Review: THE FALLING

Abbie and Lydia have a bond deep and strong. It withstands the worst bickering that adolescent power can muster. It withstands Abbie's treacherous deflowering in the back of a car and her subsequent pregnancy. And then it withstands her death as Lydia plunges into an emotional chaos as she makes her unguided way through grief. As Abbie's last days were broken by increasingly serious fainting spells, Lydia is beset by her own. Soon this spreads throughout the school as the other girls begin falling, culminating in a mass faint at assembly. Is it hysteria, a neurological plague, a weird protest? This film's strength and weakness lies in its evasion of the answer.

It's a strength because it allows the film to explore by posing questions. Why is that happening? Is it related to this? Is there something significant about the relationship? We are invited to draw our conclusions from a mass of information supported by strong performances and a characterful aesthetic. Plot is kept necessarily slight to facilitate this and you will find yourself continuing to make connections after the credits have rolled.

It's a weakness because all that depends too much on how much empathy you want to shell out to the characters. The lead performances are strong but the best played shallow sketches will only clarify the lack of depth. Do we need better developed characters if the piece is so thematically driven? Well, we do when it declares itself to be about bonding, empathy, various forms of violation and repression and their effects. As with the quirk of films like A Fistful of Flies or What's Eating Gilbert Grape or anything by Wes Anderson the difficulty connecting between the people on screen and the ones watching them makes what might be an engaging flow into a clod-hop over a scrapbook.

And you want quirk? Lydia has a twitching eyelid. When I first noticed it I thought it was a sign of her exerting control over the other girls. But it's really kind of nothing. Her brother has moments when his eyes look a little splayed but again nothing. Nothing substantial, at any rate though it's not that hard to impute meaning to those traits they come across as spontaneous inspirations of indulged actors. The brother introduces himself as Kenneth-not-Ken. He is pollinating wildly, roaming the ward of fainting victims spreading charm spoors. He recognises the boundary drawn at his sister but that barrier doesn't seem to bother either of them. Their mother, working from home as the neighbourhood hairstylist, hasn't left the house in years though she dresses and makes up as though she's never at home. You got quirk.

So did I like it at all? Well, Masie Williams provides a solid centre as Lydia, making the writing she has to work with less grating through her obvious and effortless conviction. Greta Scacchi's knotty oak Mrs Mantel allows a warmth to the dessicated bitterness by which her character might have otherwise been wholly composed. Director Morley has a fondness for near subliminal shock cuts but skill enough to use them to inform rather than distract. She plays fair, also, by keeping the initial restlessness of the narrative style under control, making it clear that we shouldn't be expecting too much plot. There is a pleasing ambiguity to the depiction of the falling itself whereby it looks genuine in this case but completely contrived in that one. The score is a pleasing mix of folky freshness and electronica which didn't let the film down once (that's not faint praise; listen to the next blockbuster you go to).

But then there are so many threads that are allowed to bend beyond recognition and either wobble unevenly or more simply fade from view. Forced moments like the older teachers' private loosening chat or the atrocity straight out of a Greek Tragedy primer in the final act jar rather than deepen and too often being taken out of the picture this way results in exposure of the void between the patches and fragments that make it up. These pieces are chosen with scholarship and taste (If, The Devils, Picnic at Hanging Rock etc.) and placed with great intention but, I fear, too little consequence.

I did continue making connections on the walk home from the cinema and quite happily found many that I hadn't consciously made while watching. This is a pleasant effect and I have no objection to a film that manipulates me into it. However, this comes at a cost of the thought developing an apologetic rather than participatory tone. I don't wish to damn any film for being different and so boldly itself but in this case my praise can only be ... faint.

Review: AMY: Selfies in the Maelstrom

The millennials' very own 27 Clubber, Amy Winehouse soared to fame like an F-18 and then crashed like a 747 but this time in slow motion. In that short time she pushed a timeless jazz through filters of her own history and templates cut from everything she didn't like about contemporary music into the 2000s to create an untouchable style. She also made cataclysmic life decisions which saw her go from a plucky teenager to a desiccated husk. This stuff we know. And we assume that because it was so public in this time where the line between public and private is so shaky that that is all we need know of this case. Amy is dead and buried, sang well but, boy, was she good for a joke. It's that bit that this film addresses.

