Review: SHOOK

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

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

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

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

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

Seen on Shudder.

Review: THE DRY

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

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

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

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

Review: THE NEST

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

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

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

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

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

Ju-On Origins: J-horror Reclaimed

I traditionally kept television out of this blogs but 2020. In any case this one posed a problem for me which could only be resolved by finishing the series and letting it haunt me. This is an intense horror experience and not for the casual viewer. But it intrigued me that a short origins event was made for this franchise which expanded far more than the Ringu-verse but well under the radar by comparison. 

Ju-On (aka The Grudge) began as a fairly standard J-horror with an iconic ghost and a series of short scenarios over different time periods in the same house with the concept that an atrocity cursed the space of the home and affected its tenants thereafter. I casually used to put this film at the end of J-horror's brief but powerful run of half a decade, beginning with Ringu in 1997. The apple hadn't fallen far from the tree by the end but its flavour was bred for intensity. Where Ringu is refined and underscoring Ju-On was blatant and often nasty rather than eerie.

The influence extended to all Asian industries, notably Korea and Hong Kong but further than these, and I would grab as many as I could find, unreviewed and sight unseen, from an online shop in HK which had a massive range, cheap prices and lightning fast shipping. Once I'd filtered the J-horror influence the expected few gems with more of their own character appeared and I treasure those to this day (e.g. A Tale of Two Sisters or The Eye) but with the filter intact it was pretty easy to discern what was and wasn't J-horror and diaspora, some of which took Ju-On's more violent and sordid approach than Nakata's subtle tack (further refined in my favourite cinematic ghost story Dark Water).

So, when Ju-On: Origins appeared as a Netflix original last year I wondered if I'd bother or get beyond the first episode. Then again, reliable reports were recommending it hotly and at six half hour episodes in entirety it didn't seem like a big ask. So, finally, I put myself in front of it. It's still bouncing around in there and probably will continue so I decided that rather than review it like a film I'd just give a few impressions and make a qualified recommendation for the curious.

The first thing to be aware of is that the cursed house - the kind of suburban Tokyo place under constant cloud cover that everyone who's seen J-horror will know well - is the centre of the curse and can extend its influence via the afflicted going out into the world. The second might sound like a spoiler but is revealed early and sets the machinery for everything to follow: the house exists outside of time, once you are in there you might see yourself in the future or the past and sometimes that other might see you. The third thing is that you need to keep on the ball to be aware of when and where you are and who this or that character is because you won't be getting a lot of help. The original film had a time shift element to it in the story of the detective and his daughter which constituted a genuinely moving moment. That continues like all the other elements from the original into this telling and that includes the nastiness and violence. This last gets extreme.

So it's intense, confusing and might be unwatchably violent, why should you waste your time? Maybe you shouldn't. If, however, you are interested in a distillation of a popular and much diluted horror franchise so that it presents a kind of primer for the whole thing but in such a way as to demand you watch closely, you should. If you got too irritated by Twin Peaks: The Return to go beyond the first two episodes you won't get through this (and it's one sixth of the running time). While I can promise that you'll pick up a good amount of the different threads on show with the particular characters I can't guarantee that some of the tying of those threads will always make sense. And, in case you wanted to sit back and enjoy a show of abstracted J-horror goodness you are going to get infuriated at the many slow passages necessary for catch-ups and development.

I said before that this would be a qualified recommendation and what I meant was that it has to include a warning about the violence. Some is surprising and brutal but suggested rather than shown but there is a lot of bloodletting and some seriously difficult viewing. If you've seen the French film Inside you'll have an idea but it goes beyond that. There are many moments in this short series where what is grossly unpleasant and what is deeply unsettling in concept are blended.

But, on the other hand, if you were enchanted by the invention and artistry of J-horror and miss it you will do well to dive in here. A constantly involving arc attacked by an expertly handled elastic timeline and still shorter than most Christopher Nolan movies (that do far less) is what's on offer here. You are allowed to cheat (wikipedia and Youtube will help you here) but my overall advice is to see them as close together as you can, perhaps one per day. That said, I'd advise against bingeing as the time-mixing can get pretty intense and you might need a breather between episodes to place yourself.

I can recall my disappointment at seeing Hideo Nakata's mooted return to J-horror in the 2013 The Complex. It was like a cover version of any of the knock offs that Ringu engendered. Not this.

Currently on Australian Netflix.

Review: PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN

Three white collar guys chew the fat at a bar and notice that a hot girl is almost passing out on the seats across the room. One of them plays designated nice guy and approaches her to see if she needs help. In the rideshare he guides them to his place, his gentlemanly motives (assuming they were ever there) draining from his face. It gets to a certain point before she asks him point blank what he thinks he's doing, suddenly sober as a judge. That's all in the trailer so don't cry spoiler. But this is a spoiler-prone movie so there won't be much more plot detail from me.

And the thing to do with this elegantly structured urban fable is to sit back and let it in. A screenplay that runs on a need-to-know and keeps to it, peppered with a realistically uneven show of character wit and a long game that you know might not pay off the way you want is here to serve you. And serving it up is writer/director Emerald Fennell, displaying all the skill of but none of the constraints of her TV CV (The Crown and Killing Eve, to name two). I mentioned the trailer just before and am pleased to report that this piece provides much more than its commercial reveals (usually too much)

Cassandra is driven. Carrie Mulligan shows us someone who has thought so long and hard about something that it has made revenge her life's work. But this is not a Sergio Leone vengeance, it's one that contains stings for its own bearer. Mulligan who physicality can make her seem anything from forty to five years old let's us know this without it breaking to other characters. Of note her vocal performance, with a voice as worn-in as an old theatre, consolidates this as it can ward off evil as well as invite. Remember Cassandra could tell the future accurately but no one would believe her. This time she's seeking at least to confront with truth if not persuade by it. Some of her schemes border on Elizabethan levels of horror in their invention and can render her coolly frightening. So how does that gel with the rom com woven into the fabric here? See it and discover.

Something that might strike you in the pre-credit sequence is the use of cover versions. From a dub step Raining Men to what sounds like the Chronos Quartet's take on Toxic we're treated to a jukebox of interpretations. The one original happens ... well, see it and you'll know it. Until then we also see Cassandra as a male's cover version of what an available woman is by action and looks. Cover versions of guilt and remorse also line up and even Cassie herself in her parents' pastel musk stick decorated home looks like an ornament. We soon understand that this is how she is compelled to see the world, a thorny jungle of advantage in which the sweetest smelling fruit might well be fatal to the taste. Her ploys in bars and the numbered acts of her longer game show her as a master, well beyond the bawling efforts of karaoke try-hards, an artist who makes even the oldest chestnuts seem fresh and original.

I had to see this movie in a cinema. It looked good way back in February when I saw the trailer for it as I watched my last movie in a cinema for months upon months. I expected to see it surface on one of the streamers but no. Its release was teased a little recently with a peppering of screenings here and there but now it's out properly. This timing might well put it out of reach of the Academy which is a shame (for Mulligan's performance alone) as its smart approach to "me too" as well as the increasingly feeble "not all men" rejoinder remain timely. This is a tough idea in an accessible package, a glob of fibre smuggled into a sweet. Take a bite, take the whole thing. Now.

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.