InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 2

MORVERN CALLAR
Lynne Ramsay
“READ ME”: a visage
lit in orange glow, hands, bodies,
hands caressing bodies, the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree, the two words blinking mutely from a desktop screen,
silence. So opens — in oneiric, inert fashion — Morvern Callar, a palimpsest of orange, beige, and grayscale, set to the disquieting rhythm
of a society whose margins aren’t quite defined, perhaps not definable, whose success stories overwhelm the silent failures amidst
them. Morvern Callar (Samantha Morton), a supermarket clerk, is one such failure, working dead-end retail at the age of twenty-one and
betrothed to her recently deceased boyfriend, a writer leaving behind a hole to his head, his corpse on the apartment floor, a copy of his
manuscript, and his suicide note which beckons: “READ ME.” These two words, appearing only fleetingly, arguably constitute the film’s
clarion call to the viewer, an injunction for the bourgeois outsider to peer into, and find poetry in, the lives of their poorer others.
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But what, or who, is there to be read? Lynne Ramsay, in just her
second feature, establishes a mature tonal register far beyond
the purview of most sophomore efforts. Poetic realism, as Renoir
or Vigo would have it, has witnessed a comeback in British
cinema under Tony Blair, somewhat distinct from the kitchen-sink
variety fostered by Ken Loach and Mike Leigh insofar as the
latter’s socialist roots are now imbued with a lyricism heavily
indebted to the tactile screen: shots of objects and household
minutiae in focus, their coarse, lived textures reclaimed by the
gently gliding lens, as in the pair of glasses sitting morosely at
the bottom of a canal in Ramsay’s debut Ratcatcher or in the dingy
poverty of an apartment interior, lit by the light of summer, in
Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank. In Morvern Callar, silence complements
these shots, rendering them still; like still life, an aura pervades
through the celluloid, resisting the medium’s mechanically
reproducible images by imprinting some trace of historicity to its
objects and some glimpse of psychological interiority to its people.
Ramsay’s Morvern takes to the exotic environs of Spain soon after
her boyfriend’s death, seeking to rediscover herself and rechart the
course of her life. But paradoxically, her mobility on the road is
matched by her aimlessness, a stasis that takes flight in both her
head and our own as we navigate the dim alleys of Scotland, before
wandering the Andalusian desert, alongside Morvern and her
co-worker and best friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott). Struggling
to articulate her thoughts in words, Morvern translates them into
action: she passes off her boyfriend’s manuscript as her own,
feigning aloof innocence in front of her prospective publishers
who’ve traveled down to Spain to meet her, and she hooks up at the
hotel with a man who’s just lost his mother. All of these little
impulses — transient, mysterious, ambivalent — are keenly
immortalized under Ramsay’s watchful, loving gaze and afforded
symbolic eminence in lieu of overt political commentary. Little
exposition or contextualization is deemed necessary in her case;
the focus lies, instead, with Morvern’s deeply subjective
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experience, a heartfelt struggle to comprehend (or simply exist in)
a world in which grief and futility have assumed near-total control.
an uneasy dynamic between filmmaker and filmed reinscribed into,
and thus neutered by, the distractions of film grain.
Therein lies the filmmaker’s creative mark and also marked
curse: for all her earnest and perspicuous examination of the
outsiders in an otherwise globalized suburbanity, Ramsay’s
works bear her worst tendencies of mistaking the abstruse for
the profound, of fomenting aestheticized sympathy where
contradictions and lived reality do more justice to the
constituents of her gaze. Ratcatcher’s exhumation of workingclass
squalor in 1973 Glasgow, for example, tempers realism with
the coming-of-age imagination of twelve-year-old James
Gillespie, effectively allowing misery-laden stereotypes of
wayward youth to puncture and permeate the narrative under
the guise of impressionism; We Need to Talk About Kevin, her
follow-up to Morvern Callar, similarly banks on Ezra Miller’s
unknowable, abject tour de force to elicit one-dimensional
fascination toward its eponymous character. The critical debate,
despite consensus toward praise, has always centered around
the politics of representation: does Ramsay empower the working
class through her compositions, or does she inadvertently
romanticize their struggles and attitudes? It’s a question that her
elliptical, shadowy evocations of milieus tend shy away from,
Armond White’s description of Ratcatcher — as emblematic of a
“Boutique Socialism” — demonstrates, for all its loaded antipathy
for the latter term, a cultural acquiescence toward poverty as
refracted through the lens of unfiltered film photography. With
Morvern Callar, Ramsay’s ideological engagements are spelt out;
rather than politicizing the margins, she displays a penchant for
poeticizing them. The subtexts of its relationships — Morvern and
her boyfriend, Morvern and Lanna, Morvern and the publishers —
are present, but defiantly couched within interpretations just out of
reach. We wager Morvern’s unequal, unhappy life under the
influence of an intellectual, we posit her willingness to take credit
for his work as confused, vengeful, or simply lazy opportunism.