It opens on two teenage girls as they sing Happy Birthday to the one holding the camera. Trumping her friends with a huge, gleaming grin, the cherubic Amy, cigarette in fingers, trills the song like Monroe and everything we know about her life hits us between the eyes. The voices of those friends (often stilted by sorrow) will keep surfacing through the media blitzkreig like rescue signals. That's necessary because for the next two hours we are immersed in a life story, a few years short of three decades of intense withering.

That this film is neither dirge nor freak show is testament to director Asif Kapadia and his team. I didn't see his highly lauded Senna as I couldn't bring myself to watch anything about motorsport (I know, if the film is good enough that shouldn't matter) but now I think I must. Winehouse's fame coincided with the dawn and rise of social media and if I say that Kapadia succeeds here because of a deep understanding of Amy Winehouse it's less from any personal insights than his skill with the ocean of content she generated.

Home video, phone video, selfies, talk shows, holidays, performances and paparazzi all contribute to the motion jigsaw we see. The new content is supplied by interviews done for the film and the massive editing job. Those interviews are audio-only; taking the talking head out of a biographical documentary removes the safety buffer for the audience so that there is nothing but editing between us and the sounds and images of the life on the screen. There is a delightfully clear path to Winehouse with her friends teasing and laughing as the cam silently records as a now natural element in a social situation. But there is also no protection offered from the video selfie of the later Amy, emaciated and self-aware, recording her wasted physique in the dark with a slight, unsettling smile.

Because the first video is so arresting it's a doddle to settle in to this format of content tsunami with only spare commentary (and that varying and unshamedly  personal), however difficult it can be to watch some of it. The balance Kapadia strikes, given how much raw source he would have begun with and how tempting it would have been to have editorialised rather than edited, is exemplary. But the balance would only rate for worthiness if it weren't also for the unflagging sense of journey that testifies to Kapadia's guidance: he knows we know the story but he wants us to know all of it so that by the time we see the montage of comedians, presenters and talk show hosts taking cheap shots with howitzers we recall our own and shrink from the memory: the film is not judging us, it happily invites us to do it ourselves.

Meanwhile we see Amy, the songwriter who slogged it out in tracky daks at home with a Strat and a writing pad, who showed astute judgement of her own performance in the studio as she perfected lines, take after take. We see a bona fide star struck dumb as she watches one of her idols present her with a Grammy, her gaping awe draining all self awareness. We see a friend in high London sass, clinking glasses with her lifelong friends. And we see a girl in plaits with a huge grin as we are told of the difficulty of an unguided childhood in a house she dreamed of escaping from the age of nine. And if we see her plummet into raving insensibility with the clubland alpha whom she worshipped, married and then accompanied on a slide down to the kind of Hell it took Jean Paul Sartre to imagine, we take it with the rest. There's a lot of drugging and boozing and clubbing here but the line between reporting and leering is never crossed. We are being informed not invited to salivate, and by the time we watch her mutely wander the stage at the infamous Belgrade concert we can no longer tut-tut or smirk at the psycho drugs and pills lady living up to all her jokes: we're lucky if we don't well up.

Eventually, there are as many scenes of Winehouse trying to make her way through the masses of pappazzi constantly on duty outside her Camden house. Even sober, she must have felt transported to another dimension where the breeze sounded like metal on metal and the sunlight came in blinding flashes. But we are compelled to remember as we watch her walk numb through the ratcheting storm of camera shutters, the insensitive eyes in her skeletal face violated by constant speedlights, that this was once a cheeky girl who just wanted to sing. And when we see her last procession through the cameras, on a covered trolley pushed by paramedics we need to remember.

