a demonic straw girl to prove it; pissed-off caregiver Liz (Hong Chau), who–it’s weird to say this–has a bit too much backstory; and Charlie’s alcoholic ex-wife Mary (Samantha Morton), who wants to listen to Charlie’s breathing for some reason. The Whale is at once overwritten and underwritten, which is not uncommon. What sinks the ship, as it were, is that it’s never particularly well-written–something it just can’t surmount. I think the real movie is in the five days before the last five days, but what the fuck do I know?

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

December 3, 2022****/****, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Ireland, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, Kelly, Kerry Condon, Barry Keoghan
written and directed by Martin McDonagh

by Walter Chaw I lost a friend this year. Not to death but to no longer having anything of value to offer him, what with time getting short. I understand that. It’s happened before for different reasons, and while it’s tempting to say it’s not my fault, sure, it’s my fault. All you need to love in this world unconditionally are your kids, and, well, the last time my late parents told me they loved me, I was nine years old. I remember that because every few years, I’ve had reason to wonder when it stopped and what exactly I did to deserve it. The myth of family is just that; I think there’s a reason people like me build their own families. The only thing unconditional is the love a dog has for you, and people abuse dogs all the time. I have friends who are enervating to me as well, and I wonder if my loyalty to them has everything to do with knowing the pain of being left by the side of the road by the people I have loved–and not wanting to inflict that on anyone else. The fashion of the moment speaks of this as “ending the cycle” of abuse. I’m drawn to artists like Kendrick Lamar who use poetry and what appears to be an extraordinary vulnerability to lay bare their struggles. Even as I write this, I’m noticing the pain I have in the middle knuckle of the third finger on my left hand. I’ve put down millions of words in the past 20 years, going through multiple keyboards and laptops in that time. I was driven by an obsession not to be forgotten, although I’m losing track of why that matters. The longer I go, the more it seems a blessing to slip beneath the surface, and then it’s done. I have a heaviness in my chest sometimes that feels like a stone, worn smooth and round, sitting right there on my sternum. Time is getting short for me. Some days it feels a lot shorter than others. I wonder how small the iris of my perception will become as the possibility of works I’ll complete dwindles to not one more. That’s it, then someone else closes the cover of your last notebook.

The Fabelmans (2022)

November 27, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coming of Age, Drama, Spielberg, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Seth Rogan, Gabriel LaBelle
written by Steven Spielberg & Tony Kushner
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) loves making movies. He loves it so much there’s a chance he’ll destroy his family because of it–showing things that aren’t for public consumption, mishandling the power of the medium, underestimating the magnitude of his gift. We know this because there’s a scene where Sammy, while editing raw 8mm footage of a family camping trip, notices his mom, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), getting a little too friendly with family friend Benny (Seth Rogen). He cuts all the incriminating clips together into a mini-reel he projects for Mitzi against the wall of his closet as explanation of sorts for why he’s sullen lately, and maybe as punishment for Mitzi, who has just struck him out of frustration. We know this, too, because his obviously insane grand-uncle, ex-lion tamer Boris (Judd Hirsch), has warned him, in a movie-stealing bit of scenery-chewing, that the tension between art and family always ends in tragedy. We know this, too…uh, too, because it’s ventriloquized through the mouths of more than one character, including Sammy’s bully, Chad (Sam Rechner). Word for tortured word. There are more monologues in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans than there are dialogues–more peaks than mountains, as it were. More waves than ocean. I don’t know why everyone in this movie talks like either a greeting card or a diagnosis, though I think it probably has to do with Spielberg wanting to excavate his past and, in the exhumation, to find easy and uplifting bows in which to tie his various strings. We all want that. I feel for him.

To Speak!: FFC Interviews Luca Guadagnino

November 22, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Interviews, Italy

Walter Chaw interviews Luca Guadagnino, director of
BONES AND ALL

Sicilian-born Luca Guadagnino is a chronicler of the sensual, of the sublime and occasionally ridiculous. He’s a sensationalist in the best sense of the term, a cartographer of the more embarrassing, least examined borders of human experience. His closest analogue, to my mind, is Nagisa Ōshima, another artist unafraid of digging into our most intimate, most carnal aspects and somehow mining high-minded art from all that primate muck. At his best, I would slot Guadagnino’s pictures in with the likes of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes or Derek Jarman’s The Last of England: erotic rather than titillating; taboo rather than polite. His movies are about the freedom of becoming lost.

