FRIGHT NIGHT @ 40

Charley is still in his teens but he's already a wreck. Amy is ready to take things to the next level which should be electrifying his teenage raison d'etre but there's a vampire moving in next door. Amy leaves, the school horror nerd Evil Ed takes his money for some pat advice and the host of the late night horror show Peter Vincent brushes him off as a crazy fan. Well, who would believe him?

Tom Holland's mid-'80s horror-teen-comedy doesn't have the future-star appeal of the Lost Boys or the genre-expansion of Near Dark from later in the decade but what it does have is an early take on self-reflexivity in genre. This is generally supposed to bloom in the next decade with Scream but Charley's knowledge that both holds him back from action and pushes the plot further places him firmly on the timeline of characters who know the rules of the movies they're in. But then, instead of making this the pivot of the plot Holland throws in the realism of the barriers. Charley knows what is happening but everyone else he knows is just in the normal world. Cackling Evil Ed, the long suffering Amy, his tv idol and his latchkey mum, think he's nuts.

While the struggle to gain credibility is a plot driver in any supernatural movie, this one wears its era on its sleeve. The teens aren't just incredulous, they're cynical. Peter Vincent bemoans the plummeting popularity of supernatural horror in favour of the current oafish teen slashers. Amy's offer toward the sexual development of her and Charley's partnership is matter of fact, not the thing of giggling or smirking, it's something more John Hughes. Vampire Jerry also knows his movies and after kissing the hand of Amy and saying, "Charmed" he asks, "isn't that what I'm meant to say?" and it plays as a joke among the characters.

But then, when it gets down to the horror threads of the weave, Fright Night plays fair. Amy is revealed to be identical to Jerry's long lost love and he pursues her. Their serpentine dance in the nightclub is genuinely sensual, playing the creepiness of the mature Jerry against Amy's youth. (This is also the moment of the film's best mirror trick.) Her erotic fealty to the vampire is rendered even more worrisome by her acquiescence. When her physical form begins distorting, there is a sadness to the horror as we see the effects of her addiction to the maleficence. This also goes for Evil Ed and his own trajectory is a tragic one.

As for Charley, himself, his task is to grow up and take a real stand. This is done through bringing his team together and doing the hard work to convince them to join him in what will be a hard fight. To do this, he has to martial Peter's vanity after his urge to quit town has taken over. Charley's values now centre on the unity of opposites, centred in Amy who is transforming into a vampire but who is still saveable if Jerry can be vanquished. He has to shed his suburban teen skin with all its dependency, take up arms, such as they are, and do battle.

The cast works well with this. William Ragsdale does look about ten years older than he should but he makes up for it with the confusion of the younger character and his distracted nature. His change has to convince if the movie is to work. The dependably dark and unctuous Chris Sarandon revisits his ghastly role in Lipstick, but adds a skin of urbanity, emanating an intimidating confidence. He is a scarier vampire than Robert Eggers' recent Nosferatu, a successful seducer of the young. Amber Bearse might seem to have little to do but look middle  '80s pop star androgenous (kind of) until she is clad in prosthetics but her Amy does feel real and unaffected in contrast to the overwrought young women of the screen at the time. Stephen Geoffreys' Evil Ed is hard to take but has to be, a kind of teenage id-engine that works its one note into the centre of the Earth. Floating above it all, of course, is Roddy McDowall, whose decades-long career by then brought him well into the core of horror cinema. He plays camp at first but through a prolonged and credible vulnerability, finds his character's essence and strength. As goofy as it can get, this is one of Roddy's best turns.

While Fright Night's reputation leaves it on a lower rung than the hits of the later '80s, it remains one of the most engaging evocations of suburban gothic available. As a comedy it goes for amiability rather than belly laughs. As a horror it is more successful, building a dread between Jerry's palpable malevolance and Charley's isolation. That Jerry can pick him off, even in the sanctuary of his own home, works solidly. As a fable of accepting the things of adulthood I think it does better than the big John Hughes teen epics by keeping the themes streamlined into allegory instead of spraypainting them all over the dialogue in dated hues. It feels like it has less to prove while offering more. That's why I can keep returning to its warm dangers. 