The Daily Mail muckreported that Amy Winehouse died watching Youtube clips of herself. If we read something like that at the time it was without surprise. As this quilt of electronic evidence suggests, though, we should step back from that and remember that any of us might well go a similar way, gasping our last as Gaz the Raz yet again does the streak at our graduation ceremony on whatever forehead implant Youtube shall have become. If Winehouse were able to see this her horror would not be from the images of herself flailing through a drug haze but the breathtaking invasion of the images themselves. The stretch between their intimacy and the alienating effect of their edited presentation creates a dizzying eeriness. As this documentary is made entirely of digital source material it might very accurately be called The Amy Winehouse Files. But the confidence of the edit and the craft in the construction prevents this from the tabloid sneer that a title like that suggests.

If you had fun in your twenties you knew an Amy Winehouse. Actually, you more than likely knew a few. Those boys and girls who sped themselves up to cope with the velocity of their own brains and boozed back down to be with the rest of us, who landed in Emergency at three in the morning, who were famished for sex and noise, who found their bedmates in gutters and agar dishes, who constantly craved neural relief, who clung to the walls in quieter moments, barely able to make it down the hall, whose laughter thrilled and terrified us, whose phone calls could drain or energise us, who were as silly as death and as grave as a good joke: we knew all those ones who gave our times their signature and colour, and we either went to their funerals young or watched as they settled into awkward mediocrity and judged them worse than those who died.

The difference was that Amy Winehouse, like Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain, was famous. The difference between that and this film is that the mass of the kind of material it's made of doesn't look all that different from what we upload ourselves. When Facebook a few years back offered the dinky Gallery of Your Life app we clicked and let the algorithm give us a pack of Vanity filter tips. Kapadia has protected us from seeing the result of Amy Winehouse clicking on what the whole internet would return and instead given us something to celebrate and learn from. Any Amys in the audience won't stop being Amys, it's not their nervous systems up on the screen so they're not bound to admit any kinship, but if the rest of us should learn to extend a little care to them then this story's work is done.

MIFF 2015!

Ok folks, it's on again. As the choirs and crowd chatter rises and drifts from the Gertrude St Projection Festival outside (just went and shot some video of it) I am at the end of a very long hungover day spent mainly getting these thirteen titles chosen from the hundreds in the MIFF guide and putting them all on my mini pass. Long, slow, cold day.

So, now as I take some hospital grade haberdasherin for the pain, visions come forth of the Dr Seuss exterior of the Forum, getting acquainted with the Comedy Theatre (very fond memories of the Princess as MIFF venue in the mid 2000s), the very fondly recalled Treasury Theatre and the Festival Club at the Forum downstairs.

So, here are the initial 13 on my mini pass:

The Duke of Burgundy
To kick off, the new one form the lad who gave us the strong Katalin Varga and the brilliant Berberian Sound Studio. A mix of Persona and Bunuel with Peter Strickland at the helm sounds good to me.





Arabian Nights
A triology from Miguel Gomes who made the extraordinary Tabu, a favourite of 2012 brings an epic of classic storytelling filtered through the state of post-GFC Portugal.






Lambert and Stamp
I dig rock docs and this one about a duo of managers who were as interesting as their charges, the Who caught my eye.






99 Homes
Interesting premise. Michael Shannon.









Battles Without Honour and Humanity
Classic Yakuza from the 70s by the man who brought us Battle Royale.







Two Shots Fired
Just had to read the synopsis.







Tehran Taxi
Intrigued.








Hill of Freedom
Loved the same director's Our Sunhi last year for its quiet but powerful comedy of manners. Looking forward to this one.





Angels of Revolution
Stalin's Russia. An atrocity. Always like to get a Russian film in if I can.







The Witch
Noticed this title on a few best-horror-movies-you've-never-seen lists and now here it is.







The Forbidden Room
Guy Maddin. Nuff said. Alright. I've been fascinated with Maddin's rich and strange blend of early cinema with indy smarts. His films might look a little like Nosferatu with tints but they never feel like anything but the mind of Guy Maddin.




As usual, I'll probably add to this once the fest has started so feel free to suggest a session. Hope to see some o' you out 'n' about among the scarves and the projector beams. Roll on, August!

Rock on Film #18: Love and Mercy

In a darkened studio a young Brian Wilson, almost a silhouette, tells us in a whisper of the music to come. He can't keep up with the thoughts forming inside his mind and begins to sound incoherent. With a red flash in a corner of the screen the scene is extinguished.

