MIFF Session 11: THE LODGE

  Richard is divorcing Laura who is still in such denial about it that when he insists they move forward with it kills herself. At an unspecified time later, Richard takes his two kids and stepmother to be, Grace, out to the winter wonderland of the family lodge. The kids Google the usurping Grace and find that she was the only survivor of a suicide cult. Grace seems ok now and pops masses of pills to keep herself in okville. So the happy new family settles in for homely white Christmas. But wait, Richard is such a high flyer that he has to go back to the city for a couple of days while his edgy bride to be gets cosy with the two kids who feel a righteous vengeance a-brewin' in a house that is going to be completely snowed in. You have a gun.

This tale of horror by manipulation progresses from its creative team of Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz who brought us the finely crafted and powerful Ich Sehe Ich Sehe (Goodnight Mommie). Now they've gone America and the dialogue is in English. And they have a good idea: what can be done with co-dependent credulity that is usually given the label of virtue (religion, in this case)? The answer is plenty and the answer is obvious so there must be something else to justify this story being told at all, mustn't there? I mean, most horror is a means to smuggle depth of thinking into a universal dread. So why does that not work here when the earlier outing worked a treat? It can't just be the language change.

It isn't. What has happened along the way between a good premise for a horror tale and what appears on the screen is that empathy loses. In Ich Sehe we were easily drawn into the opposing viewpoints of the boys and their mother as the stakes rose ever higher and the dread swelled up and got to a heart-sinking conclusion. The Lodge, despite an evocative setting and decent performances keeps its cards so tightly to its chest that all we see is the ploy at work, rolling on without jeopardy until it ends. If you've felt for any character you see on screen I'd love to sit down and talk over a coffee or a cognac as to what I was missing.

The screening began with the customary dimming of the lights and the MIFF logo slide appearing on the screen as the hubbub lowered to silence. Then the stage lights went up and someone announced that there would be security staff with nightvision goggles would be roaming the auditorium ready to sever the hands of anyone pirating the movie with a mobile phone (ok, the bit about the severing of hands is my contribution). I have never witnessed such bullshit at a MIFF screening. Two things about that: it made the entire audience restless enough that they had to settle down all over again which cut into the screening time and everyone babbled about it and anyone who wanted a crappy phone copy of a piece of cinematic rubbish like this should be welcome to it or at least explain why by way of payment.

At one point the stepmother and the kids watch John Carpenter's The Thing because, you know, it's just as icy and tight with suspicion and othering in a familiar setting. If only. The iciness of the approach cost this film its raison d'etre. Same thing when the contemporary Japanese master Kyoshi Kurosawa made a self-avowed non-scary ghost story in Retribution (of course it was scary, he was just saying that). This film comes to us with the label of the great Hammer studio name. But as low on scares as the classic Hammer horrors were they never neglected empathy. This is just mishandled and it worries me as to why as it seems so deliberate. Here we have a situation where a few moments of severe violence (and the pitifully telescoped fate of a cute animal) fail to brace us for suspense to come. We see the final scene which is more of the same of what we've already witnessed, the credits roll and we shrug. Right, now we can go. It worries me because this is what it looks like when filmmakers who disdain horror make horror movies; they want to rise above the genre vulgarity and show how clever they are. Well, they've already made a clever horror movie. Was it just time to do a stupid one?

Oh, there are no real spoilers in the above. Most of those plot points are made in the first fifteen minutes of the film and you'll get the point about the animal as soon as you see it.

MIFF Session 10: SOMETHING ELSE

Hank and Abby are a great couple. He has a goofy manliness and she seems to be made out of sunlight. Both are clearly intelligent which might be the problem as, when she leaves a note on the fridge and disappears he collapses into the slough of despond that a sudden drop in information leads to. He leaves her too many voicemails as though he's throwing bottle messages into the dark. 