The Thinker: FFC Interviews Rian Johnson

November 20, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, Mystery

Walter Chaw interviews Rian Johnson, writer-director of

GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY

I met Rian Johnson when his directorial debut, Brick, was making the festival rounds. In the middle of interviewing him, I received a panicked call from my wife that my infant daughter was sick and had been vomiting. Rian overheard some of it, saw my reaction to the rest of it, and, as I hung up, handed me a piece of paper with his cell phone and email on it and told me we could continue talking if I wanted after I was sure my kid was okay. We’ve been friends ever since. I can confidently say that through the rollercoaster of a Hollywood career, he’s remained the same person: kind, funny, available for a chat, able to navigate the absolute highs and troll-infested lows of fandom with equanimity and a notable lack of ego. Speak to his collaborators and you’ll hear the same stories about what seems like a unicorn in show business–but I’d add the caveat that Rian, in addition to being a truly nice guy, is also razor sharp. He’s the kind of person who likes to play board games and will beat you at them; who will make a bet about his beloved Dodgers with some idiot who has to root for, say, the Rockies, and never let you forget it. His unique genius is on display in films as varied as Knives Out, a morality play about righting a complex social injustice as much as it as a whodunit, and The Brothers Bloom, a puzzle-box all of sleights-of-hand and the love of the grift. Wanting to talk with Rian about the sublimated outrage, the righteousness, of his new film Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, I began by asking him to identify the pleasure that films like Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun held for him as a kid:

SDAFF ’22: The Fish Tale + Stellar: A Magical Ride

November 10, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Japan, San Diego Asian Film Festival, South Korea

Sakana no Ko
½*/****
starring Hayato Isomura, Kaho, Non, Yuya Yagira
written by Shirô Maeda, Shûichi Okita, Sakana-Kun
directed by Shûichi Okita

STELLAR: A MAGICAL RIDE
**/****
starring Heo Sung-tae, Lee Kyu-hyung, Son Ho-jun
written by Bae Se-yeong
directed by Kwon Soo-kyung

by Walter Chaw Sakana-kun lands somewhere between a Temple Grandin for fish and, oh, let’s say a Bill Nye the Science Guy for, uh, fish. A Japanese television/YouTube personality, an illustrator (of fish), an honorary professor of fish and a national ichthyologist who is sometimes asked to testify at Japan’s House of Councilors committee sessions about the importance of assuming a piscine point of view in matters of environmental importance, Sakana-kun–whose name means “Mr. Fish,” leading me to suspect it’s maybe not his real name–is a cultural curiosity who trafficks in Japan’s peculiar penchant for extreme, aggressive, borderline-hostile slapstick adorable. I have no doubt he’s well-intentioned and useful in a Crocodile Hunter sort of way, an ambassador for the wild kingdom who, if The Fish Tale, a film based loosely on his autobiography, is to be believed, has turned his profound neurodivergence into a profession. (Join the club, Sakana-kun, amiright?) I do wonder about a couple of things in regards to The Fish Tale, though: first, the way neurodivergence is made into a fairytale Forrest Gump-ian superpower that deflects aggressions micro- or otherwise; second, how the picture casts a woman, model/singer Non, as Sakana-kun (named Mibou in the film), which feels like an attempt to further exoticize our hero by making his gender itself a challenge to the normals. I will say that as a member of a minority in the United States with its own set of specific challenges, one thing I understand to be universal amongst minorities is the desire to be considered neither exceptional nor deficient: the Goldilocks mean of not superhuman, not inhuman, just merely human.