Viewing notes: I watched my squeaky clean and beautiful sounding 4K steelbook edition which I can only recommend. However, Fright Night is rentable through most of the usual outlets like Prime or Apple, for a small fee. Beware of the remake. If it has Colin Farrell in it, it's the wrong one. 

DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN @ 40 (spoilers on the milder side)

Bored yuppie Roberta follows the ongoing communication between two lovers through newspaper ads. When the pair set up a meeting there in New York, she has to go and see it happen. But Susan pinches a pair of priceless earrings and Jim has to go on tour and gets a friend to meet Susan who gets carted off before he, Dez, mistakes Roberta for Susan who has been knocked over and has lost her memory and -- There is so much that I have to leave out just to say this much. For the plot, you're best getting in front of it, yourself.

Desperately Seeking Susan was an instant hit. It had the quirkiness of the comedies of the '80s, a magnetic lead player in the young Rosanna Arquette and the who-cares-if-she-can-act-or-not star power of Madonna, riding the first wave of her superstardom. It won its opening weekend and went on to a very healthy first run cinema life. And if you see it, you will not wonder why.

The assumption in the leadup was that it was a star vehicle for Madonna who would be in the lead role. That might have promised great box office but didn't bode well for the film itself which at first sounded like a vanity project. It might have been the star power that gave it that initial rush but it was the movie itself that kept it going.

First, it's not Madonna/Susan in the lead but Arquette whose Roberta whose marriage to the dully narcissistic hot tub king Gary seems doomed to evaporation and for whom the intrigue of Susan and Jim seems more like life. While Gary interrupts his own cocktail parties for all his guests to see his home made ads on late night TV, Roberta cannot keep fading into the decor. This is another entry into the Yuppie Nightmare Cycle, also inhabited by Arquette in the recently reviewed After Hours. Susan is by far the better film.

Why? Susan Seidelman. The young director had already impressed with her Smithereens which got her into  competition for the Palme D'Or at Cannes for its handling of a central character that only a mother could love such that audiences were rivetted rather than revolted. Here, she tones down the whackiness in fashion at the time for comedies and pushes forward Roberta's plight. For all the frenetic zaniness of Susan and Jim's chaos we see a steadily developing character, one who witnesses her own development as her recollection returns. She places herself in the kind of life that she probably wanted before she signed on to yuppiedom.

Arquette's career trajectory has kept her in work before and since Desperately Seeking Susan but this is her sole lead. That's a shame as the strength of her turn here carries the film. At a time when Reaganomics was creating tribes of self-entitled greed monsters, Arquette's farewell to the insubstantial Gary is quiet and poignant. And in scenes where the screwball comedy is given pause, she gives us strength.

Madonna, for her part, does not disgrace herself in the title role and emerges as perfectly engaging, possibly glad that the film was not an extension of her MTV career. Along with Richard Hell (also in Smithereens) she hits her marks and says her lines, conveying real personality. Aidan Quinn as Dez comes through as someone you'd want to know. There is moment early on when he notes that someone is carrying speakers down the stairs that look familiar and, getting to the next landing, shoots a rapid glance of concern which tells us everything about the scene to come. It's a small but naturalistic joke. 

Mark Blum has the most thankless task in the role of the icky Gary, the husband who seems to think he has bought his way into a magazine lifestyle including his wife, he's all smiles and slime, saved by his unawareness of that from self destruction. Oh, something that doesn't carry well through time is the club scene where he is weirded out by the kerayzee dancers. Sorry folks, I know it's a tie in with Madonna 'n' all, but no club in 1985 that played Into the Groove would be anything but mainstream. Maybe it's a comment on how bubble-bound Gary is, but nah. It suffers from the same try hard flopping as the similar one in After Hours. 

Desperately Seeking Susan deserves its place among the highpoints of '80s mainstream cinema. Seidelman's wise choice of avoiding the pitfalls of fashion allow it endurance as the story of a search by Roberta for herself. The comedy also undermines the solemnisation of this so that the point of Roberta's scission can have its moment strongly. Thus, in the best way, this is a great '80s movie because it does and doesn't give in.

