InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 4

FESTIVAL COVERAGE 

FESTIVAL COVERAGE: 

SUNDANCE 2023 

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vestibulum lorem sed risus ultricies tristique nulla 

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SUNDANCE 2023 

MAMACRUZ 

Patricia Ortega 

At its heart, Patricia Ortega’s MAMACRUZ radiates a tender and 

thoughtful warmth for its sympathetic main character, a woman 

whose womanhood has — after decades of religious devotion and 

institutionalization — retaken center stage in her life. The titular 

Cruz (Kiti Mánver), a seventy-something woman, wife, and 

mother, has made small-town routine her domicile. She traverses 

quaint, sun-baked streets on her way to and from church, where 

she helps out by sewing garments for its Virgin Mary statue; she 

cooks and cleans with unspoken familiarity for her frizzled-hair 

husband and cherubic granddaughter; and she video-calls her 

daughter, an aspiring dancer currently based in Vienna, from 

time to time. More tellingly, however, she’s established a gentle 

rhythm for her twilight years, one whose lack of geographical 

specificity (it’s Spain, but it’s also any suburban community 

within) encases a larger universal truth about women her age: 

they’ve lost that lovin’ feelin’, so formative to their physical and 

psychological growth decades prior. 

But Ortega’s follow-up to 2018’s Being Impossible isn’t the terribly 

tragic reception that most of its genre’s ilk are wont to host. Look 

no further than Gaspar Noé’s Vortex or Arturo Ripstein’s Devil 

Between the Legs for those; they’re by far not the worst films on 

old age’s ravages, and this should undermine the oft-held belief 

in a thematic indie shorthand of optimistic/acclaimed versus 

miserabilist/underwhelming. (Swap the terms for Cannes.) 

MAMACRUZ’s radiant tonal palette and unassuming performances 

suggest hope amidst normalcy, familiarity within stifled desire, 

and its crux revolves around how Cruz rediscovers her body and 

her passion against society’s will. When she first stumbles upon 

one of those ubiquitous porn ads while looking up Wikipedia — 

has malware really gotten so bad in Spain? — her initial reaction 

is refusal and rejection; “turn it off,” she desperately flounders in 

the wee hours of dawn, frantically gesturing an apology to the 

Virgin propped on a drawer in her living room. 

It’s only after slight goading by the circumstances — namely, her 

husband continuing to give her the inexplicable silent (and 

sexless) treatment — plus the arguably teleological foundations 

of our carnal drives that Cruz embraces all the breathlessness 

and the heart-racing long dormant within. Attending a women’s 

sex therapy group in a clandestine capacity and discovering the 

now-voguish potentials of anal sex and Ben Wa balls, she opens 

up to a personal dimension hitherto denied her and compensated 

for, instead, by Mass and motherhood. Ortega’s scenario, on the 

whole, traffics in compassion and nuance, eschewing the risqué 

and risible sensationalism frequently realized by hardcore 

pornography and patriarchal stereotyping, respectively. That is, 

however, not to recuse MAMACRUZ from blanket criticism, which 

many a critic today is guilty of in their pursuit of ideological 

synonymy. All its sensitivities aside, Ortega’s film remains 

shuttered in by thematic exiguity and clumsiness. Its ideas are 

better off expounded in a short (given how Ortega quickly resorts 

to surrealism as a means of channeling psychological interiority), 

and its seeming provocations — by way of juxtaposing Cruz’s 

religious faith with her erotic stirrings — irk, not because of their 

tastelessness but due to the film’s thematic preoccupations 

explicitly rendered as thesis statement. To critique MAMACRUZ, 

then, is to acknowledge its selective nuances and subtleties 

while recognizing the limits of character studies whose 

predetermined scope restricts, more or less, their outsized 

ambitions. — MORRIS YANG 

GUSH 

Fox Maxy 

Expanding on the layered, accelerated style she has developed in 

her shorter films, Fox Maxy arrives at Sundance firing on all 

cylinders. Gush marks a clear progression in Maxy’s method, 

adopting an organizational logic more akin to music than any 

conventional narrative form. Maxy has stated that this is, in part, 

a film about mental health and healing, and while this may not be 

immediately apparent from moment to moment, the film’s 

cumulative effect is liberatory, precisely because it avoids the 

usual cinematic language of trauma and victimization. Where too 

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much film work ends up redoubling the violence it aims to 

condemn, Gush unfurls like a multi-faceted tapestry, showing 

that joy and pain, memory and future, hope and fear, are all 

inseparable and simultaneously present in the experiential stew 

of lived existence. 

