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.

31 Nights Review: THE CLEANSING HOUR

 

A man strapped to a camp bed is being yelled at by a hot young priest. The bed rises and the many-voiced man in it hurls verbal filth at the priest. Violence, blood and noise until everything works and the demon is exorcised and, except for the viewers at home, it's a wrap. The Cleansing Hour is a web show in which the actor playing the priest performs a new exorcism every episode and offloads merch while he's at it. Stream no. 1.

There's a growing irk between the star of the show and the producer which extends to the latter's fiancé who can't stand "Father Max". Well, she's soon off to a tv audition so she might not have to live with her contempt for much longer. Next ep comes along and the actor playing the possessed doesn't show (minor spoiler as to why but I don't need to reveal it) so Lane (aforementioned fiancé) steps in to play the demon haunted girl. A few minutes into it she goes off script. It's a real demon. Stream no. 2.

Right, so what we get is a play between global scale entertainment culture with its fickle, ravenous audiences and the horror of demonic possession. How does that work? Well, the demon knows all and who's lying about what and how easily that could all change with a few extortion tricks. It does happen so we also deal with what's at stake in the realm of "reality" entertainment. So far, that's a pretty good mix with something current brought to the table. Production values are high and the practical effects are superb. So why doesn't this work?

Well, because, for all those good things I just listed there are two problems that, once visible, don't go away. The first is that the mould on exorcism movies was broken way back in 1973 with The Exorcist and every single reiteration looks like that one, so however good you make it all the writhing and re-voicing are just going to come off as generic. The second problem has to do with what is done to offset the first. Whether you add comedy (all those horror parodies) or commentary  you need to make that weave in and so tightly that the two become indistinguishable. That kind of happens here but the more delving done into the characters' pasts that render them vulnerable to attack the less important it becomes that it's a demon doing it. There's another narrative crossroad but it's not addressed. What ends up happening is a choice made that blends the two streams on a level so superficial that it ends up as naïve on one hand and clunkily generic on the other.

The problem here is one of indecision as no amount of higher production values are ever going to mask writing that can't make up its mind. It's funny, it's cynical, it's scary except that it's none of those. Contrast with found footage movies made with such concentration on their missions that for all the glucky video look to them and stammered improvised lines of the actors are often far more effective than this quite lavish production. Maybe the time has come when a return to committed genre does a better job at justifying itself as cinema. Because the best of horror is always allegorical, regardless of whether its audiences acknowledge that: the theme should emerge through the horror rather than accessorise it. The demon through Regan attacks Fr Karras by sounding like his mother and getting to him through his guilt as it is his faith that is at stake. Possessed Lane sounds pretty much like lunchtime Lane ranting against Max.

Seen on Shudder

31 Nights Review: HELL HOUSE LLC

 

Three threads of narrative are displayed and then woven as a disaster at a horror themed attraction is investigated. There's no spoiler in telling you that the showbiz gets real and the punters are running from real nasties. Oh, it's a found footage film.

Twenty-one years after The Blair Witch Project kicked the sub-genre off (yes, I'm discounting Cannibal Holocaust as it isn't the source point) the conventions for found footage are firmly in place. They have become so much a part of the manual that the requirement that characters on screen still give a reason for keeping the camera on all the time. Another is something that Blair Witch didn't include as it didn't know it had to: a real world framing device, usually in the form of interviews. 

Hell House LLC does the first more than once but shouldn't as the wishy washy answer just gets less convincing each time. Surely it has long been time (even in 2015 when this was made) for this aspect to get self-parodic. It almost does this in the logs that the otherwise unseen camera operator delivers to camera at the end of the day. The replay trope is also given more air than usual which saves a lot of time in credulity test scenes. So, that is a levelling.

It's the framing that detracts from the film as a whole as the casting of the interviewees is too uneven. The reporter and her crew hold their own but it really only takes one to break the spell (this even happens in the mostly mighty Ghost Watch). What does work is the signposted development of the team's involvement as their investigation takes them to an extended interview with one of the house's founders and thence to the house itself. 

All this works fine but I'm left with the faint praise of calling it competent rather than outstanding as the differentiation of character in the core footage can leave the action muddled, giving us less of a stake in the action than we should have. This makes some of the effective chills along the way (and there are real  ones) unsupported by the characters and allows too much control to the viewer to function well as horror. Eventually, the empathy for the people under threat on screen drains so we are left with a string of decent scare setups, much like they would have been in the attraction to one of the paying guests.

This will sound flippant but it both criticises the execution and celebrates the idea: I was less scared by the film than nightmare it engendered. I dreamed I was back in one of the shared houses of the '90s. Everyone else in the house was getting quietly bitchy with each other and I was losing motivation to deal with it. Eventually it came to the point where I realised I'd just paid the rent for everyone without thinking about it. This caused a profound sadness in me as, under the dream, I knew it was something I would never do unless desperate, something I would never do in real life but that's not the way dreams work. And it was one of those dreams where the main emotion lingers into wakefulness until reality cleans up the psychic mess.

So I wonder what the sequels are like.

Seen on Shudder.

31 Nights Review: THE WITCH IN THE WINDOW

Simon picks up his young son Finn. Beverly, Simon's ex, is fraught because Finn broke into her computer and saw bad stuff. So, he's on zero screen time, including the phone, and in disgrace. Simon welcomes the chance to bond and takes the boy out to the house in Vermont that he's flipping. Bit of rustic air and some old fashioned slog will do the lad a world. Finn is sullen. He's on the 13 side of twelve.

Father and son work a slowly thawing truce while getting into the house repair but hear odd noises. The electrician arrives in the first jump scare and lets slip the story of the family that lived there and the woman, thought a witch, who by legend did the husband and son in and now haunts the place in anger. She can be seen in the upper floor window on a bad day. Not twenty minutes in and there's your title.