Review: THE LAST SHOWGIRL

Shelly is in the blue glare of a spotlight. A punishing close up. She nervously answers questions and under declares her age twice. This is not going to go anywhere but she persists with a smile growing increasingly tighter. How did she get here?

Back at work, she and the dancers flurry to get ready for their cue in a long running show off the Vegas A-strip. Everyone, young to Jessie's vintage, is clearly part of a warmly functioning team. That night they are told, at an informal dinner, that the show will close in a few weeks. The younger ones at least have their youth to move on. Shelly doesn't even have a pension plan.

This is a tale of that pause, the barely creditable stretch between comfort and the gutter. Friend Annette, a little older, found a way, waiting cocktails at a casino and playing the tables. Shelly has danced for a living for decades. What's she meant to do, competitive shed building? 

This is a character study, shot cinema verite style and was not written for plot but for the examination of a person under pressure. It's not the pressure of Wall St high flyers but it does concern the effective denial of a woman's life and career after decades of reasonable success. The audition we see at the start just looks like more of the same. Shelly understands this and knows that a bigger decision is on the way but what she cannot do at any cost is allow the fear or the despair to show through.

Jamie Leigh Curtis (very strong as friend Annette) signed on to this film when she learned that Pamela Anderson was to play Shelly. To Leigh Curtis, it was a vindication of Anderson's own career and Anderson's boldness in stepping up was impressive. The casting is inspired. Anderson plays a woman under constant attack, whether the snidery of her fellow dancers, the ugly home truths of the casting director at the audition, her daughter's rejection and distancing, and more, and with a clear understanding of this she has Shelly keep the flag flying, offering insights and platitudes alike in her Monroe purring voice that sounds like musk Lifesavers. If you're not watching closely, you might dismiss this as ditziness but that voice and living doll demeanour have kept her going through decades of abuse and judgement, a battering marriage and this latest turn of the screw. Being the sexy voiced Vegas dancer with the Pollyanna take on everything keeps the claws of the universe at bay and her life has been spent mastering it.

Also in the cast are the aforementioned Jamie Leigh Curtis whose Vegas tan and white lipstick and constant margaritas are heralded by a voice like Autumn leaves and a bitterness that keep her armed. It's miles away from not just Laurie Strode in Halloween but the severe Deirdre in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Her dance towards the end, done in spite of the jaded ignorance of the passers by, is breathtaking. Kiernan Shipka, whom I first noted in Mad Men as the Draper daughter, has been quietly rising through the indy ranks and forging a dependability. Her response to the reception she gets when she turns to Shelly for help is a stark pointer to the kind of toughness she will need on this career path. Wrestling star turned actor Dave Bautista continues to demonstrate that he is more impressive when playing the scenes with worldly tenderness than with power.

And then there is Gia Coppola. Last year, Coralie Fargeat headbutted us for over two hours with The Substance until we understood that it was the film of the year. The new Coppola on the block chooses something more like John Cassavettes, shooting on gritty, blown up 16mm and keeping the lighting thick and grimy for the interiors and only slightly fresher for the outside. Her take on the expected deterioration of these women asks us to follow and observe the beginning and the end of this process. There is a moment during one of Shelly's dances where she uses one hand wrapped around her back to grasp her waist. In the light of the stage it looks malevolent, like the claw of a roulette table monster making free with the staff. The best scenes in Paolo Alto were not flukes. This new one works, quietly, but it works.

THE CHANGELING @ 45

After losing his wife and daughter in a horror crash, composer John Russell must find his way to living through massive grief. He emerges from mourning, moving to a new city and job teaching composition at the local Conservatory. He lands well, finding an isolated mansion to move into for the kind of quiet that allows concentration. But that's not how these stories play out. Things move by themselves. Sounds occur when and where they shouldn't. Curious, and almost glad of the distraction, John goes exploring and finds a walled up room with a lot of dust and webs and a child's wheelchair. There's work to be done.

This was an original screenplay, based on a claimed genuine haunting. Off centre U.K. directors Tony Richardson and Donald Cammell were early choices but both bailed for creative differences. By the time Peter Medak got the megaphone, the script had been through rewrites and he added some of his own. In a very real sense, this tale of failed adoptions might have to do with the film being counterproductively uneven. While it's a favourite to put on on a rainy afternoon for its engaging eeriness, it always gets to a point where I feel like getting up for a break.