Drawing on a vast array of source material, some original and 

some appropriated, Maxy pushes images and sounds beyond 

mere representation. These elements take on a physical aspect, 

jolting the viewer as one kind of texture clashes with another. 

Clean, rounded digital animations collide with grainy, pixelated 

cellphone recordings. A shot of a landscape or a bedroom is 

suddenly flattened by the appearance of a digital image or video 

effect (for instance, a group of animated spiders crawling across 

the surface of the screen), provoking a moment of cognitive 

shock. That is, we think we are watching one type of image, but 

Maxy’s additions and distortions shatter that perception, 

reminding us that nothing onscreen is “there.” Every element is 

purposeful, like a note in a composition, producing chords of 

harmony and of dissonance. 

Certain motifs recur in Gush, including clips of Naomi Campbell 

on The Tyra Banks Show describing how the modeling industry 

compromised her sense of self; documentation of a multimedia 

performance piece with live reading, lights, and projection; and 

numerous sequences of people in their cars, traveling, 

conversing, or just hanging out. But the overwhelming majority of 

Gush consists of Maxy’s subjects experiencing sustained 

moments of happiness. There’s dancing, joking around, people 

acting silly in front of the camera in complete comfort. To watch 

Gush is to hover on the periphery of a circle of absolute love and 

trust. We are invited for a little while to just honor this 

community, to bear witness to its vibrant, irrefutable existence. 

And while Maxy’s filmic language avoids the typical tricks and 

techniques for suturing the viewer into the world onscreen — this 

is not a film about flattering or seducing its spectator — it is also 

profoundly welcoming. Like its title, Gush is both exuberant and 

overwhelming, a rush of sounds and images that surges over us, 

at times even knocking us off our feet. But if we give ourselves 

over the current, we can float. — MICHAEL SICINSKI 

THE NIGHT LOGAN WOKE UP 

Xavier Dolan 

Xavier Dolan’s career started surrounded by so much praise, but 

it seems that after a certain point, everyone grew tired of him all 

at once. It’s Only the End of the World wasn’t meaningfully 

different from anything he’d made before, to my eyes, but the 

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reviews were so much worse. It preceded — predicted, almost 

willed into existence — his true fall with The Death & Life of John 

F. Donovan, a total failure by all accounts. That film was recut so 

heavily that Jessica Chastain, who was announced as one of the 

leads, didn’t even show up in the final cut. Even then, Dolan 

couldn’t find any shape to give the film, and within all that 

footage he shot, there doesn’t seem to be much to find. Matthias 

& Maxime was naturally a retreat from disaster, as Dolan went 

back to his roots, presumably to rebuild from there, but it doesn’t 

seem like he’s interested in doing that now. In a recent interview, 

he said that he “[doesn’t] really want to do this job anymore,” and 

in his new five-episode series, The Night Logan Woke Up, you can 

tell. 

It’s a particularly mediocre example of a particularly mediocre 

form: prestige television. Each episode follows that structure: 

something vaguely exciting will happen at the beginning and the 

end — or at least the music tells us it’s supposed to be exciting — 

and what’s in between is mostly stalling. If television’s extended 

length is supposed to give room to develop character more than 

the filmic medium would allow, then that’s seldom how all that 

time has effectively been used. Without much plot to plug the 

holes, Logan is explicitly character-based, the blatant 

time-wasting even more obvious. Following each member of the 

Larouche family, there is no sense that these threads go 

anywhere; even the anchor of the dying matriarch (Anne Dorval) 

doesn’t give much sense of connection and convergence, and 

everything is simply floating through the wind. Dolan seems to 

recognize this, and so gets the character he plays to define all 

the specific relationships in a classic therapy-as-exposition 

scene, which, as per usual, sacrifices character, drama, and 

tension for the sake of convenience. 