A later chat between Simon and Finn features a blurred shape of a woman in a mirror in the background. When you see it you shiver as they don't and it just stays there. A few more appearances and this thing is really picking up and then, at the point of crisis between the pair the ante's upped to maximum when she, Lydia, the witch, appears in the upper floor chair by the window. Beyond this point spoilers so that's that for plot.

I'd put this aside because of the phrase Hallmark film that I read in an IMDB user review. I know, I know but it stuck. Well, I can see what prompted that but it's a criminally inadequate description of this tale of communication and the gravity of acceptance. Simon's work on the house has a motivation I'll leave you to discover but it has nothing to do with sales. At first you might think of how futile his plan is but increasingly you have to understand that it only works when he thinks it, not when you do. His commitment to the house has profound consequences.

So where's all the horror? Well, the build up to Lydia's activation (let's call it) is so deftly done that the moment it bursts into ignition I cursed the movie for its jump scare as I felt a full body shiver and admitted how good it was. See, I hate most jump scare movies as the jolts are unearned; they are the difference Hitchcock drew between suspense and surprise and how he preferred the former. Apart from the first two in this film (both are mild and fun) all of the jumps are hard earned. The worst feature white knuckle suspense. I cried out at one of them. They are earned not just because the suspense is so well built but built upon character and the weave of essential information. While she is a distant apparition in a window or a mirror she will send shivers but when she breaks from this her power and malevolence render her terrifying.

So, here we have a horror movie that earns its shocks through expert atmospherics and a sombre determination to stick to the growing sadness of its central story. See also, The Innocents, The Haunting and Dark Water. Hallmark film? Hallmark IMDB review, more like. This one works and works hard, even delivering a soft and puzzling chill at the end just for value's sake. That's not a sequel setup, it's class.

On Shudder.

31 Nights Review: DARLING

Darling, a young woman, gets a job in a house deep in darkest Manhattan. The owner, about to flee to vacation, tells her that the previous house sitter threw herself from the top floor balcony. Oh, anything in the fridge is fine, call you when I get to the Hamptons. Bye. Darling sets to discovering the house but is soon beset by hallucinations and a twin curiosity and dread about the locked room at the end of the hall.

There are violently scratched messages in the bedside cabinet and muffled movement throughout the house. Her visions start coming in stabbing flashes and seem to involve her in bloody violence. While out on the street one morning she is stopped by a suited man who returns the crucifix necklace she dropped. She looks back in silent gaping fear. She follows him and locates his nest before primming up and luring him back to the house. The rest you will have to see for yourself (it's 76 minutes long; it won't kill ya)

What might have been a heavily derivative genre exercise smothered in student affectation becomes a lean and effective tale of mental disintegration. Yes, it's archly arty with its chapters and hipster ironic title font and ... whatever, man. But it also gets its work done. If it uses strobing it's unusually subtle. If the black and white reminds you of too many other movies it might be aspirational but it's still effective. The score is electronic and variously droning and screeching but it's appropriate. Is it a hip New York cover version of Repulsion? Pretty much, but you don't have to know that.

I don't want to damn this effective urban gothic film with faint praise, so instead of going on anymore about its self-aware style I'll mention the oddly icy warmth of its centre, young actor Lauren Ashley Carter. I have seen Carter in two other films and they and she are both impressive (The Woman and Jugface) and a look over her filmography bids me seek out more. From her Deneuve ice-slacker entrance to homicidal maniac, she takes us with her and we happily follow on behind. Like Deneuve in the earlier film, Carter presents her flawless beauty as a starting point to an arc that alienates us from it. We discover something (but not too much) of her history and where it has left her and if we are still hankering that a girl as cute as she should ruin it all with stuff like that we should take note of our own response as it is a major part of how this film works.

It might seem odd to say but this restlessly stylish film, in committing to its horror, is, for all its affected quoting and self consciousness does more to earn its genre stripes than many more self-avowedly unpretentious pieces from the last ten years. It might be pretty but it works.

Seen on Shudder

31 Nights Review: LAST SHIFT

Jessica, a rooky cop is put in charge of staffing her dad's old police station for one last night to cover the changeover to the new one. She gets a call from a distressed girl who hangs up before vital information can be passed. She ejects a homeless man after he urinates on the foyer floor. It's not going well already but it gets worse and weirder. Compactus shelves move by themselves. The lights go out. Bizarre figures appear out of nowhere and disappear just as suddenly. The girls keeps calling up and her situation is getting worse. Piece by piece, Jessica learns of the background of the station and it's not good and will probably only get worse. Ok, it does.

This haunted house in a cop shop tale shows its M.O. from the off and keeps its effects within easy reach at all times. It's a sizeable building with a lot of corridors and confined spaces. Once you see a distant shadowy figure move across a doorway or see a compactus bay (a big metal cranked bookcase on rails) move by itself you know you are not going to be able to look at most of the backgrounds easily for the next ninety minutes. The pallet is kept on the cold side, recalling time spent in official buildings not designed for ease. I had a full body shiver at sight of a moving inanimate object within a few minutes of the start. Just what the doctor ordered.

And for a good deal of the run time that dread of unseen forces was pursued. The haunting is from the dispatch of a Manson-like cult who came to a bad and bloody end at the hands of cops from this station (including Jessica's father who came to his own violent end). Well, they're back. The girl in trouble keeps calling there rather than the new station or the emergency number and her situation is getting worse. The paranormal monster party is getting cranked up, too and it gets hard for Jessica to tell real from hallucinated.

