2020: Movies in the Plague Year

Ok, so this one's a little different. I saw some of these in the cinema before lockdown and a few after. Most, I saw as part of a VoD service. While I adapted to this and found it a pretty good way to do a 31 nights of horror in October I probably had more enjoyment programming a kind of online SHADOWS using the VoDs and Messenger for running discussion. We went through some fine movies and it was enjoyable having Friday night become cinematic again. And in the circumstances, with multi-voiced commentary happening in the chatroom I didn't have to tell anyone to shush once. These below were offered new in my neck o' the woods in 2020 and this is what I think of them.

High

Possessor - Antiviral wasn't a fluke, it was a stretching exercise. Possessor reveals a Cronenberg Jr who will go where his father went and maybe further. One to watch for strong sci-horror concepts and managed to make a kind of Inception that was as deep but hours shorter. Movie of the Year.

The Translators - Taut and convoluted thriller wisely plays things serious so it can be enjoyed. Literature vs the publishing industry with massive global stakes. Well judged writing and expert casting make everything work. 

Invisible Man - Leigh Wannell managed to surprise me with this stark take on an old tale that called upon the depths of its cast's powers and some genuinely tough thinking about the issue of domestic violence.

The Witch in the Window - Had heard this was a kind of Hallmark horror and so avoided it until it served as a plug in my 31 Nights in October. Nope, not Hallmark but a highly effective haunted house story with depth and development and a crushing conclusion. A new horror favourite.

Host - What to do in lockdown? Make a movie about being in lockdown and run it for the limits of a normal Zoom meeting. Everyone's on board in their own spaces and cannot physically save anyone else. Strayed a little too far into literalism but worked until the end.

The Vast of Night - How to make yet another alien invasion movie? Set it in the 50s before the mythology was too well drafted and make it about personal accounts and the act of listening. A sci-fi gem about witness.

Women Make Film - Epic trek through cinema history that puts its lessons where its mouth is, narrated by and featuring only the work of women film directors. Never lagged or disappointed over its eighteen hour screen time.

The Trouble With Being Born - Unnerving tale of memory using a learning android as the central character puts A.I. to shame through its refusal to sentimentalise. Forces searching questions from the viewer by making them fill the silence with their own discoveries. 

The Lighthouse - Wasted lives duke it out in a phallic retreat. What is the cost? What is the prize. Much better than the director's debut The Witch.

Relic - Atmospheric fable of hereditary dementia told with convincing horror overtones. Central scene involving the corridors of the house still haunting.

Middle 

Freaky - Freaky Friday the 13th. A passable effort from Blumhouse and the writer/director who brought us the dizzy and wonderful Happy Death Day. Horror side could have been more threatening. Comedy side could have been darker.

Shirley - Left turn from normal biopic focuses on issues that the subject might illustrate something about the creative process. Shirley Jackson lives in a Edward Albee style marriage that allows the colonisation of younger couples. That Jackson gets a book out of it without naming or even suggesting the title is to the film's credit and Elizabeth Moss is her usual committed self in the title role. Nevertheless, it didn't quite haunt me the way I wanted it to.

She Dies Tomorrow - Nice idea about contagious despair but doesn't travel quite far enough from its presence to warrant feature length.

Bombshell - Strong relating of corporate rebellion as significant female anchors and tv editorialists push back at hostile boss culture. Wish it had ventured into satire as its insistence on a movie of the week straightness works against it, despite some power in passing scenes.

Mank - Terrific performance by Gary Oldman in the title role as a writer threatened with professional extinction by the gods of media pens the screenplay of one of the most revered films in history. Sticks to a flawed reading of history but makes a stronger character piece for all that. Reminded me of Salieri in Amadeus telling his warped side of the story of Mozart.

1917 - Outstanding achievement buoyed by a solid central performance can't quite rise above a first person shooter feel. 

Low 

I See You - Invasion by stealth horror tale builds well before revealing the mundanity of its secret. 

Colour Out of Space - Ragin' Nick Cage roars through this well meaning attempt at a Lovecraft classic but the problem is lacklustre conception and the overlong running time that gives the sense of treading water rather than building tension.