No one could accuse Dolan’s previous work of a lack of drive and 

energy, but considering that he’s credited as the writer, director, 

producer, and editor, Logan is shockingly anonymous. It’s stylish 

only to the extent that any hack television director could handle, 

and so the music by Hans Zimmer and David Fleming is needed 

to push the coverage into any kind of shape, which it does with a 

fitting apathy: each cue contains only the generic musical 

signifiers of whatever emotion it’s supposed to convey. All this 

could make Dolan’s biggest haters wish for one of his stylized, 

somewhat formally contrived setpieces set to slightly disjoint 

pop music, begging for a character to come and pull the screen 

into a different aspect ratio. Without the flare and youthful 

exuberance, all that’s left is the emptiness that was always at the 

core of his films. 

GUSH 

Fox Maxy 

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There’s almost a promise of some growth, some development on 

his ideas by casting Dorval as the Mother. Dolan’s relationship 

with his Mother has been the most defining obsession in his 

work, and Dorval has played that surrogate since his very first 

film, the semi-autobiographical I Killed My Mother. But now she’s 

dying, dead by the end of the first episode. Maybe time has worn 

on Dolan in more ways than just his fatigue; maybe there’s a 

newfound awareness that all their shouting has come to nothing. 

All those conflicts will never be resolved, especially with someone 

they’re so close and so entangled with; there’s only so much time 

left. But from the two episodes screened, this doesn’t seem to be 

the case, and it’s hardly even gestured towards, despite how 

obviously fertile that ground is. Even though he’s doing it in such 

a tired, lazy way, Dolan seems to be trying to wrap up his career 

as a whole, killing his mother once and for all. — ESMÉ HOLDEN 

OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN 

Rebecca Zlotowski 

The stepmother is typically an outsider role in literature. 

Originally an adaptation of the novel our Ticket Is No Longer Valid, 

which centers on a man's infertility, Rebecca Zlotowski’s Venice 

competition debut Other People’s Children is a story that’s evolved 

to be a character study of a woman’s exclusion from traditional 

milestones of her own life because she hasn’t chosen to have 

biological children yet. Rachel (Virginie Efira) is constantly told 

that she’s running out of time. Her gynecologist (an infamous in 

niche circles cameo from documentarian Frederick Wiseman) 

tells her her “biological clocks ticking,” her sister (Yamée 

Couture) becomes pregnant, and her new partner Ali (Roschdy 

Zem) is hesitant to fully introduce her into his personal life, 

initially in the case of his four-year-old daughter Leila (Callie 

Ferreira Goncalves). Though the development of Rachel loving 

Leila as her own is the primary source of her internal doubts 

about her child-free life, the title doesn’t just refer to Leila. 

Rachel teaches middle school, and takes on a mentoring role 

with a struggling student (Victor Lefebvre), supporting him as if 

she would a son at times. Her life is complicated because she’s 

lived, and there is never any easy resolution. 

This story is told entirely without its louder moments. Music cues 

will rise or cut in earlier than expected, the whole scene will fade 

to black, or a conversation won’t be audible until it is in the 

aftermath of conflict. These strategies give the characters 

privacy, and lend more weight to the subtleties of performing 

reflection rather than action. Particularly, the use of Vivaldi’s 

Mandolin Concerto in C Major is a Kramer vs. Kramer nod, 

intentionally signaling memories of much more conflict-driven 

relationship stories. By choosing to frame her narrative in which 

multiple relationships, large and small, enter, change, and leave 

Rachel’s life through its emotional aftermath, Zlotowski bends 

what would otherwise be a simple falling-in-love and then 

out-of-love story into a character study of what happens when 

every desire is complicated by life itself. This narrative should be 

a melodrama, in an expected sense. The music would rise and 

fall with the tension; the characters would fight on camera, and 

Rachel would cry when it’s over. And yet, it’s not. With the leisure 

of a Sautet or Rohmer drama, the best character moments come 

in peaceful performance rather than outburst. 