But it's at this point that the film loses pressure. While there is a laudable restraint from the kind of lazy jump scares that the setting might beg for with its obstructed lines of sight there is increasing repetition of certain tropes after the point (in a very well staged scene that mixes exposition with chills) that Jessica is aware of the possibility that she is only imagining things. It looks less like the things are going to torment her forever and more like her failure to mount an offence against them. But it suffers from repetition. So, as the Jacob's Ladder-headed ghosts wobble away we are allowed to get used to them. So is Jessica. The night of terror becomes more of a bad trip. When the girl on the phone motif reaches its own climax it's creepy from the break in repetition as much as the denouement. 

One other moment is worth mentioning: a grotesque figure appears and seems to stalk a freaked out Jessica who hides in the compactus: we get a few shots to suggest that we're about to get a jump scare and a properly earned one but this doesn't happen and we have enough time at the apparition to recall a significant detail from earlier and we understand why we don't get the jolt. 

The third act turns the looping phenomena off as Jessica faces the bad things down and goes in pursuit. If the ending is unsurprising it is at least committed and offered as a hard conclusion. As such, it doesn't disappoint. That sounds like faint praise but really, I am only recognising something that too seldom rewards the idly taken chance on an unknown film. It helps that Juliana Harkavy's Jessica is a credible and nuanced protagonist who (although the writing can let her down) carries us through the proceedings with an unexpected warmth, not a thing you'd think to demand from a film like this.

Seen on Shudder.

31 Nights Review: CLINTON ROAD

We begin in a busy night club run by Ice T. Four young friends cram into a booth and chew the fat and plan to go out to where the wife of one of them died and perform a seance. Too long for a prologue but too briefly presented to do more than suggest a lifestyle that will have no bearing on the rest of the story. There is one good moment. Eric Roberts comes to the doorbitch and says he's on the list. The doorbitch doesn't believe him so he flashes his licence and she apologises. She'd thought he was one of them pesky Eric Roberts impersonators again.

Then we're out in the bush on Clinton Road and the psychic falls to the dirt by the fire and does the funky gibbon which freaks everybody out. It freaks one of them out so much that he goes to the car to get his phone (and then just opens the door without the key). He's interrupted by a  ranger/state trooper/guy in a uniform who tells him to skedaddle. After the uniformed one vanishes things start happening like a big ginger incel with a blunt instrument (nyurk nyurk) who lumbers around roaring and hitting folks and a little girl who is not as scary as most under-tens who want to stay up past eight p.m. goes strolling around the woods with a security blanket.

The location of the title is a real place on a real map and subject to a lot of folklore, every item of which is included in a kind of tourist sideshow re-enactment. At some point they're in a building and then they're not and then it ends. 

I am a champion of the notion that cinema should be seen as a blank canvas with each new screening. It's difficult to dispel one's own experience of elements like plot and genre in order to do this but a little effort can add a sense of newness to any film you see. Apart from the bizarre night-club to backwoods trek we make here all we really get is a series of set ups shot with the cleanest looking digital video imaginable. There is no suspense. There is no sense of development. Nothing builds or mounts.

I did some Googling on this title and got far more than I expected. Articles in Variety and other trade mags mention Ice T being in the new supernatural horror Clinton Road. So, someone got a Go Pro and had some dirt on Ice T (and probably just knew Eric Roberts' mobile number) and asked Tommy Wiseau to fund the pre-press. 

It's my own fault. I go into Tubi and find things I haven't seen that I really might want to see. I tend to stay away from most of the genre fare as it's mostly knock-offs. You know that person who dresses with labels like Praba or Pierre Cordin after a holiday in Bangkok? Well if you go to Tubi you can feast on epics like Paranormal Phenomena or The Amityville Terror. This movie isn't a knock off of any specific movie and is unlikely to generate knock-offs. My mistake in choosing it discounted that important consideration. I broke out the old Val Lewton number Isle of the Dead afterwards which crapped all over it and got outta there.

I read the synopsis of Clinton Road and then flipped through the IMDB. The first page of user reviews are all shills who give it 10/10 or 9/10 if they want to throw you off the scent. The next page's ratings all plummet to the under 3/10 end of the spectrum. So, if you liked the cover art of this one, do like the ranger man says: "get off the road and go home! NOW!" Before he disappears.

31 Nights Review: BEYOND THE GATES

Night Eight rolled up and I decided to find something unseen on Shudder. A few synopses later I chose this for the premise: two brothers meet up to deal with the estate of their father, starting with the video shop he ran while drinking through his guilt over his wife's death. As they go through the old stock and we meet some more of the cast, they find an old fashioned board game plus video in the locked office. Putting it on they get freaked out but they're intrigued: it might hold a clue to their father's disappearance and it looks neat, anyway so they take it home. The game binds them into playing it which will lead to them going to where the title says they will.

This is the kind of thing that people who are snobs about horror claim to let through: well produced, character development, considered plot and credible performances. I know, such people still think that horror movies are all hockey masks and teenage death-sex but they will all claim to hold genre films to values that are often irrelevant to them. That said, put to the test I don't think any such people (and I know a fair few personally) would get along well with this. Why? Well, it's like when someone who thinks they are witty hears a pun and calls it a bad pun. If you ask them for an example of what they think is a good pun they will often just dismiss it with: all puns are bad. Really? So, they've never read any Shakespeare or James Joyce or ... any novelist in or out of an airport newsagency who cares about delighting their readership. But I digress. 