That's not to say it ever really drags. The Changeling feels draggy over the course of its reasonable hundred minutes because, as good as he is to watch, George C. Scott's John Russell is so blustery and pragmatic that he never seems to be under threat. Add a plot convolution that plods when it should accelerate and you have something that does actually feel like a story fixed with patches rather than drafted anew as a fluent single treatment.

Medak is no slouch when it comes to effective film making, the chills here as good as you'll find in anything of its era, but he can appear to lose sight of the aerial view of his projects. If you read up on The Ruling Class and that is stars a young and feisty Peter O'Toole you might hurry to it but by the second of its two and half hours you might start cherry picking the good bits of what should have been a  ninety minute satire at the most. Similarly frustrating is the '90s entry Romeo is Bleeding which should have been a sure fire bad cop story in the era of Pulp Fiction and Bad Lieutenant but ends up as cinematic porridge. The Changeling is not as bungled as either of those as it does deliver on its promises as a complicated ghost story, it's just that we could lose about fifteen minutes of transitional or lifestyle scenes (they date it stylistically, anyway, and give it the feel of being a filmed Playboy ad for pipe tobacco). 

It is also not helped by its orchestral score which begins with an enjoyable uncanny piano and strings theme but soon blands out into aural treacle. This is after the likes of Jerry Goldsmith's terrifying score for the Omen and John Carpenter's unsettling piano and synth music for Halloween. It gives the film the feel of a luxury budget production but that's really not always what you want in a horror movie.

But horror movie it is and is quite readily regarded as a classic of its kind. I might question that last point but I do have to admit that the goods it brings when it needs to (that séance scene!) and those moments of development that suggest that the real darkness is not in the haunted house alone, are gripping. You might notice that the worst of my criticisms here are kind of the opposite of faint praise, that my sticking points are quite likely local to me. Perhaps I should just say that, while I would watch something like The Haunting (1963) at the drop of a hat but think about revisiting The Changeling it might be more indicative of its place in my estimation. I love The Haunting. I respect The Changeling.

Viewing notes: I watched my lovely 4K release of this which came with a BD and a CD soundtrack album. This is not currently available to rent or buy in Australia. If you were to travel back to the days of VHS shops you'd be able to get a copy on a cheaper weekly rate. Not everything had got better.

AFTER HOURS @ 40

Bored office drone Paul strikes it lucky one night ... kinda. A chance conversation with a beautiful woman at a café gets him a number and leads him into the worst night of his life as twists, turns, rug pulls and wrong footing have him run the gauntlet in a New York that has replaced the sleaze of Taxi Driver with an affluent bohemia. Not fun.

Griffin Dunne's pet script (he didn't write it, he just wanted to do it) had been passed around forever and, through a series of acquaintances, landed in the hands of Martin Scorsese. Marty had just seen King of Comedy fall through the earth and his first attempt at Last Temptation kicked out the studio door. This looked like money. It was the mid-'80s and cokey crazy was working as well as the teen empire. Movies for those of voting age and up were popping like mushrooms around the time. These days it's a genre called the yuppie nightmare cycle. Desperately Seeking Susan and Something Wild cast rising stars in comedies that could go south or west as long as they smashed a young urban professional against a loopy femme fatale. Susan had two of them including a major pop star. After Hours had five.

It flopped. After the big no show it was injected into the art houses where it did better over a longer time and was quietly absorbed into the mud of the cinema gutter as forces like The Coens and Stephen Soderberg rose and got to work. So what's wrong with it?

First, Griffin Dunne's empathy card starts fading from the café scene in which we cannot believe that Rosanna Arquette would pick him up. Also, Linda Fiorentino's sassy boho artist feels phoned in and the papier mache piece she's working on looks like a year twelve goth kid's project. The taxi ride from his familiar territory to the wiles of the west end of Manhattan is done cranked so it looks like it was shot as a speeding car in a Jerry Lewis movie. The punk club is pure passe try hard unless it's meant to be a yuppie version of one. Look, there's a lot of good moments and observations and the turns of Terri Garr and Rosanna Arquette shine, but the whole thing feels tone deaf.