And there's something else. Something is attacking the house. In fact, every time he looks through his camera or just daydreams of her the sharp clawed thing attacks the front door. He's in a small southern U.S. town and his friend, the sheriff assures him it's just a bear, another friend suggests it's a wildcat. Even though he has only heard it and seen nothing more than the claw marks on his front door he is convinced it's out there, however much he sees the sense of his friends' caution. He's in an emotional abyss where the slightest things can look like hell. So, has he created his own monster? Will the love of his life come back and, even if she does, will things ever be the same? Only the last part seems impossible.

Co-lead, writer and co-director Jeremy Gardner has already delighted the adventurous movie hunter with his no-budget wonder The Battery which did the near impossible by refreshing the zombie movie, here he is looking at the monster in the dark and, once again, his audience is the winner. As a nearly meta touch this film is adjacent to the universe that indy champions Benson and Moorhead (Spring, The Endless) and involves them as producers and even put Benson in a main role as Shane the Sheriff. This strain of sci-horror that has been developing in shadows of the already shadowy A24 label of "elevated horror" (I hate that term but it's useful here). This one allows for deep character development, gathering the indy feel from Hal Hartley in the '90s all the way up to contemporary mumblecore, but delivering on the crises and the scares. The humour and the scares come from well wrought stories and easy self-parody does not make it to the screen.

That means you need good dialogue and casting to match and, in this case, strong ensemble direction. The gang's all here. There are a few monologues as characters talk to each other candidly and they feel natural. The show don't tell envelope does get pushed but its set in such poignant dialogue that it manages to feel natural. We've come a long way in the twenty years since the Blair Witch Project which was shot and improvised by its actors under remote direction and the big bad was a constant unseen threat. Now anyone with a shop-bought computer can make a monster worth the name but it still takes cinematic skill to stop an audience from laughing in derision. The laughs I heard at striking points in this film were not derisive, they were shock. The shocks are thrills and the thrills give this life. 

MIFF Session 9: HAPPY NEW YEAR, COLIN BURSTEAD

Colin, his wife and daughter are getting ready for a family event, a New Years Eve party at a country manor. He's on the phone to his sister who's invited the family ne'erdowell David and is already regretting the upset this will cause, particularly with their mum whose worried about her husband's financial chaos ... And on. Everyone gets to the venue and the chemistry experiment gets fizzy, explosive and chaotic as elements do battle. You've seen this before. Of course you have and writer/director Ben Wheatley depends on it. Ah, the strange vision behind films as diverse as Sightseers, Kill List, A Field in England and High Rise is having a crack at a Mike Leigh ensemble piece. What could go wrong?

Well, plenty and all of it is good. Do we really need another Abigail's Party? Maybe not but if Wheatley is trying it on it's like Led Zeppelin trying Reggae on Houses of the Holy: everyone's having a go at that but why are THEY doing it? Well, while this piece with its self-avowed cast improvisations might seem like an exercise in coasting I think we're looking at a very assured filmmaker edging towards something that is both homage to signature British filmmaking and the kind of radical move T.S. Eliot wrote of when he suggested that revolutions in poetry should start with a return to the banal. On a limb, I'm going to compare this not just with Bleak Moments or High Hopes but with The Blair Witch Project. That guerilla style movie (twenty years old this year) drilled back to the origins of horror and forged a new campfire tale. Colin Burstead is a kind of base touch; not so much proof that he can do it but that it needs doing.

With a cast that boasts the heights of Charles Dance and Bill Paterson along with faces you will know from The Office and a score of other U.K. tv (including the wonderful Haley Squires, also in In Fabric at this year's fest but broke through in Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake), you know you are in for a mass of naturalistic comedy and tight emotional venting. All of that is here. Also, a film that suggests intra-familial cataclysm takes delicate care to deliver a climax that involves the delivery of documents and you understand that this cold and often severe moviemaker wants you to also feel the warmth. By the time we got to Auld Lang Syne I felt like clapping.

MIFF Session 8: FRIEDKIN UNCUT

Interview movies with film directors typically struggle to rise above the level of dvd extras. What you need is a raconteur but one whose filmography also compels. I can listen to John Landis talk about anything but don't care that much about any movie he's made. The best film about David Lynch wasn't about his film career but his life as a young artist and so avoided the self-caricature everything else made about him suffers from. But if it's William Friedkin who not only helped make Hollywood's 1970s centrally important in history but can talk about it with great style the documentarian's job is really that of not stuffing up.