Not only is Rachel centered in a narrative that would traditionally 

place her in a supporting role, none of her choices and concerns 

are left within a vacuum. Rachel discusses her past experiences 

with abortion with a partner, and how, though she wants children 

now, that wasn’t always a goal, and her own relationship with 

motherhood is marred by her mother’s death. This also comes up 

when Rachel, her sister, and father (Michel Zlotowski, not a 

stranger to making appearances in his daughter’s films) visit her 

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mother’s grave, and they debate the role of Rachel’s unborn niece 

in Jewish law, and what constitutes life. These conversations 

questioning and affirming and remembering the idea of choice 

don’t pretend that it’s easy, only that it is a fact of Rachel’s life. 

She hasn’t made up her mind about what she wants from Ali, how 

she feels about Leila’s mother (Chiara Mastroianni), or whether 

she needs biological children to feel complete in her aspirations. 

She’s able to grow still and change and live without settling into 

her 40s in someone else’s life. 

unused lithium, years worth of unpaid property taxes means 

there’s a lien on the house, and Brandon is so broke he’s reduced 

to stealing Top Ramen from the convenience store around the 

corner. It all piles up such that when he’s robbed at gunpoint at 

the aforementioned market by a sexy female criminal in a 

sparkly balaclava, it’s both the latest in a long line of indignities 

as well as a brief distraction from the mundanities of his life. 

Much of Efira’s performance is left unsaid. Her character’s wistful 

selflessness comes through in the slip of a hand back into her 

pocket when picking Leila up from judo around her mother, and 

in her regret-tinged rejection of a kiss from a near suitor. Rather 

than playing Rachel’s worry through histrionic neurosis, she 

builds up a smiling mask of grace as she slowly opens herself to 

the possibility of her world. Though Sibyl and Benedetta displayed 

a dramatic prowess, this warm, layered turn from Virginie Efira 

may instead remind accustomed viewers of her work in 

Madeleine Collins, as a mother living a double life trying to keep 

up images. Her onscreen happy ending isn’t marriage, having a 

child, or an impulsive chase of an impossible dream — it’s putting 

herself first and not accepting what comes without condition. 

Though this is a somewhat personal story, and the real ending 

isn’t the same vague philosophy, the epilogue is a reprioritization 

of the character, and a truthful one at that.— SARAH WILLIAMS 

YOUNG. WILD. FREE. 

Thembi L. Banks 

When we first meet Algee Smith’s Brandon in Thembi L. Banks’ 

feature-debut, Young. Wild. Free., external stressors already beset 

him. A high school senior living in South Central with his manic 

depressive single mother, Janice (Sanaa Lathan), and two young 

siblings whom he’s practically raising by himself, Brandon is fired 

in the film’s first scene from a McJob he desperately needs, after 

a physical altercation with a coworker. Janice can barely get out 

of bed to buy groceries, her baby daddy Lamont (Mike Epps) is a 

low-rent drug dealer who keeps coming by the house to steal her 

After an attention-grabbing introduction, we learn that the 

masked bandit is a schoolmate of Brandon’s, named Cassidy 

(Sierra Capri). Cassidy is in the mold of Melanie Griffith’s Lulu 

from Something Wild: a sexually liberated delinquent, 

unencumbered by typical teenage obligations — she mostly 

wanders the hallways of school but doesn’t appear to actually 

attend classes — who’s also inexplicably obsessed with Brandon. 

Popping up unannounced at Brandon’s house to return the wallet 

she took from him, stocking his fridge with food, and getting him 

to stay out all night so they can cruise the Hollywood hills in her 

convertible blasting 80’s pop, Cassidy is less a person than a 

collection of incongruous, movie dream-girl traits, the type of 

female character seemingly designed in a lab to draw uptight 

men out of their shells and give in to their rebellious streaks 

while possessing no pesky inner lives themselves. She 

encourages Brandon to work out his frustrations by wailing on 

her cherry-red BMW with a golf club, gets him to cut class so they 

can go watch a Lena Horne film at repertory theater, and, as far 

as Brandon’s financial troubles… she has a solution for that too. 