Trying to care for Dunne's horny creep who tries to pass as an average guy will never work. We can laugh at the uber cool goof artist or feel sympathy for Arquette, recognise the '60s casualty of Terri Garr's character and find a lot of the frustration scenes anxious. But we are supposed to want Paul to make it back to his flat and lick his wounds and I, through more than a few views, have never been compelled to care about him.

This is from Martin Scorsese whose grip on how to make awkwardness and threat hilarious puts him up with the masters of Russian literature (read some and you'll get the weight of that). He who drew both intense eerieness and clumsy naivete from De Niro in Taxi Driver was surely well suggested as the perfect fit for this feast of such moments. Perhaps it's a problem of concentration. While he's so good at finding the horror of the everyday and the laugh in physical threat, when he's only meant to do black comedy or dark farce, he pushes it so far it only works as over egged.

I'm going to admit something that I don't have to: my first viewing of this was a bad experience. I went with a couple of friends to a screening at the long lamented Trak in Toorak. They were down from Brisbane and we were cramming things in. We trammed from The Quiet Earth at the Valhalla to Toorak for After Hours, Scorsese fans all. The Trak was an arthouse, mainstream second run, classics and contemporary indy. If you went there you knew the director's name and reputation. After Hours had been billed as Marty's whacky fun fest. The audience was plummy and comfy, the very yuppies that the genre was aiming at. They tittered at almost every line, even transitional or expositional moments which didn't try for laughs. Soon, everything was like the funniest moment of comedy any of them had ever witnessed. Imagine a Friday the 13th sequel in which everyone screams at every single kill and every scene, even the sex, for the entire running time. They had paid for a whacky fun fest from Scorsese and by the Lord Harry they were going to get it. I was shrivelling from the embarrassment of it, fearing the judgement of my northern sophisticates. We left in silence, even getting a cab in grasping flight.

Horrible but every time I've seen it since the only improvements I can find are in lines and moments that those screeching laughs and belly thunder had covered. Increasingly, it has played as a failure for me, over earnest in its attempt to be light and sharp. It's why I delayed watching Shutter Island because, as a horror fan, I didn't want him to bugger that up, too (he did). Scorsese still had greatness to come. He finally did make The Last Temptation of Christ and it's a masterpiece. Goodfellas reaches great heights and is still untarnished by its boring younger sibling Casino (or its embarrassing grandchild The Irishman). At some point he might have decided that a good paycheck and a reputation just felt better and was happy enough riding on the legend. 

I'll always look out for him in cinema documentaries but the films since 1990 have mostly been well made and bland (there are exceptions but those are few). He'd been such a god at Uni, we knew his dialogue by heart. From the time I saw Taxi Driver on a Steenbeck editing desk I was completely hooked. We  bent the knee for all of them and felt we'd found a cinemaster for our generation (even though he counts as the previous one) some we loved, others we forgave. After Hours was the first one I forgot.

PSYCHO @ 65 (Lots of spoilers)

When the mild mannered but impatient Marion gets a big pile of cash to deposit for her boss she takes it on holiday to nowhere. Maybe it will persuade her reluctant lover to marry her as he always whingeing about not having the money. Maybe it will fund a new start on an Island off California. Whatever, she's ahead of the chase and, tired after a day's driving, wheels into an off highway motel. The nervous guy who books her in makes her nervous so, after an eerie conversation with him she begs to to take the last shower of her life before bed. She doesn't make it to bed as the shrieking old woman in the house by the motel has beds and flesh and sin on her mind and comes in with a butcher knife and that's that.

That's not the end of the movie. Not only has the murder taken a big number of shots edited into a small number of seconds that feel much longer and accompanied that with a relentless screeching of violins at the top of their range which seem to sound like widened eyes, a sequence which deftly convinces us that we've seen a lot more stabbing and a more nakedness than we have, but we've just witnessed the killing off of a character we've had half a movie engaging with.