In loosely thematic passages about particular films, working with writers and actors, and general thoughts on filmmaking, Friedkin takes us through a career of eye popping cinema with the ease of that rare party guest who has a lot of good stories that don't sound like lies. He's strangely modest the closer the talk gets to his own vision for particular projects, retreating more into the comfort of production stories, appreciation of other directors and actors. This is not exhaustive and the most hagiographic this film gets is the avoidance of things like the Sonny and Cher movie, The Guardian  or Jade. However, we're here for The Exorcist, French Connection and the repatriated Sorcerer and Cruising which get delivered to our door.

Supplementing Friedkin's own accounts are a host of peers from the ubiquitous Quentin Tarantino (always worth listening to), cast members of Friedkin's films (Willem Dafoe and Matthew McConaughey have some fine moments) to the surprisingly interesting Wes Anderson. This allows a break from the artist as character and clip heavy threads but dos also add momentum in the timeline.

Cineastes who were in their teens in the '90s will recall how exciting they found Tarantino's films. With good reason. QT stuffed his pieces with astutely chosen retro and cool in for a generation obsessed with both. It meant that a mass of Tarantino clones emerged in the following decade. Friedkin didn't have that kind of influence. He describes seeing the likes of Citizen Kane and being inspired by the notion that film could do such a thing and, rather than make Wellesian epics of his own, plunged into an on-the-job trained career exploring what he could make of the elements. This is why the French Connection and The Exorcist didn't resemble any film that had preceded them. If anything the crime movie and horror film both looked like the supercharged documentaries that might well have come from the documentarian that Friedkin started out being. This exhilarating portrait of a great filmmaker didn't make me want to go and remake the Exorcist, it made me want to watch every film I'd ever seen all at once.

MIFF Session 7: MONOS

A group of teenage guerrillas are put in charge of an American hostage in the mountains of an unnamed South American country. When their trainer leaves them to it their paramilitary prep gets scrapped and they turn back into teenagers, firing off rounds for the fun of it, fighting with each other. Their hostage, named Doctora, must navigate a narrow and rocky channel.

This film is less a narrative than the development of a situation. There are moments that read like a political thriller but the overall purpose is closer to the story the writer/director openly attributed: Lord of the Flies (there's even a shot of a fly riddled pig's head on a stake at one point). While we are given little plot there is much to follow as internal tensions or crises arise. Rather than acts we are presented with passages that better resemble musical movements that begin with the atonality of the initial chaos and gradually form into a more terrifying discipline.

This often severe scenario is set in breathtaking natural splendour, providing a constant juxtaposition of what nature we are witnessing. As the human side of that falls into cruelty or violence its creative side also blooms and the cast of local stars and unknowns create a disturbing tension that frequently breaks into sudden explosive action. Around it, greater nature, that of the endless jungle and the power of the river, dispassionately metes its various hazards and bounty as a human leader might punish or reward.

More than one voice has made a comparison to Apocalypse Now and what I'm about to write might sound strange: I felt more than once a kind of homesickness for that film, as though it was a place I'd lived. In a stretched sense I did as I wrote reams on it as an undergraduate and saw it at the cinema more times than I'm comfortable admitting. But my point is that Monos both made me long for Coppola's great epic and the weight of its grim story to guide us through its eye popping setpieces and wonder that it didn't do something more like this recent film and just present the setpieces like a massive living tableaux.

Here, I'll put a word in for the increasingly powerful music of Mica Levi whose groaning scores for Under the Skin and Jackie have been searing highlights of recent mainstream cinema. There is a little strings glissando at times which feels a little too signature but mostly we are given flutes and drums which often blur between film music and the sounds the monos themselves cultivate.

