Review: SYNCHRONIC

A young couple share a trip that starts out like an hallucinogen but quickly becomes real as one descends to a swamp and another falls to his death from a height that isn't the elevator he just entered. A pair of paramedics answer the call but are mystified by the scene. The next case is even more bizarre. Word of a drug trending wildly on the scene called Synchronic coincides with more crime scenes where contemporary New Orleans people are being skewered with ancient swords or dying from snakebites in modern apartments. And then the daughter of one of the paramedics vanishes. Has she reacted to her pain from the trouble in her home by running away? If she did, did she do it with a dose of synchronic? If so, what does that mean and can she return?

Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead have been quietly building a reputation for no-budget movies with sky high concepts like The Endless or Resolution. They have come to be identified as the current face of cosmic horror, extending the kind of world building that made H.P. Lovecraft's writing so durable. There are even offshoots like After Midnight or She Dies Tomorrow helmed by other writer /directors but given production clout by Benson and Morehead. Usually, what happens from here is either the continuation to exhaustion of an underground effort or a breakthrough that changes its field. Synchronic is the latter.

There's a boosted budget visible on screen in the effects and casting (Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan, for starters) and the concept is more given to action rather than the mumblecore workshopping of previous entries. Synchronic has more mainstream production values but keeps the darker thinking that made the others so vital. So, if it looks so comfortably commercial and runs on good ideas, why does it get so draggy?

The set up is intriguing. The notion that a means of fleeing one's own time with a drug that only works on younger people is brilliant. The extra work put into the two leads' lives, their friendship and what will have an impact in the finale is all by the book. The trouble is that there is too much dwelling on information we already have which appears to be added depth until it starts getting fatiguing and suggests that the narrative has stopped moving. That might be cute in another time travel movie but in this one it really only looks like a lack of discipline. To my mind Benson and Morehead have misjudged the impact of the mainstream aesthetic to the effect that instead of it allowing them to smuggle in some radical thinking it only stirs a need in the audience for the kind of heightened action they associate with the look and feel. So, do you dumb it down and get it done or bend the commercial look until it works with the sci-fi? Here it's neither, we just know that we want Steve's discovery montage a lot earlier than when we get it, the intrigue over the drug and its infiltration to be speedier, and the already good bromance between the lead characters to be notched up.

That said, if you relax about this stuff and are willing to get to a gripping conclusion you will be rewarded with a compelling sci-fi outing that will take you places you didn't expect (despite what you might prefer to expect). I can report that by the final scenes I'd pretty much forgotten my reservations about the middle act as I got caught up in an action sequence of a kind that was only left as a promise on earlier outings. Benson and Morehead are worth the support of anyone who wants their cinema mixed up with great what-ifs. And I'm already in line for their next outing.

Review: WHITE RIOT

In the decades since '70s it can be easily forgotten how political British punk was. As one who took part in the Big One back in 1977 I am now well placed to push my pince-nez back and bellow: "these young yobbos who play three chords and get their hair all spiky and say they're punks. We never said we were punks! Never had to .... young .... punks ....." and trail off to get the night's Milo in the kitchen. But I recall with heat the power of the Rock Against Racism movement in the UK. I was comfy in Queensland as part of the extended Euro invasion force and didn't even see the issue where I was. But in Britain they had a neo fascism whose numbers were swelling and getting louder just as the punks were rising. The problem was that it could get difficult to tell them apart.

There are early mentions in this documentary of icons from the time erring in this, Sid and Siouxsie are caught wearing swastikas and Bowie's cocaine-addled bullshit about needing a dictator (and Eric Clapton's rant from God knows where). Hell, tried it myself when I landed in a new town without friends (guess what, that went as soon as I got a social life). While the first two in that list were going for shock value and never espoused any Hitlerism, Bowie and Clapton's gaffs only drew the lines sharper. Jimmy Pursey was a worry as his Sham 69 attracted a few young NF punters but even he calls it in the end for the better side of history.

This is the tale of the co-incidence of a modestly-sized cultural movement using home made forces of DIY press and music events and a generation splitting with the previous one on the value of the great clanging nonsense of patriotism. The organisers of the RAR gigs speak lucidly of the problems of getting traction on a movement that might well have seemed trivial at the time to the extent of massive public events. It might not have crushed the National Front but it certainly hit them in their youth recruitment section. It wasn't Woodstock, it was work, a lot of work, and it made a difference.