Well, it happened in Robert Bloch's novel, Hitchcock must have relished the disruption. His love of gimmickry stretched back to the beginning of his career and would continue to its end. This one allowed the publicity to try the line about cinemas refusing entry to people who tried to come in after a certain point in the run time. But the word was that he killed off his star. The story after this is the investigation by Marion's sister Lila and the reluctant boyfriend Sam, along with private eye hired by Marion's boss. There is plenty of plot to go from that point and it's where the intrigue finds its compulsion in the question of what Norman's game is and what his mother has to do with it.

But as plotty as it gets Psycho is more about that crushed attempt at a family that were the Bates. There is a lot more to this in the novel but most of that is narrated backstory and would have necessitated either an unacceptable narration or flashbacks which might have served to drain tension and pace. Hitchcock's adaptation concentrates on the effect of the family's demise on the rest of the world as it meets it in the form of Marion and the interest in discovering her fate. Norman and his wild mother are the sharp splinter of an old dead tree that yet can tear and kill. 

Anthony Perkins is perfectly cast. His skittish nerves, fragile movements in conversation with strangers remind us of the living relatives of the birds that Norman has stuffed and mounted on the walls. Then, his assured motion in cleaning up after his mother's atrocities give us a different side. We are to learn the most about Norman of all the characters, some of it in a direct lecture by a psychiatrist but as much if not more in these moments of contrast, pragmatism and panic, predation and prey. The shrink at the end sets up the final moment of reconciliation of the facets but it is Tony making the hairs on the back of our neck stand up.

Of the other cast, they are perfectly functional with the exception of Martin Balsam as the detective Arbogast whose worldly face and effortless manipulative powers give him a forbidding strength of his own. I haven't forgotten Janet Leigh as Marion whose intensity belies the good girl grown up. She must stare at us from behind the wheel of her car, emoting as the thoughts of her predicament sound in her head. At one point her face breaks very slightly into something like a wicked smile as she considers one consequence of her theft. I wonder if original audiences thought that this expression made her the Psycho of the title. Her interaction with Norman Bates involves a slight purging for both, a night time conversation that might bond or separate through its awkwardness, it is the closest thing to freedom that anyone in the film gets.

There is a lot to discover about the production of Psycho and I'd recommend you pursue any extras on physical media that you find, or other sources. I won't go over it too much here but to mention a few things. First, Hitchcock effectively paid for it himself. This is why, between Vertigo and The Birds, Psycho is in black and white. The fact that he determined it to be a kind of modern gothic black and white with cinematographer John Russell, is down to his ingenuity. I cannot happily imagine this film in colour. The lower budget allowed for the casting of a few names lower on the pecking order of Hollywood but who came through strongly. It allowed him the shower scene as the original backers Paramount retreated and Hitchcock had to get creative with studio affiliation. It also allowed him to call in the talents of composer Bernard Herrmann whose extraordinary strings-only ride through frenzied violence earned him a doubling of his fee from Hitchcock. Psycho is almost an independent film and features the best of the limitations that suggests.

I first saw this at school. Mr Bowman, an English teacher who took us for an elective on film writing in year eleven, was delighted to screen it against the screen in one of the chemistry classrooms which had tiered seating where we also saw our anti-drug and anti-sex instructional films. At sixteen, it was the most violent film I'd ever seen. Sonny, a darkly narcissistic bully, was sobered by it and blamed the screaming music for its effect. By that stage the local commercial tv station was playing movies like Zabriskie Point and Husbands with the swearing left in. My Nana had spoken of how subtle Hitchcock had been in suggesting rather than showing his violence. She must have seen Psycho but it would have been too inconvenient an example for her lesson. Then again, she was the one who bought me the novel.

Psycho didn't quite change my life, though I was heavily affected by it, but it opened doors that held confrontations soon to become riches. The decade to follow featured a revival of Hitchcock's mid and late period movies as they went back into cinemas, on tv and into home video. We discovered his black comedy The Trouble With Harry, the might of Rear Window and the bizarreness of Spellbound. Psycho wasn't there. It remained a byword for the extreme mainstream. Anthony Perkins presented an Oscar, standing beside Janet Leigh, and joked about taking the rap for the shower scene killing. A vocalisation of the screeching strings still signifies imagined psychosis. But for me, to see it again, I cannot look away from its sadness, that sense of bad paths chosen or compelled that can only lead to great destruction. Marion turns off the main highway to her final stop. Norman lets his mother in to deal with the crisis he cannot confront. In psycho we acknowledge the broken and the bruised of us, their silencing force and their comforting masks. For me, it is Hitchcock's masterpiece.