There’s no denying the indelible impact of poetry, written or visual,
but in this case the marriage between both forms is itself unequal:
the latter’s spontaneity foiled by the former’s scarcity. Ultimately,
the bitter taste that remains after the reading, whether for Morvern
or for us, curdles into flattened sympathy. That, for better or for
worse, is Ramsay’s acclaim in poetry and realism, two fields whose
crops cannot both aspire to the same fecundity but have, thanks to
her, done so. — MORRIS YANG
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KICKING THE CANON
THE DEVIL’S REJECTS
Rob Zombie
When Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses was released in 2003 (following numerous distribution delays by its original producer
Universal Studios due to objectionable content), many chalked it up to the vanity project of a rockstar. Zombie, after all, had made his
name first with the band White Zombie and then as a solo artist, mixing and matching classic horror movie monsters, Max Fleischer
cartoons, The Munsters, and Alice Cooper into a heady stew. He was part carnival barker, part unhinged sociopath, part Stan Lee, always
ready to proselytize for old B-movies and the sort of bric-a-brac that accompanies Halloween funhouses. Corpses became notable
mostly for casting future pop-culture mainstays Chris Hardwick and Rainn Wilson in early roles and for its bald-faced liftings from Tobe
Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre parts 1 & 2, leading to a mildly diverting horror oddity that couldn't quite overcome Zombie's
fanboyish adoration of ‘70s genre classics.
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Sullivan. Roy (Geoffrey Lewis) and Adam (Lew Temple) have the
grave misfortune of falling for Baby's honeypot routine while
their wives, Gloria (Priscilla Barnes) and Wendy (Kate Norby),
lounge around in their room. Once the men invite Baby in, Otis
makes his presence known and a sick game ensues, the two
psychopaths playing with their victims like malicious children
pulling the wings off insects.
Any other filmmaker would make this extended set piece the
climax of their movie, an extended bit of extremely unpleasant
torture and sexual mortification that leads ultimately to the
death of each hostage. But this is only the halfway point of The
Devil's Rejects, as Zombie spends the second half of the film
slowly reconfiguring the remaining Firefly crew from antagonists to
protagonists, allowing them the status of romantic, mythical rebels
and outlaws. It's a bold gambit, facilitated by Sheriff
Wydell's simultaneous transformation from lawman to killer as
he seeks revenge for the death of his brother (a previous victim
of the Firefly’s, as detailed in Corpses). Wydell eventually murders
Mother Firefly in cold blood, then hires a couple of ex-con
mercenaries to capture Baby, Otis, and Spaulding. The on-screen
representative of “law and order” fully becomes that which he is
hunting, abdicating his moral authority in the process and
granting the Firefly's a patina of righteous fury as they now
fight for their own lives.
In their exhaustive, 10-part essay series from 2022 titled The End
of History, an extremely detailed examination of the films of Tony
and Ridley Scott as they relate to the death of a certain kind of
American mainstream cinema, filmmakers Scout Tafoya and
Tucker Johnson devote Chapter 6 to the aftermath of 9/11 and its
pernicious influence on U.S. popular culture. It's a positively
Hoberman-esque bit of provocation, making connections
between the rise of the surveillance state, the dampening of
dissent amongst journalists and artists, the worrisome rallying
behind the U.S. war machine, and particularly the haunting
images that came out of Abu Ghraib in 2004. It’s a fascinating
(and reasonably convincing) series of linkages; Tafoya and Johnson
speculate that the American media's failure to deal with this
atrocity created a rift of sorts, leading to a rise of extreme
horror films that, in their words, were “the only images that
commented on America's uncontrollable bloodlust.” There's no
indication that Zombie is particularly political, nor would anyone
accuse him of being an intellectual, and yet astute critics at the
time recognized in films like Hostel and The Devil's Rejects clear
allusions to the Abu Ghraib photographs. Willow Catelyn Maclay,
perhaps our finest critic on Zombie's body of work, puts it more
succinctly: 'In Zombie's films, death matters.” The suggestion being,
clearly, that in other genre films, and perhaps in life, death is
purely abstract (not for nothing are most people's memories of the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan largely impersonal, long-distance,
night-vision images that look more like video games than battle
zone footage).
In his seminal 1970 collection Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan,
Robin Wood writes on the idea of the “incoherent text” that
“moves[...] toward an unresolvable and usually unrecognized
dilemma, both the incoherence and the dilemma become in
themselves eloquent, speaking for the quandary of a civilization.”
Zombie taps into this eloquence in an intuitive way, in the sense
that he seems to genuinely love the monsters he has created and
can only bring himself to vanquish them in a kind of heroic blaze of
glory. The Rejects driving into a hail of bullets while Lynyrd
Skynyrd's “Freebird” blares on the soundtrack is as deranged a
summation of America as one is likely to muster, murderers and
rapists romanticized into oblivion by the forces of law and order
that are in fact just as evil as the predators they purport to protect
us from. As writer Mike Thorn says, it’s a “vital American movie,
made of the very same iconography and textures that it burns to
the fucking ground.” This is our 21st-century The Wild Bunch. —
DANIEL GORMAN
KICKING THE CANON
“The Rejects driving into a hail
of bullets while Lynyrd
Skynyrd's “Freebird” blares on
the soundtrack is as deranged
a summation of America as one
is likely to muster.