SDAFF ’22: No Bears

November 8, 2022****/****, 2022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Iran, Pseudo-Documentary, San Diego Asian Film Festival

****/****
starring Naser Hashemi, Reza Heydari, Mina Kavani, Bülent Keser
written and directed by Jafar Panahi

by Walter Chaw Jafar Panahi’s No Bears is about imprisonment–a topic near and dear to the Iranian filmmaker’s heart, as he has been, and is currently, a prisoner at the discretion of Iran’s fascist government. First sentenced to six years in prison in 2010 for making films critical of the regime (a conviction that included a 20-year ban on filmmaking of any kind), Panahi spent that time under house arrest but was finally physically imprisoned in July of 2022 for raising a fuss on behalf of director and fellow prisoner-of-conscience Mohammad Rasoulof. Through clever subterfuge, Panahi has continued to direct new movies during his ban, of course–good ones, perhaps none so good as his latest, in which he plays himself, looking for a little peace and a wifi signal in a remote border town. He’s directing a film by proxy, watching from his laptop as his AD, Reza (Reza Heydari), listens to his instructions regarding blocking, camera, even performance, transmitted across a physical and emotional distance through Reza’s earbuds. “It’s not the same without you,” Reza tells Panahi; the energy is off with Panahi working through a surrogate. He can’t pinpoint how, exactly, and Panahi, as he portrays himself, isn’t one to make an awkward situation more comfortable. He listens more than he speaks. He waits for people to finish, then gives them an extra couple of seconds to regret what they’ve said. I’ve seen Werner Herzog do this in his documentaries, too–letting the camera run long past the point at which decorum would dictate relief from scrutiny. Panahi now lives under constant surveillance, after all, so why should any of his subjects suffer less?

SDAFF ’22: Millie Lies Low

November 7, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, New Zealand, San Diego Asian Film Festival

***½/****
starring Ana Scotney, Chris Alosio, Jillian Nguyen, Sam Cotton
written by Eli Kent, Michelle Savill
directed by Michelle Savill

by Walter Chaw Michelle Savill’s hyphenate debut Millie Lies Low is a deeply uncomfortable update of Laurent Cantet’s Time Out that deals with issues of diasporic disaffection, the pressures of satisfying social expectations in the age of panic, and the navigation of identity when identity has become branding for institutions both personal and corporate. It’s an everything burger of existential dread, in other words, an extraordinarily competent horror film about a lie meant to hide vulnerability that becomes many lies that leave our hero, ironically, increasingly vulnerable. She’s Millie (Ana Scotney), a Kiwi architectural student who has won an internship at a prestigious firm in New York but has a panic attack while the plane’s on the tarmac and learns, once demanding to be let off, that she can’t get back on without a new ticket she can’t afford. Unable to accept that she’s made a shambles of her opportunity, she leans into the deception that she’s made it to the Big Apple with Photoshopped social-media posts and Zooms, where she manufactures big-city backgrounds from Wellington alleyways. In disguise, she stalks the classmates she’s left behind, like Tom Sawyer haunting his own funeral–all while slinking around hiding from her best friend, Carolyn (Jillian Nguyen), her bro boyfriend (Chris Alosio), and her housekeeper mom (Rachel House).

SDAFF ’22: Riceboy Sleeps

November 6, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, San Diego Asian Film Festival

**/****
starring Choi Seung-yoon, Dohyun Noel Hwang, Ethan Hwang
written and directed by Anthony Shim

by Walter Chaw Anthony Shim’s emotionally lacerating memoir-cum-melodrama is an intimately observed cultural piece molded around a Mildred Pierce framework. There’s nothing it doesn’t do reasonably well, even switching aspect ratios to reflect expanding consciousness and experience in a way that’s useful rather than simply distracting, yet there’s a certain tidiness to it all that makes it feel calculated. I think it ultimately fails to do what it most wants to do, that is, express the fullness of the immigrant experience as one based as much on hopeful aspiration as on struggle and generational trauma. I got the sad part to the extent the film is willing to go there in an honest way. The other part? Not so much. Maybe moments of connection and love would clash with the typical blue stateliness that defines the Canadian film industry: self-seriousness undermined by the picture’s slavishness to prestige formula. One part defiant individualism, one part obvious insecurity. Or maybe there isn’t a non-traumatic aspect to immigration and the challenges of assimilation, and Riceboy Sleeps is acknowledgment that life for perpetual aliens is just unrelieved–indeed, unrelievable–pain. I think, really, the problem with Riceboy Sleeps is that it arrives after watermarks like Minari, Columbus, Spa Night, Driveways, The Farewell, and Everything Everywhere All at Once–films that provide a fuller portrait of the Asian-American experience while also covering the key trigger points this one covers. If it were the first rather than the latest, it would be closer to revelation than to parody.