The reason such folk won't get on with this is that it takes its time to get to where its going. We get to know these characters with nuanced performance supported by solid writing. Everything required of a creditable drama is on screen. Only at the very end (and I mean the final ten minutes) does it break out into what might be described as generic action and in those moments it does falter as they feel more perfunctory after all the world building of most of the film. The story needs it but it feels too sudden and lacks the power it might have had with more construction. This is why horror fans might find it lacking; they'll want the game tighter and faster. But while I am as subject to consumerist itching as any movie goer I let this pass as I was so impressed at the immersion I was offered. I felt the dread and dominance of the face on the television screen (Reanimator's Barbara Crampton) whenever they were in the room and then wherever they were. It's the world of it that's creepy, not the Ghost Ride action at the end.

If you do give this one a click, watch with patience and stay until after all the credits. You'll want to ask your tv a question. Out loud. But you won't.

Review: THE WIND

This is the opposite of the experience I had during last year's 30 nights o' horror. The movie Satanic not only has a goofy title for a horror movie made in 2016 but its promotional art looks like it was done by a child trying to be scary. I took a chance on it expecting only cheap knockoff rubbish so I could fill my quota without overthinking. It turned out to be a strong, well considered movie about youth and bad decision making. The Wind, on the other hand has a powerful image of a prairie woman seen from behind brandishing a shot gun at the doorway of a shaky wooden house, ready to repel the worst. It had reappeared on SBS on Demand after months of absence during which time I considered it lost. Now it's back.

Lizzy and Isaac have gone west in the expansion of the USA in the 19th century and are eking out an austere but effective life on the land. Another couple move in to the nearby abandoned cottage and the two pairs form a workable if tiny community. And then jealousy and hardship take their toll and bad things happen. Bad things have already happened but we learn them after the present bad things as this out of sequence grimoire tries to herd its themes together to form a second timeline motivated by dramatic importance.

The problem is that it gets so convoluted that I had to face the fact that I stopped bothering to unravel it through a lack of empathy with anyone on screen. There are well presented points here and good performances to support them. There's a readiness to step outside genre parameters and reorganise elements for a new kind of horror film. But the horror isn't scary, the tragedy is unaffecting and the players are betrayed by undercooked writing. This, for me, wipes all the impressive production values  off the board, because in the end I stopped caring. In some movies this wouldn't matter: this one depends on empathy which far too soon reduces to a plea for indulgence.

A waste of good atmosphere.

Available on SBS on Demand until November 30

31 Nights O' Horror 2020

2020? Why stop at 31? Well, I started doing the horror movie per night last year and found it easier that I'd feared. Anyone who's read this blog even casually will know that this is my genre of choice so a full month of it should appear kind of heavenly to me, no? Well, yeah, but how to choose and when to play? It's a lot easier this time as I have been saving up a few things from recent acquisitions and keeping an eye on the VoDs. I made a short list the other eve and it was huge. I could do it just with new, unseen titles. 

So, it will be a mix but I can choose more carefully. The 4K Suspiria gets a place of honour somewhere on a weekend and titles like The Haunting or Invasion of the Bodysnatchers can be slotted anywhere at all when comfort viewing is the thing (oh, that one, too, either 50s or 80s Thing works well for me). But the real discovery lies in the ones that vy for my remote click with good tile art and engaging synopses. Again, still, I will choose something that presents itself as dire generic dreck. So what, it will probably be under 90 minutes and I can at least complain about it in a review. This is how I clicked on Satanic last year and was almost disappointed to find how good it is. The cruddiest Netflix tile and a goofy worn-numb title promised garbage but it's an increasingly poignant story of bad decisions and the fragility of youth and ends up both genuinely terrifying and heartrending. So, there's that.

Like last year, I'll be playing it by ear so I won't be listing recommendations here. I will, however, be reviewing hitherto unseen titles on the blog. Last night I started with the curio Night of the Demon. Recently released locally in Australia on Blu-Ray I saw the full UK edit for the first time. Beware, though, our release is the unrestored extra from the 2 disc set so, while it benefits from a higher resolution it's also quite rich in old print artefacts. Dig that? Well, it's a nice mid priced disc that will take you straight to the feature with zero fuss. Anyway, this was a fine and comfortable start.

Tonight? Who knows? You will, if it's new to me.

See you on the couch.

Review: THE WRETCHED

Ben goes to live with his dad while the divorce is panning out. His left arm is in a cast from a mishap and he isn't much of a fan of his circumstances but he gets a job at the family business which is not taxing so he can't really complain. Meanwhile the young rednecks next door get a special visit from the local witch of the woods and the woman turns from lumbering young parent to a forbidding siren like horror who leaves flowers wilted in her wake. Children, including her own, begin to disappear. Ben sees this and has to act but first he has to be right about it.

It's the complications that make this supernatural gaslighting tale nudge a little over the mass of off the shelf supernatural tales cramming the horror section of the VoD services. The people next door are being taken over by the witch but they also know how to appear normal when needed. Ben's broken wrist came from an impulsive theft and escape attempt so he has a history as a troubled teen which diminishes his credibility as a witness to atrocity. The more he has to report and investigate the more he has to trust an increasingly hostile field.

John-Paul Howard in the central role gives us a relatable teenager. Bright enough to understand the signs of foul play but sexually eager enough to miss sight of a trick being played on him and philosophy enough for us to see how much of a sport he is about it. This is important as while the film as a whole progresses without a great deal to offer beyond a standard genre outing without the warmth of this character we'd probably just hit pause and get back to it some time down the track if at all.

But while the stakes could be higher and the tension tighter The Wretched turns out to be a perfectly fine genre outing that will engage both the genre vets and casual tourists. Even the sequel wink at the end has just enough cleverness to it that we might not even mind if there is another one. As well there might be given the purpose-built evil figure that is flat enough to be malleable for future outings with minds as or more creative than here. Giving the dough a little extra time to rise? You could do worse.

Hired from Apple movies.

HOLIDAYS!

