Review COLOURS OF TIME

Young Adele is leaving her idyllic country home to seek her mother in Paris. Her mother has kept Adele afloat with a regular monthly payment for her twenty years, leaving no personal memory in her daughter. On the way, this is late 19th century, she meets a couple o' young bohos on the river cruiser headed to the city de lights for fame 'n' fortune as a painter and photographer. They're a little edge but seem fine at heart. When Adele does meet her mother it's in the Monmartre brothel where she's a star. Ok, so where did those two boys say they were staying?

Meanwhile in the present the descendants of Adele filter a quartet of interested parties to inspect the near forgotten family home in the provinces. They find a trove of photographs, a few paintings but think little of them. They differ on what the greater clan should do with the property which is being touted by the real estate brigands as the site of a supermarket to be. 

Meanwhile, Adele makes up with her mum and starts to free herself up from her rustic roots and swan into a golden gaslight venue to meet the great and famous of La Belle Epoque. In the present, the canvas is borne to an expert in a specialist museum as it really does look kinda ... impressionist. A voyage on the good ship ayahuasca has consequences both funny and aching. 

I seem to be skimming with faint appraisal but this is less a film of plot and revelation (though it does contain both) than one of personified themes. The four cousins range from the Gen Zed fashion photographer whose profession's shallowness saddens him to the bon vivant apiarist who wants the world to slow down, the industrial disruptor who wants it to speed up, and the gentle French teacher who wants it to be more aware of itself and everything it has already been. In the past we are cleft by personal magnetism to Suzanne Lindon whose Adele aborbs the shocks of Parisian life with an increasing strength that is tempered by a sadness, seeing her own innocence pale and fade. 

This is a layered tale of discovering the importance of experience, of treasuring the moment while savouring the riches of the past. It does this heartily, without a twee second of screen time. One review called it Paris porn. Do NOT Google that! If you've seen Amelie, you'll get the idea. Is this Paris porn? Oh my worthy wombat yes. If you've ever had a fix on the deliciousness of the city you will luxuriate in this film. But it is also aware of the weight of its themes. At one point, the centennials run to a high spot to look upon the first street in town to have electric light. In this film about painting vs photography we are well reminded of their relation to the beginnings of the very thing we are watching. Paris wasn't just home to great art and photography but offered the world some heavy early milestones. Put the potential twee out of your mind, go and sit back and feast. You'll love the taste.

Viewing notes: a lovely morning session on a pleasant rainy day. It was interrupted by a fire alarm. The last time that happened was during Beasts of the Southern Wild in 2012. The beeps were in time with the movie's music and I just thought it was a nice incursion of electronica. This one had someone with a great Mark E. Smith voice telling us to stand by. It kept going so I went out and was told by the harried staffer on the phone that they'd pause the film if they didn't have to evacuate the cinema (Kino in the Sofitel complex). I had a loo break and told the few others in the audience when I got back in. A shorter tempered staffer came in and explained what I just had and an older bloke started insisting rudely on an answer which the staffer couldn't give. I politely advised him to cool down, we were all pissed off and they should get an answer to us soon. I had just said that when the film resumed, just before the point of the alarm. Well done, Kino!

Review: PASSENGER

After a prologue that gives away the monster but not the exact summoning, we meet couple Maddie and Tyler who have quit their job-bound lives to stay on the road in a well appointed van. Of course, they are going to meet the big bad but not until we get to know them a little. When they do, it's on until the big end and then the credits. 

Movies like this need a few things to work: a scary monster, appealing leads and a compelling legend. Well, we get the appealing leads. Jacob Scipio and Lou Llobell are very easy to like and the writers are careful to bring a little friction into the relationship. In the course of a few scenes, we learn that Maddie is less enthusiastic than Tyler about life on the road but he accomodates this with a few cheeky motel bookings to help ease the way and suggest that Tyler does value the relationship over the big project.

The scene comes along when they inevitably break the lore and invite the big bad along with them. Then it's pursuit, weird incidents and outright violence and end.The reason the big bad is that he is just bad. No great motivation behind his torment of the couple beyond them allowing him in by their breach. Ok, doesn't Hellraiser not care whether the earthlings are good or not, as long as they summon the Cenobites? Yes, but that is complicated by several line-crossings in the characters and familial relationships and makes for an unpredictable tale. This one starts, goes, keeps going, and ends pretty much exactly as you expect after the first couple of scenes.

That said, I'm sure director Andre Ovredal wouldn't be bothered by the criticism. Like the stable of filmmakers behind the Conjuring and Insidious franchises, it's all about the formula. I can choose not to pick the formula but, after the linear Troll Hunter, Autopsy of Jane Doe and the boring The Last Voyage of the Demeter, this one seemed to offer a kind of urban myth creep to it. But it's just jumpscares. Oh, one exception. There is a genuinely creepy sequence in a car park, the power of which completely transcends the rest of the film which, after its moved on, just flattens out again into cruise control. Seems trivialising but I did appreciate how wounds received in the action were attended to and dressed.

I could probably watch any number of two cent found footage movies on Tubi and find at least three that unnerve me in some way. The thing I didn't list above that this film didn't supply is suspense. There's none. Big bad turns up, seems to have supernatural powers, and does his stuff. Next.

Review: PRIMAVERA

The girls of the orphanage are watching a young stray mother cat suckle her kittens. When the matron finds them, she teubars the kittens from the mother, bags them along with a hefty rock which she drops into the canal outside. The girls get back to their business, rehearsing for their concert where they will be either masked or hidden from their aristocratic audiences or married off to the men of the group as breeding machines. It's Venice in the 18th century and if you're a woman your choices are limited.

When the composer the orphanage is using proves a duller drawcard for patronage then the one with the more famous composer a few blocks down the canal, the board agrees to get the one they let go a few years back. He's good at tunes but even better at underselling himself. He himself was sold into the priesthood as a child when his mother made a foolish vow to her god to send him off there after reading a coincidence as a miracle. So, he has been less than stellar away from the orphanage but his reputation as a composer has improved and, through his incessant asthmatic coughing, manages to whip the players into a shape concordant with his fiery music. His name is Antonio Vivaldi. Yes, that Antonio.

When I saw that this film with this subject matter was on offer I resolved to see it. I'll put up with a lot of cuteness in the name of celebrating a favourite composer, twee as it can get, and Vivaldi's story is a good one. In this case, it's also a very well told one. The centre is not on the composer but one of the violinists in the orchestra, Cecilia. She is chosen as the soloist by Vivaldi as she played without regard for approval but what the music demanded. We follow her musical progress but also her arranged attachment to a war hero officer. Those two things will prove contradictory in this scheme.

While we haven't had an inundation of composer biopics lately, there is a tradition among them that the composers be treated as a mix of gods and rock stars, rude and explosive and beloved for the greatness of their art. This stretches well before Amadeus crowned the approach and is partly what I expected. Vivaldi wrote the hit song of virtuoso violinists in his series of concertos called The Four Seasons. His enlivening music that set a flashing violin performance against a string ensemble can win non-classical listeners the way that Kind of Blue wins jazz skeptics. His evocation of the forces of nature expresses a boldness and power that sets it apart from its baroque contemporaries; we hear the summer storms, feel the snowfall, and even the oppressive asthma-hostile breathless heat of summer in the sound without ever needing to be fanciful. It's there.

This film scores big points for doing little more than suggesting that the composer turn his attention to nature as an inspiration. In the performance moments, there are a very few subtle hints at this epochal work. Mostly, we see the effect of Vivaldi as a mentor to a developing musician, the limitations of a society that forbid both artistic heights and human fulfilment in the same person. Apart from the crowned heads and local worthies our pallett is as beige and ascetic as the uniform dresses that the orphans must wear and the plain lower cleric garb of the composer's priestly garb. The walls of the cultural prison might well have been the inspiraiton for the sense of dress in a Venice that has been so richly celebrated for its colour, fashion and art. When the music takes flight it almost lifts us from our seats. 

As the post credit note (no, not a spoiler) reminds or informs, Vivaldi was a local unknown in his life and the wonders of his music were not uncovered until two centuries after his death. His life was as cloistered as it is suggested here. Cecilia's tale might seem more fanciful and free-thinking that would have been the case at the time. She is named after the patron saint of music which spirit is let free to roam her otherwise cloistered mind. But that is just the effect we encounter while listening to Vivaldi's music in the knowledge of how he lived and died. A sober portrait of genius but very welcome for all that.