Now, if you are gagging from my obvious bias toward RAR I'll keep it short. This account not only moves at a clip it does so with high value vintage footage of the likes of The Clash rehearsing, Tom Robinson and Steel Pulse playing at the RAR gigs, as well as the physical work of setting the stages in parks. At first you might take the sight of what someone has just said typed out on the screen but give it a minute and you'll realise that you are not being preached at but invited into a major part of what holds this film and the movement it examines together. If something isn't archival film or a present day talking head it's cut out and pasted on to the screen like the layout of a fanzine. There are even re-enactments (kept wisely low key) where this extends to live action as when a cop bursts into a flat with the black bar of tabloid reporting over his eyes. By the end credits you get the sense you've been exposed to a lot more information than a barrel of interviews.

Rock Against Racism didn't fix the problem but all it claimed to do was highlight it and invite anyone who cared to come and sing along. Sing it does, though, out to this day of ours with gangs of incels bellowing to the kookaburras in the mountains. But they, while they are not ignorable, are the least of our worries with the insidious normalisation the the right have discovered to the tainting of a term like leftism where it was once a description. Do we need a new RAR? Maybe, but more, we need a film like this to remind us of the tools we already have and our concern, our kindness and our wits.

Thank you.

Written, spoken and memorised by ....

Review: SAINT MAUD

A brief scene following a medical disaster has a nurse squeezed into the corner of an operating room with blood actually on her hands. She is in numb shock and the palette is an icy blue. Then a mass of bubbling blood coloured liquid that might be the pits of hell is revealed to be tomato soup. Maud is getting ready to go to her next job as a private carer, telling us in a voiceover prayer that she is doing what she can before her god has her real job ready. She trudges through her cold British seaside town, ascending to the house of her patient Amanda, a dancer whose body has betrayed her with cancer and left her decaying if still hedonistic. The disaster at the beginning has left Maud with possibly undiagnosed PTSD and she has since got religion in the form of a severe and ascetic strain of Catholicism. So, decrepit old debaucher, meet your quiet, judgey missionary. What could go wrong is the plot of this film.

For a while things seem pretty normal, if you count strange dialogues between carer and patient about the latter's newfound religion and the latter's moments of apparent orgasmic communions when alone. Amanda has not let go of her hedonism, even at death's door and Maud feels compelled to warn Amanda's regular sex worker away from the house. Tensions grow until a moment of cataclysm (seems small at the time but it's enough) plunges Maud into an earthly hell. Fired, she retreats into her stark and small flat, praying by day and luring sexual partners by night in pubs. Then god speaks to her directly, with words, in a voice. He has a plan for her. She needs to be ready. 

It's at that point where we must confront our decision between taking what we see literally and what Maud is seeing in her mental condition. It's not an easy choice. I'm an atheist but have no problem going along with a religious narrative in a fiction if it doesn't expect me to commit to theism (so, I can feel for Fr. Karras in The Exorcist without exactly empathising with him) but depictions of religious mania need to keep a steady course this side of their own compliance with reality. Saint Maud does something else again.

While the full story of the opening scene offers us a lot of context we are still left to marvel at the extent of the change from the nurse Katie to the Maud we first see interacting with the world. Maud does not go to church for masses or confession or even prayer. She does not engage with the community that a church encourages. The state that looks a lot like medieval Catholicism has been formed by Maud herself and includes no one else, no equal under the deity. She is not Bess in Breaking the Waves but rather Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, driven through a self-scouring discipline into the belief that she alone can deliver humanity. There is another film that is probably near impossible to find called Act of the Heart that treads a similar path but cannot compete with the intensity of this film.

This severe delusion has come from trauma which has led to the pressing loneliness imposed upon the survivors of trauma. No one else can know their pain or sense of futility in attempting atonement for the tragedy in her past. Religion provides a form fitted solution to this and, as Denis Potter once put it, it's not the band-aid but the wound. Rather than providing an escape from pain, Maud's invented universe of stern gods and impossible choices simply find a use for it.

Happily, this film does not preach this but gets on with it. Rose Glass weaves a clear style with the gravity of the story in transparent fashion and her vehicle, Morfydd Clark in the title role, grabs your attention by the neck.  Maud's tale, stark and humourless, does not pause for breath and just as you think all is lost at the finish line you are shown something else. Not saying what but it works for the best and the worst.

Review: MINARI

Jacob and Monica Yi are chicken sexers. That the job description is nowhere near as fun as it sounds is a good indicator of this film's reason for being. I don't mean that it is dull. They've moved first from Korea to the USA and then from California to Arkansas to transition from chicken sexing (you'll see it in action, wonder why you never thought of it before and then ask what happens to the ones that won't be hens before it's answered in the dialogue) to farming. This is where the dream meets the reality. They've found a fair sized block of land to cultivate and know that specialising in Korean style vegetables usually shipped from California is a potential winner. But starting a farm is hard, maintaining it harder still and making a living from it excruciatingly slow. They have two children (one of each) who are assimilating to American culture. The rest is about keeping everything manageable. This, in short, is a film about living, doing it and making one.

