Review: RESIDENT EVIL

Bryan is a courier and he's late to deliver an organ for transplant to a hospital. On the way out and home he's accosted by a staffer who offers a very good payday on an emergency job. Bryan takes it. It's about to be a weird and rough night, to say the least. Welcome to the world of Resident Evil where the action is always on and lethal. I'm not going to describe the plot as it's too easily spoiled and this is one film this year that everyone who wants to be constantly engaged should see.

I'm of the demographic that should be into video games but I never caught the bug. In fact, I was such a wild larrikin back i' the day that I'd frustrate many a fellow student by refusing to play my side of whatever the game was by my opponent more than once who would angrily start playing for me. So, I neither know the game nor any of the movies made from it in the 2000s. What I knew about this film was Zac Cregger, writer and director.

I thrilled to his debut Barbarian with its constant switching and expert atmosphere. I stayed intrigued during Weapons. I didn't care about the video game origins of this one as I knew I'd be getting something that played to convention but welcomed its audience into its cleverness. Zac Cregger is clever. His comedian senses allow perfect timing of jolts and just the right amount of humour to extend tension. No jump scare or threat is without construction, however subtle, everything is earned.

This is a non-stop action movie but if you want subtext think of how every story with a rapid mutation plot is a story of reproduction. Bryan starts his journey with a flunked response to his partner's rightful demand to address their pregnancy. The phone call is interrupted by bad weather conditions which adds another point of anxiety to the already tense one of him getting through to deliver the package which probably is a life or death situation. And then you get the monsters.

Austin Abrams takes us with him on this nightmare ride and his Gen Zed exasperation endears him through every scene. He knows just about nothing but has to be ready for just about everything which stretches his responses from the kind of lifelong bystander to main character energy that (this is Zac Cregger) itself carries costs and hazards. If a video game is a voyage through puzzles and demands for alertness then that's what this is (for a comfortable ninety minutes) but it still feels a lot warmer than it needs to. As a moment of cinema this might even end up being my favourite movie this year, an nail biting actioner drawn from a console diversion. I think I like it even more for all that.

Review: IT ENDS

Four recent tertiary graduates pile into a car and set off, following directions that start diverging from expectations. When they stop to get their bearings they are attacked by a crowd of people who have come rushing out of the forest. Getting away, they try to work out what is happening. The petrol is down to a quarter tank but isn't emptying. No one is hungry. The road just keeps on keeping on. Allegory for life or just a weird tale for Gen Zed?

Alexander Ullom's debut feature plays it lean, giving us plenty of time to digest the various guesses by the friends as to what has become of them and how they might best act to end it or cope. With four clearly distinct characters who act consistently but are never types as an allegory would more typically have them. They are, however, all still young with various levels of ambition, newly hatched from the education mill that has packed them with prescribed values like school lunches. 

I was reminded of tales like YellowBrickRoad or The Blair Witch Project for the depiction of lost people whose youth and energy can lead them to both decisive action or self-binding confusion. And I was also reminded of the film of Ionesco's Rhinoceros, with its challenge to the normal world from the wilderness of alternatives. 

The young cast make a lot out of talky but still spare action and dialogue and manage to hold the screen without falling into tiresome repetition. This despite the single forward motion and the constant setting of forest on either side of a road that they must accept might be eternal. 

There is little more to say of this film without spoiling it but I will register my admiration of such a minimalist approach that yet compels questions of its outcome. I really didn't not guess the ending but wasn't surprised to know it. 

Some who see it might dispute its status as horror but I think that along with those other examples I mentioned, the lack of control in a confusing environment that threatens life and limb (a kind of gore-free Romero zombie movie) provides a constant, slow burning dread. Add a fine electronic score, in there, too.  I'd definitely call it horror. And good.

Review: THE INVITE

Music teacher Joe grinds his way home and collapses on the floor of his apartment to find out that his frantically tidying partner Angela has invited the loud-sex couple from upstairs over for nibbles and drinks. The ensuing argument is interrupted by the appearance of the other couple who take the sounds of argument in their stride. Two couples, one almost estranged and the other open and engaged. There's a lot of working out to do. That's the film. 

No, I'm not being dismissive. The awkwardness of the beginning gets ironed smooth by candid talk and the spirit of sharing which replace it with a constant tension. This needs nuanced performance to work as its sheer verbosity will need a lot of care. Director and actor Olivia Wilde steps up and mostly succeeds in giving us an ensemble piece that charges along. The actor in the director knew, also, that the way to making a talkfest work is a lot of physical action; not big, just supportive.

Where this gets strained is in an uneven hand with techniques like overlapping dialogue. While this can suggest confusion and add tension it can also be frustrating to view and distracting. From His Girl Friday to The Thing From Another World, contrapuntal speech should compact information and suggest urgency. Here, it enhances awkwardness risks vagueness and alienating chaos. The other factor is the score. Apart from some needledrops, the music in this film consists of harsh stabbing bowed solo strings that spike up as a kind of dialogue helper. The effect is disruptive, informationally noisy. It is never welcome.