One spends a small eternity waiting for the film to acknowledge 

the lack of tonal consistency or how Cassidy (whose fashion 

sense falls somewhere between one of the kids 

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from Clueless and an exotic dancer) and her behavior clashes 

with the comparatively grounded drama of Brandon and his 

family. So, for a good long while, the film simply splits the 

difference between earnest realism (i.e., Brandon and Janice 

spend most of the time fighting over money, Lamont, and 

whether she’ll resume seeing her therapist) and fantastical, 

wish-fulfillment nonsense. While it makes for an inharmonious 

union, morbid curiosity at how Banks might land this plane 

sustains the film for longer than it should by all rights. 

To the film’s slight credit, there *is* ultimately a reason for 

Cassidy’s “extraness,” but getting into what that is falls squarely 

within spoiler territory. One can say, however, that it hinges on 

the hoariest of twists (presumably this is the actual reason 

Cassidy incessantly references film bro staples from the late ‘90s 

and early ‘00s) — the sort of narrative device that, even when 

done well, rarely plays fair with the audience and almost always 

feels like a betrayal of any goodwill the film might have 

engendered up to that point. The revelation has a crippling effect 

on the film, leaving several substantial plot threads dangling 

(including a murder that Brandon participates in as part of a 

breaking and entry gone awry) so it can engage in touchy-feely 

psychobabble while forcing the viewer to play back in their heads 

half a dozen scenes that, upon reflection, make absolutely no 

sense. Reconciling the two modes the film employs was always 

going to be a tall order, but the solution Young. Wild. Free. arrives 

at feels deeply cynical, radiating backwards and negatively 

coloring everything we’d seen up to that point. While providing an 

explanation for why nothing was passing the smell test (as well 

as clarifying some of the more curious visual motifs), it only 

confirms all the worst suspicions about the filmmaker. — 

ANDREW DIGNAN 

IN MY MOTHER’S SKIN 

Kenneth Dagatan 

Trapped in their luxurious mansion, a previously well-to-do 

family in the Philippines suffers through the tail end of World War 

II, constantly being harassed by the Imperial Japanese Army 

. The patriarch, Aldo (Arnold Reyes), is rumored to have stolen 

gold bars from the Japanese, which has put Antonio (Ronnie 

Lazaro), a Filipino liaison to the kôgun, on their case. Although he 

denies having stolen anything, Aldo takes Antonio's thinly veiled 

threats to heart and decides to leave his family behind in hopes 

of contacting the approaching Americans. Left alone, his wife 

Ligaya (Beauty Gonzales), daughter Tala (Felicity Kyle Napuli), son 

Bayani (James Mavie Estrella), and their scheming live-in servant 

Amor (Angeli Bayani), are forced to fend for themselves, as the 

scarce rations put them on a steady diet of sweet potatoes for 

the next few weeks. When Ligaya suddenly falls ill, Tala and 

Bayani wander the surrounding forest, desperate to find help for 

their ailing mother. Chancing upon a dilapidated house, Tala 

comes across a fairy (Jasmine Curtis-Smith) who claims to 

possess a cure for the mother's failing health. 

“[This] callback to the 

grindhouse flicks of the ‘70s 

offers up the most respectful 

portrait of sex workers the 

big screen has seen in ages. 

Kenneth Dagatan's creepy body horror fairytale is a beguiling 

genre amalgam which combines folkloric terror, historical 

tragedy, and shades of J-horror. When the fairy's supposed 

miracle cure inevitably sets in motion a bizarre transformation, 

Ligaya's body contorts uncomfortably, and her voice crackles 

with blood-curdling menace, recalling Kayako's eerie death rattle 

in Ju-On: The Grudge. Obvious parallels to Guillermo del Toro's 

Pan's Labyrinth aside, In My Mother's Skin grafts its more 

fantastical elements onto something altogether more nasty, even 

as it looks at the world through the innocent, naïve eyes of 

14-year-old Tala. Mangled corpses and severed heads abound, 

punctuating — maybe "interrupting" is the more apt descriptor — 

the film's deliberate pacing. There are kaleidoscopic shots of rich 

flora blossoming around the characters throughout the film's 

97-minute runtime, and their oneiric blurriness — 

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reminiscent of Carlos Reygadas' 2012 magical realist Post 

Tenebras Lux, as well as the works of Apichatpong Weerasethakul 

— counters the cold, sharp, gray interiors of the barren family 

manor. 