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FILM REVIEWS
PLANE
Jean-François Richet
While the ongoing Liam Neeson dad-action-movie concern has
been producing ever more diminishing returns, over the last
decade and change, just about nobody has so consistently provided
sturdy B-movie thrills on the level of Gerard Butler. Year after year,
he dutifully and enthusiastically turns out the kind of mid-range,
violent thrillers that used to be hitting theaters once
a week in the 1990s. From the deeply silly … Has Fallen series to
the impending apocalypse of Greenland or the surprisingly epic
Heat ripoff Den of Thieves, the sign of an upcoming low-rent
Butler actioner has become legitimate cause for excitement.
His latest is no exception. Butler plays Captain Brodie Torrance,
a widowed commercial pilot with Trailblazer airlines, tasked with an
overnight New Year’s Eve flight from Singapore to Tokyo, after
which he’ll be headed to Hawaii to spend the holiday with his
daughter. Hopefully the lightning storm he’s been ordered to fly
through won’t cause any trouble… whoops, no, there’s a crash
landing on a remote island, which turns out to be a haven for
Filipino separatists and drug traffickers who like to ransom their
kidnap victims, and it’s up to Captain Torrance to save the day. Did
I mention that this movie is called Mayday? No, I didn’t, because it’s
brilliantly just called Plane. Also on board is Louis Gaspare (Mike
Colter), a fugitive who’s headed back to the states for extradition
and who has a very conveniently helpful background as a Foreign
Legionnaire. Together, Torrance and Gaspare have to infiltrate the
enemy stronghold, rescue the passengers, and somehow get off
the island to safety. Meanwhile, a couple of big wheels over at the
airline (Paul Ben Victor and Tony Goldwyn) are in a command
center ordering up a team of private mercenaries to locate the
plane and parachute in for a hot extract.
The siege setup and relationship between the two uneasy partners
recalls nothing short of Carpenter’s legendary Assault on Precinct
13, and while Plane predictably doesn’t rise to anywhere near those
heights, it’s never less than a fully amusing and wholly engaging
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FILM REVIEWS
affair. It may not be original, but it hits every single beat it needs
to, from the opening act’s introduction of a motley gaggle of
passengers and crew (the grouchy rich guy, the cute girl tourists,
the plucky flight attendant, etc.), to a harrowing crash sequence,
to Torrance’s selfless hero’s quest to care for his flock. Butler
himself is firing on all cylinders here; his Dad energy is confident
but quietly terrified. Even though he and we know that he’s in over
his head, watching him swim around in all that emotion while still
kicking appropriate amounts of ass is a blast the likes of which
we rarely get anymore.
Once the third-act action kicks in, Plane realizes its full potential.
Director Jean Francois-Richet (who coincidentally helmed the
2005 Precinct 13 remake) stages the action cleanly and clearly,
even though the handheld can be a little too much to handle
sometimes. The plane crash itself is appropriately exciting, and
a fun mid-movie fistfight comes off in a single wobbly take, but
the mercenary- assisted breakout-and-escape finds the film’s
peak in a rising and violent climax. Especially appreciated here
is a gag involving what a .50 caliber sniper round does to a
human body, something that gets repeated four or five times
(and frankly, that’s not enough). A delightful example of a movie
doing exactly what it promises with absolutely no frills or
pretense, Plane is the kind of movie that should be coming out
twice a month. — MATT LYNCH
DIRECTOR: Jean-François Richet CAST: Gerard Butler, Mike Colter,
Paul-Ben Victor, Tony Goldwyn, Yoson An, Lily Krug DISTRIBUTOR:
Lionsgate IN THEATERS: January 13 RUNTIME: 1 hr. 47 min.
WILDCAT
Melissa Lesh, Trevor Frost
Premiering at the 2022 edition of the Cannes Film Festival and
dropping into U.S. theaters in the autumn, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO
was a film that challenged both our notions of the “animal movie” at
large and how we assemble and contort images into tidy, digestible
narratives, no matter how antithetical to the visual media itself that
may be. The director took care to move away
from the default anthropomorphism that so many such films are
lathered in, rejecting the easy metaphors typically used to
engender human empathy in viewers by appealing to their
instinctive homocentrism (, and instead attempting to imagine and
explore an alien umwelt, abstracting his images more and more as
the film moves forward, refusing any easy thematizing in EO’s
beguiling spaces. Into that sphere comes another faunal work that
sneakily subverts expectations of form: Melissa Lesh and Trevor
Frost’s Wildcat.