Viewing notes: Primavera is still hanging on at cinemas like Melbourne's Nova but is also available through Prime for rent or purchase. .

Review: THE END OF OAK ST

We open on a community barbeque and the narrative telescoping of every plot point we'll see along the timeline of this movie. The main family is stressed to collapse. Dad's still delivering pizzas, Son sees the coming scission and regrets and brings his dog to the party against Mum's wishes, Daughter wants to go to Cornell to be taught by Carl Sagan but it's too expensive, and Mum's writing a bitter novel about all of it. Then, the whole neighbourhood gets yanked out of the present by unseen forces and now they're in the land of the dinosaur.

Then, for the remainder of the running time, they have to workshop their troubles and fighting for their lives so they get a forced perspective on things while they try to figure out what has happened and how to get back to where they once belonged. That's it.

This is David Cameron Mitchell's third feature after the brilliant teen horror It Follows and the (can't comment, haven't seen) Under the Silver Lake and I'm getting reminder notes from the legacy of Richard Kelly who, so far, really only had one great movie in him. (Kelly did crap on his own legacy with a hasty new cut of Donnie Darko which lowered its IQ but we can talk about that another time.) People got It Follows wrong, thinking it was punishment for teen sex (it was more about knowledge and responsibility) and it looks like he never wanted that to happen again. Well, it won't with this one. It's even set in the '80s, as though that's going to protect it from people who find it too literal and pointless.

As an example of that, I'll cite this movie's use of the dioptre (diopter for those of US spelling bent). There is a scene of the family discussing the situation. We see tight two-shots where both characters (mother and son, daughter and father for e.g.) are in sharp focus but couldn't be. They are in focus but the lens is focused on two points with an attachment that looks like a halved lens. It's almost as old as cinema itself but I'll give a very famous example: when Chief Brody is talking to Bad Hat Harry on the beach in Jaws, the beach behind Harry should be a blur but it's sharp. When dioptres are used there's usually a telltale seam, often with noisy subjects like hair but sometimes it's right along a seam in the set design like a doorway or darkness. As this is a technique I notice on sight, I was distracted in locating the seam. There's one in which the corduroy couch in the middle distance goes suddenly from sharp lines to a blur. Have you noticed how long this paragraph has gone explaining this? Well, watch that scene and try to explain to me how it served the narrative even slightly. It's there because someone watned to do it. That's all. And there are a few more. Anyway...

The thing about it is not that it doesn't cut it as an action adventure, that works a treat, it's just that you have seen this action adventure more times than you can count. Anne Hathaway leads the cast with dependable skill and the whole thing goes at a clip before it ends. I didn't stay through the end credits but it wouldn't surprise me to discover that there was a post credit scene.

Apart from some slightly new takes at the detail level there is really little more I can say. If you want popcorn with a zero-challenge movie, this is it.

Viewing notes: the Shogoth behind me in the cinema murmured something at one point but I let it pass. Then, when a cataclysmic event happened, he groaned out loud: "was that really necessary?" I swung round and met his Friday-night-with-beer-pizza-and-the-boys grin with the hiss: "Please be QUIET!" regetting the "please" instantly. He was silent for the rest of it.

Review: TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA

Chris, a young filmmaker, gets a gig as the director to resurrect an old slasher franchise. As a young and queer and independent director she's demographically perfect to reboot a genre long characterised as anti-sex. If she's doing it, it's gotta be right for now, right? Let the wokies take that. But then, after a meet and greet with the original final girl that's straight out of an '80s horror flick, she is entranced and pleasurably fearful of the older Billy Presley who has been living in voluntary obscurity since the first Camp Miasma movie. All the plans Chris had for the origin story fade to invisibility as she tries to get Billy to tell her what her crucial look in the eye was about all those years ago. The suits won't be thrilled (you'll meet them) but Chris is about to go for a career igniting ride.

Jane Shoenbrun's third feature sees the production values catch up with her ideas. Those sprites of the mind are flying in the light like fireflies and make this characteristically slower paced outing rich and strange (which, Schoenbrun herself will soon be). First, there might be a reference to every single '80s slasher that ever was (as well as a host of them from before). Second, her themes of untreated pain and alienation in the nooks of lives, are here more concentrated than in We're All Going to the World's Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. The discipline is palpable and makes the whole busy movie rush by.

Apart from those themes we have a lot of notes about cult movie fandom, video culture and seeing grown up things too young. It's about the slasher genre and why it keeps coming back for new crops of teenagers before and behind the screen and it addresses the misconception of the subgenre that it is a conservative warning about having sex too young. I sing again with the hosts of The Faculty of Horror podcast: The movie's rad, the killer is the puritain. And it is about the monster of the Camp Miasma franchise, a box headed blade-wielder known as Little Death. I think I knew that little death was a euphemism not long after I knew I could have my own and that was from reading (and almost  all that that implies). Keep you eye on that concept and you'll find the slow focus of the central mechanism of this movie roll into clarity.

Schoenbrun brings her multi-media montage to a frenzy. When the time comes to evoke gthe '80s style in quote from the film within the film, she gleefully overstates the geysers of blood but goes on to gtakea more considered look at a massacre scene and the look in the eye of the then teenaged Billy as life events converge on her during the shoot all those decades ago. This is a rich mix.

Hannah Einbinder shows us depth from the word go as an ambitious but still timid young artistwith big issues; her trek is a constant development. However, it is Gillian Anderson who takes and keeps centre screen with an updated Norma Desmond of the slasher movie. She is clearly relishing this role, by turns monstrous and nurturing.

If this is what Schoenbrun can do with only two feature films notched up, I can only wait for the next. I don't care if she is accused of ghettoising her sexuality the way others are charged with doing that with their ethnicity, aren't artists meant to express what they know? Let's be fair about this. Then again, her next project is aa series adaptation of Cherles Burns' eerie coming of age graphic novel Black Hole. Some carry over themes in that and she uses the stark black and white of the comic I think we're in for a treat. Meantime, try this flavoursome third album from an artist worth your attention. Oh, she usually gets compared to Lynch. Sure, but I'm going to add Luis Bunuel.

LOGAN'S RUN @ 50

In this future you get blown up at the age of thirty. You can try lying about your age but the little jewel light on your palm will start blinking and it's off to the carousel of  "renewal" for thee. Some try to flee, and get called runners, but are hunted down and killed by the Sandmen. So, that's it for choices. One day, one of the Sandmen, Logan, gets a mission to find Sanctuary, the mythological home of successful escapees, it's a tad thankless as his own use by is brought forward and the command will deny all knowledge. Ok, that cute girl from the Transmat Tinder seemed a little out of joint with the society. She's probably part of the underground. They run. Sandmen in pursuit.

Logan's Run is an adaptation of a co-written novel from 1967. If you're seeing hippie happenings in the renewal ceremony, that's why.  Even with the reference being out of date in an America soured by the Vietnam War and Watergate, the juxtaposition of kaleidoscope colours and ritual adult termination works well. The softening of one renders the violence of the other clear. The runners aren't just going for their lives, they are the ones who walk away from this Omelas (please read Ursula Le Guin's short fable), opting out of the paradise that depends on mass murder for its continuation. 

Dystopian cinema was having a moment in the early to mid '70s with outings like ZPG and Rollerball. Popular science books like Future Shock foretold a society of detachment and alienation. THX 1138's culture includes counselling booths where a bland picture of Christ spies on the locals and advises them to buy more. Hollywood could sell tickets to bummer premises, regardless of the ending and the sharper of the directors could go to town on design and poignancy. Logan's Run feels like a feature film but looks like a contemporary TV show. Someone only just seeing it now might find that offputting but it's intentional. The slick new city looks like the Brady Bunch in a nightwear-only shopping centre.

The lightness of the dialogue feels cultivated, suggesting a cultural imperative to the naivete of its sound. That goes with the climate controlled skimpiness of the costume and the sex and hedonism on delivery. This state of things is a designed culture. Everything is beautiful, even the official lie that renewal meets what it says rather than violent population control. A later scene, outside the city shows a kind of AI that has gone from gathering seafood to something ghastly as a logical extension. Could Sanctuary itself, the promised home of the escapees, be different bullshit from the same source? Who said the future's shock had to be hard and all at once? Modern audiences of this film might not easily see its darker shades and what that might say about them as consumers.