Darkness. Sounds well up from the silence and drift across the audio field like sea creatures. Cooing harmonies, garbled speech, machines. And we shift in our seats as it's still dark and it looks like the projection has broken down. But then as the cacophony swells a patch of lightness grows in the lower screen, brightening with the rise in sound. And then it bursts into colour and movement as the Beach Boys rise to fame in a montage of press conferences, concerts and goofing around in the studio. Everything looks like moving cover art. And BAM! We're in.

Brian in the 80s buys a Cadillac but it's the strangest sale the beautiful saleswoman has ever made. His odd fragmentary speech broken by absent silence at first puts her on edge but she relaxes and lets things happen as she thinks of the location of the ejector seat button. But he exudes a kind of charm despite himself and when the mini circus of his minders, led by the ogreish Dr Landy enter to bundle him off, she is intrigued. Suddenly we're twenty years before and Brian, young and mop topped twists himself into a panic on a plane, shouting and flailing as his bandmates (who are mostly his brothers) pin him to the floor. Welcome to the world of Brian Wilson.

Then we are swung back and forth between these two episodes of Wilson's life: his slide down into mental illness when young and his rescue from its nadir in middle age. Through this we are shown the fragility of a man crippled by a blend of genius and naivete. This Kurt Vonnegut time pendulum has some scenes seemingly respond to others decades apart and it can get tight. Between the constant personal oppression by father or by psychiatric slave driver there's a real danger of claustrophobic despair. It is to this film's credit that that does not happen.

First, there's the perspective shift. When 60s Brian lies on a car bonnet and hears the music of the universe we are in his head. We see the older Brian through the eyes of Melinda from the Cadillac dealership whose pity and curiosity grow into love enough to attempt the demolition of his psychiatric wall. We are neither condemned to a tv-movie pageant of great scenes from history nor
led into a autohagiography. The central problem in each of the two periods has the same root but presents different symptoms and this by itself offers a kind of navigable texture.

Second, there's casting and performance. Brian Past and Brian Future (as they are named in the credits) are played by two different actors, neither of whom especially resemble Wilson but who both use acting to provide the prosthetics.

Paul Dano, already in danger of being the speed dial nutbag de jour, gives us what might be the peak of all his crazies. His Brian walks through the blinding California sunshine, hearing the music of the spheres and fails to convince anyone else of its beauty. He's so in love with what's in his head that the constant rejection of his attempts to communicate it work their way into him like a malignant growth. The smiling brightness he begins with, the sweeping gestures and leaping physicality in the early scenes shrink around him, pressing him into silence and stillness until he is rendered a formless mass on an elaborate bed. Dano works the room taking us there, meting out the craziness in irregular doses so he's hard to predict and judge. By the time he's drifting under the surface of his pool, eyes as wide as a drowning victim's, we feel the hopelessness he does that he'll ever say anything again that anyone else will listen.

John Cusack is the later, broken Brian. He is absent and lost but also incessantly curious. His enthusiasm is a feat of self restraint as he keeps his hands still in awkward positions and seems to drift in and out of awareness. His intellect is clearly visible through its incautious restlessness. It can be hard to watch him through the sheer anxiety his presence engenders. At the same time, we want to care for him, keep him safe and warm. This is the most striking performance by Cusack since the great Being John Malkovich also took him out of his overgrown teenager schtick. He has clearly observed the real Wilson but his physicality is not a cover version nor a splendid acting class exercise: it is an embodiment of character, just like Dano's.

This is what separates this film from lesser rock biopics like The Doors which played Oliver Stone director solos about Navajo mythology and the presence of the great Death between tv movie moments. Val Kilmer was fine in that one but he was the leader of a tribute band rather than a character in a movie. By contrast, Ian Hart in Backbeat plays a character called John Lennon who we're allowed to forget became JOHN LENNON because we want to see what this angry teenager would do next. Cusack and Dano do not waste the good writing handed to them to fill these roles and we are grateful to follow the strange tale despite its historicity.

