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

Review: ALPHABET LANE

Young couple Jack and Anna trade the bustle of Sydney for the serenity of the country. Life is tolerable with only each other for company but the sense of isolation swells up between them. They work at different phases of the day which further complicates things. One day, driving home, Jack passes an old timer on a horse and delivers the experience to Anna like he's brought home a boquet of flowers for her. He says he stopped and talked with the man, calling him Joe. Anna, at first incredulous, twigs and plays along. Soon, the pair are living through their imagined extra family, sending letters from Joe and his wife Michelle to each other. Things are about to get strange.

Or they would if this meaty premise had been served with a stronger screenplay. The Chekov rifle, here, is the breaking of the folie a deux by outside influences demanding explanation. This could lead to Hitchcockian tension but, instead, we get a dragging repetition where the new details and attempted complications are just absorbed by the pair and never strongly challenged by anyone who might. A very late third act decision seals this but without satisfying resolution.,

I kept wondering if this was a kind of minimalist thriller but kept coming up against a problem. Jack and Anna have clearly demonstrated flaws but these seldom compel palpable hazard. The suggestion of infidelity cannot sustain the audience's knowledge that Jack and Anna are writing to each other through the fantasy characters. If they were really concerned, they'd tap out and call it. Or, delving further into the shared madness, raise the conflict to more serious stakes. But that doesn't happen. Ever.

The emotional beats are soft and the points of crisis gentle. This pair of amiable young people, having brewed an explosive, relationship-annihilating potion, seem ok with just sipping on it. When one or other introduce serious developments in the agreed narrative, the tension is not there to play it through and they just deflate back to acceptance.

Because there is so little opportunity taken with the potential of this scenario, the appreciably short eighty minutes of screen time feels much longer. This is not the fault of the performances: the compliance scene alone when Jack persists with his invention until Anna understands and runs with it, is strongly played, believable and charming. Between that and the odd point of breakage in the third act it feels like it's coasting. This is emphasised by the pleasant but formless score of humming vocal harmonies and the soporific pacing which increasingly makes the film feel like a short film in the guise of a feature. 

I was reminded of Peter Carey's A Happy Story. There are no similarities in plot but the sense that compliance might lead to discovery in a relationship is a potent recall. It's worth noting that the Carey piece is a short story. I wish I could speak better of this attempt at an interesting premise and say more than praise its impressive use of its location but it just kept disappointing me. I kept thinking, this needs to feel real. Then the credits rolled.

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS @ 35 and HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER @ 40

Serial killer movies have been with us for a long time. Claims of which is the first interest me less than who was the first punk band. Both punk and serial killer movies peaked in their turn after any identifiable ancestors and the main task is to separate the cultural trend from the technically included. So, instead of doing that, I'm going to compare one from before the trend in the '90s with the one that started the trend. 

By the time Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, the term was known but not really hammered into the parlance. What became the joke about anyone a little awkward or withdrawn was more like a reference to a dark and grave phenomenon. John McNaughton's film keeps to that understanding. Its unflinching look at the violence is painful to the eye and its mood is grim.

Drifter Henry stops by Chicago to catch up with his friend Otis. Otis's sister Becky has also knocked on the door, escaping her husband's physical abuse. Becky is drawn to Henry's quiet power, partially because it stands between her and her carnally unrestrained brother. Meanwhile, Henry leads Otis into a life of murder as a leisure activity. I'm not going to spoil either of these movies, here, but you can already see where this is heading and, while you won't be surprised, I guarantee you will be horrified.

John McNaughton's film is stark and dour. Every surface looks like it would soil the lightest touch. These are people whose life decisions were formed in trauma and poverty. The Chicago of the setting is not the metropolis but the lightless apartment blocks and empty nocturnal streets. Becky's attempts to brighten her circumstances with chirpy optimism stop well short of the kind of grotesquerie that David Lynch might have imagined, this deep darkness feels far too grim for such whimsy and her cheery voice only reinforces the dread.