Though predictably less experimental than Skolimoswki’s film, the
directorial duo’s debut effort is still a challenging work in its own
right, assuming the superficial posture of an animal or nature
documentary but shedding all of that subgenre’s most irksome
trappings. This is especially surprising given a logline that is rich in
potential for the saccharine: Harry Turner, a young British soldier
back from active duty in the Middle East and suffering from PTSD,
heads into the Peruvian Amazon as a kind of escape (and informed
by Fawcettian notions of romantic adventure). Once there, he
meets Samantha Zwicker, a young American grad student
spearheading a wildlife rescue and rehabilitation effort, strikes up
a relationship with her, and begins caring for an orphaned baby
ocelot. But rather than entering into some canned arc of mutual
salvation between man and beast, Wildcat succeeds by allowing its
intimacies and conflicts and tragedies to unfurl organically. It’s a
thrillingly destination-ambivalent work in its linearity, its “story”
revealing itself in real-time and recalling something like Minding the
Gap, where emotion is earned through the edit’s construction rather
than any overriding or predetermined intent. It’s exploratory in the
best and rarest sense.
No small part of this is thanks to the film’s production. Wildcat leans
further into the ethics of animal science than your average film of
this ilk, both discursively — those fluent in the writings of Frans de
Waal and Ed Yong (and EO, for that matter) will be familiar with the
documentary’s comfort in nature’s mysteries and its refusal to
ascribe human agenda to animals — and in the filmmaking process,
which barred Lesh and Frost from proximity to the ocelots, leaving
Turner and Zwicker to capture much of the
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FILM REVIEWS
film’s footage, guide its rhetoric, and navigate the murky terrain of
on-screen self-reflexivity. Again, as in Minding the Gap, this
naturalism works to build a profoundly affecting emotional core,
which in turn operates as a ballast for the film’s amorphousness
and thesis-agnostic approach. That doesn’t mean Wildcat is without
ideas: the film’s very synopsis suggests the seed of an notion about
humanity’s essential cruelty, as it extends to animals, the natural
world, and other people, and the filmmakers subtly but poignantly
allow this to mature through the film’s edit, refusing histrionics and
arch narrativization in favor of small moments of brokenness and
healing, joy and despair, callousness and care, all cocktailed into a
moving, deceptively vast, and, ideally, perspective-shifting study in
our collective responsibility to the world, each other, and ourselves.
In a documentary film landscape ever more engineered toward
biography and “essay” in form and true crime and social causes in
content, a trend only further enunciated by the age of streaming
we’re living through, the market has been flooded with prefab films
of easy topicality, buzzword baiting, and baseline competence,
most with very little visual appeal or intellectual heft to speak of.
Wildcat is a wondrous respite from such trite and calculated
offerings; it even has the confidence and conceptual restraint to
resist plaguing its frames with unnecessary aestheticizing or
arbitrary images of Amazonian grandeur, with Lesh and Frost
understanding the fundamental intimacy and modesty of their
film’s foci. (Drilling down to the slightly more niche, Wildcat’s title
also amusingly offers something of a middle finger to the similar
minimalism employed by DisneyNature for the works they assembly
line out to the public — Penguins, Elephant, Polar Bear — though the
directors may not frame it as such.) True to form, then, the film
ends not with pat conclusion or happy-ever-after condescension,
but with the same delicateness and sensitivity that has guided its
entire 100 minutes. There is no magical fix, the future remains
murky and unknown. Some bonds are broken, others are formed
and firmed. “I feel like I’ve done something good,” Harry states.
That’s all any of us can hope for. — LUKE GORHAM
DIRECTOR: Melissa Lesh & Trevor Frost CAST: Harry Turner,
Samantha Zwicker IN THEATERS: December 21 STREAMING:
December 30 DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon Prime VIdeo RUNTIME:
1 hr. 45 min.
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FILM REVIEWS
LANDLOCKED
Paul Owens
The past invades the future in Paul Owens’ Landlocked, a
low-budget, minimalist horror drama that's steeped in the
nostalgic haze of VHS grain and childhood memories. Having
directed documentaries for over a decade — most of them set
in the world of video games and video game culture — the film
marks the narrative feature debut for the writer-director, and
his documentarian sensibility comes through as he weaves his
family's home videos into a slight but novel supernatural thriller
plot. In Landlocked, Mason (Mason Owens) returns to his
soon-to-be-demolished childhood home after the death of his
father (Jeffrey Owens). Rummaging through old boxes, he comes
across a mysterious VHS camera that allows him to see into the
past whenever he peers through the viewfinder. He soon begins
recording his findings obsessively, desperate to hold on to the
memories he fears will be lost with the house's demolition.
Owens fills his images with the fluorescent glow of CRT screens
and a few creepy, intensely voyeuristic sequences that are,
somewhat surprisingly, situated in similar aesthetic territory as
the transgressive pinku eigas of Japanese underground
filmmaker Hisayasu Satô — although they, perhaps less
surprisingly, lack Satô's thematic provocations. Instead, Owens
makes liberal use of slow cinema conventions, namely the
genre's long, uninterrupted takes, to give the audience a sense of
the film's setting. Landlocked moves along at a deliberate pace,
even with its concise 75-minute runtime; early on, there is a
tangible sense of melancholy in the scenes where reality and
fiction converge. Whenever Mason looks through the lens of the
time-bending handheld camera, the dilapidated house and
neglected, junk-littered backyard momentarily spring to life with
the blissful sounds of happy children and proud adults, contrasting
sharply with the eerie silence that now pervades them. He is quick
to embrace this miraculous occurrence, happily reliving his
long-gone salad days. But his scanline reverie turns grim when a
sinister presence finds its way into his former home as well.