Yo, folkeroons of the edges of the screen, hope you are all coping with the ashen grind of the plague outside. This post is to announce that I'm putting Shadows Contacless in suspended animation for at least four and a bit weeks. Have I run out of movies to show you? Never. But as October is rapidly approaching I must attend to one of the few religious holidays in my annual calendar: 31 Nights o' Horror. (Oh, come on, you all know that friend who takes a hol every year camping (like in The Blair Witch Project), fishing (like in Jaws), caving (like in The Descent) or going to Grandad's place (like in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). Well, it's just like that.

Yes, from Oct 1 to Halloween I will be watching a horror movie per night. I'll be plundering the fare on Shudder and anything even vaguely attractive on the other VoD services. That and digging my chattering teeth into some auld favourites and new players in my own collection like the 4K discs of Suspiria or US as well as the great mass of horror pieces in my greater collection.

I'm not including Shadows in this as this is a holiday and I want to relax into this fare, however nerve-wracking, without having to worry about the sensitivity, values or tolerance of anyone else at all. Some of these will probably be shared but with a very few others and I will happily take suggestions for shared screenings along the way.

Also, I'll be polling the folk in the Facebook group to see if they want it to continue after my holiday. This will require a response as I won't be putting the effort in if faced with a vacuum. So, let's see how that goes.

On a less whingey note it has been 24 weeks of lively chats with some great films and a building sense of community. This has been a great comfort to me in these bleak days of plague. The engagement alone has kept me from feeling I was doing this alone. For which, I thank each and every one of you who joined in and got stuck into some great cinema. Felt like old times.

Shadows Contactless: Friday 25 9 pm, Netflix Party: SORRY TO BOTHER YOU

Cassius is out of luck and debt ridden and stumbles one step further down towards rock bottom. So, he gets a job in a call centre selling ... whatever crap he has to. It's tough at first but the old timer next to him tells him to use his white voice. Skeptical, Cassius tries it and starts raking in the sales. Soon he gets the invite from management into the deluxe realm in the upper floors he's been noticing, with the golden elevator peopled by the ostentatiously confident. 

It's good but some things aren't.  He's made friends back in the sweatshop who are chasing industrial action and he's now on the wrong side of them. His performance artist girlfriend is getting restless, politically and romantically, and the vibe he's getting from management is getting sinister. All the while people are being invited to leave their cares at the door in a kind of industrial slavery and it's working. The most popular show on TV is called I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me.

Boots Riley's full scale assault on contemporary exploitation, race relations, the gig economy and savage capitalism is the kind of movie that can make you laugh out loud when recalling a scene or line. It's dark and brutal but lifted at all times by a disarming comedic timing and constant wit, like Fight Club directed by Michel Gondry. At its centre, LaKeith Stanfield plays a contemporary Candide, going along with the good but never quite thinking it through. You will not expect the final act.

OK, we're changing at least for this one by going back to Netflix Party. I understand that this might lose me some regulars but I need to seriously rethink how to get us connected for shared screenings independent of platform. Meantime, here's how to get it.

You'll need to use the Chrome browser.

Find your way to Extensions (through settings) and search for Netflix Party and add it to the browser. A logo with the red letters NP will appear among the icons beside your address bar.

I will pick the movie and create a Netflix Party with a chatroom and post the link on the SHADOWS group page in Facebook. Click on that as the start time (I'll post it) approaches and you should end up in the Netflix chatroom (you will have an avatar and will be able to choose you own name for the chat). You'll notice that the movie has not started yet. 

If you don't see the chatroom and the movie starts playing you are in the wrong place. NB - you can only do this with a browser which might well mean you need to watch it on a computer. I get a laptop and connect it to my tv with an HDMI cable. This is the bit where we start losing people. You might also be able to use Chromecast (don't have that so can't try it).

When the time comes I'll start the movie and every one will see the same thing at the same time.

So, join me, won't you?

Shadows Contactless: Friday 18 September 9pm, SBS on Demand and Messenger: DELICATESSEN

 

Add caption

I've only seen this once and when it was new. It's from so long ago and there have been so many movies since that I'm struggling to recall it. Except, of course, that there are scenes and images from it that might as well be from Youtube clips they are so well shared. Delicatessen is one of the arthouse staples from the early '90s that everyone had seen. If you had a Valhalla or Astor calendar on your fridge at the time and for a decade on you would recall the word in the thick typeface under the pig. Thing is I can recall it so little that I can't remember if I enjoyed it or just said I enjoyed it. It will almost be a first viewing.

What I can say is that this is the first feature of the team Jeunet and Caro who also gave us (together or apart) The City of Lost Children and Amelie. If you know them you know the deal. They get into a look and vibe like steampunk or comic book and tell extraordinary tales, never so cute that they can't also gross you out, never so gross that they can't also filter it through humour. Mostly, they offer invention, wit, visual wonder and engagement and invite you to the party. Let's go.

Shadows Contactless: Friday 11 September 9pm: SBS on Demand + Messenger: THE UNKNOWN GIRL

 

A young doctor in her first senior job prevents a trainee from answering an after hours call at the clinic as she judges it not to be an emergency. The next day police officers arrive to request the surveillance tape from the door. It shows one of the last actions of a woman who was murdered that night as she sought refuge at the clinic. Sounds like the start of a thriller. It is, kind of. This 2016 film from les freres Dardenne concentrates on character, the character of the doctor who seeks to know the deceased woman posthumously. Still sounds like a thriller.

Well, it is and it isn't. The Dardenne brothers have for decades been serving up the grimmest of social realism for decades from their base in Belgium and here they stretch out to genre to see what they can find out about their characters. The good news is that it works. We do get a hefty load of realist gravity but we also get a kind of lightening effect from the performances and an openness to cinema beyond the indignant eye of the usual fare. It is grim but it's also entertaining.