Everyone in the city is beautiful. They're bred that way and no one's older than thirty. To that end the perfect Micheal York and Jenny Agutter as Logan and his partner in escape Jessica are machine perfect humans being apex male and female as the 1970s would have them. Both British actors in a cast of Americans, they keep their accents but for a few vowel shifts and both provide solid reinforcement of the assembly line smile to the extent that it looks more like fancy dress. York was often considered a self-player, a handsome fencepost but he's shouldering the role as well as he did in Cabaret, here. Is it that or had he finally found his perfect part? Agutter, always an alert presence on screen, effortlessly displays the resistance under the skin. By the time we get to Peter Ustinov's doddery sage, we can see the purpose beyond the sheen.

I revisited this thinking that I would be in for an exercise in ridicule, a taste of where dystopia met Disney but really, this is an example of why it can be good to be wrong.

Viewing and reading notes: I hired this through Prime but you can also get it on HBO and Apple. You could try for an old DVD at an op shop or online but you won't get a new copy on physical, hereabouts. Oh, and again, please seek out and read the four page wonder that is Ursula Le Guin's Those Who Walk Away from Omelas. It's an extension of the trolley problem that will keep you thinking which (like Guinness) is good for you. 

Review: THE BLUE TRAIL

Brazil in the near future. The old get their houses marked with alloy laurel wreaths. Then they get sihpped off to "colonies". No one comes back from a colony. Tereza, seventy-seven, is doing fine, thanks all the same, is put into the custody of her daughter who is less than pleased to accept the burden. One thing Tereza wants to do before death is fly in a plane. As her documents card just leads her back to her daughter's blocking, she goes off grid, bribes a riverboat man to take her where she can bribe a local to take her in an Ultra Light. This story, even if she does get up in the air, is not about the destination.

This satire on what the future of the aging population might look like is happy to take things slowly and let the lessons fall gently. Tereza discovers much that her shrinking life in the village was keeping hidden about life in the greater world. The title refers to a rare snail that secretes a blue liquid as its trail. Folklorically, a drop of that into each eye will produce visions of the future. It only ever seems to give people bitter trips of bad things that happened in the past. That's funny both times we see it and it's not hard to plug it into the story's overarching theme of the hazards of escape.

What we see of the colony is the reduction of the old to cattle. They are required to wear incontinence nappies whether they need them or not. They are strapped into their transport seats with what look like restraints rather than safety devices. Tereza used to work in a crocodile butchery. At the start of the film we see the baby crocs flowing down water slides before we see their caracasses on hooks getting trimmed with circular saws. The recalcitrant old are trussed up in cage-backed vehicles for forced transport to local police stations.

Then again, while her featurelessly routine life in the village is reduced to existing through each day and year without event, as soon a Tereza's adventures begin on the river and she variously finds contentment and disappointment, we are compelled to wonder why she couldn't have just done something comparable before the threat of incarceration. I know, plots drive on conflict and crisis, but perhaps the easy inclines of the story's timeline points might have benefitted from a few more peaks. 

I say this mainly from my admiration of Denise Weinberg's charismatic performance at the centre as Tereza. Nothing gets past her and when she is placed in front of the hurdles and failures along the journey you know the cogs and sparks are flashing behind those strong eyes. This is not a film of intense dialogue, it is far more a visual feast, but then she might have been given more licence to act without words. 

This is hard to say for sure as the film has good performances that feel independent of the director. That is my problem, if any, with this modestly eight-six minute fable, we feel like more fable. Funnily enough, I am, for the second year in a row, avoiding my usual winter holiday with MIFF and just taking a week off. This movie felt exaclty like the kind of thing I would have chosen to get in another movie at the Forum. Glad I saw it but wouldn't have missed it.

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS @ 55

Judge Justin Playfair's nerves have been pushed to snapping. The years of seeing the worst of humanity and the law being abused have cast him into a fantasy: he thinks he's Sherlock Holmes. His brother is using this leverage to get the family's fortune signed over to himself. There is also a troubling blackmail attempt looming against Justin. He agrees to an assesment by a psychiatrist, confident he'll sail through it  but an incident at the hospital makes everyone who has seen it doubt Justin's supposed mental illness, particularly the doctor intended as his assessor, a Dr Mildred Watson.

If you're still with me, you might be thinking how cute this sounds, an early '70s goofy comedy where the crazy man turns out to be a sage. Not so fast. Early scenes where Justin does answer to his real name complicate that scenario. His first dialogues with Mildred suggest that there is a kind of crushing sadness to his fugue state. The ethics of his pantomime name that failed his own strength and had him running to idealism are flattened against the wall in a world he insists is built only of fact. A middle-act musing on the principles in Western movies compound this. Justin Playfair is screaming under his clipped adopted accent and deerstalker hat. Dr Mildred Watson does assume a journey of her own in following her patient's hard won whimsy and armour but, despite early signs, it won't be leading to a big song of hope before the credits.

The opening years of the 1970s in American mainstream cinema boasts a number of durable fables of eccentricity against the system, joyful whimsy against the staidness of the world. Harold and Maude, Catch-22, Little Murders, Where's Poppa, A New Leaf and more stood up to the crewcut authority that saw students gunned down on campuses and the repression of anti-war protests. It was a time of reckoning for a film industry that had passed over more Doris Day for more Easy Rider and for a brief period the films that emerged in this spirit were given decent budgets and backed by the studios. After all, there really might have been a dollar to be made in this hippy shit.

Not all of it works, sometimes it's more shit than hippy, but when it does it holds principles that sing out to the decades beyond it. I showed Harold and Maude to a small group of Millennials back at the end of the 2000s and each one left the experience with a new favourite movie. At one point (traffic cop scene) the machine glitched and they cried out for me to repeat it from the start of the scene. I did and had never heard such laughter as it played. A very similar experience was had with Little Murders. If they Might Be Giants was available at the time, it would have joined them.

There's an important link between these films that has to do with their times as well as any optimism for their future. In Harold and Maude, it's the memento mori: the love story is overcast with the spectre of death, from the camps in Europe to the inevitable end of their relationship through death (not a spoiler, btw). In Little Murders the swelling tide of social rage spills into widespread homicide that weighs down any possible skidding off into the whimsy that began the film. In They Might Be Giants, Justin's loopy pursuit of an imagined Moriarity points increasingly toward a darkness at the end of the tunnel. 

If anything, it's Giants' presentation of a frightening ambiguity that might keep it from discovery as a cult movie. Some cuts omit a late scene at an all night supermarket. I remember seeing this as a late night movie and laughed loudly at the chaos of it, how the authority was caught up in the whirl and drawn to its own version of madness. If you see the cut without this, the film ends on a dour note with the final image promising a kind of doom for the characters in their personae or for the personae themselves.

The limited edition blu-ray from UK label Indicator provides both cuts. Having seen the shorter one in a local release, I opted for the longer one. The supermarket scene doesn't travel well across the years as its cuteness is not supported by its execution. It's still a good idea, just no longer a hilarious one. However, the shorter version that cuts it out leaves the film hanging heavily, swinging sluggishly towards an ending that only feels like a massive bummer.

What saves the film from its frequent skids from substance is a cast that enliven its uneven writing through commitment. George C. Scott as Justin brings his scenery gnashers out from the trophy room but keeps it warm as well. It's almost an apology for his publicly regretted (and Oscar winning) performance in Patton. Through the bluster he does allow us to see the screaming void that lies between Judge Playfair and the fictional sleuth role that feels so much better. Joanne Woodward as Watson gives us a professional whose own struggles with her profession stem from a frustration with its ethical slides. Her acquiesence of Justin's persona carries her own denied melancholy.

I don't think They Might Be Giants will be much cited in the same statement as Harold and Maude. It's still hard to get a hold of and the accretion disc of senior cinematic gems has been steadily fading with the fade of arthouse venues, the oaf-handed wash of the streamers masking off anything that takes engagement that might draw eyeballs from the phone screen to the viewing screen. I'll do some waving right here. We need more Don Quixotes to tilt at windmills. They really might be giants.

Viewing Notes: I watched my imported Indicator Blu-Ray of this film which allows it to scrub up well with clean video and audio, a good booklet and some worthy extras. The cut without the supermarket scene was available on Blu-Ray locally through Cinema Cult but I suspect it's out of print. I couldn't find it on the streamers but was not surprised about that. Find if you can. You'll be glad of it.