The Hunt - Sleazy political comedy claims balance by making the rightwingers all disenfranchised rednecks and the liberals button pushing illuminati. Nice try, Snowball.

Review: THE TRANSLATORS

After an announcement at a book fair of the imminent release of  the final part of a mega-successful novel series (think Dragon Tattoo) a group of people are picked up in Paris in a stretch limo and conveyed to a country mansion with a multi level underground bunker with all mod cons. They have been assembled from all over Europe (plus one from China) to work on a simultaneous translation of the book for a same day global release in as many markets as possible. But this is massive business so it has to be done in secrecy that forbids anything like digital communications or contact with the outside world of any kind until the four hundred plus pages are singing in English, German, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Italian and Greek. They are sealed in. Watching this I beamed behind my facemask and enjoyed the setup so familiar from those thrilling glamour heists of the '60s like The Brain. This is going to be a fun thriller.

So, what's a thriller in any case? Can be many things but it should declare high stakes from the off, show clear threats to the order and throw in as many twists and turns short of being silly or twisting itself into incomprehensibility. I was actually happy for it to just hit marks and say lines after that opening but it gives so much more. Like what? Well, rather than just establish the stakes as a McGuffin that only has to be declared as valuable, we are given a developing dialogue literature and how it relates to the business that sells it to the world. Where is the author left after that exchange and where do these ghostly servants translating end up in the process? The intimidatingly urbane publisher Eric Angstrom who has been made rich by the books and looks to only get richer, assumes a kind of overlaid value in the scheme of things: picking up the finished pages from the author as though they were bags of cocaine and bearing down on his translator crew like a cartel boss, complete with uniformed Russian guards. Not one day in and there's a leak; the first ten pages are free online and a ransom demanded. From that point it's war, or at least oppression in what increasingly seems like a brutal prison.

This example of the art of thriller does one thing right which lets a lot of other right things follow: it foreshadows every twist credibly so that each happens with a clean precision. And with a cast you will know if you see more than one subtitled film per year who bring great balance and heat to what might have become an over-machined plot. Here's a thing to consider: the translator characters are played by actors from the nationalities they represent; all speak mostly French until their own languages become a plot point and the setup as intended by Angstrom uses the multi-lingual filter as a capitalist mechanism whose human parts, while dosed with media and pastimes, are effectively temporary slaves. Russian translator, Katarina is doubly a slave, so devoted to the book's heroine that it borders on cosplay. Alex, the English guy is obsessed with meeting the author Oscar Brach, thinking that participating in this far flung function of the publishing industry will bring him close to greatness. And so on, everyone of the workers is drawn by more than simple professionalism.

Against this, how can literature compete? While the Dedalus books are presented as airport novels that got lucky we get many clues as to their being fashioned from a knowledge of great literature and there is the sense from the depiction of the author that, as cynical as he might be about the business, they have been written with conviction. Is this related to the motivation of the extortionist who is prepared to topple this monolith of the industry?

Because of this torsion, the literature vs commerce theme and the requirements of the thriller genre we could suffer the deflating effect of a lack of follow through but in this case each detail as it is given us in reward for our attention feels like a treat. Perhaps some of the confession sequences can go longer than needed but the conviction of the performances prevents them from dragging. Add a little symmetry in some of the imagery a the top and tail of the film and you have a movie that will make you smile like you do when you unwrap the best presents.

Review: THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN

A little girl recalls a dream of waking in a forest when it is raining. She goes up to her father and shows him a grasshopper she has caught. A little later he's inside the house, looking out at the pool. Something's wrong. Cut to the girl floating motionless in the pool. Dad comes out, takes his time to remove his shirt and comments: Not again. He steps down into the water and lifts her back to the ground like a doll. Later on the couch he uses a digital tablet to reboot her. She smiles and greets him. Android.