“Owens fills his images with
the fluorescent glow of CRT
screens and a few creepy,
intensely voyeuristic
sequences.
It's a compelling concept: Mason's retreat into nostalgia brings
momentary comfort while also carrying the pain of old wounds. But
while Owens' unique spin on found footage horror is undeniably
creative, his protagonist's endless wandering and constant
tinkering with retro gadgets begin to wear thin eventually. There’s
a warmth to the clunky, tactile clicks and buzzes of cassette tapes
and VCRs that brings to mind a bygone era's outmoded tech, and
Landlocked utilizes its slow-burn approach to dwell on the
evocative analog particulars that likely still linger vividly in the
minds of everyone who grew up with them. But after a few return
trips to the crumbling living room where Mason reviews the
countless hours of footage he shot, the glowing bulbosity of passé
TV sets begins to lose its luster, and the seams of the underwritten
script begin to reveal themselves.
In a similar vein, the pristine digital cinematography, which makes
for a striking contrast with the staticky scuzziness of the home
videos, fails to ever feel truly “cinematic.” The shot composition,
aside from a few exceptions, hardly adds any mystery or intrigue to
the frame, and it speaks to the strength of the central formal idea
that the film nevertheless manages to get some of its images
lodged in your brain, the sudden appearance of a menacing,
shadowy entity proving to be particularly haunting. But when
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FILM REVIEWS
measured against a work like Joel Anderson's sorrowful 2008
ghost story Lake Mungo — a mockumentary of similar thematic
terrain — it doesn't feel like Owens' low-key DIY outing has
anything insightful to say about grief or letting go. It's a shame,
as the seeds of a fantastic and affecting film are there. But as it
stands, Owens doesn't quite have the chops to execute his
ambitious ideas, even as his first foray into fiction manages to
conjure some captivating moments. Who knows? Those might
just indicate bigger and better things to come. — FRED BARRETT
DIRECTOR: Paul Owens CAST: Mason Owens, Jeffrey Owens, Paul
Owens, Seth Owens DISTRIBUTOR: Dark Sky Films IN THEATERS
& STREAMING: January 6 RUNTIME: 1 hr. 15 min.
THE OFFERING
Oliver Park
Even in the seemingly endless combinations and reconfigurations
of tropes that make up horror B-movies, there occasionally needs
to be some new input. Dusty old pentagrams and declarations of
“The power of Christ compels you!” can only last so long in such a
fast-moving genre, and with his horror flick The Offering, Oliver
Park draws on a source of inspiration that is getting more and
more airtime in modern horror: Judaism. Following the son of a
Hasidic funeral director and his pregnant wife as they attempt to
reconcile with his family, only to be preyed upon by a spirit hungry
for the blood of children, The Offering is the latest entry in the
emerging sub-genre of Jewish horror. In recent years, the
sub-genre has offered up works as disparate as Marcin Wrona’s
2015 masterpiece Demon, Keith Thomas’ crowd-pleasing
chamber-horror The Vigil, and queer drama Attachment; with The
Offering, Jewish horror proves that it can achieve the same as most
horror B-movies: trash status.
With expositional set-dressing operating on a level of subtlety akin
to A Quiet Place, a glacial first half, and uniformly bland
performances, The Offering makes more of an argument against
Jewish horror than it does for it. The film’s Jewish elements mostly
feel disposable, as though transplanted straight from theology and
folklore into a narrative without much consideration for why or how
they might be most effective. Judaism seems to be a shortcut for
Park and writer Hank Hoffman to establish Old World-inspired
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FILM REVIEWS
fear within the New World, an enclave of spiritualism and
tradition cast against modernity. But the film doesn’t seem
overly concerned with actually using any of its rich setting or
lore, instead resorting to dull jumpscares and other tired tropes
of occult horror. From a lazily designed creepy child to the piles
of books and tapes our protagonist must search through to piece
together the puzzle, The Offering doesn’t even really update its
clichés for its specific setting, instead recycling imagery from
its predecessors without any real effort put into making those
images actually work. In fairness, like most B-movies, The
Offering does have at least one great jumpscare — a delightfully
mean-spirited and visceral thrill when the creature digs its claws
into a pregnant belly — but that gnarly bit of ruthlessness can’t
stop the film from falling flat. It’s certainly never scary enough
to move viewers to the edge of their seats, and rarely even
interesting enough to keep anyone’s attention. — MOLLY ADAMS
DIRECTOR: Oliver Park CAST: Nick Blood, Emily Wiseman, Allan
Corduner, Alan Kaye, Daniel Ben Zenour DISTRIBUTOR: Decal
IN THEATERS & STREAMING: January 13 RUNTIME: 1 hr. 33 min.