What keeps saving The Invite is performance. It's a quartet that responds to an expert handling by a quarter of it. Seth Rogan's bitter Joe is ready to flee the scene for life until he hears what Pina and Hawk are into, the hard nut of his resentment of his life takes a lot of battery until the promise of responsibility-free hedonism appears. Pina, a sultry and sullen Penelope Cruz, and Hawk a masking Ed Norton who seems forever on the point of breaking, think of their activity with more of a new age leaning. Finally, there is conductor Olivia Wilde herself, frenetic, alert, hankering to trust something beyond the slow plunge into formlessness that her life has become. 

In earlier outings like Booksmart and Don't Worry Darling, Wilde had a tendency to overplay the comedy, pushing it toward a kind of Ken Russell psychocamp. That is mostly done here through the score and her own performance as Angela but what happens is that it fits perfectly into The Invite. Soon after, she would present a more tempered and naturalistic expression of it in I Want Your Sex under Greg Araki's direction. In place, among the other three distinct personae, her Angela provides a square-completing corner.

From the off, this reminded me of the kind of late 'sixties sex comedy. Taking its cues from recent French and Italian cinema, Hollywood affected a controlled explosion of risque issues-based movies, cleansed with the likes of the previous decade's aging stars like Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. If one pops up on a streamer, give it a spin. Wilde's cinephilia makes this stagey fare a movie rather than a theatre piece as the various spaces in the house are used to strong effect.

The Invite works despite its moments of overplay like the score and counterpoint dialogue and it works because the cast make it work. The issues harboured by the couples might seem spare but their handling that reveals vulnerability and fear through fine acting craft brings the whole thing home. I have not seen the Spanish original but will now hunt it down. This is a comedy that works best if you do some work but it will be work well done.

Review: PENNY LANE IS DEAD

Penny has just got into Uni after all that schooling and gets two best and oldest friends down to her family's beach house for a weekend of celebration. Just the girls, Toni and Amy. Then Kat turns up. The wild girl who, as Penny's cousin, demands to join them, offering a commemoration of a cup cake for each. We've already seen her making these and we know that the icing isn't just vanilla. Penny crashes and the others put her to bed in her own room. Then there's a knock at the door. It's Kat's loose canon boyfriend, his worryingly older companion Merrick and the unknown quantity Rodowsky. Maybe they do just want to use the phone. It's 1986 and they don't have their own. 

This is Mia Kate Russell's debut feature and feels like it. High production values, solid performances and good action choreography cannot turn messy writing into cinema. As a home invasion story, we need establishment of characters, some inner conflict and then the hold off as the invaders negotiate with their captives before the big showdowns. Don't look at me, this is genre cinema and I don't make the rules. 

Here, we have Penny and Toni finally admitting their attraction to each other is deeper than classmate, Amy's probaby lifelong trauma recovery, and Kat's chaotic anger at everyone she's ever known. We also get the hazardously unstable trio of bad boys balanced by a pair of good boys who are kind of off screen until the story needs them. You get the issue? It's less a stressful standoff than a writer's chessboard in a game against herself.

The first half hour contains almost everything in the plot and the rest is just elongation of that: the bad guys enter and then variously argue with each other or act impulsively with either no consequence or major plot shifting violence. But then we know so little of these people that it's hard to care for them even at the point of death. By the hour mark the film feels more like one and a half hours old and the final half hour is stretched to snapping until some very ill-advised plotting suddenly appears. 

Home-invasioners need careful tension to be played with an expert bow. If there is anything to be had from ennui in the process it should add to the plot's frustration, not transferred to the viewer as a waning care. I will, give props to Tahlee Fereday for her Toni. Toni is the best written and has most agency out of the original trio and her Joan Jett tough girl offering keeps what remains workable of the movie ... working.

Of less importance but annoying to one of my vintage is the parade of anachronisms. It's 1986 because no one has mobile phones. Apart form one or two instances, the needledrops are more like 1976. By 1986, The Angels track that opens the film had already garnered its cheeky audience response which would have played much better than the seventies original. Then again, that might have been a permission that didn't land. No one exchanged a low five with anyone else and (though this might have been for a potential US market) people didn't apply for college now or then in Australia, but Uni. Of the girls only Kat looks like she gets her fashion sense from mid-80s magazines, the others could be, as they are, from now. (I did say this was of less importance.)

I think there's enough here to form a promise of what Russell can deliver. The market has changed and the new barbarians of cinema are charging in from years of YouTube training, literate, cheeky and effective. It's not just the old guard that has to mind that.

Review: WHISTLE

A group of school friends come across an ancient artefact, a Mayan battle whistle that suggests it can summon the dead. One of them, at her boyfriend's goading, blows it. At this stage we've already seen people die horribly after doing this and now it's up to the chums to work it out and do something about it. The closest thing to a spoiler I'll give is the second act revelation that the inscription on the side of the grim object doesn't mean summon the dead but summon your own death. People who blow this whistle meet their deaths but accelerated. If they die of heart failure at seventy that's how they are going to go at seventeen, with their future selves delivering the bads.