There are tv-movie moments, though, and they do threaten to let the whole thing down. Mike Love is a dick at band meetings, endlessly ranting about keeping to the formula instead of all this progressive malarky. Characters supply timeline details as they comment that Pet Sounds didn't sell or toasting Good Vibrations, Brian's pocket symphony to God and the biggest selling single the Beach Boys ever had (that's a real line from the movie), session bassist extraordinaire Carol Kaye is puzzled that Brian scored her part in D but the double bassist in A (and then shares a knowing smile when it all works out). Also, do we at the morning tea of the age of Google really need end titles to tell us what happened to the key players? How many true life movies have come to a three point landing only to have the tourist brochure read out before we can leave? Unnecessary. If you really need that stuff put it in the movie. Except you don't need it.

The marks I'll take off aren't all for the midday movie moments in time, though. Paul Giamatti's Landy is written like a panto villain with added psychobabble. Giamatti rises just high enough above it with a performance that understands the kind of round the clock manipulation Landy exercised and the security that allowed view of its ugliness through. He makes his cartoon character repulsive to the touch and worryingly tactile. Still, I kept expecting him to come upon an act of defiance and bellow out a roaring: "Ah HAAAAA!"

If you can look past all that you 'll see some solid cinema. The studio recreations have the closeness of a Maysles documentary (or Godard's One Plus One done with the Stones) and some of the moments of musical cohesion are brought to heart pumping life. There's also some of the best judged handheld camera I've seen in a long time. One walking track through a couple of rooms in an apartment fills us with dread. The camera as adrift as its subject in the scene where Brian is testing the studio for the right vibrations as a small orchestra waits mute makes us feel seasick and crushed at his state. There is a montage that suggests a kind of reconciliation of past and present that clearly evokes 2001: A Space Odyssey but without archness or the ghost of a wink. Melinda has a few scenes where a conversation is from immediately before or after a shot of her thinking hard on a balcony or looking tired in a cafe. Elizabeth Banks' performance as Melinda is worth a mark for showing us why such a drop of Californian sun as she could believably fall for Brian in high fuckup mode. She carries a sadness that recognises his. We need this. Hers is the human warmth that gives us a lifeline through the ugliness of the later episode. Well cast. Well played.

Did I mention sound? That beginning audio collage wasn't just a fancy way of starting. Not only do we get an electronic score but riches. Constructed from raw studio takes, speech, singing and playing the music of this film is a series of mounting waves of sound, sometimes heavenly as when Brian is listening to his own imaginings with his eyes closed on the bonnet of a car, ugly and threatening, as when his lunch guests cutlery sounds like a quarries of hell. There are even timeline quotes from the original source like Murry Wilson, the father whose methods of music instruction cost Brian his hearing in one ear, saying, "I'm a genius too, ya know." See, that's how you'd put a historical soundbite into a film without the cheese.

Ok, I've said too much already. Just see the damn thing. If you miss it at the cinema then at least see it at home with good sound. Wilson had a hell of a life. The hell part seems to be over now (he did finally finish, record and tour the failed Smile project)  and his children were raised you know they suddenly rise they started slow long ago head to toe healthy wealthy and wise....

Review: EX MACHINA: Design by design

Geeky Caleb wins the chance to spend time with dot com genius and overlord stopped-counting-ionaire Nathan. The helicopter that delivers Caleb to Nathan's personal glacier almost presses Caleb to the ground with the force of its rotors as it takes off. We'll see that reprised in a few different ways in the next ninety minutes.

Nathan lives in a high security bunker. His bushy beard with suedehead crop is not hipster: he lives like no one's looking. Hungover at their first meeting he is asked about the greatness of the party that put him in the state of pain. "What party?" he says without a smile.

After being teased into signing a fearsome non-disclosure, Caleb is told that he will for the next seven days be testing Nathan's robot for self awareness. Caleb will be part of the greatest moment in the history of man. Caleb, awestruck, corrects this to the history of gods. It won't be long before we hear Nathan's streamlining of that thought.