Review: THE MUSICIANS

To honour her father (and as a flex to her brother) Astrid demands that her company (roadwork equipment) fulfil dad's wish to hear an unplayed string quartet played for the first time. To honour the music, she wants it played on Stradivarius instruments. Eye watering amounts at auction later, she assembles the fiddles and then the players, applying interpersonal patches where needed, and sets them all at a country mansion to rehearse for a broadcast and recording that might well see her business back in black. The players either hate or disrespect each other and can't get it together to finish practicing a single movement. Time for the big guns. She persuades the composer who would as soon forget his own work, to come along and pep everyone up. This should go a lot more smoothly than it does. 

Gregory Magne's film of contemporary manners plays things easily with a series of increasingly important waves of conflict and resolution, piecing together the shards of dischord and arhythmia until, obstacle by obstacle, the greater problem is unavoidably clear. This is a film thatr understands music.

Hotshot young bowslinger George springs in, ready to take over while Peter is worried that his blindness will prevent him from an effective performance. Young influencer Appolline on the viola never went to music school but has played Carnegie Hall and Peter's ex squeeze Lise on cello turns to animate ice when they are in the same room. They are all daunted by the entrance of the composer Charlie Beaumont who is uneasy with the errant youthfulness of his forgotten music.

This is a film about ensemble, cooperation and concetration on the part as an essential to the whole. Music is not the magic that lesser attempts make it, something that only godlike people produce. It is work and it is acceptance of place in service of skill. 

When I chose this today, I wanted something far from the horror and violence and darkness I might normally go for that now only reminds me of the darkness in the news. I got it. This is a quiet lesson in banding for good instead of the screaming entitled narcisism deafening the globe. But if I'm suggesting it is a kind of soft feelgood piece in a French accent, I should also state that, for all its apparent gentleness, The Musicians packs a punch; it just takes its time to get to your gut. 

There is a moment that an American movie would put in the centre to prove the concept and show that everyone has learned and is ready for the world. Here, when Peter starts a folky version of the standard In The Pines and the others add their own parts, it's not a mounting cresendo of the righteousness of the buddy system, it's low key and through a natural sounding arrangement that really could have taken place. And it will melt your heart. Thetitle sequence of the film opens with what looks like a huge dank room in a monestary that soon proves to be the interior of a cello. In its first minutes you are told the type of movie you are going to get and assured that it is under way. Just what I needed. 

Viewing notes: went to a morning session and realised that this is the kind of movie that attracts seniors who can be even more entitled that teenagers about opining audibly. There was a contingent at the back and they are blithely gasbagging through the ads. But then they ceased and watched the movie all the way through quietly. Bliss.

Review: COLONY

A bio-terrorist stages an outbreak of a manufactured virus in a big building in down town Seoul. Clear nods to Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later and REC are made but this one does have this to bring to the table. It's not a living death that would result from the spread, the rage virus symptoms are only the beginning. The developer of the virus who begins the film by injecting himself with the sole dose of the antidote, has a strange new communication in mind. His act is a proof of concept. He has in the opposite corner a bio-scientist among the crew of survivors and another outside with the military team who are most interested in containment via masses of weaponry. There must be a brainy way out.

At some point, all Romero-style zombie outbreak movies turn into action movies, using suspense as the driving force of the narrative. The horde in Colony develop their cognition and behaviour through a hive like mass sharing of information. Add this to thte danger of being torn apart, anyway, and you've got a pretty good entry into the sub-genre. Writer/director Yeon Sang-ho has already been in the sub-genre with the extraordinary Train to Busan. We're in good hands.

As this review will be spoiler free, I'll leave the plot there. I can say, though, that the horde and their actions make for a spectacle both yucky and suspenseful. This story is about communication, though, and pits the hi-tek s;lime 'n' grime against more conventional intelligence and teamwork in a gratifyingly tense fashion. An enigmatic message on an invitation, when connected to the events later in the story is about communication failure. It's not too much of a stretch to see the link to the pandemic and the unknown horror of AI.

The casting, aside from the standard gathering of types for justly violent ends, is very good. Jun Ji-hyun as biologist locked into the situation balances with her clear compassion a solid intellect which brings a face almost constantly tight with thought. As her would be nemesis, Koo Kyo-hwan as Seo Young-cheol, the young, vengeful genius who invented the virus, displays a nonchalance of real creepiness, especially when among his seething creations.

If the ground is imperfectly broken and the innovation of the newer ideas in this one do not impress, the choreography of the horde's movements is strong and the blending of practical action and CG effects is seamless (except when it is used with the monkeys: they might just be too difficult to model). There are moral dillemas and mini tragedies on the stage and more than enough for the two hours of screen time to feel like a lot less. A largely electronic score keeps things growling and eerie by turns which will always get my vote. Fancy a fresh take on an old zombie tale? Spin it!

Viewing notes: I saw this at a surprisingly well attended screening for a 10 am show. The film is so involving and speedilly paced that audience talk wasn't a problem. Currently in cinemas.

THE RAPTURE @ 35 - SPOLIERS!

Sharon works in a call centre retrieving phone numbers for other people. Her workday is repeating that five second script for hours. By night she rides the passenger seat of her mate Vic's convertable as they cruise the L.A. strips for play pals. Then at all hours, they re-enact the juicy bits from Sodom and Gomorrah. Then it's back to "please hold for the number". Then, one of her noctural escapades she sees an extraordinary tattoo on a woman's back. It's a vivid pearl by a stream. The woman tells Sharon that its meaning has to do with the second coming of Jesus Christ. 

This loads Sharon up for closer listening to the mini cabal of apocalyptic Christians in the canteen at work. They see through her attempts at infiltration but then she does have the dream, that they all talk of sharing, about the pearl. Scene by scene, Sharon goes from restless frustration to high-charge spiritual wealth. Following a disaster in her life, some years on, she travels to the desert with her young daughter to meet the Apocalypse.

This fable is told so straight it derails into the bizarre. The redemption story of the first act is plain enough sailing but as soon as Sharon's religious awakening sets in and her zeal alters her life completely we start wondering what kind of movie we're watching. Is it an exercise in extended irony? Is it a genuine religious essa    y? It is to Mimi Rogers' credit that Sharon's transition feels less like a claimed miracle than a redirection of her energy from one way of life to another. Her initial cynicism becomes a determined hopefulness. Without this committed performance this story would be a rancid conversion story. We need to follow her from that self retooling into the great test of the middle act without being overwhelmed by our own cynicism. Does it work? I think that depends on the viewer's won religiosity.

Spoilers follow!

This was screenwriter Michael Tolkin's directorial debut. Between the hits of Gleaming the Cube and the 1992's massive The Player, he chose this modestly budgeted tale of gigantic deeds. It was impossible to sell to mainstream audiences and barely made it through the festival circuit and arthouse avenues. Woman gets religion, kills own daughter and faces God. Oh, and throw in a literal rendition of the Book of Revelation. Tough enough without Sharon's final decision which would set the least religious (like me) audiences into a slough of horror.

And as abrupt as her final defiance feels and how that makes it seem rushed, it has a very effective telescoping in the opening scene in which a glacial tracking camera passes by steel grey partitions of people in headsets constantly repeating a short script. It's as though Matthew Barney wanted to express the notion of Purgatory. Purgatory or Limbo (my familiarity with this nonsense is barely extant) is where she finally stands, having denied love of a God that drove her to atrocity. We don't need the final shot before the credits to linger, we've already seen how it plays. If Tolkin had written her returning to the call centre we would come to the same conclusion. 

But that is where this film defies its audience to stay with it. If the conversion was hard to witness, this self-sentencing is both an act of integrity and one of utter futiliy. When I showed this at a movie night, one of thesemi-regular crew, an Anglican priest in training, approached me afterwards and called it a very honest story. I'm still unsure of what she meant by that, but the film's refusal to punch down the way that some of its characters do does lend its plainness of touch a sense of sincere interest. (The same person came to see REC and through a grin said, "that was wicked!")

Tolkin imbues the pallet with a kind of magic hour gold, whether in Californian motel rooms or the dry wilderness of Sharon's sacrifice, giving the whole running time a kind of base comfort. When we start to see angels and apocalyptic horsemen across the horizon or standing on bitumen highways it gives us pause to recall how much of a horror fiction the Bible is (read the last book and see).