Dagatan navigates the tonal and aesthetic back-and-forth with 

supreme confidence, easily seesawing between nightmarish folk 

horror and unambiguous brutality. Opening with the grim 

drudgery of life during wartime, the fairy's arrival brings a sense 

of wonder and hope, at least at first. The fairy, golden-winged 

and gorgeous, glistens with magic and vague malevolence, the 

latter being completely invisible to the young protagonist. Once 

Tala invites the deceitful evil into her home, however, its true 

nature quickly becomes apparent, and the timid Ligaya's 

transformation into a terrifying ghoul heralds Tala's imminent 

loss of innocence as well. Interestingly, though, In My Mother's 

Skin not only reflects on the war-induced loss of humanity but 

also on folk religion's place in one of the most devoutly Catholic 

countries on earth. The family frequently prays in front of an 

altar upon which an effigy of the Virgin Mary stands. But as the 

grotesque curse grows stronger, sending Tala and her younger 

brother deeper into despair, their prayers fall on deaf ears: the 

gods of folklore reclaiming the land that was theirs before the 

Spanish converted the island nation to Christianity. "The 

Philippines is a very Catholic country," elaborates Dagatan in an 

interview with Filmmaker Magazine. "I really wanted to provide a 

contrast to that hope of Catholicism." 

Consequently, his film is loaded with subversive imagery, most 

notably reflected in the design of Curtis-Smith's fairy herself. 

Acting as an inversion of the saintly Mary, her translucent halo 

transforms the warm glow associated with the light of 

Christianity into a perverse omen of doom, the golden wings not 

so much sacral as insectine. Dagatan elevates the mischievous 

mythical creature into a symbol not only for the cannibalistic 

nature of war, but also for the inevitability of loss, forcing Tala to 

confront mortality as a cruel and unavoidable thing — the most 

essential and the most painful part of growing up. — FRED 

BARRETT 

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LAST THINGS 

Deborah Stratman 

Last Things — the latest from Chicago-based experimental artist 

Deborah Stratman — begins with a voiceover reading the 

introductory prose from Clarice Lispector’s swan song novella, 

The Hour of the Star. “All the world began with a yes,” it declares 

over the blank screen. “One molecule said yes to another 

molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the 

prehistory of the prehistory and there was the never and there 

was the yes.” Genesis begins as molecular affirmation; humanity 

arrives long after. Lispector’s words thus set the scene for 

Stratman’s dense, 50-minute philosophical-geological inquiry, a 

bold posthuman gesture that dethrones the human as linchpin of 

both history and evolution and asserts, instead, the primacy of 

the mineral kingdom. 

Rocks, as Last Things suggests, evolve. Citing Robert Hazen’s 

mineral evolution hypothesis — which suggests the process to be 

largely a byproduct of living organisms — the film situates itself 

within a thirteen-billion-year-old narrative of matter, its 

migrations, and its evolution. Though earth rocks have existed 

for eons, they store no recollection of their journey. They’re an 

archive without memory; they endure and will continue to endure 

after the Earth’s death. In her scattered and elusive essayistic 

style, Stratman examines the implications of mineral evolution 

on humanity and vice-versa. 