BEAUTIFUL BEINGS
Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson
Icelandic director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s Beautiful
Beings is a brutal yet abundantly tender coming-of-age tale that
examines how intergenerational trauma mars the friendships that
teenagers have with each other. As a film that focuses on the
dysfunctional bonds between four boys — most of whom come
from abusive families — Beautiful Beings bears a striking
resemblance to Darko Stante’s ravishing 2018 feature debut,
Consequences, in which scenes of juvenile violence condemn a
decaying society which orphans helpless children.
What elevates Beautiful Beings to a bildungsroman worthy of its
nomination as Iceland’s Academy Award submission are the
magical and hallucinatory sequences that recur throughout the
film. For children whose first experiences of love are intertwined
with domestic violence, it can be impossible to name the hurt. The
emotional vulnerability of children is partly why most domestic
abuse cases go overlooked; abusive parents are aware that
speaking out is not an option for children. In Beautiful Beings,
Guðmundsson uses fantastical elements to ensure that the
experiences of children are understood by adult viewers; this
element of surrealism is how the film’s portrayal of social cruelty
cleverly resists veering into senseless suffering.
Beautiful Beings begins by closely following 14-year-old Balli (Áskell
Einar Pálmason) as he is bullied by the other boys in his school,
who go so far as to stalk him in order to bash his face in with a
burnt tree branch. Balli’s mutilated face, covered by an unflattering
mask, becomes the topic of the Iocal news report on youth violence
(which also conveniently serves as exposition of the film’s thematic
concerns). Elsewhere, Balli’s classmate, Addi (Birgir Dagur
Bjarkason), is watching the news report with his mother (Aníta
Briem). When Addi’s mother expresses concern for Balli, Addi disses
him for being an oddball who deserves his fate. But Bjarkason’s
sensitive performance betrays Addi’s hardened mask — he clearly
feels for Balli, even if he is unwilling to admit that at the expense of
his youthful machismo.
But Addi’s empathy perks when he offers Balli a cigarette and
pleads with his gang of friends, Konni (Viktor Benóný Benediktsson)
and Siggi (Snorri Rafn Frímannsson), to accept Balli into their group.
The pair are reluctant at first, but gradually warm up to Balli when
they notice that he lives alone in abject squalor and filth; his
drug-addicted father is dead, his step-father is in jail, and his
mother is rarely home. Their camaraderie, however, isn’t instant,
and this is where Guðmundsson’s screenplay expresses clear
nuance in its depiction of the tumultuous relationships between
traumatized teenagers who haven’t been taught how to love.
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Konni and Siggi make fun of Balli and his house and at one point
even spit on him for being afraid of heights. Of course, as we later
realize from Addi’s voiceovers, the boys’ attitude toward Balli
stems from and attempts to conceal the truth that their own
families are just as broken: Konni spends his time beating up
other kids to avoid going home to an abusive father, while Siggi’s
father is a negligent alcoholic. In the boys’ movement toward
brotherhood, what could be mere miserabilism becomes richer.
Of the four boys, Addi’s home situation is the most stable and
hopeful, but he’s embarrassed by his loving mother, who
proclaims to have visions of the future — something that Addi
experiences himself but vehemently denies. This injection of
mysticism may seem jarring in an otherwise staunchly realist
script, but it adds character to the film’s study of the ambiguous
ways that children interpret trauma, both theirs and others’.
Cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen (The Innocents, Another
Round) imbues Addi’s dream sequences with both horror and
notable empathy: violent fathers appear as supernatural
apparitions, but these dark visions are also balanced by tender
scenes, such as one where Addi gently asks Balli whether his
father has been sexually abusing his sister. The sun's warm hues
appear to protect Addi and Balli as they struggle to articulate the
suffering their own families inflict. Such piercing expressions of
love between the boys often take place by the expansive sea or in
sunlight; in doing so, Beautiful Beings posits that learning to love
and be loved in return is a precarious but precious freedom.
When Guðmundsson’s film reaches a terrifyingly brutal conclusion,
the sacrificial depths of compassion the boys have for each other
assuage the cruelty they have dealt with. Intergenerational violence
doesn’t have to last. In a world where boys are so often forced to be
men, Beautiful Beings reminds us that children are always also
simply children; the kindness they have runs deep,
and we can only hope that it endures into adulthood. — SHAR TAN
DIRECTOR: Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson CAST: Birgir Dagur
Bjarkason, Áskell Einar Pálmason DISTRIBUTOR: Altered Innocence
IN THEATERS: January 13 RUNTIME: 2 hr. 2 min.
THE DROP
Sarah Adina Smith
From a certain angle, 2022 could be seen as the year of satire.
There spectrum was vast, from the “high-brow,” like Ruben
Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning Triangle of Sadness, to Halina Reijn’s
extremely mid Gen Z send-up in Bodies Bodies Bodies, to the
lackluster mockumentary Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul from
Adamma Ebo. Heading into 2023, given the state of our global
present, one can only expect more, but in this second week of
January, writer/director Sarah Adina Smith has already delivered
what will hopefully be the worst: The Drop.