An acquaintance of mine worked at the Valhalla in Northcote and reported that when some creepy Christian types came to buy tickets for the Rapture he had to tell them that they'd just missed it. True story, but it only makes me wonder how this film would be received in the America of Christian Nationalism, by which the tenets of the religion are subordinate to the branding that nourishes mass bigotry and oppression. The movie wasn't made for people who think that the Bible was written in English or anyone who would comprehend Sharon murdering her child as virtuous. This movie was not made for people who do not know their own holy book. It wasn't made for anyone who would simply dismiss the very end as a moment of  "serves her right". It was made for anyone who would witness and question themselves. That's the hardest sell of all when it comes to a night at the movies. That's why The Rapture is one of my favourite films of the '90s.

Viewing notes: I watched my ancient DVD of this one in absence of anything better quality (though it's pretty swish for a DVD). It's long out of print on physical media but can be rented online at sources like Prime.

APRIL FOOL'S DAY @ 40: Spoilers

Muffy walks through her parents' mansion, preparing for guests. She finds a Jack in the box that first looses a mild scare but then, in a haze of childhood memories, shoots a monster out. Meanwhile, her guests gather at a jetty to take them to the mansion on the island across the lake. Like Muffy, they're all teritary students preparing for Spring Break. The first you see of them is the hot young Nikki who appears in the 4x3 frame of a camcorder like a found footage movie from the next decade. The rest reveal their character keynotes and when a knife fight starts among them that escalates into an overboard conflict it's soon revealed as a prank. It's the first of April, like the title says. Everyone's happy but then the ferry deckhand Buck falls off as the boat is docking and gets between the hull and the jetty on the island. Half his face crushed and bloody, he gets taken back to the mainland for hospitalisation. Not a prank.

Muffy meets and greets and treats them to a champagne dinner where everyone reveals a little about themselves and gets well pissed. There are already some ructions that we note as telescope views before everyone turns in and finds a world of pranks like lights behaving oddly, bathroom sinks spraying the wrong way and so on. But there is Nan's room whose wardrobe houses a cassette of a baby crying. We aren't told but we know she either miscarried or had an abortion. Another of the good eggs finds smack paraphenalia in his medicine cabinet. Some pranks have claws.

Into the night and the next day the gang find themselves in a kind of whodunnit rollcall that takes a leaf or two out of the then new slasher playbook. We discover various ambitions, frustrations, shared secrets and denials and wait for the corpses to pile and the elimination to lead to the killer. 

Already, the pacing and the more social concerns are diverging from the average '80s teen thriller. The killer doesn't seem to mind if the victims are having sex or not. There's sexual fluidity that is stated but never judged and not offered as a motive. There is a world of mid-'80s middle class concern of young adults going through their education and initial steps into the grown up world and, while it doesn't play like a 20-something Big Chill, the focus on the notion that Reganomics might not be the answer. The cigar stealing walking sales pitch who is clearly heading for yuppiedom gets a slapstick prank and then a serious hit. Wits are a better armour here.

SPOILERS

And then when the crew are reduced to a couple (one of whom is played by Amy Steel, the champion final girl of F13 Part II) who have discovered Muffy's terrible family secret, they break through and find that everyone is fine and waiting for them. Muffy announces over a trolley of champagne that they all been part of a test for her plan to use the house as a proto escape room scenario. Everyone laughs. Then there's a coda scene which I won't spoil.

April Fool's Day is a lot less like Terror Train or Friday the 13th than the meta teen horrors of the following decade. While the cast are not listing the genre traits of teen horrors while watching one in the living room, there is a sense of play and a wink between the screen and the audience as to what is happening. If the big reveal feels a little smug, Muffy's business plan provides a knowing cynicism that shades the ambitions of the crew of chums with a clear contempt. And then the coda takes this a step further, suggesting that the franchise will have some serious extra spice to it when it starts working.

The other thing this film reminds me of is American Psycho, also in its future. While it goes nowhere near the core of that novel and later adaptation, the hint that a class and business based entertainment franchise that appeals to ruthlessness and grand guignol violence might be just the thing for the times paves the way. This film will not work if you approach it as a mid-level slasher. It doesn't quite work as a satire, either. Considering the likes of Something Wild which wasn't the comedy its poster tried to sell, it might well serve as a retrospective warning to the culture it was part of, that times soon to come would take some careful navigation. As that, it works.

Review: TUNER

Niki is assistant to piano tuner Harry. Nikki not only has perfect pitch which makes him a natural but his hearing is so acute that he needs to wear solid earbuds and, outside, noise cancelling headphones as he describes himself as allergic to sound. When Harry goes to hospital, Nikki keeps the rounds going and one day, after proving that he can, he saves a security crew a job by opening a safe that they need (legitimately) to drill into. Impressed, the security boss leaves Nikki a wad of thank you notes with the tip to get in touch with him. Money problems. Nikki gets in touch and becomes the security gang's safe cracker. A meet cute along the way gives Nikki yet another reason to advance himself and their relationship is as volatile as their youth dictates. All good? You can already hear the sour notes.

Nikki has grasped life for the first time since he felt excluded from it by his condition. As a robust adult, he finds the rewards and hazards of connection can get serious in the worst ways. The film tells this with economy and a firm hand on the tension, leaving most of the weight to the perfomances. That's not to say that the dialogue is a problem. Nikki's condition and its history is completed slowly, through several dialogue scenes that show that Nikki has told this story all his life but no longer minds telling it again. He knows what happens when people aren't aware of his condition. The criminal code is laid out similarly, piecmeal, as needed, until the climactic dillema puts it to an arm wrestle. 

As Nikki, Leo Woodall is solid, showing a strong restraint behind his typical cultured blank. A late scene in which he smiles feels like the sun coming out from behind cloud. Havana Rose Liu's Ruthie is all nerves and self doubt beneath a sassy exterior. Dustin Hoffman knows it's not his film and gives us enough of the senior larrikan to tell us he's been places. Lior Raz as badass boss Uri is all paternal charm until he's a monster of wrath. 

A telescoped object appears like a Chekov rifle in the middle act and we clock it and wait for it to come into play. When it does, it has the cornered instensity of a novel rather than a film. This needs to happen but the gigantic stakes and vice grip coincidence bothered me. This is not an adaptation but an original screenplay. To its credit the film does take this thread into deeper waters and leaves an interesting question about a particular decision. Does that balance things? Not when I can't get the forced convergence out of my head but it's easy enough to follow the tale to its enjoyable final scene. That's a scene we have seen many times and can predict easily. Happily we can rely on Woodall's performance to get us through it.

A thriller/romance/ethical drama with heart and wit is not to be sneezed at. This is a film that says its lines and hits its marks but finds it gravity in some compelling performances. It's always good to see Dustin Hoffman on screen. A younger image of him as a dashboard bobble head in the trade van reminds of him and what his character means. No, we don't need it, but it's on the warm side of fun, just like this movie is on the warm side of crime thrillers. 

Review: LEVITICUS

Naim and Ryan lark about with rough play until they break through the show and admit their mutual attraction. This is not the stuff of their small town that is gripped by the kind of psycho religion that appears warm and friendly until it doesn't. One day Naim goes over to Ryan's place and finds him involved in the same kind of rough and tumble with another boy. Without too much detail, following a ghastly ritual by a creepy travelling religious figure, Naim witnesses an act of violence against Ryan that appears to be committed by an invisible force. This makes sense of the weird prologue and will surface as an explanation in the middle act. Things are turning grim.

Part queer coming of age story and part supernatural horror tale, Adrian Chiarella's feature debut exhibits a clever idea of religious "conversion therapy". Rather than praying the gay away, the idea is to have the object of love become monstrously violent. This can involve doppelgangers who bring their own persuasion to the table.

It's too cold for satire but too loose for outright horror but its spell holds and works all the way through the running time. The one moment of deadpa humour towards the end feels like it's from another movie and is memorable for that reason alone. Mostly it's a slow pendulum swinging between the credible warmth between the lovers and the unforgiving punsihment the rest of the town wishes upon them. Mostly, though, it feels personal the same way that the Book of Revelation feels personal. That is an ultraviolent revenge fantasy but Leviticus is Moses' report of his god's dictation of law and conduct to avoid damnation. Remembering this adds great weight to this film's title. 

Chiarella makes great use of the locale, building on breathless nocturnal night streets, mills that smoke and spew flame and a muted pallet for a place that even nearby nature's beauty shudders to colour. This is strong world building, the way it always is when a setting that might seem to write itself is reconstructed  for atmoshere. Part of this is Jed Kerzel's electronic score with its groaning and wailing, hissing and growling as though the land and wind themselves are straining from the culture they surround.

