Review: HERETIC

Two young Mormon conversion units knock on the door of the highly affable Mr Reed. He has signalled his interest in a visit and is up for a chat. It's raining hard at the doorstep but they tell him there needs to be a woman present if they are to come in. He says his wife is at home and, satisfied, they settle on his living room couch and begin discussing religion with the waft of blueberry pie coming in from the kitchen. Or is it? There are the usual awkward silences and looks that happen when strangers meet in unfamiliar settings. Then, Mr Reed asks about historical polygamy, the spectre of which still haunts the church, displaying a scholarly knowledge of Mormonism. Sisters Barnes and Paxton are initially impressed but begin noticing things are not quite right. There's a fair bit of detail about this in the trailer but I'll leave it blank here.

This is an A24 thriller. The company that brought you some remarkable genre cinema over the past decade and a bit but also the daggy oldie's term elevated horror, has been on the trail of expanding its brief toward the genre defying goal of good cinema. Mostly that's been seen to with great moments like Pearl. Then, there's this.

Heretic gets to work quickly, dropping Chekovian guns into every opening scene and guiding us with a gentle curve to the point where the weirdness pushes against a tightening tension that bursts in the second act only to be resolved for good or ill in the third. All of this is handled confidently by the film to the extent that nothing at all will surprise you about it. It's like watching the clock that you hear ticking throughout, it's going to keep on working.

Comparisons are odious but I can't sit here and not mention that Barbarian from a few years back managed to wrong foot its audiences near constantly, blowing initial expectations way out of proportion, yet brought everything back home. Heretic attempts this a few times but there is such a lack of tension throughout and the stakes keep getting punctured that the only thing to get on edge about it the theological proposition developing in the dialogue.

Hugh Grant's goofy Englishness pitted against the sinister scheme he's plotting should work better than it does but you just keep wanting to like him. The young women are presented in cliché form, one pious, the other worldly, but this runs into trouble quickly. One character, given advice by the other of how to handle the situation starts doing so in a writerly sudden character development; her change is like a swimmer sprouting fins to evade a shark. It soon feels like an overall essay about the nature of religion using a few nominated characters to mouth declarations and counter arguments. Even the potentially interesting theoretical hijacks feel like they were shouted into inclusion during an all night session in the writers' room over some brews and a lot of muscle relaxants. The whole thing ends up feeling like a challenge to make an a24 thriller based on an essay on belief. Here's a proposition: if you believe you will be surprised by this film's plot, you will be; if you don't believe that, you won't be. 

EYES WIDE SHUT @ 25

Well-heeled Manhattanite couple Bill and Alice go to a Christmas party thrown by their uber one-percenter friend Victor and there, in the boozy, soft light wooze, both are sexually tempted but both decline. Afterwards, sharing a post party joint, they get into an argument about potential infidelity which ends in Alice confessing that she was struck by the sight of a naval officer at a recent holiday they'd been on. Not just struck but after a single glance from him, she says she was ready to abandon her marriage for the stranger. Bill is so slammed by this that he sets off into the night looking for an opportunity to slake his jealousy by any means possible and ends up infiltrating a secret orgy of the great and famous where his life is threatened. He is saved by an interloper whose fate appears dreadfully sealed. Freed, he flees, determined to discover what happened.

Stanley Kubrick was by the time of this film's completion producing so few new films that each was given greater hype than the previous on their approach. Among the rumours sticking to this one was that it was a box office time server before the one he really wanted to make, A.I. Such rumours served to diminish Eyes Wide Shut as a secondary work made to finance a primary one. However, Kubrick had wanted to make an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler's Traumnovelle (Dream-Story) since the 1960s. It had gone through many different imaginings and castings until finally made in the 1990s. It was a primary work that Kubrick was highly pleased with. 

On the ground around me, people who professed to be lifelong fans of the director mostly expressed distaste for the movie, often exaggerating the lameness of the hyped orgy scene and considering the film a waste or their time as well as the effort it took to make. I was reminded of a lot of backlashes previously, against all kinds of things, other movies, music artists' new albums, novels and so on: Kubrick didn't make the movie they wanted so whatever this one was was angrily flushed. For my part I had been unconvinced of Kubrick's unquestioned genius but had seen something in this last one that fascinated me. To this day, I consider it one of his best and most rewatchable. This is not, I swear, my own contrariness, the film's themes of responses to jealousy feel hauntingly genuine to me, heightened by the high sheen of the visuals and gravity of the music. If I had to choose, I'd rather have this than Lolita, Barry Lyndon, or Full Metal Jacket.

Why? Well, expanding on my reason given just then, I think it's one of the most accurate treatments of sexual jealousy committed to screen. Not only does it hit the disproportionate responses between the couple but neither consummates their extra marital desire. It plays and feels more like a fable than the erotic thriller it's often touted to be.  Alice, however drunk she is, resists the charms of the Hungarian lecher at the party. Bill seems on the edge of following the two models who appear like a masturbatory fantasy from the golden light of the glitz. The couple's post-event discussion about each other's moments of temptation leads to the argument and Alice's confession. That confession, while it still haunts Alice, becomes a motif for Bill, recurring throughout his adulterous trek in a series of black and white vignettes, a scene that never happened for real but is what he imagines his wife imagined and desired. He is revenging himself against a passing thought (a resonant one but still just a thought). 