In the next seven sections (partitioned with title cards) we see the progress Caleb makes with Ava the android, understanding or failing to understand the mind of his host and wondering about the origin of his own intelligence. It's a multi-layered game of cat and mouse between the Kurtz-like Nathan, the pixie-like Caleb who has wandered in from the forest and the born-adult Ava whose test-nailing attribute might well be guile. And that is what keeps the well-worn theme of the meaning of humanity when faced with a superior machine version of itself: humanity is over; how smooth and warm shall we make our death beds?

That isn't a spoiler. This is a film of fulfilled foreshadowing and surprising plot developments but neither of those devices is delivered as a twist. Rather we witness stations of progress in characters' awareness of the situation and their varying capacity to propel beyond them. This takes some fleet footed writing which then must be borne in exacting performances. These things we get.

Irish actor Domnhall Gleason's Caleb holds a weight of intellect and melancholy but keeps these beneath a light and airy glow. He is someone who has come to know his place in life, is saddened and kept lonely by it but has developed a kind of comfortable ache to cope with it. He lights up at the challenges in Nathan's bunker, animated at the gift of purpose.

Oscar Isaac dominates without visible effort. As Llewyn Davis, he was uptight and middle American. In A Most Violent Year he was all svelte self-made elegance. Here he plays a kind of real life Zeus, pummeling a punching bag like a Neanderthal but soaring through concepts like a beam of light. My first comparison was that of many who have reviewed this film: Kurtz. But Kurtz, highly civilised European brought the darkness that old Europe never shook free upon the unspoiled primeval world he found at the end point of empire. Nathan might well feel the self-loathing that plagues Kurtz (and drinks like a fish to prove it) but the sole power left to him that does not engender this points toward a more rarefied than Kurtz would have comprehended: he is not saddened by the discovery of his own nadir but by his apex; his own personal Turing test result is his awareness that he has created his own annihilation and that, in his view, it is just.

The performance that rivets us, though, is that of Alicia Vikander as Ava. Most of her body is mesh over transparent plastic which, like all difficult thinking, shows her workings. She is left with human-like hands and a Scandinavianly perfect face. Her near-human movements (accompanied by the slightest of mechanical whirs) and gaze must keep us watching and guessing as we sit with Caleb on the other side of the glass wall that divides them and look for signs. Given the technology that we witness in the build to her first appearance we will not be satisfied with a monophonic wind up toy but will demand awe at the sight of a machine whose thoughts, like our own, have travelled beyond initial programming to pursue that all driving remnant, desire. Vikander brings a classically trained dancer's control to keep shy of full human fluidity yet stop us with the possibilities of her development. This also goes for her vocal performance. We wonder if we are in uncanny valley and about to feel alienated or viewing it from a distance, fooled by own our best wishes.

The immersion of the world of this film must be celebrated here too for it strikes me as designed rather than art directed. What I mean by that is not just the expensive noiseless hush of the beige walls and the glass surfaces that give us a constant reminder of the notion of the copy; I mean the hot and cold electronic score by Ben Salisbury and Portishead's own Geoff Barrow which pours like cream and razor blades into the soft light; I mean the opportunity to savour the technology the way we did with 2001, The Andromeda Strain, and the opening sequence of Colossus; I mean the contrasting chaos and bad temper of the expensive Jackson Pollock on the wall which creates its own expansive dialogue; I mean the silver society lady in the Klimt portrait who seems at once armless and crucified; and I mean the restless unsettling questioning set before us, our own as well as the characters' that keeps us guessing throughout the digestibly brief running time. Alex Garland who penned the screenplays of the draggy 28 Days Later and the soggy Never Let Me Go has saved up his best for his directorial debut. He gives us a test. Take it. See how you do.

Review: UNFRIENDED: Self and Selfability

The line that weighed most heavily with me from Blair Witch Project was: "I'm scared to close my eyes. I'm scared to open them." Can't look. Can't look away. Multiply that by the immersion of youth into communications technology that has happened since and you get this film.