The Dardennes always cast perfectly and they place at the centre of the intrigue the luminous and compelling Adele Haenel who keeps the centre heavy but vital. (Actually, if you like the central perofrmance of this film I'll just slyly direct you to Portrait of a Lady on Fire which you can see on Stan. It's an extraordinary two hander which topped my favourite films of last year.)

If you like your verite don't worry about the thriller aspects, they're kept in rein. If you like your thrillers, don't worry, you'll enjoy getting to know the lady in the centre of the frame.

Join me.

Shadows Contactless: Friday September 4 9pm SBS on Demand and Facebook Messenger: WADJDA

Wadjda is a schoolgirl. She wants her own bike. To do this she enters a competition that could get her there. She has to be careful about this. Her mother isn't keen for her to go riding a bike around town as one wrong prang might break the girl's hymen. Wadjda is ten years old and lives in Saudi Arabia.

You might get a couple of impressions from that description that you are in for either a grim tale of oppression or a knockabout comedy of innuendo but this is neither of those things. There is a lot to be said for the position of women in this particular society and expectations of them and Wadjda's growing awareness of the kind of hurdles she will be facing in the not too distant future. But this film does something that many of its kind don't do, it remembers she's a kid and how kids pursue their things of great import. This prevents the film from preaching or being too sentimental and I can safely promise that you will be neither bored nor lectured and right up to the final gesture before the end credits you might well be charmed.

See you on the couch.

MIFF 68 1/2: Festival of Ether

In a world where celebration was life one festival stood up...

They were falling like dominos. Performance feasts like Melbourne Comedy, crowd magnets like the Grand Prix all tumbled before the microscopic player COVID-19. When I read that my beloved MIFF, too, was plummeting from the sky. And then toward July the wreckage stirred, dust blustered out and the thing rose to its feet and declared it would be going ahead, it would be a little different, given the times, but it would be there for us. It even gave itself a cinephilic joke as a name: MIFF 68 1/2.

The program was up by mid-July. It was expectably slimmer than normal and the pricing was acceptable (mostly). You couldn't do anything with the information on the handsomely refurbished website. Members were given earlybird benefits and were the first to be let loose on the fare but, really, apart from the festival itself that reaped some extra lolly, who really got anything out of membership this year?

I wasn't caring a deal about that as I was trying to work out how ticketing was being handled. Minipasses? Single Tickets. What delivery were we looking at? It had to be streaming but what was the platform would they take advantage of the flexibility? Finally, we'd see an end of the sold-out session or the issue of popular titles being uncomfortably full (when it's a physical event, I have switched tickets away from too full sessions). All of that would, however temporarily, be a thing of the past. Right? Later....

PROGRAM
At first glance it looked bland and unadventurous: documentaries, contemporary auteurs, verite. Then I noticed Dau. Natasha a product of the infamous Ilya Khrzanovsky's Dau. project (Google it) but then I recalled the film 4 from a few years back and passed. The plain packaging of Women Make Film almost had me passing on it, too until I realised how massive and compelling it might be (and was) A few more picks later and I had a modest five or so which was enough to take a week off work from home and feel like I was part of an event. The second week brought new titles and I added three.

What's Happening?
It was hard to find out how it was going to work until a breath before the festival itself. This made it difficult to plan. Were they going to replicate the effect of physical screenings by limiting their availability. Would there be a bulk deal like a minipass? What platform were they going to use and would I be able to plug into it? And so on. Without knowing most of these I decided to play it safe and take the second week off work from home (yes, that means something). It meant that, worst come to worst, I'd have a work free week off. The shape of the festival and access to it were to remain mysteries until the big launch on YouTube. It felt like an attempt to juice up the sense of event but it just felt like a grasp at the old normal.

The Website
The website was redesigned from the ground up and was an attractive and useful thing, eventually. I failed to get in until I asked on the FB group and was told that the redesign required new account creation from everyone which should have been on the landing page. Ok, done but I used to be able to go back and check previous years' activity which could come in  handy. That's gone forever.

If you used Chrome on Windows 10 it was anyone's guess where to click on the thumbnail to get to a given film's page. It really did seem randomised. On other platforms it was more consistent.

Ticketing
The main thing was the admission that there was no control to be had as to the numbers of viewers per household. Indeed, the sole means of policing was the silence in the streets after curfew (for Melburnians, at least).

There were bundles offered of like films for any who wished for a more controlled experience and these were well priced. While there was an adjusted membership pricing and benefit list it held no better lure than under the old circumstances. I could still have done with a minipass but as the pricing was acceptable I went with a list about the same size as a mini.

Pricing was in two tiers: $14 (most of them) and $20 (spotlights) which is more or less on par with services like Apple Movies. Exceptions included the epic Women Make Film series which was $20 for the lot (viewing windows per episode, a relief for a 14 hour series).

Delivery
When it was unveiled the delivery method was via the website with a number of recommendations. I chose plugging a laptop into my tv via HDMI which mostly worked a treat (problems I had with this were pretty much due to which device I was using). Once started, punters were given a decent 30 hour window to complete the film which allowed a rewatch if needed (see below for issues with this).

Anyone puzzled by this or without the means was stuck with watching on a computer or smaller screen device.

If you needed to pause a film for a later resumption within the window you were faced with the entire introductory slideshow and ads again, you couldn't just pick it up. So what? Well, the slides for sponsors etc., while I understand why they're there, are on screen forever as the ridiculously high volume background music throbs. Then you get a few commercials. Normal fare and then an age restriction warning and any notes about the screening itself (captions etc.). Is there no way at all to allow that to be bypassed for a resumed screening? I timed it a few times and was able to potter about getting food or drinks ready while it blared away.

