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.

Review: POSSESSOR

Tasya comes out of her latest assignment in a state more wracked than usual. That's saying something. It's the near future or parallel now and she works as a corporate assassin guiding living people through a brain implant connection. Unusual brief, enter, kill, shoot self, pull out. Something about this one was awry. She used a blade instead of a gun and chose suicide by cop rather than self. The debriefing goes smoothly but she's haunted. Perhaps the job is getting to her and a little too deeply. She rushes into her next assignment, keeping a few quirks she's picked up to herself.

She possesses a young man whose girlfriend is the daughter of the boss of a data mining empire. It's an inheritance hit. She has to get Oliver to kill the boss and the girl so the malcontent can step in and be king. This takes prep. A lot of prep but she'll be getting shares in the company as well as a massive payday. Hiding her punchiness she gets into the puppet machine and away we go. What could go wrong?

Brandon Cronenberg's difficult second album sees him stepping only slightly from the brash debut Antiviral. While detractors will make noises demanding he show he can do a rom com with showtunes he presents himself with more confidence and concentration. While the pacing could do with a nip here and a tuck there the central motive is kept front and centre, delivering a solid stun in the closing moments. 

I, for one, enjoy how he's followed the basic push of Cronenberg senior's output. For one, I miss David C. making the kind of movies he used to. This and Antiviral are like a young David Cronenberg who has seen all of Cronenberg's movies, old and new, observed the patterns, refined the lumps and ramped up the darkness (there is some heavily wince-able violence on screen here as well as some surprising nudity and simulated sex). And then they still differ from Brandon's father's work. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch, in fact to read this entire film as a kind of examination of the influence of father over son. 

If the world held the justice it ought to Andrea Riseborough would be a name as revered as Meryl Streep and as well known as Nicole Kidman. Her tough performances allow her to take us through massive stress. Here that includes a strangely eye popping vulnerability. The other side of her play is Christopher Abbott as the possessed gives us a day-to-day stress of one living through a life that feels increasingly wrong. Oh, this is not a drill, what happens in the exploit happens for real. For my part, I'd take this over something like Inception if only for its insistence on the element of empathy, backstory information that doesn't take a seven kilometre walk to get to, and about an afternoon's less running time. Bran-don! Bran-don! Bran-don!

Review: FREAKY

Before we get to the credit sequence we get a title WEDNESDAY in white letters and THE 11th in blood red. A group of middle class American teens are playing while the parents are out. They mention the urban myth of a local killer before splitting up and meeting that very figure who dispatches the lot of them and takes the magic looking dagger in the display case. THURSDAY the 12th, young final girl Millie wakes, blows a kiss to the poster of the hunky pop star beside her bed and springs out to greet the day. Sister's a cop and mum drinks but there does seem a little warmth left from Dad's passing. Off to school where we see her swarmed by mean girls, exchange looks with her secret crush, exchange bitchiness with her teacher and take refuge in her friends, black girl, gay boy. Later, after humiliation as the football mascot of the unbelievably named Beavers football team, she farewells her friends, is pursued by the masked killer, taken to a football field which is also a Mayan pyramid where he plunges the magic dagger into her shoulder. But the moon has vanished behind a cloud and skews the lot of it. After a lightning bolt she's him and he's her. She wakes up in her room the next morning and it's Freaky Friday the 13th. Ok, the movie has already made that joke but it's still a good one.

So, he reaches a rapid understanding that his chosen profession of slasher is only helped by this switch as it grants him access that his big lunky Vince Vaughan body forbade. She wakes as him in an atrocity decorated broken down mill trapped in the kind of self disgust that her beauty might have kept at bay. You'll get the plot from here. I don't really need to spoil it but I don't spoil.

What you also get is one of Blumhouse's clever outings like Happy Death Day or The Purge. It's not Get Out but it's also not overreaching. This horror comedy which veers more toward fun than thrills does have a personal story of a girl with issues but it also keeps the pace up and the suspense mostly dialled high enough to convince. Thankfully, the script keeps the self-referential camp out of the dialogue (mostly, that is, but the line "You're black! I'm gay! We are so dead!" is funny in action as much as typed out) though I counted more than a handful of visual winks. Then again, by now after the '80s slashers, the '90s post modern parodies of them and the flat minded copies of older titles grew exhausting there's not much left in the let's have fun with callbacks barrel. This film plays like it says on the tin as a mix of body switch and slasher.