I don't think that this expresses male jealousy vs female, just the likelihood of a lack of balance between people intimately involved. This story invites you to revisit the often brutal ugliness of a moment of your own jealousy and, honest viewers who were more interested in what the film before them asked of them than in what temporary approval they might find by trashing the movie in front of others, will take away a confronting candour.

Is the orgy scene lame? Compare it to the New French Extremity and the daunting boundary pushing of erotic thrillers since and, sure, it seems very slight for the participants to care too much who knew about it. That point is better expressed in the conversation Bill has toward the end with Zigler which is more about class exclusion. The suggestion that any given modern city might be by powerful narcissists might not be news to anyone but the thought of it, when given a second or two, remains a shivery horror. As to Bill, wandering the rainbow coloured sets of a very clean Greenwich Village crawling with dirty minds, he for the moment can only see opportunities that he feels the force of his will alone bestow entitlements upon him. It's as powerful an allegory for the concentration of sexual arousal as any.

While the casting of the two leads had changed greatly over the decades as Kubrick returned to the thought of this adaptation, he really knocked it out of the park by choosing alpha celebrity couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Young, talented and beautiful, Cruise and Kidman were on screens as much as they were on the covers of celebrity mags at supermarket checkouts. They were characterised as a power couple without controversy. The opening scene depicting the pair getting ready to go to the party feels completely natural and, once established, we feel we are in the company of people we know at the same time as unreachable movie stars. Cruise plays up to his walking grin persona but is also put through such strain that this appears increasingly shallow. Kidman speaks mostly in hushed tones with elongated vowels takes Alice to a point of unquestionable authority. The film's final line is hers and she delivers it with the quiet but abrupt confidence that the whole film has begged: "fuck!"

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT @ 25

Heather, Josh and Mike, three film students head out to the country to win big in their coursework by making a documentary about a local legend. Picking up some local intel and colour with some interviews about the Blair witch and mass murderer Rustin Parr, they shoot some introductory footage in the town and then head into the woods for some more folkloric landmarks. The woods are a bigger deal than they expected and they are soon disorientated with night encroaching. "This is America," say Heather, "how lost can you actually be?" The implicit answer from the woods is, "hold my beer".

So begins the cultural moment that resounds these decades on and will only continue. Yes, the film makers really only planned on making a nifty little campfire tale that might light up a few festival screens and maybe have an afterlife on VHS. The formula is still applied; make a low budge horror and kick the door down to a film career. After Blair Witch, though, the starting point could be a lot closer to the earth. The technology that was less than a decade away used it as a source point. 

I have a clear memory of  a post to the newsgroup alt.horror in 1999 where I first saw this title. It was from someone who had been creeped out by the trailer. Just a post among many (it's probably still there) but, while we ol' stagers were used to thinly veiled spam, this just read as normal. Everyone who stopped by it in the feed searched for the title and found the trailer (pre-YouTube and embedding links). And we all brought back our impressions to the newsgroup as trusted posters. And we mentioned it to anyone we could interest. When the website appeared with its images of film cans as menu links and limited though excitingly usable video, it looked like the slick end of urban myth creation.

There is a persistent idea that the Haxan Films team designed the proto-viral campaign through their own punky resourcefulness but the real story is far more satisfying. There are millions of words written about the circumstances of this film's marketing alone and it gets too intricate for me to detail here but a summary should do. After the groundswell of whispers, electronic and actual, blew the title like a gale to its midnight screenings at the Sundance Film Festival where it showed to packed houses, the property was picked up by Artisan for many times more than its production costs and that astute corporate entity elected to pour money into the guerrilla style infiltration for the marketing. This included the extraordinary measure of wilfully distributing "bootleg" copies of an incomplete cut. The vapourware movie bled out of the modem and into the living room in the VHS haunted world of the late '90s. This is how I saw it. A friend of a friend who knew a bloke passed on an unlabelled cassette and we watched it, feeling part of the forbidden elite.

If you want to know about people thinking it was real by the time it was released in Australia in December 1999, the answer is few, if any. U.S. general release preceded it by five months and the internet had long been the e-land of the spoiler. But the flavour of it allowed a tinge of excitement, especially when getting into the cinema and passing the photocopied sign about the dangers of motion sickness.

Hype will always have antihype and people who complained of it being boring, uneventful, a ripoff or plain unscary flooded from the woodwork. For all their complaints about the way horror movies should look and play, the box office here extended the story in the rest of the world. It was a massive and persistent success. At a time when studios were pouring money into increasingly defanged horror movies, this tiny thing beat the lot of them. TS Eliot wasn't always right but he was when he suggested that any artistic revolution needs to be a return to the banal. There, amid the smellable mud and palpable exhaustion was a banality that felt like a nightmare.