Nocebo (2022)

November 6, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Ireland, Philippines, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Eva Green, Mark Strong, Chai Fonacier, Billie Gadsdon
written by Garret Shanley
directed by Lorcan Finnegan

by Walter Chaw Lorcan Finnegan’s Nocebo would fill an interesting double-bill with Jaume Collet-Serra’s Black Adam, both violently rejecting the interventionist and exploitative tenets of colonialism (traditional and neo-). The reasons these films at opposite ends of the production spectrum might manifest within days of each other in 2022 are cynically self-evident, perhaps, but it doesn’t lessen the fascination of their parallel genesis. The world is being destroyed by unfettered, voracious capitalism in ways so obvious that even widgets extruded from the intellectual-property mill are compelled now to occupy the same sociopolitical spaces as an independent film. I don’t know that it’s possible to qualify this development in that while it seems like progress, history has a way of reducing revolutions almost instantly to T-shirts and freshman dorm-room poster-ganda. Capitalism is undefeated. I loved Vivarium, Finnegan’s previous film, a great deal, mainly because it played out manifold variations on its philosophical theme: to what extent does biology determine behaviour? Nocebo is similar in that it, too, asks a question about guilt and vengeance, then works over through multiple approaches to the answer before landing on the same conclusion that notions of good and evil are arbitrary distinctions imposed on innate compulsions. A mother will be compelled to avenge her child because a creature is obliged to reproduce itself. Anything else is merely obfuscating chantilly on an intrinsic cake.

Armageddon Time (2022)

November 5, 20222022, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Brazil, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, Banks Repeta, Anthony Hopkins
written and directed by James Gray

by Angelo Muredda “All the great artists sign their work,” Anthony Hopkins’s benevolent grandfather Aaron tells his aimless but creatively-inclined grandson Paul (Banks Repeta) early in Armageddon Time, James Gray’s autobiographical profile of growing up in Flushing, Queens as part of a tight-knit Russian-Jewish family. That advice seems to weigh heavily on Gray, who places it at the top of a ladder above less helpful artistic feedback like one teacher’s admonition not to copy when Paul reproduces a Kandinsky he saw at the Guggenheim from memory, and another’s gentler but no less prescriptive prompt, after Paul’s creative work doesn’t follow the brief, that he do the assignment. Signing the work for Gray, who has long been fascinated by the tension between the weight of Old World family ties and the seductive levity of contemporary life, means carefully tracking his fictional surrogate family’s cross-generational assimilation into Ronald Reagan’s America, which he proposes happened not just in the shadow of ghouls like Fred and Maryanne Trump (played here by Jessica Chastain)–donors at Gray’s and Paul’s private school–but, more insidiously, through American Jews’ growing proximity to whiteness. Suffused with Gray’s typical tragic grandeur and rich thematic preoccupation with the uniquely American compulsion to recreate oneself as a blank slate despite one’s inescapable background, that signature is nevertheless a bit fainter than usual here, owing to the off-the-rack genre elements of the artist’s coming-of-age narrative and a still-developing protagonist who, by film’s end, remains too opaque to leave his mark as either an artist or an authorial surrogate.

Nope (2022) [Collector’s Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

November 3, 20222022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Horror, Japan, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version.