Smith’s oeuvre is rich in the offbeat, the uncomfortable, the
questioning. Buster’s Mal Heart (2016) features Rami Malek
interrogating reality, while her most recent effort, Birds of
Paradise (2021), opts for something you might call “spooky ballet.”
It makes some sense then, given her willingness to move through
various modes, that Smith would venture into the world of cringe
comedy with her next feature. The Drop seeks to satirize modern
relationships; from a particular perspective, you could argue it’s
attacking the wokeness of today’s notions of parenthood, but
that’s a slow-witted response. The film isn’t dumb — the quips are
quick — but the problem is, quite simply and quite fatally, that it’s
just not… funny.
Lex (Anna Konkle) and Mani (Jermaine Fowler) head to Mexico for
a destination wedding. Along for the ride are several couple
friends, including the betrothed, Peggy (Jennifer Lafleur) and Mia
(Aparna Nancherla), as well as Lindsey (the always-game Jillian
Bell) and Josh (Joshua Leonard), and the Emmy-winning actress
who’s footing the bill for the whole thing, Shauna (Robin Thede)
and her husband Robbie (Utkarsh Ambudkar). Populated by that
cast of comedy welterweights, viewers could reasonably expect
The Drop to go either way — will this be the kind of film to ride its
underdog status to unexpected delight, or will it be crushed
under the punches of a too-heavy script. Unfortunately for
everyone, it’s the latter.
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FILM REVIEWS
When Lex enacts the eponymous drop, causing Peggy and Mia’s
baby to fall to the ground (she’s okay, by the way), life as they all
know it is over. Mani begins to question if Lex can possibly make
a good mother after such a grave mistake, while Lex realizes
she’s unsure if she even wants children. And that’s only the
beginning — a lot is happening. The cast does their best with the
material they’ve been handed, but that mostly works to highlight
the film’s deficiencies; for instance, Bell and Konkle, who are
known for cringe comedy favorites Workaholics and Pen15,
respectively, aren’t given anything to chew on here that
approaches their memorable work in those series. The film does
rise to almost funny during a pre-wedding party where each
person gives a performance dedicated to the bride and bride.
Over-the-top acting from Shauna and a straight-up depressing
song from Lex and Mani are the closest to cringey the movie
ever gets, and still elicit barely a snort from even a generous
audience.
Setting aside the film’s failures of comedy for a second, Smith
does get a few things right. As in her other features, she
effectively creates a sense of foreboding and apprehension, both
pre- and post-drop: the crashing waves and ominous score
marking the film’s opening images, the contrast between the
hospital’s clinical bleakness and the resort’s easy beauty. And
oddly enough, the film’s earnest, even sentimental, beats hit
harder than any of its attempts at humor, leaving one to wonder
if The Drop would have been more successful with someone else
behind the pen. But a few littered strengths can’t compensate for
the film’s failures of design — it tilts toward barbed commentary,
but only musters flaccidity. Both satire and cringe comedy are
meant to challenge viewers, but all The Drop manages to
challenge is the audience’s patience. — EMILY DUGRANRUT
DIRECTOR: Sarah Adina Smith CAST: Anna Konkle, Jermaine
Fowler, Jillian Bell, Joshua Leonard DISTRIBUTOR: Hulu
STREAMING: January 13 RUNTIME: 1 hr. 32 min.
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OLD REVIEWS NEW RELEASES
JETHICA
Pete Ohs
“As a portrait of insane male entitlement
run amok, Jethica is profoundly
disturbing. But curiously, as the film
progresses, any sense of real danger is
gradually replaced by a kind of
pitch-black gallows humor. There’s a
sense here, bolstered by the film’s
unconventional production process, that
everyone is just making this up as they go along. Clocking in at barely 70 minutes, Jethica can feel at times like a sketch or a rough draft
of a more polished film, but it’s also that same quirky sensibility that makes it so invigorating [...] It would be a stretch to call this
Rivette-ian, but Jethica nonetheless joins a fascinating cohort of contemporary indies like Slow Machine, Black Bear, & Italian Studies that
are interested in playing with narrative conventions, contorting the standard story beats into peculiar shapes and twisty curlicues.” —
DANIEL GORMAN
SAINT OMER
Alice Diop
“Diop, who has already proven herself an expert
documentarian, shifts modes here with remarkable
ease and commands a confident narrative debut
positively vibrating with ideas; a mythic maelstrom
compacted into the suffocating environs of a small courtroom
[...] Diop masterfully entwines her narrative with the play [Medea], and
showcases how the ensuing trial tacitly weaponizes the mythology of Medea’s
betrayal, treachery, and, most importantly, her “otherness,” allowing the woman who
stands before the court to serve as the vessel for a slew of projections, which only further
obscure her reality.” — IGOR FISHMAN
DIRECTOR: Alice Diop CAST: Kayije Kagame, Guslagie Malanga, Valérie Dréville,
Atillahan Karagedik, Aurélia Petit DISTRIBUTOR: Super LTD
STREAMING: January 13 RUNTIME: 2 hr. 2 min.