That success was transformed from dollar returns to cultural absorption. While what came to be known as the Found Footage genre was slow to launch, the example of its marketing was heeded thereafter, with the ever more normalised internet open to a seemingly infinite spectrum of claims to veracity or more plainly effectiveness. As video recording and reproduction improved in quality, price and distribution, the no-budget feature became such an established norm that its aesthetics were adopted by the mainstream the same way that post punk eventually made it into Heinz soup commercials. Features shot on digital video and projected in cinemas warranted as little comment as anything shot on celluloid. The sense of video's veracity and immediacy became a trope. Now we are at the point where blockbusters are shot on the highest resolution video and look cleaner than film to the extent that some titles get algorithmic film grain imposed on to the digital image the same way that some dance CDs had sampled vinyl surface noise added.

When Found Footage did find its foothold in the late 2000s with Paranormal Activity, the sporadic titles that had appeared between that time and Blair Witch took on a pioneering status. Now, Found Footage is so routinely acceptable that it's just another kind of movie. Still, things penetrate: Rob Savage's lockdown/screenlife horror Host, presented as a single Zoom meeting made it to the screens of those living under the same conditions as the characters. It was a little over the twentieth anniversary but no one who had seen Blair Witch wasn't reminded of it.

So, after all this time and motion, does the Blair Witch Project still work? Yes, and to the same extent. Cut away the hype of real events, you can now watch it in the current climate of routine Found Footage cinema and it feels the same. Feels? For the most recent 312 Nights of Horror challenge (a horror movie per night for all of October) I decided to up the tally of FF titles from all sources. The Blair Witch phenotypes do not need description, they present themselves as markers to an audience that could count them off a list if they weren't so thoroughly expected.

It is scary. If you go into it with the intention of resisting it, ask yourself why you are borthering. If you are going to rate it for jump scares or the appearance of the title character, you should have paid more attention to the first ten minutes that told you in the plainest terms that this was not going to go that way (though many more recent FF films do). If you have ever been lost or felt powerless against distressing circumstances, you will understand this film and why it still scares its audiences. It was my delight to show it as a twentieth anniversary screening to a pair of friends around my vintage who just had not got around to seeing it. Winter 1999, I lit a fire in the hearth, put on comfy foods and wine and we watched, rendered silent when the end credits rolled. One of my guests turned to me and only had to say, "that was good."

Viewing notes: I waited months to do this one as that's how long it took for Second Sight's extraordinary restoration of the film to appear on Blu-Ray. Removing the incidentally imposed film grain on to the video footage rendered it flawed for its directors. Now, the video looks like video and the film like film. The cut is unchanged (though there is the slightly longer festival cut available). There is also a wealth of supplemental material. I know I sound like a shill but this is how a favourite movie should be treated, whatever it is. However, the film is available by subscription on both Stan and Netflix and rentable through pretty much all the others. Get ya some Found Footage.

Review: LEE

Lee Miller, transitioning from fashion model to photographer among the avantistas of Paris, keeps at the shutter bugging until she finds her level as a war correspondent going to the darker shadows of the human state. She narrates this from age to an interviewer and we have our frame. This can be done well like in Amadeus or woefully like in Chaplin. Lee does it with a difference.

The film is given the stellar performance of one of the contemporary greats in Kate Winslet's lead role and is supported by some serious skill in the surrounding cast. But then, the test of how reliant on the historical record the film should prove to be against how cinematic it prefers to be. There is a persistent evenness of pace here which allows the film as a whole to drag and it begins to feel like a dull movie made of good scenes, too reverent. The reverence hazards audience empathy as Miller as a character tests patience with capriciousness and frowning disapproval. It's not until a good halfway through that she, facing the spectacle of the liberated death camps, that her enforced humility allows us in.

This applies to the interview format. At first it plays like Chaplin with the enquirer feeding lines for quotable quotes. Amadeus solved this by having the narrator aggressively toy with the young priest to the point where Salieri's twisted memories become a weird version of the real story and implicate the priest as a witness, making the problem of veracity unsolvable. Lee plays it more like that and leaves the sting till last at which point what felt tired and generic biopic material becomes active narrative weight.

I'm getting all fustian here and not really describing the film itself as that's how the movie made me think as I was watching it. I felt like I was filing scenes away rather than enjoying them gather and take form. Throughout the running time there are moments of commentary on the status of women in art, in public life, in war, in history, and they are all worth our attention and are handled without condescension. It is not until, like everything else in this story, we hit the forcefulness of the war that they really find their power. The girl in the death camp who can only trust her fellow victims moves like a maltreated kitten. The woman publicly humiliated in a French village gives a piercing stare to Miller's lens which is shame incarnate.

So, yes, we are talking a timeline of moments more than a cohesive whole life and its big lesson. That, in the end, might well be the way of a better biopic. If you're not going to wildly fling a biography to the wall for fun and life lessons, maybe this is it: roll it out until you find the riff and then just play the riff. Doesn't sound like I liked it, does it? But I did.