The importation of Monica's mother to help with the kids adds the missing piece of character. David, a little boy with a hole in his heart, despite initial resentment forms a strong bond with her as she provides genuine if playful life advice in direct contrast with his father's more guarded words (he explains what happens to the male chicks to David with a Dad's lie). It is she who brings the title to the screen as she plants the minari at the creek where it grows wild and as fast as weeds but is crisp and useful as a kind of celery. It is she who tells David about the error of him trying to scare a snake away.

This film is that kind of thing all the way through but lest you consider that a promise of listless torture consider that how these daily life events are presented gives you plenty of scope to reflect on what they mean to these people and how easily you could slot yourself into these situations. The trouble with such a gentle approach can be a perceived need in some cases to sledge in a big crisis out of nowhere: the Yi's could face racism, legal demons or intra-familial turbulence (and there is that astronomical telescope of David's heart problem). Not here; the writing is so deliberate and delicate that none of these things find resort; it's just the rolling out of life and how we try to cube it into plans.

Best known cast member is Jacob played by Steven Yuen. His arc in Walking Dead took him from figure of fun to one of the most popular characters, scooping up depth every season. The last I saw of him was as the creepy urbane Gatsby figure in Burning. Everything is reined back for Jacob and it blends easily with the rest of the performances. Yeri Han allows genuine warmth through her near constant sternness. Alan Kim is loveable as David and Yuon Yuh-Jung is exhilarating to watch as Grandma. This is fine ensemble playing.

This film gets to me personally for two reasons: it reminds me of my grandparents who were immigrant farmers (Russian) and there's a whole branch of my family that established itself in Arkansas (went and met them in situ a few years back and wish I could have stayed longer). It isn't hard to appreciate the links between any kind of family-wide venture in one's own life and this earthbound tale which is why it's so easy to appreciate its universality. It talks big but very quietly.

Review: THE DIG

 

Rustic aristocrat Edith Pretty hires even more local self-taught archaeologist Basil to excavate and investigate some ancient mounds on her lands. What he uncovers is enough to rewrite history so the British Museum come barging in and take over, retaining Basil to hang around and clean up when needed. As the cast blooms so do the threads of plot and sub plot but the real tale here is the discovery of transience, permanence and continuation. The more we look at history the more we know we ourselves are history, our lives and deaths just more parts of the weave.

Lofty thoughts but can they weave a movie that runs just short of two hours? The answer is not just yes but a surprising yes. I use the weaving analogy advisedly: the interplay of directorial concept, writing and performance give us the human role from sweaty work to refined aloofness whereby the gigantic self knowledge of this unearthed treasure is blended with the central nervous systems of immediate needs as well as a look at the entropic cry of ambition. All that in such a quiet and superficially unimposing passage.

The other side of this, the other role, is played by the earth itself, here in a part of the country whose beige-with-benefits sombreness reminds all who walk upon the soil of where they are headed and that the wonders of the ancient site are just themselves plus time. Morning fogs with the sun a mere suggestion, the English country garden or featureless morasses with the rain, rain and rain.

The lead is shared between the redoubtable Carrie Mulligan as Edith Pretty and Ralph Fiennes as Basil Brown. Both of these actors not only show great commitment in their characterisations but bring very strong voices. I last saw Carrie Mulligan as a suburban revenger with an American snarl that could tear plaster in Promising Young Woman. Here she reigns that in to deliver pain beneath the posh and it's just as strong. Ralph Fiennes is unforgettable to me since seeing him (wrongly) own Schindler's List (as soon as he appeared you forgot all about Schindler which really was not the point of that one). Fiennes is from the Suffock of the setting but he still needed a coach to get him to the trueditch dialect o' the paddocks and fields. Like Mulligan his sober front holds pain but his is a kind of preternatural sadness at his knowledge of the earth to earth. Elsewhere, Lily James is all libidinal force constrained in a non-physical marriage and Johnny Flynn toffs up the sexual edge he used in Beast.

Why was I so compelled by this? I began to watch as a demonstration of my upgraded Netflix sub to go with an upgraded system that would stream Dolby vision and atmos but I just kept watching. The themes of time and entropy are clear and in every scene but like the lead players they contain enough pain to power the slow roll of the story. I particularly liked one technique of playing relevant dialogue over different action with the same characters. It struck me as economical but also as effective in de-staging the performances and writing: we hear the ghost of conversations as they float around progressed time. I was surprised to find how much I did enjoy this seductively unassuming film. It's long. It's slow. It's deep.