Films designated "Spotlight" were unable to be played until a given timeframe on a single date. This struck me as an idea to inject a sense of moment to highlighted features, to add a feeling of communal festival going. Wouldn't that be most effective if the after chat (or the simultaneous chat) were allowed by agreement between friends who'd organise it anyway? A complete absence of popular participation in available forums (Twitter and FB were crammed with publicity posts which caught a very few responses by comparison with previous fests. I used to enjoy seeing the live Twitter wall at MIFF venues; it really gave out a sense of community. I can't, then, quite comprehend the decision to limit particular titles to such constrained windows when the advantage of having a VoD platform is that it frees the punters of that entirely.

And what's with limited ticketing? Is that really a licencing restriction? A technical one; is there a limit to the amount of connections? Any of these might be true but because they are so constricting it would be useful to know why this is so as it makes it a lot easier to deal with and plan by. If anything like this form of MIFF happens again, just tell us why you are constrained to limit certain films. It will be a lot less annoying knowing that it isn't just someone's futile attempt at creating buzz.

What I Saw Ranked

Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema - An encyclopedic epic of how cinema works using only the output of women filmmakers. Mesmerising and ocean deep.

Shirley - Good stab at biographical film that uses the themes of the subject over a timeline of significant events and creates a film that would be interesting if it were about anyone.

She Dies Tomorrow - The thought of mortality as a virus plays out among some ten percenter Californians. More effective for its subtlety.

Prayer for a Lost Mitten - A cinematic poem of charm and quiet power.

The Tango of the Widower and its Distorting Mirror - A puzzle rewarding the adventurous.

The Go-Gos - A good rockumentary tells of how an act works, for better and worse

Black Bear - A serpent of invention eating its tail.

La Llorona - Sombre and deep felt magical realism about the resonance of tyranny.

Anne at 13,00 Ft - Effectively difficult. Too effectively difficult.

So...

I had gripes about the teasing approach which felt tiresome rather than exciting and the delivery method could stand a lot of work and a few other whinges but, look, after all the other major events had to cancel, MIFF found a way of forging ahead and provided a decent generalist program that still shied form the mainstream. They delivered.

SHADOWS Contactless: Friday August 28 9 pm SBS on Demand + Messenger: THE DEATH OF STALIN

After a final act of negative influence, a kind of accidental bullying, the great leader and teacher of all the Russias and peoples of the greater Soviet metropolitan area dies. A few localised fumbles later and the party cogs roll into the room and try to work out what to do while watching what they say because they don't know who's listening but they also know who they are talking to. And that's the top people.

Armando Iannucci's hard satire swings between gallows humour and the real gallows as the fallout from the death of Stalin hurtles downward through the ranks. Why bother doing this now? Couldn't someone have come up with it in the '50s when it was a fresher story? Political muscling, whether self avowed or not, doesn't easily regenerate without a contest of people near the top who want themselves to be where the boss was. You can extend that to the bizarre state of information bending and bullet dodging of elected officials here and now. Stalin and his crew set themselves to reality redefinition as though it were Sunday lunch and everyone knew what happened to anyone who might cry: "but you said...!"

The mind who gave us Veep, The Thick of It, and In the loop knows that there are times when satire need only be applied as a thin sheen over reality. With the event of the title of this film Ianucci has, if anything, only to restrain himself until the emergent truth of its chaos appears. The Stalin story is particularly poignant as it brought up the confusion that occurs when succession raises its head after the death of an autocrat. Who goes next? The party light or the relative? Did this roll the sequence from Tsar a full circle to a replacing autocrat?

In the end, after all the brutality and paranoia, Ianucci delivers us from gut punch to belly laugh without ever having to err into cuteness or over-earnestness. That along with a dream cast and some great comic timing, gets us here to where the lampoon meets the wall.

Join me, won't you?

MIFF Session 10: WOMEN MAKE FILM: A NEW ROAD MOVIE THROUGH CINEMA

The title of this does more than simply describe the contents of this massive documentary series, it expresses its approach. How to present cinema directed by women without potentially alienating audiences through politics? You make the entire thing a primer in cinema itself from focal length, editing to representing the meaning of life but you only use films directed by women. If you come out of this thinking "not all male directors" this experience has left you on the side of the road. This is a celebration and everyone's invited.

The framing device is also in the title. The various narrators are seen driving cars or unseen as the dashcam takes down winding roads while the story of cinema and how it is created is told by voices such as Tilda Swinton or Jane Fonda. That established we are given 40 chapters that inform us of what cinema is, how it is constructed and how its part of the essential bargain with the audience.

The size of the instalments is daunting (all but the last are three hours long) but the focus on the issues is kept so focused and accessible that viewing becomes a question of how to interrupt it rather than how much more you can take. This would work better in a tv on demand setting when the resumption of a paused episode was not prefaced with the masses of sponsor messages and advertising that every screening in the MIFF context was given. There are around eight chapters to an episode so the lines are pretty clearly drawn for the time-poor viewer. This would be essential on ABC or SBS on demand services.

This is a Mark Cousins project and features his writing. This is usually lucid and informative but can stretch into hyperbole and go spinning out of control in the space of a single sentence. It can also at times crawl under the viewer's radar when the thing it is meant to define is proving elusive and the accompanying footage presents a question that is not answered. These moments are not frequent but I can recall them and when you're talking a fourteen hour stretch that's something. Cousins' own voice on other series like The Story of Film has a Northern Irish lilt that stays on the right side of monotonous or grating but here, putting his commitment where his creativity is he employs some of the most sonorous voices he could find to tell the tale.