There have been comparisions with It Follows but they are too shallow, missing the point of the entity and its way of being. It Follows played on a kind of penalty for wisdom, expressed like a sexually transmitted disease. This is something more hideous for its origins, the product of jealously guarded ignorance.

The leads, Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen offer the warm centre of the film, both very natural with each other. But they must also express the horror of its conceit, and it feels painful to witness the turn of the familiar faces from love to hard antagonism. A grown up Mia Wasikowska as Naim's mum provides a maternal support that degrades into its own creepiness.

If I felt a certain lacking while watching Leviticus, I think it's probably from the film's refusal to fall into the cliche that besets horror stories with teens. There is a information scene but even that is kept fragmentary. Recent horrors like It Follows and the Philipou's magnificent Talk to Me have dispensed with such scenes of authority and it furthers the sense of hopelessness necessary for stories like this to work: the traditional authority figures are absent, untrustworthy or even atagonistic. Leviticus uses this to blend a sense of despair that the final image sets in ancient stone.

Viewing notes: I went to a 10 am screening at the Kino in Melbourne. Sparsely attended and mostly by men about my age (who still seem to be a lot older to me) and a few much younger huddles. If there was talking or any cruddy behavious I didn't notice it. Mind you, this intense film could probably silence a Saturday night crowd.

DIRTY HARRY @ 55

A sniper is murdering people across San Fransisco. Detective Harry Callahan is on the case, grumpily accepting his new partner, but finds it a lot harder than expected. The killer, self-dubbed Scorpio, is fame hungry, communicating through notes left at the scene and in the papers, extorting money from the Mayoralty. Harry, who isn't called Dirty for nothing, is uncomfortable in the public eye.

The first of five Dirty Harry films, this Don Siegel helmed movie draws from the true crime case (still unsolved) of Zodiac. Fictionalising it allowed more swing to the narrative as the psychology of the killer was woven into the action procedural. When you watch this film you are looking at crime thriller as a transitional form. It's a visible leap from the recent Boston Strangler from Richard Fleischer which kept to a near-documentary approach until the extraordinary final scene. Dirty Harry's documentary stylings are kept to the location shooting, showing Frisco as a modern metropolis by day and a neon-lit warren by night whose streets wind and dive like burrows. 

Add to that some authentic politics (a Mayor who won't speak a racial slur in one of the killer's notes) and a maverick detective who might just have to adjust with the times to do the job as he needs to. This is at the end of a long developmental stage and a casting circus that proved a bumpy road. By the beginning of the '70s, the villain was a psycho based on a recognised figure and his nemesis was the sexy magnum force of Clint Eastwood. When you look at the turns in decades as cultural signposts you often need to do some shifting to get it right. Hollywood's '70s, though, began ahead of time with films like Bullit punching above weight. By this film's appearance in 1971, it feels at home in its time.

Harry's openly racist comments in context come across as tests rather than the convictions of a petrified veteran. His first interactions with his new Mexican-descended partner offer a give and take that Harry knows he won't win. This vulnerability proves to be one of the film's strengths for, however it strays in later installments to the franchise, this one enforces a cultural challenge. After that, his moments of anger are reduced to cries of natural justice that anyone could sing along to. The famous monologue about counting bullets and feeling lucky gets two airings: the first is effectively sadistic but the second is controlled rage.

Against him, Andrew Robinson's Scorpio is a baddie whose psycho origins are not examined as they would be two decades on in the serial killer bandwagon. He's a nasty pasty from the first shot (the film opens with his first sniper killing) and blithely extorts money and gets more murder in with increasing boldness. His lair has the scrap book decor that would be obligatory in a '90s serial killer flick (even in the deviating Seven) and his smiles and grins when plying his trade are disturbing. The film's extraordinary cinematography takes him from a gleaming close up to an insect-sized scale against the grass of a football stadium, as much an idea as a human figure, a boogeyman in a modern city.

Lalo Schiffrin's score takes a few leaves from Morricone's music for Gialli and floats gently through violence and picturesque daytime cityscapes.

Dirty Harry surprised me on rewatch. Its machismo is subject to question, not just assumed to be right. Harry and his partner make mistakes which doesn't just expose their fallibility but the scary puzzle of fighting such a figure as Scorpio. Audience's in San Francisco must have felt conflicted to see this version of what they lived through resolved with the perp punished at the same time as worrying if the movie might draw Zodiac back out to get some more work done.

The film's leanness and breezy pace call across time, beyond those '90s exploitative serial killer clones, and show how it could be and can still be done. 

Viewing notes: I watched my splendid 4K remaster of thiswhich kicks out the jams. You can get it on disc and right now, it's also on ABC iView for freeeee.

Review: BACKROOMS

Clark's not doing so well. His separation is grinding and his furniture business is winding down. In therapy, he complains about roleplay but returns to his anger with his wife as though he's still possessed by it. His shrink, Mary, is patient and quite indulgent but seems to be making little progress. One night (having been kicked out of home, he's sleeping in one the beds he hopes to sell), he notices the electrics going nuts again and, investigating, he spies a weird phenomenon: a thin line of light appears to be leaking through a wall that should have nothing behind it. He approaches it and falls right through it. On the other side is a huge yellow room with a messy stack of furniture and doors that lead to the same yellow carpet and wallpaper, a labyrinth of corridors and rooms variously empty or furished with sunken couches and tables that poke out halway from the walls. It seems endless. Welcome to the backrooms.

Clark reports this to Mary and describes it thus: imagine telling someone who has never seen a dog what it looks like and asking them to draw the description. Good analogy. One room might have a table and lamp and a series of decreasingly sized repeats. There could be a room with a pool. If you look up you might see long vents with tiny doorways that would open onto voids. If you see a figure in the distance think twice about greeting it; it could be a cutout with a radio or something animate and lethal.

Kane Parsons, director, did not create the Backrooms (nor claims such), they began as a photo of an anonymous yellow wallpapered corridor in 2019 on 4chan. Another 4chan-er responded:

"If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in

God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you"

This engendered a long and rich collective world building which appeared to describe the same infinity with added lore. Parsons, under his YouTube handle Kane Pixels, produced a series of situational and historical videos which, while not quite telling a story, follow a thread of discovery and investigation. His confident work caught the eye of the likes of James Wan and A24 and there it was this morning in front of me in a well stocked cinema.

As this is a feature film, a central narrative was struck in preference to the discontinuous episodic structure of Parsons' web series. This was what worried anyone familiar with at least the series. Would it get Hollywoodised? Well, it has been but tastefully. We get characters with motivations that lead us into the dreamlike claustrophobic setting and a progress through a conflict that is hampered by the unsettlingly dynamic realm.

Beyond that, Hollywood is left at the door and it's up to the audience to follow who, given just enough, will deliver the rest around the characters. The audience was a little fidgety which annoyed me through the ads (when they're allowed to be fidgety) but everyone shut up and paid attention at the prologue scene. Note to filmmakers who intend their work be shown in cinemas: start, Homer could have told you, in a crisis and add some conversation punching noise. You've got 'em.

I remember planning a joke for this review, considering the presence of a psychiatrist, that maybe this was what Jung's collective unconscious really is, the manufactured garbage of all of humanity, sinking into the floor of bland yellow office space. But the film kind of beat me to it as it progressed. Then, afterwards, when I went to do some shopping, the crowds and modern brutal architecture of the shopping centre felt like a VR experience augmenting the movie. 

When we see the outside world, we look at street scenes flattened by a long lens, rows upon rows of housing development boxes. Are we guilty, here? Are we dreaming this terrifying, smothering space into existance just form the way we expect to live? If the backrooms form a hell it is more like the one in Hellraiser than the Inferno, containg no sense of justice beyond the ill chance of its discovery.

If you were curious about whether to see the YouTube series first, I'd advise against it. Go in as uninformed as the characters in this film. Then, try the series for at least Parsons' background. As the story in this movie is just one slice of the possible lore, sequels are almost inevitable and I'd see them all if they only sought to explore different slices.

Oh, there has been scuttlebutt about Parson's getting assistance in his direction. He was twenty when this film was finished. He was a teenager when he made the web series. Anyone who doubts this age range is capable of this kind of work should try to remember for themselves. At twenty, you can be sitting on a tram and conjuring worlds. It's not the age of the artist but the art in the daydreamer, and there's plenty here.