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, Steven Yeun, Michael Wincott
written and directed by Jordan Peele

by Walter Chaw I don’t think you ever see the heroes getting hurt, but they limp around a lot, and I couldn’t stop wondering why. Just because it’s more dramatic to be out of breath and limpy? There’s a rule about not looking something in the eye, but I don’t know how the horses can obey it, or if horses look up and behind them when they run. I’ve never seen them do that, in any case. If there’s a rule about eyes, is the plan, in the end, to put eyes on the hood of that hoodie, and if it isn’t, why did he? I understand there’s a point being made here about how Hollywood doesn’t care about the people who work in it–especially minorities and child actors–once their usefulness has been used up, yet I worry if by equating their trauma with a television chimp who goes insane and starts eating faces that the analogy, assuming there is one, has gotten as out of control as the chimp. There’s a reveal that’s less a reveal of an important plot point than a reveal that the reveal of an important plot point was left out somewhere. There’s a powerful opening scene where something happens involving a nickel that is very effective up until the moment it’s explained, at which point it no longer makes sense; why did it do what it did and not what it does for the rest of the film? Is it attracted to movement? Noise? It seems like both–but if so, how are folks constantly escaping it by moving around and making noise? That picture she takes? It looks ridiculous and will be convincing to no one. Wouldn’t the camera and the film the famous cinematographer is shooting still be in one piece, like a black box, when the thing happens with the balloon? How is that the first balloon it’s ever seen or eaten? If I ate a balloon (and could, for instance, withstand multiple gravities of speed and possibly interstellar travel), would I explode?

Poltergeist (1982) + The Lost Boys (1987) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

October 25, 2022****/****, 1980s, 2022, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tobe Hooper, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Spielberg, Teen, Thriller, Vampire

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

POLTERGEIST
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Beatrice Straight, Heather O’Rourke
screenplay by Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais & Mark Victor
directed by Tobe Hooper

THE LOST BOYS
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Corey Feldman, Jami Gertz, Corey Haim, Dianne Wiest
screenplay by Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Bill Chambers Although Walter Chaw’s already written definitive reviews of Poltergeist and The Lost Boys for this site, so much time has passed since they were published that I feel obliged to say something original about these films before moving on to the Blu-ray portion of this review. Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist and Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys, each celebrating milestone anniversaries this year (fortieth and thirty-fifth, respectively), have aged unusually gracefully. Partly this is due to the Star Wars-festooned bedroom of Poltergeist and the comics-store hub of The Lost Boys being evergreen–though what was once indicated by Robbie’s C-3PO lightswitch cover (his middle-class privilege) and Sam’s pedantic knowledge of Superman lore (his lack of social life) may not come across as clearly to a generation of viewers that has grown up with Jedis and superheroes as the inescapable sum of pop culture. Moreover, these are not naïve films that invite condescension, and any doubts about their sophistication (aesthetic and otherwise) are laid to rest by the instantly dated attempts to drag them into the 21^st century: Gil Kenan’s remake of Poltergeist and the dtv sequel Lost Boys: The Tribe.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival ’22: Mother, May I? + Old Flame

October 22, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

MOTHER, MAY I?
*/****
starring Kyle Gallner, Holland Roden, Michael Giannone, Chris Mulkey
written and directed by Laurence Vannicelli

OLD FLAME
**½/****
starring Rebeca Robles, Andy Gershenzon
written and directed by Christopher Denham

by Walter Chaw Laurence Vannicelli’s sophomore hyphenate feature, the two-hander Mother, May I?, feels timid given the richness of its premise and, for the places it’s not willing to go, really has only enough going for it for a short–a proof of concept, maybe, a long trailer that hints at dark psychosexual undercurrents. At its current length, it all comes to nothing, a gothic horror about possession and maternal/filial relationships that has all the elements but not the will to put them together. I heard a description once of serious cognitive decline as having a slice of bread in one hand, a toaster in the other, a bottle of jam and a butter knife on the counter, and having no idea how any of it comes together. That’s Mother, May I?, which finds Emmett (Kyle Gallner) and his fiance Anya (Holland Roden) tasked with cleaning out his recently-departed mother’s expansive manse in the woods, complete with a reedy lake and an overly friendly neighbour, Bill (Chris Mulkey). It’s rich, made richer by a mindfuck game Emmett and Anya play in which they set a timer and then force each other to speak truthfully about past traumas before it runs out. Emmett has a few: his mother abandoned him at some point in the past, orphaning him in her affections, and her death has left him nothing but a windfall in the eventual sale of the family reserve. During one of their ersatz therapy sessions, Anya playacts as Emmett’s dead mom, and Emmett starts wondering if his mother hasn’t actually taken over Anya’s body when she doesn’t snap out of it after the timer goes off.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival ’22: Megalomaniac