So, fourteen hours of cinema instruction and history that highlights the contribution of women film directors later and I'm ready to follow up on a mass of titles (listed here: https://www.womenmakefilm.net/) And I have a strong sense I have just experienced a marvel. This series starts at its title to tell you what it intends but, outside of a few lines in the opening credits of each episode, it is free of political agenda, concentrating on cinema that, increasingly sensed throughout, demonstrates that good films are good films. The potential for a kind of monument to tokenism quashed, we are given the key and the movies beyond the door are waiting.

MIFF Session 9: SHIRLEY

Rose and Fred are newlyweds who turn up at the household of celebrated writer Shirley Jackson and her husband Stanley, college professor and literary critic. The couple move in until they can find their own home and Fred's academic career can get a good start. What follows is a version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf for depressives as the blocked writer stirs to find amusement and then inspiration in manipulating the young couple. Stanley parades and philanders, stifling the ambition of his own protege, Fred. Rose becomes fascinated by Shirley and begins her own invasion.

Fiction based on historical events should not serve the timeline. I don't mean that it should not be true (truth, however abstract, must be its purpose). I do mean that it should not admit events into its own timeline just because they happened. Most biopics ignore this notion and play out like pageants, leaving the interrogation of the life in question behind the mask of worth. Exceptions are rare but telling. Amadeus plays out as mythology, pitting one figure against another, each representing something about their art and creativity in general, ending in a showdown of the worldly and divine. This is not the place to begin a biographical study of the composer but it offers great insight into the mind and motives of a skilled mediocrity (its narrator, Salieri). Nowhere Boy about a teenage John Lennon takes care to omit the name of the band he is forming by the end of the story: that he became famous despite and/or because of the emotional torment of his youth is what lives on the screen and the images of the fame serve an end credit sequence.

Shirley comes from this kind of place. Her famous short story The Lottery is mentioned in several scenes (including the opening where it's spoiled) but she, as yet has not written a novel. More intriguingly, she is on the trail of a missing student from the local college from a few years before. In a moment of communion Rose offers an insight into the case that lights the moribund Shirley's eyes. These are characters in a story first and foremost. We are given no signposts to particular works from Jackson's output (no scenes where she is served by a timid clerk named Nell or meets a bestial college wife called Theo) as the idea of a writer crawling from the slough of despond through the opportunity to exercise power over another after years of dominance by her husband (which sent her to the slough to begin with).

These are the things that give this tale of sustained powerplay its darkened mood and near Gothic atmosphere. As such it performs a far better ground to approach an understanding of the writer of such iconic horror tales. Elizabeth Moss, the world's go to character actor, brings the light of rage into Shirley Jackson, one who knew the deadliest blows are dealt in embraces.

MIFF Session 8: SHE DIES TOMORROW

Amy is convinced she will die the next day. After an opening scene in which she is farewelling a character we don't see (unless it's the guy we see through a doorway who appears to be ranting) she returns to her house, puts the Lachrimosa from Mozart's Requiem on loop (well, it's vinyl so she just keeps putting it back to the start of the track) and does stuff while getting progressively drunk. She tries calling a friend who doesn't seem to hear her that well but says that she'll ignore her family commitments and come and visit Amy. Amy gives up on the call and keeps doing stuff.

Jan does turn up, lets herself in and talks Amy down from a wall (not suicidally high). Amy tells Jane about dying the next day. Jane observes Amy's falling off the wagon and cautions her against rash decisions but Amy isn't talking about taking her own life. Then what? She's just convinced she has less than a day to live. Assured that Amy is essentially fine, Jane leaves and goes to her sister in law's birthday drinks, interrupting a bizarre conversation about dolphin sex (which the other two guests are not comfortable with) with her own conviction that she, too, will die tomorrow. She's already tried to call Amy with this but got no answer. It got into her head and it won't leave. Eventually she does, going back to her strange home studio. We hear a conversation between the two guests who have also caught the thought and then back at the brother's house the couple both get infected. They go to their daughter's room and cuddle paternally.

The spread of the thought is then assumed to make its way throughout the city. Jane, wandering aimlessly, later comes upon two young women who are having a stunned but quite happy conversation about it. And then at one point we see the end of the chain that brought it to Amy and, while it answers no further question than that we understand that it is an ongoing malaise.

This feels less like a simple outbreak of meditations on mortality than an epidemic of existentialism. It bears the same message to everyone it touches but they respond differently. Against this the baubles of the old normal as activities, possessions and the trappings of reproduction and nesting are on display in a presentation that swings from video-verite to purple psychedelia. Once the nagging bug of an idea gets in everyone is changed, regardless of whether they will die or not, bodily or not.

Kate Lynn Sheil redeems herself from the winceable mess that was Kate Plays Christine and provides a strong central or starting figure of sliding chaos that will envelope the rest of the cast. The ever welcome Jane Adams brings her dependable convicted fragility to Jane. The scene with the doctor that morphs into a sex scene but doesn't is powered by her wonder, eagerness and barely concealed disappointment. Tunde Adebimpe whose role becomes more profound that we might expect shows us great subtlety in his polite uninterest in the party conversation which expands into the strong but quiet conviction in the subsequent conversation.

She Dies Tomorrow flirts with a kind of indy mumblecore drama but refuses to give in to it. There is pretty much nothing cute about it (which immediately tears it from those conventions) but there are stretches of warmth and authentic concern. I almost gasped to see the main production credit go to Benson and Morehead, a team whose films as writers and directors have built a growing cosmic horror realm including the adjacent After Midnight/Something Else (2018). This film bears little of their stamp but rather doesn't disagree with their branded Lovecraftoverse. It would be an apt entry into a B&M marathon. On its own, it stands as a creditable absurdist what-if. Points!