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.