October 20, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Film Festivals, Horror

***½/****
starring Eline Schumacher, Wim Willaert, Benjamin Ramon, Pierre Nisse
written and directed by Karim Ouelhaj

by Walter Chaw Belgian filmmaker Karim Ouelhaj’s Megalomaniac joins Danish filmmaker Christian Taldrup’s Speak No Evil as fresh additions to what feels like a new iteration of the “French New Extremity” subgenre coined by ARTFORUM’s James Quandt, which flowered briefly at the turn of the 21^st century. Films of the loosely-defined movement dealt with the ugliest parts of France’s social history, treating atrocities long thought better hidden with a frankness as unusual as the explicitness of the images. I love many of these films–Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs and Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day, in fact, rank high among my all-time favourites, even though I almost never recommend them in polite company. Their violence is extreme and intimate. In place of catharsis, find only despair and self-loathing. I have felt this existential howl watching certain films of Bergman’s–Tobe Hooper’s, too. But I would say the French New Extremity caught the attention of the mainstream for the craft of its presentation and the care and intelligence with which the characters made to suffer were drawn. They’re difficult to dismiss as exploitation or “foreign” in a pejorative sense. They’re gruelling but artistically rigorous, making them difficult to diminish. I think of many of the genre pictures of South Korea like this, too: devastation exploitation flicks made by Steven Spielberg. And though credit is due the birthplace of the Marquis de Sade and Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol for finding another meat-spigot to turn at the dawn of our last fin de siècle, works by Lars von Trier (The House That Jack Built certainly and even Antichrist) and Fatih Akin’s The Golden Glove suggest whatever was in the water is spreading.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival ’22: All Jacked Up and Full of Worms

October 19, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Horror

*/****
starring Phillip Andre Botello, Sammy Arechar, Betsey Brown, Trevor Dawkins
written and directed by Alex Phillips

by Walter Chaw A sub-, sub-, sub-genre of exploitation flicks–stuff like Jim Hosking’s The Greasy Strangler–has cropped up seemingly out of nowhere in mainstream-adjacent spaces where it appears the only aim, or goal, is provocation. I watched The Greasy Strangler with irritation and impatience until a scene in which two characters shrieked “potato chips” at each other in incomprehensible accents broke me into helpless hysterics. I don’t know if it’s funny or its full-throated dedication to battering all defenses finally just worked. For what it’s worth, the movie went back to being irritating and trying for me almost immediately. I have a different response to Jackass, a chaos agent provocateur that ultimately strikes at the heart of some real and touching truths about not necessarily healthy male relationships, but possibly the healthiest most male relationships are allowed to be. Nevertheless, there are similarities between stuff like it and The Greasy Strangler. Both proceed because there must be something that is next, not because there is a narrative that demands it or characters with motivations leading organically to another sequence. In that way, these films are not unlike life in all its arbitrary bullshit and oft-times malignant-seeming causes and potentially tragicomic effects. Exaggerating random vicissitudes as filtered through sentient existence could conceivably be considered satire at best or, you know, knowledge of some kind that might prove useful in providing perspective to those looking for meaning and structure in the universe. What I have trouble with is how often this stuff feels like the parts of Kevin Smith films–which is all of Kevin Smith’s films now–that are puerile and embarrassing. Feature-length shit-monsters from Dogma.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival ’22: Influencer

October 16, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Canada, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

