Review: SHOOK

Social influencer Mia takes her turn against a glamour backdrop delivers a spiel as the instamodel before her wanders off to seek relief. Pulling back we see that what we assumed was a Hollywood occasion is a tiny lighted backdrop in a parking space beneath an inner city building. Well, we didn't know. It's a good joke as is the scene where we follow the model into the toilets and get a Demons 2 style payoff. If the rest is anywhere near as good as this we're in good hands.

Mia goes to the family home to house and dog sit the place while her sister is out of town. Their mother was nursed to her last by sis and you get the sense that her brief holiday in Frisco is a treat long in the coming. Mia sets in for the evening herself at home again, a prodigal daughter with a sense of burden. This isn't so bad as it's too easy keeping in touch with her followers and friends through her mobile. Then the calls begin. A guy from across the road who has just become a new follower rings and the calls get increasingly menacing until Mia finds herself playing choice games that mount towards the life and death of others.

While it's easy to point out lifts from the Scream prologue, He Knows You're Alone or Saw, or Phone Booth, Shook brings enough of itself to the table to warrant its own watch. The plot is mechanical but the genre is self-avowed and mercifully unironic. The extras I'm implying here don't lie in any intensification of the generic elements which it might have cheerfully followed to its own benefit. No, this is a story of identity and the darker things in the shadows that emerge when an identity rises to mass popularity. Mia is an influencer and so are her friends. All the rest are followers if they are not too young or too old to follow her. Quite early in the piece the better cousin is less Scream than Ingrid Goes West with its dark musings on remote identification and personal immersion into the fame of others. By pushing a high functioning thriller plot forward the comparisons between them end but the starting point is compelling. And, as genre films like this are fuelled on histrionics it's only pleasurable to see them here so pummellilngly delivered and to the last spoken line.

There is a noticeable lag in the transition from second to third act as big revelations don't quite conceal the repetition that starts feeling circular. If that's noticeable in an eighty-eight minute film you're in trouble. However, performances across the board from a cast of under-the-radar performers fill the tale and keep it going with a few lapses in some of the minor parts. It's Daisye Tutor (I really want to pronounce that as Daze-yeah!) who has to carry this one and pretty much does, showing a figure of power realising the limits of that power and suddenly subject to the kind of pressure the world puts on her followers (ok, ok, when I said "unironic" up there I was referring to the generic aspects, this movie doesn't wink at its audience about being a thriller). Though much of what she is meant to do on screen is be exasperated Tutor does give us a range within that and plenty of physical humour.

I picked this one last night as it's the first movie of the year with a 2021 release date. Hey, I thought, at eighty-eight minutes it'd be worth it for the date alone. Well, it was worth a lot more.

Seen on Shudder.

Review: THE DRY

Aerial shots of cracked farmland give way to a murder scene. A woman lies in a hallway, blasted with a shotgun. A baby screams in the next room. Later, in distant Melbourne, AFP officer Aaron Falk prepares to attend the funeral of the supposed murderer, husband of the woman and high school friend Luke. Complicated? Well, he's also responding to a handwritten note telling him that he and Luke both lied. No further clues. Right. Leave of absence. Trip to the country.

Falk drives right into an unresolved past event and a plea from the parents of the accused and deceased to look into the recent murder. Well, he can't do that officially so he has to chum up with the local sergeant of police. Along the way he reunites with old high school chum Gretchen, still sexy young single mum. They used to hang out and, wahey! we're back in our teens, splashing about in a head high creek in a richer and more fertile age. As Falk wanders the old haunts he comes across the creek, now a dustbowl, and remembers with horror seeing another of the teen quartet lifted lifeless from the water, Ellie Deacon, the girl he is strongly suspected of murdering (his alibi is the lie of the note).... Ok, ok: this is a return-western in the bush and has all the elements but adds a vintage murder to a contemporary one. 

What's good is a strong, smellable sense of the country and the colours of drought. Good, too, is the decidedly non-American style of personal interaction and dialogue which I haven't seen at the cinema since the great Noise in 2007. I love scores that alternate synthesis with orchestration and know when to blend them: the music in this film is swoon great. Performances are up there with a few unsteady moments; it's always good to see Eric Bana command a scene in his own accent; the younger friends are also very naturalistic. Oh, and very good to see some vets on screen like Bruce Spence, John Polson and Julia Blake.