Though cryptic and eccentric, this is far from Stratman’s most 

impenetrable work. Much like her previous film, The Illinois 

Parables (2016), Last Things frequently reformulates itself, armed 

with an arsenal of approaches. The movie embodies a variety of 

perspectives, from outer space to microscope slides, as 

Stratman’s images — landscapes, crystal and rock formations, 

sketches, spelunking and laboratory footage, celestial satellite 

imagery, microscopic forms, etc. — collectively embody an 

otherworldly thrill. The soundtrack (including pieces by Brian Eno 

and Okkyung Lee) and sound design (by Stratman herself) are 

often glitchy, alien, and sublime. Stratman’s rendition of rocks, in 

addition, highlights the complexities of their history and 

evolutions. She imbues them with a vastness far beyond the 

dismissal often extended towards the inanimate. Images are 

often accompanied by voiceover interviews or passages from 

texts (always narrated by unseen figures); these narrated 

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passages are eclectic. Scientific mineral theory enmeshes with 

speculative fiction — fact and fiction married — and there’s a 

slippery ambiguity at work in Last Things’ lack of citations (at 

least, until the end credits). The disparate sources which fuel the 

narration thus culminate into a singular and chaotic vision. 

of epochal change. Rakesh is poor, using his father’s old 

hand-me-down boat to fish along the shallow coastlines. Ganesh 

is an upwardly mobile, middle-class businessman, having studied 

abroad in Scotland and is now the owner of a large ship that 

requires a crew to venture into deep waters to make its catch. 

The extinction of humanity — an increasingly inevitable prospect 

— is at the meditative core of Last Things. Yet the film downplays 

this drama and de-emphasizes our cosmic importance. At one 

point, Stratman includes a shot of Casa do Penedo, the northern 

Portuguese landmark-home erected around four massive stone 

boulders. The domestic architecture builds off its pre-existing 

geological landscape. It’s a perfect culminating image; human 

constructions are at the mercy of mineral formations, and the 

eradication of our species and the decay of everything material 

we’ve produced is just a ripple in the history of our earthly 

co-matter. In refuting tendencies of anthropomorphic thought, 

the film becomes an empowering reminder of our own 

insignificance. Yet any hint of didacticism shrivels away in 

Stratman’s hands; instead, she embraces pleasure in the 

unknown and the sprawling ambiguity of the universe. — RYAN 

AKLER-BISHOP 

AGAINST THE TIDE 

Sarvnik Kaur 

Coincidentally or not, Sarvnik Kaur’s new documentary Against 

the Tide arrives just one year after Shaunak Sen’s acclaimed 2022 

doc All That Breathes. The two form a diptych of sorts — both are 

Sundance premieres, and each grapples with social and 

environmental issues in modern-day India as refracted through 

the relationship between two men, here life-long best friends 

Rakesh and Ganesh. Beginning with the birth of Rakesh’s son and 

ending with the birth of Ganesh's own child, Against the Tide 

compresses roughly a year of their respective lives into a 

90-minute narrative that charts the tumultuous ups and downs 

of their day-to-day existence. Both men are Koli fishermen, a 

traditional Indian caste which dates back to at least the 15th 

century, but whose way of life is now slowly eroding in the face 

Kaur gets a lot of mileage out of simply observing the two old 

friends at home and at work; Rakesh’s small, cramped shack, 

tattered clothes, and beaten-up boat stand in sharp contrast to 

Ganesh’s comparatively massive vessel, as well as his modern 

condo, stylish outfits, and sleek smartphone. But despite the 

outward trappings of success, Ganesh’s lifestyle comes at a cost, 

too. He’s massively in debt, borrowing money left and right to 

keep his crew on in the hopes that a big catch is coming soon. 

For his part, Rakesh can barely afford the doctor’s visits for his 

chronically ill baby, revealed in time to have a congenital heart 

defect. Both men are in dire straights, their plights exasperated 

by the increasingly small loads of fish each of their expeditions 

keep turning up. Climate change, an influx of Chinese boats, 

conflict with Pakistan, and good old-fashioned human 

malfeasance are all partly to blame; but whatever the cause, the 

men’s livelihoods are hanging by a thread. 