DIRECTOR: Pete Ohs CAST: Callie Hernandez, Ashley Denise Robinson, Andy Faulkner, Will Madden DISTRIBUTOR: Cinedigm IN
THEATERS & STREAMING: January 13 RUNTIME: 1 hr. 10 min.
SHIN ULTRAMAN
Shinji Higuchi
“Compositions come from overhead at odd angles, or from the side through a crook in an elbow or the arm of a chair,
or from far below, at the point of view of a keyboard or computer screen or the inside of a bag of chips. There’s not
“ exactly any particular reason for these perspectives, or for the fact that Higuchi and Anno hyperactively cut from one
to another within a scene seemingly at random, other than to liven up what could otherwise be lengthy scenes of
incomprehensible exposition. But it’s tremendously slick and entertaining, and that, above all, is indicative of what’s
so vital about Shin Ultraman: it’s simply the most fun movie I’ve seen in quite a long time.” — SEAN GILMAN
DIRECTOR: Shinji Higuchi CAST: Takumi Saitoh, Masami Nagasawa, Tetsushi Tanaka, Hidetoshi Nishijima
DISTRIBUTOR: Fathom Events IN THEATERS: January 13 RUNTIME: 1 hr. 52 min.
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OLD REVIEWS NEW RELEASES
SKINAMARINK
Kyle Edward Ball
“Combining practical, on-set lighting, a digital camera capable of shooting
in extreme low light, and a rigorous post-production process, Ball has
constructed the film almost as a series of still photographs. The sharp 2:35:1
widescreen frame, coupled with a blizzard of fuzzy (digitally added) film grain,
literally feels wrong, in the sense that scope images simply do not typically
look like this. Ball has truly tapped into the uncanny, transforming the
quotidian into something strange and unknowable.” — DANIEL GORMAN
DIRECTOR: Kyle Edward Ball CAST: Lucas Paul, Dali Rose Tetreault, Ross
Paul, Jamie Hill DISTRIBUTOR: IFC Midnight
IN THEATERS & STREAMING: January 13 RUNTIME: 1 hr. 39 min.
THE EXILES
Ben Klein and Violet Columbus
“Having at least some [context], though,
The Exiles should resonate as a
necessary reconciliation with the
30-plus years of complacency from the
world at large that has allowed China to
erase a mass murder from their history
books. That’s the angrier side of the film,
at least, which well utilizes the largely
external commentary of Choy [... But] a
more vulnerable side of The Exiles
emerges from Choy’s shelved archival
footage.” — SAM C. MAC
SICK
John Hyams
“Thanks to its quite odd pairing of collaborators, Sick is a movie awkwardly
pulled in two directions at once. On the one hand, you have director John
Hyams — who cut his teeth on two Universal Soldier movies, both with a big
cult fanbase — bringing to this slasher his exceedingly brutal action
choreography and viscerally intense aestheticization of that action
(the hard, dull thud of body blows, the sharp crack of
breaking bones), thereby allowing the genre a
sense of real danger and immediacy
it’s been lacking On the other hand,
you have screenwriter Kevin
Williamson.” — SAM C. MAC
DIRECTOR: John Hyams
CAST: Gideon Adlan,
Dyan Sprayberry, Bethlehem
Million, Jane Adams
DISTRIBUTOR: Peacock
STREAMING: January 13
RUNTIME: 1 hr. 23 min.
DIRECTOR: Ben Klein & Violet Columbus
CAST: Christine Choy DISTRIBUTOR:
Amazon Prime VIdeo STREAMING:
January 13 RUNTIME: 1 hr. 35 min.
BACK TO THE WHARF
Li Xiaofeng
“Xiaofeng manages some striking compositions here and there [...] But
these visual grace notes are few and far between: Xiaofeng mostly settles
on an unfussy, quotidian realism that’s largely uninspiring. The story leads
eventually, inevitably, to tragedy, but the emotions don’t land like they
should. Xiaofeng doesn’t seem to have much of a knack for this kind of
long-form storytelling, where balancing plot with characters is of the utmost
importance. ” — DANIEL GORMAN
DIRECTOR: Li Xiaofeng CAST: Zhang Yu, Jia Song, Wang Yanhui, Chen Jin,
Enxi Deng, Yuhang Gao DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon Prime Video STREAMING:
January 17 RUNTIME: 1 hr. 58 min.
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Photo Credits:
Cover - Lionsgate; Page 1 - Fun City Editions; Page 2, 3 - Cowboy Pictures; Page 4,5 - Lionsgate;
Page 7 - Kenneth Rexach; Page 9 - Amazon Studios; Page 10 - Dark Star Pictures;
Page 11 - Decal; Page 12 - Join Motion Pictures/Sturla Brandth Groevlen;
Page 14 - Hulu; Back Cover - Amazon Studios