***/****
starring Sara Canning, Emily Tennant, Cassandra Naud, Rory J. Saper
written by Tesh Guttikonda & Kurtis David Harder
directed by Kurtis David Harder

by Walter Chaw Much like the higher-profile Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Kurtis David Harder’s Influencer takes aim at Zoomers with a sharp eye for critical detail and an even sharper ear for cutting dialogue. It’s plotted with machine-like precision and delivers a series of switches–and switch-backs–that aren’t just amusing: they speak ironically to the very interchangeability of Influencer‘s stars that the film seeks to satirize. I don’t know if this is intentional, but it’s appreciated. I especially loved the subtle shots at both a culture that would “other” someone with a physical deformity and that same culture that would still “other” but “other for profit” the same deformity. That’s some dour shit about the state of things, providing the film a bracing jolt of topical venom. It’s not the murder and identity theft getting under your skin in Influencer, it’s the full-frontal assault of the new beauty myth as it transitions from makeup conglomerates to social-media stars turning a side-hustle of self-objectification and narcissism into a six-digit lifestyle. There’s a lot going on in this movie, in other words, though on its surface it’s a fleet thriller with charismatic leads who manage to give their objectionable rakes a legible undercurrent of depth and humanity. Squint a little and Influencer is a sly update of de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses, only one of the partners in this classist love triangle is eternally missing: a ghost in the worldwide machine.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival ’22: Mother Superior

October 16, 20222022, Austria, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

*½/****
starring Isabella Händler, Inge Maux, Jochen Nickel, Tim Werths
written and directed by Marie Alice Wolfszahn

by Walter Chaw Marie Alice Wolfszahn’s Mother Superior is an overly familiar period piece about a young woman engaged as a caretaker for a mysterious and ailing older woman in a rambling country house–a plot most recently explored in the superlative Saint Maud and Sebastián Lelio’s pretty good The Wonder, due out soon. It’s possible to mine interest and value from a template so threadbare, but there’s a built-in danger of playing with a premise the audience has likely already started to unravel as soon as the particulars are established. In Mother Superior, the young nurse is Sigrun (Isabella Händler), whom, we gather from the opening-credits sequence, is maybe the offspring of a Nazi breeding program. She goes to work as a nurse for creepy Baroness Heidenreich (Inge Maux), who is suffering from Parkinson’s disease–though it only really manifests in some trembling when she tries to drink tea. Why would an aspiring anesthesiologist agree to be the hospice nurse for the Baroness? also-creepy caretaker Otto (Jochen Nickel) would like to know. Unfortunately, five minutes in, most everyone who’s seen another movie would be able to tell him.

Halloween Ends (2022)

October 14, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Andi Matichak, Rohan Campbell, Will Patton
written by Paul Brad Logan & Chris Bernier & Danny McBride & David Gordon Green
directed by David Gordon Green

by Walter Chaw I think the point, if not the pleasure principle, of franchise entertainments is the illusion of ownership over them, the obsessive knob-polishing of arcane knowledge not so very different, in many cases, from the pursuit of doctorate degrees in the liberal arts. You dedicate your life to learning so much about an exceptionally narrow field of study that you eventually come to a place where you know a lot about a little and not much about the rest. This monocultural–and, in most cases, monotextual–training tutors one in identifying deviations from the mean, so that what was joy in discovery becomes jealous taxonomy in defense of the tiny corner you’ve painted yourself into. The point of it all, ultimately, is to complain. When a totem such as John Carpenter’s Halloween arrives, it carries with it the inspiration for epistemological/maniacal cults: entire fields of worship in which the limited revelations provided by a singular text serve as the foundation for religion. Hungry for more tablets, new installments are met with jeweller’s glasses and tests of fidelity to the one true Word. The complaining, in other words, starts immediately. Is this new version of the Golden Calf walking the right way? Is it behaving as it should? Slow, not fast, or fast, never slow? Is it savage enough? Is the hero worthy? Is the lamb worthy of the blade? Each new film in any long-running series that earns enough each time out to warrant a continuation receives the scrutiny attending the unearthing of a new book of the Bible. Sources are vetted, false prophets are suspected, bloody debates are had in the town square, and finally, it’s either the grudging acceptance into a growing canon or a casting off into the wilderness. The complaining is the point. It solidifies a community like the negging built into Evangelical outreach missions, and it’s instant. The only thing verboten is if the franchise threatens the fragile identities of the high priests of its insular cult of personality.

A Complete Unknown (2024)

Nosferatu (2024)

Nightbitch (2024) + Babygirl (2024)