Review: SHELBY OAKS

A group of online paranormal investigators meet disaster on their final assignment at an abandoned prison. All but one of their bodies is found, leading the sister of the missing woman to start her own investigation. After a bombarding montage of the case a violent incident sees the film itself change from a found footage with interviews mockumentary (like Lake Mungo or Horror in the High Desert) into a much slicker conventional feature film. That's about twenty minutes in. It's so smooth a change that revealing it does not constitute a spoiler. It's more a soft serve bait and switch. Apart from some extra video footage soon after the turn, this is now a normal mainstream movie.

That was the main gripe of audiences who have responded against the film, it felt dishonest. The other gripe is a tall poppy cull. The writer/director Chris Stuckmann has spent years creating a lot of good will as a YouTube film critic, offering solid appraisals of the titles he reports on, whether good orf bad. That changed in the last few years as people were noticing his reviews were almost entirely positive. He addressed this in a video, saying he was fed up trash talking film makers, omitting the word other and then this feature film appeared. 

Personally, I don't care about that nor care for tall poppyism. Is the movie any good? Well, that's the sticking point: it isn't. Charges of over derivation are meaningless in a genre film, all of them come from a tradition that is recognisable; it's part of why we like them. Shelby Oaks is not a good horror film because it never feels quite right.

But what is a budding filmmaker to do, offer up yet another found footage fest after deacdes of them? Why not, if he's good enough at it? I think the problem lies in how the bulk of the running time doesn't match the promise of the opening montage and first act where Mia's action is sparked and the hunt is on. It doesn't play convincingly as a conventional film because audiences are throwing popcorn at the screen by the time Mia decides on a whim to investigate the freezingly creepy prison by herself at the witching hour. No justification given, she's set on it and does it. This is not the story killing argument of why the kids in the Evil Dead cabin don't just turn around and go back to town. Mia could easily have waited, asked her husband to come along and do it by the light of day. It's almost as if someone is saying: aw come one, you want to know, too? Sure we do, but you could have made a daylight trip a lot scarier than the cliche one.

On cliche, the house in the woods we do get to only ever feels fake with black mould that looks art directed rather than organic, a CG hell hound that never quite works, and the kind of nasty hick monster that Barbarian already did in a game changing way years before (and with refreshing complexity). The remainder of the tale drags its points so agonisingly that the audience is already at the finishing gate by the time of the final shot. 

I'm not here to trash talk a good critic but rather to sadly admit that not all of the YouTube brats come through with a Talk ro Me or an Obsession, nor do all the talented streamer filmmakers break through (Isaac Rodriguez, anyone?) Stuckmann's high profile on online outlets just gave him further to fall and, as far as this film has gone, the fall has lingered and the landing must have been painful. I will admit to wincing when I saw the credit of Mike Flanagan in a production role. I like him as a cine-thinker but have only found his work trope ridden and unimpressive. Is this the same operation as the final moment of Paranormal Activity that was so goofy it all but erased the good scares of the rest of the filim? Id it why Poltergeist looked and felt more like Spielberg than Tobe Hooper? I don't know. I will say that there is just enough here to warrant another chance. Just enough. 

Review: HOKUM

A prologue features a conquistador and a small boy seeking something in a vast desert. This leads to a moment of desperation where the conquistador is driven to extreme violence. Through intercutting we learn that this is happening in the mind of an author trying to finish a trilogy of novels. He's liberally sipping whiskey and trembling from too many years of doing that. A noise in the house distracts him and he sees a figure in the darkness of a stairwell that vanishes with light directed at it. It reminds him to care for the ashes of his parents.

So, it's off to Ireland where they honymooned and the hotel where they stayed. The near petrified owner, Cobb, interrupted in quietly scaring two children with the story of the witch that haunts the place lets the skepitcal American writer, Ohm Bauman, that he's in for the reverse of fun and games. Which ensue.

Damian McCarthy's third feature packs a fair bit of his previous two but this time minus the quirk-forward approach. If I call this his most mainstream film so far I only really mean that it was made for the kind of distribution it has won, chain cinemas instead of festival venues and specialist streamers. That this $5 million movie has so far made five times that sounds like a winning gamble. 

If that sounds like I'm calling sellout, I should also point out that Hokum is a far richer cinematic experience than any genre film made for the many times its budget. We are witnessing the rise of a generation of new filmmakers who cut their teeth on YouTube and emerge with first features that play like veteran cinema. McCarthy's films don't ;ook like theirs . he's much more along the lines of the artsy indy crew of Peter Strickland and Joanna Hogg with a clear lean toward horror. Hokum looks and sounds like lush budgeted Stephen King adaptation but with an art house sensibility, as though James Wan ditched the jump scares and went broody.

If casting Adam Scott was a cynical use of a well known and beloved American leader it's also astute as he plays the hell out of his character without a second's stylistic frisson between him and the rest of the cast. He works. He works against and with the quirk, acquites himself in action sequences and carries the developing horror with his character's melancholy.

I'll mention the score here as it really stands up. A sequence that starts with a fire alarm progresses to the manipulation of that portamento tone until it is a musical motif. I normally notice such a thing as it's happening. The combination of action and scene changes obscured this shift until it had been playing that way for minutes.

So, the rising director who seemed destined for the eternal arthouse broke through. Unlike Gareth Edwards whose strong and resourceful Monster led him to the popcorn epic Godzilla or Rob Savage whose canny COVID horror Host brought forth the deflation of The Boogeyman, McCarthy at least has stepped into the mainstream with something that still looks like his own work. While my tastes still prefer his middle feature Oddity, despite all about it that doesn't quite work, this is the one I'd choose to introduce him to someone unfamiliar. If he can make the good bits of his approach the things that make him a living, he'll join Coralie Fargeat and Jordan Peele in the stronger corner of the mainstream. Perhaps he needs to keep to his native Ireland to keep that sweet. I'd be in the queue for that.

Review: OBSESSION

Bear loves Nikki and he's shy about it. Nikki doesn't know or won't show. He buys her a novelty gift, a wish trinket which he's too awkward to give to her but uses it himself. An emotional maelstrom explodes that not only pays back the wish but takes Bear to the nightmare at the other end of his obsession. This movie plays rough.

Wish stories are about as old as speech because the motive is. The three wish model operates like this: first one proves the power, the second is disastrous and the third undoes the second. Curry Barker, whose YouTube hit Milk and Serial (please watch it) punched above its weight at serial killer and found footage movies, is only interested in the first wish and puts it in the hands of an emotionally vulnerable person who won't be able to handle even a mild granting of it.

If Nikki swung on her heel and rapped on the passenger seat of his car professing boundless love it would be an 'eighties black  comedy. The Gen Zeds in this story have already streamed those movies. The one they play is tougher and scarier. There are laughs but most of it is constantly unsettling as people who are not prepared to have their wishes granted face an earthly torment.

Milk and Serial puts a lot of plot into an hour of running time. Obsession runs forty minutes longer. Apart from moments when I felt this was staying too long on its plateau I understood why the plot is meagre by comparision for more screen time. Barker and crew's film craft is impeccable but his real purpose here is to bring his notion to life through rigourous performance.

This is Inde Navarette's film. Her Nikki handles fast and often dense dialogue as though it were occuring to her in the moment and her physicality is played against appearance. A prolonged smile goes from funny to unnerving. Her vocal riches take her from a sweet young woman to a banshee. Speaking from the corner shadows, moving into light and retreating from it while speaking violence as though it were mundanity renders a tired horror trope fresh. She is a monster.

But she is a monster created by a boy in a man's body, one to whom the idea of commanding allconsuming love from another might seem a throwaway notion but is too ill-equipped to think it through. This is his obsession, not Nikki's; she's its victim. One of the threads in this tale is consent, a thing that vanishes with anythning resembling a wish. Bear is old enough to know; he restrains himself from taking advantage of the situation at first but only at first. This film has the fortitude and depth to keep Nikki scary but identifiably wronged.

Curry Barker is one of the generation of YouTube brats who have plied their craft and had it tested in the unforgiving public arena online and made first features that look like the work of veterans. It occured to me that the power of the narrative and the naturalness of the yojng adults in it was reminiscent of the teenagers in Talk to Me by the Philipou brothers. We'll be seeing more cinema arrived at by this route. It's already feeling fresher than the general fare and carries a sense of daring. With the cinema sound system blaring out the rumbles and drones of this movie's electronic score and the odd aspect ratio a noticeably claustrophobic 1.50: 1, this is a movie made and presented on its own terms. All that and it's good. Really good.