Perhaps the best way to zip this up is to share what I learned about the title. Mono in Spanish can mean child or monkey with a sense of cuteness. It's a term the kids use for themselves without further elucidation. They have nicknames from popular culture like Smurf, Rambo and Bigfoot but whether they style themselves after the tricksters of the jungle or boast that their youth has allowed them warrior status is kept ambiguous as though examining it by the coloured light of the forest might reveal far too much.

MIFF Session 6: THE SWALLOWS OF KABUL

Atiq is a guard at a prison for condemned women. At home his wife is wasting from cancer. Elsewhere in the same neighbourhood of Kabul the beautiful young Zunaria is drawing on the wall listening to hiphop. Her husband Mosheen wanders the streets and comes across a stoning of one of Atiq's prisoners in a market. In a moment of confusion he enters the crowd, picks up a rock and throws it at the woman who collapses, pools of blood forming around her burka. Coming out of his mental haze he is overcome by guilt. When he returns home to the joyous Zunaria he cannot bring himself to tell her what he has done.

This animation from a novel by Yasmina Khadra is heavy on the smothering stasis of life in Kabul under the Taliban. Armed thugs patrol the streets watchful for what seem inconsequential acts which engender explosive violence. Personal freedom is a thing for the veiled fragility indoors but even there anyone might be listening.

This film is animated with what looks like a moving watercolour. Stunning use of chiaroscuro, the muted pallet of the location and an elegant evocation of character. Do you ever remember a film in another language as though it had been in English. I'm almost recalling scenes of this as live action. That's important as the single strongest impression I have of the emotional movement of this extraordinary film as well as its aesthetic is that of Italian neorealism. The search for and discovery of those moments of uplifting humanity in those bare but complex films of Rosselini and DeSica are in the blood here. The horrifying climax of the story held the entire auditorium of The Forum in a thick silence before a quiet almost unified release of breath. I was in tears.

This screened with the short Son of the Sea, a beautiful blend of animation and live action about a couple coping with their grief. Good to see shorts now and then. I feared they'd been policy-ed away. Then again, the feature was only 80 minutes.

This was an exchange for me as I had again to avoid a standby session and pick two others. This was a whimsical choice but I'm glad I made it.

MIFF Session 5: SHARE

Sixteen year old Mandy wakes up the worse for wear on her front lawn. Someone shares a video with her from the previous night. It looks like the beginning of a sexual assault. She has no recollection. While she tries to keep control of the process and make her own enquiries the video is discovered by her parents and it becomes a police matter and then a legal case. Meanwhile, she is dismissed from her basketball team and suspended from school. She has entered the aftermath of a rape survivor. She can't face her friends but can't live without them. The law hangs overhead but seems to grind to a halt.

Because of the explosive nature of the subject the treatment by writer/director Pippa Bianco is kept sober and observational. While there are significant revelations that appear throughout they are met with the stunned acknowledgement of Many and a family that is immediately supportive but increasingly powerless to move the forces she needs. Meanwhile, she goes through her days, trying to make sense of what happened and how it is affecting her life so profoundly and there is a crushing sense that the law is drifting from her as effortlessly as it does in a Kafka story, far beyond her control.

Bianco's suburban normal is concrete in contrast to the thick ethereal cloud of the law and at its centre young Rhianne Baretto as Mandy cuts holes into the light with her wonder and anger, constrained to continue living the same way despite everything changing. Early scenes with her friends and teammates feel natural, both joyous and contemplative. Encounters with them after the case has begun (including the accused) have an unnerving truth to them as they can swing from shunning and meaningless pranks to flashes of genuine affection. Everyone's living in the same place and getting their cherry slushies from the same 711 and the way those pockets of memory can open with riches or stay zipped up on a caprice gives an uneasy memory. And then there is the near constant pealing pings of the phone messages that might be salvation or just more uploadable, sharable violence.

There is a hint of Bresson's Mouchette in the deceptive plainness on show here which leads up to Mandy's final action which involves a potent choice. We see her make it but still feel strange. That's it, the best a narrative like this can do when it insists against mainstream histrionics, is to plant a question in us which must linger.