I didn't go to the cinema to see this as it looked like yet another late '90s style teen horror with a decent budget and low level scares. Between Scream and its clones that had a good three years before The Blair Witch Project made them irrelevant. While there has been a return to this format with outings like Thanksgiving and Clown in a Cornfield, I just didn't want to sit through another. Add online movie hire and a quick argument-settling choice, we landed on Whistle, come what may. So, how does it do?

As for new themes or tints, a little queerness minus judgement is a welcome addition but by now long established in the genre. Mostly, it's tropes added for a purpose-built unit. However, if you consider how the heyday of the slasher movie was composed of a continual loop of tropes and is now evaluated as a good old day, what fault this film for doing the same. It's greatest debt is to the Final Destination series in which, title by title, a group of friends was stalked by death having cheated it in some way. What Whistle adds is a personal touch where the future death visits the young, leaving the question of fate against potential of the youth. It's not much but it does work.

The cast is up to scratch, led by the charismatic Dafne Keen who binds all behavioural and narrative gaps with promise. The cast is typically more solid than the writing and the direction. We meet the weirdo religious psycho who is also a drug dealer and his persona goes from kindly alpha to bad guy in a few lines of dialogue and believably but we have already clocked him singling out heroine Chrys in the opening school morning scene. His character, eventually, little more than a plot device for the final act, providing stakes that it doesn't really need. But what are we expecting, Ingmar Bergman?

What really brings this one up beyond the level of serviceable is some solid art direction and well crafted kills and, really, if you can't sail through a genre piece on those two features what are you doing in front of this one? It works. You will forget it the next day but it helped the pizza and beer go down and ended under two hours later.

Viewing notes: Whistle is no longer in cinemas but can be hired online or watched as part of a Prime subscription.  

Review: I WANT YOUR SEX

Artist and gallery owner Erika hires generationally timid Eliot on the spot and soon reveals it's because she wants him for sex, dom and sub BDSM. This is framed by Erika as a kind of job perk and Eliot, wading sluggishly through a loveless and near sexless relationship, acquiesces. This only gets more complicated until the big third act showdown which changes everything  ... or does it.

What feels like an early '70s sex comedy produced by High Hefner but dragged ragged into the twenty-first century could easily look like a cake (with too much icing) of workplace assault and exploitation to the Eliots in the audience but that's the point. Director Greg Araki, like, me has no skin in this inter-generational gundown. He's an X (I'm a Jones) which is also part of the fun. And fun there is with Millennial Erika morphing from Ice Empress to sourmouthed dominatrix in her journey of terraforming Eliot's low social-skilled Zed boy who is by necessity as comfortable admitting his masturbation while in a relationship as he is pretending that the relationsihp itself has any substance. 

If you cannot see beyond the depiction of an abusive power game and that your recognition of that aspect is essential to your seeing the comedy, then this film is not for you. Araki doesn't shy from the darker side of the situation by trowelling on the wit: Eliot is fully aware of the unethical imbalance and calls the abuse what it is; he just likes the perks of it when they do come. Would this work if the genders were reversed? This is tested, in a way, by the threesome scene towards the end of the second act in which roles and points of atraction are so dizzily confused that it threatens a few disintegrations. You are, in other words, invited to speculate about gender roles while within this specific reversal. This is so well served by the pace and performances that you can enjoy the counterpoint of thinking what-ifs along with following some fast paced storytelling.

Performances? Olivia Wilde's always-on screen is dizzying in its caprices, declaring a loud paradox one minute and then crumpling it into the bin as nonsense the next. Her energy constrasts with Cooper Hoffman's listless timidity that masks fists of frustration. Araki is clever enough to mete this out so that it doesn't just lead to a climactic explosion in the finale. He has a more complex plan in mind which you'll get to.

Araki fills his screen with thick neon swatches and neo-pop art cheek. Interventions of other genres trade screen time with sudden breakouts of animation which look like the kind of thing that is leading YouTubers to cinema auteurism. Araki doesn't have to do any of this but in this more conventional narrative style that he must adopt to bring off this central conceit, it also feels like a little nod to the auteurs of his own generation, Natural Born Killers-era Oliver Stone or Wes Anderson: it doesn't feel like he's claiming the interventions for himself.

The satire Velvet Buzzsaw from a few years back did something similar using the contemporary art world and, while it had some genuinely funny ironic scenes, never quite outran its own quest for cleverness. I Want Your Sex does work because the cleverness is split between the affectations of the characters and the overall wit of the tale: it's made funny to be funny, all else is collateral. That means that the willing audience shall be the winner.

PS - if you're reviewing this for anything online and need a picture, DO NOT search for the title, even if you add every qualifier from cast crew, date, production company etc. I finally found the image I used by removing the title. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.