Henry, polite and personable in daily life transforms into an ultraviolent monster at any encountered slight. He goes from tipping the waitress at a diner and paying her a compliment to murdering the married couple at a liquor store. When Becky points out that his story of how he killed his mother changed in the same conversation the tension is unbearble. The moment is crossed, unsatisfactorily but cleared and marked for any future reference Henry might need. With Otis things are much worse. Henry is hard work. Can't suck up to him, can't deviate. In charge but without a plan.

At first the violence is depicted by a collision of lingering shots of the victims' corpses and the audio of the action played back. Eventually, we do see the acts and they are brutal but undramatic. A home invasion scene is dehumanisingly cruel and near impossible to watch without wincing or covering. Henry's policy is to vary the M.O., making detection difficult. This will only continue until Henry is stopped and that might take his own death. 

In The Silence of the Lambs young FBI trainee is pitted against the dangerous mind of a cannibalistic serial monster (now imprisoned) to help with a current case of near equal ghastliness. A bargain forms between the pair, a quid pro quo of expert opinion and personal trauma. While this hazardous pathway is negotiated, young Clarice is heading for a baptism of terror.

Really? Five paragraphs on an obscruity and just one for one of the most influential crime thrillers of all time? Yeah, but that's to do with that influence. The Silence of the Lambs is a film I didn't revere even as I first saw it, out with friends at the cinema on first release. My second viewing was for this blog. While I've softened on my disdain for it because of that, I still think its value lies in what it started, not what it was.

Jonathan Demme's film was made to hit and did so. It spawned a decade of copycat movies, each entering an arms race to produce a killer more brutal, ingenious and impossibly well resourced. I note two exceptions to this: Seven and The Ugly. While both plug in to the exploitative nature of the sub-genre they also both deviate from it in ways that distinguish them from the source point. The rest, The Cell, The Bone Collector, Kiss the Girls, and so many more, filled the form and played along with little to tell them apart by. 

And they mostly hit big, as well, with genius level criminals, elaborate murder methods and forbidding lairs. The dread in Henry had become the Grand Guignol of the big nihilistic '90s. In case you think I'm gittin' all judgey, be informed that I was first in line to see most of these at the cinema and those I missed got rented on VHS. I also got burned out by them and by the time Tarsem's eyepopping art-direction exercise The Cell appeared I tapped out and left the hall.

I am making this comparison because it highlights the irony that the earlier no-budget film is always grim but never sensational and the later one is a massive A-list cast extravaganza masking a tawdry exploitation movie. Silence is, at its best a well crafted dark crime thriller but it is also a movie that happily invites its audience to cheer the choice of victims by a killer who is nothing but an extended open target for othering. There is carefully placed dialogue in the film, between Clarice and Hannibal, that Buffalo Bill is not a transsexual but scenes of him have all the subtlety of bait. The sleaze is not Bill's, it's Demme's and source novelist Thomas Harris'. It's the popcorn and choctop selling sleaze of mega suits tripping on a goldmine. 

What's new? Not that but if any of us is going to laud a movie as near perfect or subtle or profound as Silence has been regarded, where is the love for the first big screen Hannibal in Michael Mann's more complex and harder to love Manhunter from the same year as Henry? It's the Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster pairing along with a massive budget that did that. Next to that, the modestly made but severe and brutal Henry can never compete, though its violence has none of the scary titillation of Demme's film (if you are aroused by the murders in Henry the problem is not in the film). 

Silence created a trend of mounting depravity that licenced its audiences to switch sides after the devil stand-in got too bad and cheered on the good guys when they kicked down the door. No wonder Seven's refusal to allow John Doe genius (he's actually more of an a proto sovereign citizen) made it stand out. No wonder Simon's fear of self is more striking than a committee-designed super-psycho.

I was ready to be humbled by a revisit to The Silence of the Lambs, hoping I'd see more to it a second time, but it just wasn't there. Then again, it did give the TV great The X-Files its base aesthetic (tellingly). Henry, on the other hand punched me in the gut all over again. Its power is palpable in the notes its not playing and that never turns into TV.

Viewing notes: I turned to my old DVD for Henry (scrubs up well for an oldie) and watched Silence on Prime (but its licence just ran out so it's not there anymore. You can rent both through Prime and VOD. You can still get a Blu-Ray or DVD of Silence but you'll have to look online for any phsycial copy of Henry.