What's not good is that it plays like a novel, giving us time spent on inconsequential action and needless overstatement of relationships and restatement of stances like resentment here or crushes there. This works in a novel where a reader demands a sense of place and time passing but in a feature film, unless these things are going to find commitment into narrative threads, they run like soap opera. It's not the place of any review to how a film might be augmented for improvement but the real power in the revelatory scenes here is almost upstaged by a evening of the stakes to the extent that the crucial moments can drag when they should compel. Cut out twenty minutes of establishments we don't need and keep the focus on the twin mysteries and you'd have an eerie murder mystery with a can't-go-home-again theme. Ah well....

Review: THE NEST

Mini Brady Bunch, the O'Haras, go about their perfect daily lives in upstate New York in the mid '80s. The dad, Rory, makes a phone call to an old colleague back in the U.K.  before popping the proposition to his barely woken wife Alison that they uproot and decamp to Blighty for an even greater lifestyle. She's not happy about, it's not for the first time, but he prevails and before you can recite Paradise Lost he's welcoming them to a country manse in green and pleasant Surrey. He promises that Alison can start her own horse riding school (which happy job he wrested her from) and the kids can go to some fine blazer schools in the neighbourhood. Meanwhile he commutes to London and dazzles the suits with his golden gab.

The cracks appear the more you look and you get a lot of time to look. Rory is a lifelong bullshitter who has occasionally struck it lucky but thinks his charm is unbeatable. When he feels a little pushback he sheds a few decades of emotional development and starts screaming and whining about betrayal like Donald Trump. Back at the ranch the daughter Sam is learning local fun and truancy, far from her American disciplined gymnastics, son Ben is getting bullied and Alison seems to be losing form, briefly brightened by the appearance of the horse upon whose rock she'll build a school. No one is saying it but no one wants this life and as Rory continues his campaign of flamboyant losing those cracks are getting existentially dangerous.

It's vital that this story be told in the '80s when Ronald Reagan was selling the poverty creating lie of trickle down, Thatcher was denying all but the richest of her constituents the very notion that they lived in a society, Australian billionaires were being hailed as popular heroes where they'd always just been ridiculed in egalitarian fervour. Even in pop music the great flavourless mainstream was swallowing all that had been original about post punk and crapping it out as pitch perfect lollies. Rory, venal and savage in the ice blue walls of his London offices, is just another purse snatcher from the second age of the velociraptor. His estranged mother has to think of who has turned up at her doorstep when he visits and has no interest in meeting the family he's built, staying at their splendid mansion or even having the conversation they are having. It's as though he is a polaroid turning up in the post of her younger self vomiting at a party.

If that sounds colder than you like then meet this film. That's what you get for almost two hours of screen time. It does help that it is so handsomely shot and that the bit about '80s music above is given more than lip service and mostly it helps that the performances are top shelf. Jude Law, who I've only ever been able to see as a golden sleaze is here amping up his gab in fine form but it is Carrie Coon who bears this film's burden. While she accepts that her Alison is doomed (like everyone on screen) to be unlovable she shows us how that arose in her character and the question of how she not just fell for Rory's bullshit but persisted with it is answered in her cultivation of the genuine pleasures that this veneered life can present. Equally credible in glamour wear and mucking out fatigues we watch a woman driven to a raw resignation to the point where change must occur and it must be from her. If you sit through this you will be waiting for her to appear on screen again as the film loses its life without her.

Otherwise, it's worth noting how this same film created two different impressions in me and my companion. I knew the director had made the ugly-creepy story about a cult escapee Martha Macy May Marlene and noted that the trailer made it look like an equally intense thriller. My friend had avoided the trailer and just watched the movie as it rolled out before her without waiting for something sharp to happen. She had the better time with it. The Nest is not a thriller by any stretch and shouldn't be marketed as such. It is a slow burn fable from the age of greed that has much to tell us as we emerge from the sobering stasis of plague and head back into a world where we might appreciate our better qualities. If this piece does take a little too long to say that while never really peaking then maybe it is as well because we will be living it soon ourselves at an even slower pace.