And that's where it does get strong. When "Murder Barbie" acts in reaction to the rape culture around her it's not easy to tell why s/he is doing it except that the two forces of outward appearance and understanding of how it feels merge into a more visceral revulsion of the boy's entitlement and the violence that nurtures it. As Millie inside the Blissfield Butcher she exults in her newfound physical power to the point where the cruelty it allows disgusts her. The teen movie cliche scene of the newly madeover nerd girl making the boys go pop as she walks in slomo down the school hallway is charged with psychosis rather than attitude which does lend it a pleasant edge. There's a very interesting kiss and -- 

-- and I began to understand as I enjoyed that along with so much else about this that the lessons onscreen weren't preaching to me but a demographic I hadn't been in since the first Friday the 13th left me wide eyed and shaking in the cinema seat surrounded by friends on Schoolies' Week. So, it really didn't matter if I thought the gay is ok messaging met with my approval because there was no chance that it wouldn't. I immediately began to feel old and started shrinking in my seat. Except.

Except the best part of all of this stopped anything like that because I saw this movie IN A CINEMA! After almost an entire year in various degrees of lockdown, I bought a ticket online and fronted up and checked in and took my seat in a great big movie palace in central Melbourne (and Melbourne Central, just quietly) and with a choctop and a clear attention span. Early afternoon screening so the smaller audience was already scattered behind me. I turned off my phone and sat back, enjoying every last crappy ad and trailer and as the curtains widened for the feature and the lights went down I felt the same kind of smile that forces itself on to my face the moment the airliner soars to its ceiling and I am pushed back into the seat by the sheer force. So, yeah, the darker horror elements in this movie should have been darker and the warmth could have done with more comedy but this, this was fun. Again.

COMMEMORATION

The beach was less than a block away but ten stories down. I sipped a home mixed rum and cola and felt the knots of my exams ease as I looked across to the tower across the street. Rich people went about their evenings in their own cells and from this distance looked like a wall of tiny televisions. The light outside was a thick dark violet and sinking into black. Mark, whose family owned this flat, stirred some spaghetti in a pot as the sauce simmered and plopped beside it. We'd head out after dinner and go strolling along Broadbeach along with all the other schoolies. I really hoped that Kaye and Maree and their gang had made it down but there was time enough. For the moment I sipped, smiled at the tinkle of ice cubes and let it happen.

We caught up with the others the next day when Wayne and Chris came by. We'd all skipped breakfast and lunch was on the rise so we went to the biggest beer garden I've ever been in with tap beer served in kiosks like remote signal stations. Best steak and chips I'd ever eaten and the beer was cold with a tight bitterness I never taste anymore. What was on that night? Something. It could be a smooth start at a cafe before hitting the night beach for a bonfire. It could be a grey lit den of adolescence where a heavily tripping girl saluted everyone who came in, saying "welcome" in a voice twenty years more weary that she had a right to be. It could be anything. Repeat.

There was a killer on the loose who targeted couples in remote areas. He struck in that very corner of south east Queensland but for some reason he was still a news item, a grey pencil drawing of a man in a Balaclava, cartoon eyes gooping out from the newsprint. Because this is the way these things happen he was called The Balaclava Killer.

Mortality is  not on the menu when you're seventeen. You break and self repair. If you swim with Mako sharks you knew what you were getting into. And we were almost never not in a pack. And it was as a pack that we piled into the Norton Twin Cinemas (I'm making up that name as I only went there once and a long time ago) so see the new horror movie that you had to see. It sounded like Halloween but in the country but that sounded good. Tickets, choctops, a selection of informative shorts and then everything went black and it started. A title card came up with a date, my birthday, as it happens.

You know the deal kids, lust blades and terror. A slasher on the loose. The old timer who seems to have materialised from the walls howls about doom. Someone kills a snake (and it looks real). And the killin' a-starts big. From that point it's blood and screams. I can't remember whose hand it was gripped my wrist in the worst bits but I'm sure it wasn't Kaye or Bernadette. But no time to dream. The final girl, as she would come to be known in slasher knockoffs for the next twenty years, screamed and fled and at last turned, stood and fought. And then there's that ending. It was the most gore I'd ever seen in a movie (Halloween has almost none) and the big finish punched such a gasping thrill out of me I was hooked on the experience. Halloween had been at the drive in but it was nothing like being in this electrified well of survival. 

Nothing was open on the way back to the girls' unit on Mermaid Beach but there was plenty of flowing garbage in casks in the fridge. For the first time that week we thought of the Balaclava Killer. It was as though we had sunk into the first shimmering moments of a nightmare, the same nightmare, shared and pressing. We checked corners that we'd have to turn. Every footfall not our own was his. We were almost silent. Back at the unit we unwound with wine that only had to work. It did. Youhave never been that drunk.

Tomorrow, as I type this, it will be Friday the 13th. That's what I will be watching on its 40th anniversary.