Review: COMPANION ( first act spoilers)

Caution: The publicity material for this film includes spoilers, not just the trailer but the poster. If you want to go into the movie uninfluenced, read this review after you have seen it.

A prologue signalling The Stepford Wives' influence leads to a meet cute between Iris and Josh. Cut to Josh driving Iris to a country cabin to introduce her to his friends. The cabin is a mansion and her friends are one percenters which makes Iris nervous. Once in, the house owner, a Russian wealthmonster, and others greet Iris variously with warmth or sniffy sarcasm; she was right to be anxious. Nevertheless, she does engage in conversation with the others, eloquently speaking of love at first sight over dinner and, later, draws out the sarcy one to reveal the control in her relationship with the house owner. 

The next morning, Iris prepares to go as planned out to the nearby lake to spend time with Josh but he demurs and she goes on solo. The owner appears, escalating a seduction routine into sexual assault which ends in his violent death at her hands. She rejoins the others, coated in blood, holding a knife. Josh gets up and yells, "Iris, go to sleep!" Her eyes roll back instantly until they are white blanks and she freezes. Iris is a robot.

This Gen Z thriller which the publicity took pains to point out was from the folk that brought you the likes of Barbarian. If that made you expect some narrative rug pulls you were right. The revelation of Iris being a cyborg is the least of what follows but it itself follows her opening narration as she glides a trolley down the aisle of a supermarket that the two times she felt truly happy were when she met Josh and when she killed him. That happens within the first five minutes of the film. When the writing is like that the decision about what to reveal in the run up to release must be intense. Robert Eggers had over a year between the announcement of Nosferatu and it hitting the screen. Then again, whatever alterations he made to that well trodden story were only ever going to be at the indy level. Companion's high concept sci fi premise could not afford to risk audience apathy by making it just look like a social drama for the young folks.

That over with, what does Companion offer? The Stepford Wives cornered the market in the notion of male fantasy manifest as magic with the theme of control riding high in the age of second wave feminism. Blade Runner blurred the effect of self awareness in the fabricated human, showing both its power and vulnerability. What's left? Updating the concept from mechanical robots to lifelike hardware controlled by a phone app is good and drives effective plot triggers but it's not much more than cosmetic. Of course, a 21C upgrade was going to be a phone app. What the creative team have done here is dress things up to look like the near future but have reached right back to grasp the essentials: control and its nemesis self awareness.

Queen bitch Kat is frank about the control she and her equally human consort put at the active centre of their relationship. Her conversation with Iris about this involves Kat joking about needing to become a human before she can begin to confront her situation. This is key. Iris doesn't know she's a robot and deflects Kat's innuendos about self-control. As soon as that breach is made, the breakdown of order begins and the rest is spoilable plot.

The fabrication of controlled humans is an ancient one and persists because control is an everpresent issue in human interaction. Iris' naturalness disturbs the couple Kat and Sergei whose relationship is founded on coercion. Their response to Iris doesn't puzzle us and we are more inclined to judge Josh for maintaining an association with a cybernetic sex slave. Kat's comparison between Iris and a sock Josh might jerk off into lands with him. The Jurassic Park question of we can but should we hits straight away.

That this is maintained while the narrative has switched to a sruvivalist thriller until the two thread merge is testament to writing and creative nurture that puts this film a notch above the already impressive It's What's Inside. There is space in the writing that allows for compelling action, more questions of sentience and some very funny dialogue. Add some strong digital cinematography (sorry, I don't miss film grain) and sharp music scoring and you have one of the most vibrant social thrillers you'll see this year.

Jack Quaid tightropes the barrier of average young guy with an emerging selfishness and the thing he becomes quite effortlessly. However, if Yellowjackets, The Boogieman and Heretic didn't convince you, Sophie Thatcher is the current young star of genre stories. Her range of glassy fragility and bad girl toughness makes her characters the ones you'll fix on. This is her film.