Viewing notes: I saw this in a Hoyts cinema with recliners and beds. I have a lumbar region that whinges about recliners but also a thick beanie that serves as support. The beds were understandably poepled by couples. There were two: one kept the talking to whipers, the other enjoyed the freedom to pollute the darkness of the auditorium with phone screen light. Neither bothered me that much, the well attended session was one were the audience were with the movie which always feels good. I'd seriously consider getting this film on physical media if it appears post cinema.

Review: UNDERTONE

Evie spends her days tending to her near-comatose mother at home and holding up her half of a podcast of the paranormal (with her as the skeptic). The episode in progress with Justin sounds intriguing: he's been sent ten audio files of sketchy origin. As they go through the files, they start finding anomalies in the audio. Bumps, whispers, phrases in strange languages. This last gets the two chatting about backmasking and they find examples in certain nursery rhymes which leads to the discovery in one of the files of a phrase that might be a key to something very nasty. Against time, they need to find as much about that as possible. Will they make it?

Ian Tuason's feature debut from his own screenplay is a weave of themes and uses remoteness as the spur. This is essential. It means that, in the end, Evie must first accept the supernatural explanation and then fight against its source by herself in small town Canada, with Justin in distant London incapable of helping.

Meantime, we get a lot of convincing of Evie who counters Justin's credulity with reason and doubt. She has to experience in herself. This is done in measured doses and forms a strong thread throughout. She's not easily won over but she is under the greatest threat. The recordings are by a man of his wife to prove to her that she talks in her sleep. A childless couple, the woman starts speaking about saving children and some of the strange utterances she makes are decoded to reveal an ancient spirit intent on causing miscarriages or, though possession, infanticides. In the second act, Evie confirms that she is pregnant. That's as spoilery as I'm going to get. 

This is mostly managed with conventional horror cinema grammar: use of darkness, odds between what audiences see and characters don't. While the direction stays on the right side of bombast (this, thankfully, does not play like the James Wan dross that the trailer promised), this film hangs on performance. Nina Kiri gives us a dynamic young woman who can sublimate her various guilts and stresses behind a self-preserving persona. We get a good indication that she takes great comfort in her rationality. The quiet voice-only performance of Justin (played by Adam DiMarco) serves as a solid counter.

If there are flaws they lie in the use of creaky tropes. The house, clean but shadowy, does not need the exaggerated Dutch tilts to make it more sinister. A counter is a moment in which a light is switched on in an adjoining room. What makes it genuinely eerie is the sound of the switch clicking. It's slight but audible, reminding us that it needs to be thrown by a finger. What we don't need is the trope of chorusing the dialogue of the demonic world with pitched-down voices mixed in. This is as old as The Exorcist. It was, and remains, powerful there. In 2026 it just sounds old hat (not ancient, mind you, just old). All of the instances where a voice is thickened this way would have been a lot more effective as the original voices alone, speaking as normal.

In a film as carefully sound-designed as this (and it is brilliantly worked), you would think that one extra stretch away from conventionality might have suggested itself but, no, it's just the old trick brought out again. This and the events of the very end feel like rushed decisions and I can forgive them in a first timer's movie. I do know that Tuason is slated for the next Paranormal Activity franchise entry and can only hope he brings the better moments of restraint to that. Then again, I know what happened to that franchise. Anyway, let's end on that: hope.

Oh, the concept of a patron saint of cursed women, given as it is here, without irony, is an ignorant nonsense.

Viewing Notes: as all the new horror movies are having tiny cinema airings before being sucked into the void of streaming, I was forced to rent this through an online provider. Happily, the beaufitul UHD image and surround mix came through and it was a pleasure to view.

NAKED LUNCH @ 35

Bill Lee stopped writing early and got a gig as a bug exterminator. He calls it the best job he's ever had but he keeps running out of spray powder. Taking a lead from his beatnik pals, he catches his wife Joan injecting it into her breast. It's a literary high, she says, kind of a Kafka jag. Then, after a series of strange encounters with cops and talking oversized beetles, market stalls selling dried centipedes, he reminds his wife that it's time they did their old William Tell routine. She balances a glass on her head and he takes a shot at it with a .38. The glass rolls over the floor intact and Joan lies on the carpet with a bullet hole in her forehead. When a monstrous figure in a bar tells him to get a ticket to Interzone and send back reports from there, he goes.

Naked Lunch was always almost a movie from its publication onward but there are problems in the book that, depending on when the scripts were attempted, made it unfilmable. It could be seen variously as pornographic, ultraviolent, thickly surrealistic and dense. Burroughs' novel moves between lucid muscular narrative and arcane weirdness that continues and will continue to daunt the casual reader. What Cronenberg did was make a companion text.

This is a quilt formed from selected passages in the novel, biographical details of Burroughs' life in Tangier and in New York among the beats, as well as anything he could cull from other works like Junkie, Exterminator and Queer. Through this, Cronenberg threads a loose narrative centred on Burroughs' guilt over the killing of his wife and this forms a number of loops in which the act and its consequences repeat for a person who could never quite outrun them. Add the figure from the novel of Dr Benway, both sympathetic to and contemptous of the addicts in its world. Fascimiles of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg appear as sympathetic companions. Bill Lee moves through this, observing wryly, sharing blackly comic anecdotes, receiving overloads of psychic and sexual information.

This never quite fulfils the brief of a movie version of the book but it works best if you already know the book and would be effective as a spur to attempt a read. As a filmmaker Cronenberg had to clear the things that were literature and render unto cinema audiences the things that created a character to follow. Peter Weller plays Bill Lee as a taciturn wanderer, unfazed by the worst his life can deliver, delivering his lines as though he were spinning them from corroded copper, not quite caring if everyone hears them. It's the speech of the literate junkie, from the only imaginable centre of the universe. Weller pulls this off enough to keep screen centre with enough substance for us to try to make sense of everything around him. The great grace of his performance, though, is his evident refusal or agreement with Cronenberg, not to do the Burroughs voice. This party trick of everyone who ever went through a beat phase was a craw-sticking feature of the Kill Your Darlings biopic of Ginsberg a few years back, making the thirty year old Burroughs sound like he was eighty. Weller just finds Bill Lee, bowing to Bill Burroughs as the creator, not the entirety.

Judy Davis gives us a female counterpoint to Bill Lee, her New York version weary and in search of kicks, and her Interzone version more guarded, more worldly with an understanding of the dangers of Lee's influence. Both are nuanced and sexy as well as unsettling. Ian Holm's Paul Bowle's facsimile is solid but more a presence than a player. Michael Zelniker and Nicholas Campbell as the Ginsberg and Kerouac stand-ins are fun. It is Roy Scheider, though, who steals his every scene as the forbidding and funny Dr Benway. You'll remember him as much as Weller and Davis for his few minutes of screen time.

Because Cronenberg was prevented from shooting in Tangier by the first Gulf War, he improvised and went to the opposite end of the spectrum and made everything look like a set. The wall to wall magic hour golds and reds are pure tungsten lights and give the scenes an extra sting of oppressive delerium. 

Naked Lunch is a film about writing the same way that the book is a novel about literature. Writing is an art of the mind, constructed from thoughts that form and take life while walking dogs or doing dishes, the act of writing when that's done, has none of the physical theatre of music or painting. Cornenberg's brief was a tough one. I don't think it works entirely but I also admit that it wasn't made to be witnessed in isolation.

I failed to finish Naked Lunch three times before I stumbled on the solution: read it among noise. Just after I moved to Melbourne, I would go on tram trips to anywhere to familiarise myself with the system but also the speech and mood of the locals. I packed my Fontana paperback into a jacket pocket and took it out on a particularly long journey and found, finally, between shutting out the noise and letting it blast, that the strange prose on the pages started to have cadence and flow. A similar thing happened a few years earlier when I heard the Birthday Party single Release the Bats just enough times, having gleefully celebrated and ridiculed its chaos, to realise it was a tightly constructed rock song. A few more trams to wherever and I finished the book.

In case that puts you off there is a very good documentary that could bridge Cronenberg's film and Burroughs' novel. Burroughs: the Movie from 1983 is a terrific warts 'n' all account, narrated by Burroughs himself of his life and work with a wealth of footage from his younger life and various collaborations. Criterion have released this at one time which might point to it being trackable by several means.

Until then or you find a copy of the book, you can see this film. Take Bill Lee's advice and exterminate all rational thought and take this in