They live in a contemporary house in the woods somewhere outside Vienna and go about their days like father and daughter. A mother is mentioned in a voiceover but does not appear, departed without explanation. The man has constructed a working model of his daughter who left of her own accord years before without being found. That's all very Hallmark until you get to the scene where he removes her tongue and genital apparatus to clean them. No more Hallmark. 

And then even Elli the android leaves, gets lost in the woods and wanders out to a road at night. She is picked up by a man who recognises that she is artificial and conveys her to his aging mother as a companion. Elli asks too many questions so the old woman wants her gone. Instead, her son returns to turn Elli into his mother's brother, decades dead. Now Emil, Elli has to work out who she is meant to be and how to use her programming to make a life of it.

This sombre piece only partially plays as Joy Division cover of A.I., raising questions of very stark morality and the human responsibility for its own inventions, it also serves as a leather-tough examination of what young humans make of being expected to behave as their elders expect. Elli's programming has a disturbing duality in that she plays like a child but talks more maturely when intimate. Are we witnessing an ideal of the former relationship with the real Elli or a kind of dissociative coping? Either way, it leaves her father untroubled. Or does it? A rare scene of him at the workplace in what looks like an underground tunnel construction site he sees a blurry figure of her against a wall and stares at it as though haunted. As Emil (a process that can be done with a face switch and an upload or two) he is assumed to accept a new role, seemingly on the strength of a few potentially violent fragments of the old woman's memory.

Told within a tight square frame that renders even wide open landscapes claustrophobic The Trouble With Being Born leaves us little room for sentimentalising these situations. While it keeps firmly short of sensationalism that might push things the other way (there is NO sex depicted with the child actor who wears a silicon mask and whose nudity in some scenes is computer generated) it gives its viewers a clear shot at the distribution of power in each scene. We are given a wealth of detail that will allow us to piece together what we are not shown in the long as well as short term including the opportunity at self-interrogation as to how we are receiving this hard and strange story.

When people were changing from 4X3 TVs and getting widescreens and changing VCRs for DVDs I saw many sets and players abandoned on the footpaths and nature strips. I will never forget two sights: two large old boxy TVs with their screens facing each other; a VCR with the remote taped to the top. The first looked like an embrace between two evicted people. The second looked like a dog abandoned with a box of tinned food beside it. I'll let you imagine how I felt watching this one.

Review: WORDS ON BATHROOM WALLS

Adam has a secret. It's so bad that he has to be inserted into the last term of a Catholic School after a bizarre incident at his normal school. The incident was a psychotic break and the secret is that he has Schizophrenia. It makes him hear dark, damaging voices and see imaginary characters who variously feed him new age blather, act like 90s teen comedy sidekicks or threaten to beat up anyone who comes close. He makes it through a hallucinatory interview to get admitted into the new school and slowly comes to terms with his new pharmaceutical regime which erases the playmates and gets him in with the local genius who agrees to tutor him through this trying time. She's beautiful and from the wrong side of the tracks and his new drug has side effects that take his self control. What could go wrong?

If you're thinking a YA Lit version of A Beautiful Mind you're not far off. This film plays its genre with a confident lack of challenge, doing its job before the credits roll and ticking all the boxes. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to watch any genre hit the marks and leave. It usually means the work on the theme is the important thing to fill the vehicle. Here it's the question of trust, trust in self as well as others. The plane takes off, flies and lands comfortably.

At the centre of the cast is Charlie Plummer, a kind of teenage Thurston Moore who begins with instant appeal by talking through the fourth wall (past his therapist) with a host of pop culture references and clever self-awareness. He's fine but suffers along with the rest of the movie from a lack of edge. We get so very cosy with the situation's fragility that the inevitable second act break feels manageable rather than high stakes. This is a pity as the issue at the heart, a young person with a young person's disorder, might have warranted more than a few moments of audio magic and CG. If, for example the imaginary friend crew had a hint of darkness or desperate hollowness that would have testified to Adam's pain, we might have had something more substantial. While the opening scenes played out (and they are bright and energetic) I mused about the possibility of a story where a kid's creativity is indistinguishable from his schizophrenia but realised I'd already seen Donnie Darko.