Beautiful Blair, one of her school's alpha chicks, is languidly teasing her boyfriend Mitch through a Skype screen. He's horny and orders her to unbutton her top, flashing a knife and talking tough. She grins playfully and tells him she likes his violence. This does and doesn't sound creepy. It does because it is but it doesn't because we've already caught her looking at a teenage suicide on youtube. Mitch's Skype call interrupted her from looking at the video that led to the suicide. But, hey, she's only sixteen.

The pair are themselves interrupted by a gaggle of friends also on Skype. This is all taunts and giggles but they all notice the silent extra person in the space, the generic head and shoulders placeholder avatar who doesn't speak and can't be identified. A few group runs at shaking the anomaly off fail and they just go ahead with the ol' collective fat-chew. Then the plain-Jane avatar starts speaking in text.

By now you will recognise that this is going to be a story of revenge for the suicide and a lot of high school bitchiness will be punished. That really really really is not a spoiler. This film makes no secret of its journey any more than Halloween did back in 1978. The point is not in the plot (which I'm not going to spoil, regardless).

The entirety of the screen is occupied by the computer screen of one of the characters. We do not physically leave this rectangle. (Here's a sidepoint: in the Blair Witch era, the film's authenicity as a found footage piece was compounded in the cinema by being screened as a 4X3 near square in accordance with the original ratio of the raw footage, Unfriended is in the shape of the 16X9 screens whose shape was influenced by cinema. There ya go!)

But we don't need to leave it. The screen is turgid with diversions and utility. The Chrome browser, the side by side thumbnails of the Skypers' webcams, Facebook sessions, Messenger exchanges, Youtube videos, Spotify playlists: none of the characters appears anywhere but on a subset of this screen. The confounding of artifice with raw experience that Brian O'Blivion warned us of in Videodrome has come to us but not as he planned, at the ready will of its users rather than an anonymous corporation.

As the entity (is it ghost or revenging hacker?) insinuates itself into the friends' space and compels them to play against each other and the results are brittle and violent. For all the fuck-you worldliness anyone of this age must assume they are raw, scared and alone. Any screaming at the screen would be audible to parents in other rooms as just more of their teenager's histrionics and probably about something wincingly trivial: these young people, wired to the world as they are, are alone and more vulnerable than if they were loosening down at a party.

The coup of Unfriended, the thing that lifts it above all the teen horror remakes and retreads I saw in the trailers before it, is that it not only understands teenagers and their rough but sophisticated pecking jungle but how this has only been intensified with technology. It's not the fact of the technology but their naturalised engagement with it that is being understood on screen. And we are at once in the future-now and the tradition of horror that creates unease by the steady removal of control. The signal of the webcams through the Skype connections render these pretty faces distorted and monstrous almost constantly; sometimes they seem even to have lost their physical youth. Even before the time-limit games that the cyber-intruder compels them to they are no better able to pull the plug at the mains than a human pokies disaster is able to walk away after running out of coins.

The other strongly aspect of the online world so brilliantly understood here is that is creates its own digesis, its own world of logic, emotion and functionality. Sudden asides between two characters in Messenger are like confidential scenes. Clicks on reference videos or websites serve as thought balloons or voiceovers. The stream of consciousness in clicks is really no more alien than Joyce's was in words as it is familiar to its audiences as daily reality. When Billie infiltrates even this and it becomes momentarily difficult to tell her from the others in pranking or self-incriminating mode. For each door the online world opens a dungeon door closes somewhere else.

This film has been compared in preference to Hideo Nakata's earlier Chatroom but the comparison is as uncomprehending as it is unfair. Nakata's film presents the visualisations of a text-only world that was obsolete while his film was in production (based on a play from the early 2000s). I haven't used anything like irc for many a moon but can readily recall the constant buzz between what I imagined I was communicating with and what it might actually be. When the characters in Chatroom took to the outside world they didn't know what the antagonist looked like. In Unfriended, everyone knows what everyone looks and sounds like. They know the decor in each others' bedrooms. Even the faceless interloper takes on an identity that will forever be playing on Youtube, eternally ridiculed, eternally ridiculous, the delete button greyed out and unreachable.

I've rambled and there's probably a ton more to say but this will do for now. Oh, one thing: due to the extreme intimacy of this film's world in a screen in a screen, the hard and expert work done on the sound and editing that brings it as close as the screen you are reading this on and the natural pacing and overall acceleration (all kept within an easy 83 minutes!), demands that you see it in the front rows of a cinema. Don't wait for a more controlled loungeroom tv or (worse still, despite the apparent irony overload) a computer screen. See it where it can hit you. Now!

Films I Dislike that Could be Improved Through Further Committment

Dead Poet's Society:

From the get go this story of manipulation of a group of impressionable people by a demagogue reminded me of fascism. Robin Williams' Mr Keating doesn't lead his flock away from conformity to freedom but to just another conformtity: his. After everything that happens we're supposed to cheer the kids for making their stand rather than weep for their gullibility. Put Nicholas Winding Refn in the chair and watch as the real story of localised brainwashing cordons a group of the elite blazer-wearing privileged away from middle class mediocrity to the blazing cult of heroism. It'd make a nice obverse role for Ryan Gosling after his own fall and redemption in Half Nelson. Keep the music the same. If you don't get the irony of its cloying sentimentality as the boys give the parting leader the secret sign then you should find a way out of compulsory voting.

Eddie and the Cruisers:

Imagine Jim Morrison appearing on the scene just before the Beatles break in America but dying in an accident before his big groundbreaker of an album is released. This premise is still intriguing but this early 80s film doesn't seem to realise that sounding like Springsteen on an off night wouldn't sound like the future in 1964, it would sound like musical potato starch. So, do it for real. Have the band go from the Four Seasons to a kind of proto Doors as the central figure takes the same journey from good time music to poetic disgust. Have it sound like pop music straining out of the chrysalis like the first Doors album. Keep it from breaking through with the same kind of intra band politics that smothered Brian Wilson and you get a much more plausible reason for Eddie's death itself to be a controversy.

Compliance:

True life horror unfolds in a diner as a prankster claiming to be a cop manipulates the staff until his chief victim is traumatised for life. The big message was about how we submit to authority too easily but the tone soon became too ugly. The victims' compliance, however factually based, grew so incredible that they were soon cast as deserving of their treatment and the resulting gap was filled with the perpetrator's viewpoint. The sleaze of this is not that we identify with a sicko but we're then supposed to snap out of it and condemn him at the end so everything's ok and we were really on the side of right all along. Phew! Well, commit to it, really commit to the sleaze and sick self pleasure of it. Start, continue and finish inside the bad guy's mind. Cast Will Ferrell so you never know whether to laugh or not until it's too late and you're with him on a nightmare voyage through a dark and terrifying narcissism. Keep the footage of the victims intact. Just don't start with it. Anyone who watches that and has to be reminded at the end that it's bad should be given a list of local psychiatric facilities before something terrible happens.

Dune:

I had looked forward to this as I was already a Lynch fan after Eraserhead and Elephant Man and really wanted to see what he could make of sci fi and colour. It was just too big for him. Lynch is so much better when he's deep inside the nervous system than out on the open field and this film only proves it. Seeing the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune didn't change my mind in that direction, either. It's like a two hour long "previously on Dune" sequence that highlights all the subplots. Throw those away for starters unless they are directly relevant to Paul's progress from viceregal heir to living god. Have Paul pursue the mystery of himself as though he's on the tail of a killer and you've got something. Anyone who needs to read the book to get the rest is free to, meanwhile here's the companion film. Could be a good Cronenberger.

Animal Kingdom:
This mess was bursting with treasures but you had to  pick through a lot of used marshmallows to get to them. The single most compelling performance was Jackie Weaver's but everything that had to do with the youngest brother seemed to drive the most important scenes. Stick to that. Put mother at one end and son at the other and slowly bring them together through their own stories. Ditch all the sub plots and overlong fates of the other brothers and get rid of the dragging speech that explains the title as there is no need for it. Ben Mendelsohn can still play his super creepy murder scene and Jackie still gets her mother wolf grin at the cop that goes through everyone who sees it. Cast a more believably seventeen looking seventeen year old as Josh and you've got it, a great family crime/coming of age film without the director getting in his own way to let you know how wonderful he is.