On paper, Against the Tide might sound like a simplistic portrait 

of have vs. have not, but Rakesh and Ganesh are compelling 

subjects in their own right, both well aware of their grim 

situations and open with their spouses and each other about 

their fears. Far from wallowing in self-pity, the men are lively and 

proactive, willing to ask tough questions of each other and push 

back when necessary. The film is most compelling whenever 

Kaur and cinematographer Ashok Meena allow scenes to play out 

10


unadorned, simply observing events and allowing various details 

to accumulate.The actual fishing footage is breathtaking, 

occasionally flirting with the abstracted verisimilitude of Paravel 

and Castaing-Taylor’s Leviathan while still giving viewers a clear 

view of the labor involved, the nuts and bolts of fishing on both 

an industrial and an individual scale; men maneuvering these 

huge nets and the monumental effort it requires to haul them 

into and out of the water is a sight to behold. Scenes of Ganesh 

haggling in the harbor fish markets reveal how desperate 

everyone is, as buyers and sellers jockey for position and hope to 

chisel some kind of profit from one another. It’s a flurry of 

activity, a real glimpse into a part of the world most viewers will 

be unfamiliar with. 

A key subplot gradually emerges, as Ganesh questions whether or 

not to illegally use LED lights on his ship in an effort to net larger 

yields. Rakesh is adamantly opposed to the idea, noting that it is 

against the Koli tradition and leads to overfishing, leaving small 

operations like his own with nothing. Ganesh counters that they 

are both already catching nothing on a regular basis, while larger 

ships utilize LEDs one way or the other. It’s an ethical quandary 

played out as an intimate, interpersonal drama, and one that isn’t 

resolved in quite the way viewers might assume. It’s a worthy 

film, fast-paced and teeming with ideas, and if it’s not ultimately 

optimistic about the future, it still highlights the values of 

ceremonial tradition and communal activity. — DANIEL GORMAN 

JOYLAND 

Saim Sadiq 

As the first Pakistani film to premiere at Cannes, Saim Sadiq’s 

Joyland — which also won the Un Certain Regard selection’s Jury 

prize and the Queer Palm in 2022 — is a historic directorial debut. 

Set in Lahore, Pakistan, Joyland is a gentle and sobering look at 

repressed desires. However, while Joyland is groundbreaking for 

what it represents for Pakistani cinema, the film’s 

disproportionate focus on a cisgender man’s anxieties 

undermines its promising premise. 

In one of the very first scenes of Joyland, a woman’s water 

breaks. This is not Nucchi’s (Sarwat Gilani) first rodeo; she swiftly 

tells her other three daughters that they will be fed. She makes 

sure the spill on the floor is cleaned, before ordering her 

brother-in-law, Haider (Ali Junejo), to get his bike so they can go 

to the hospital. He is visibly flustered, and so she yells at him, 

once more, to get his bike. Only then does he listen. Throughout 

the commotion, Haider’s face is out of the camera’s line of sight, 

though Nucchi’s is in full view. With this, Sadiq makes it 

abundantly clear who runs the household. This opening scene is 

Joyland’s strongest moment, as it precisely delineates the 

patriarchal gender politics which govern families: Nucchi is more 

strong-willed than Haider, but is confined to her expected role as 

a mother of four. Her brilliance is unfairly hampered by a 

flustered man who doesn’t quite know what he wants in life. 

Joyland would have made for a searing indictment of patriarchal 

cruelty if it had sustained the masterful concision displayed in its 

opening scene. Instead, Haider’s insecurities over his masculinity 

— he is unemployed and his wife, Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq), is the 

sole breadwinner — is how audiences are made to view the 

women in his life, especially Mumtaz and Biba (Alina Khan), a 

trans dancer with whom Haider has an affair. When Haider lands 

a job as a backup dancer for Biba, Mumtaz is begrudgingly forced 

to give up her career as a make-up artist in order to take care of 

Haider’s father and Nucchi’s children. Just as she is pushed to 

the margins by her father-in-law, Sadiq’s script also diminishes 

Mumtaz’s role in the narrative in the latter half of the film — she 

is reduced to her palpable sadness over Haider’s lingering 

absences. By the final act, Mumtaz all but slowly disappears from 

the script altogether. 

Perhaps what is more concerning is Joyland’s treatment of Biba, 

whose character is largely defined (and curtailed) by her love 

affair with Haider and the transphobic violence that she 

experiences in Pakistan. Joyland has little to say about trans 

womanhood that isn’t filtered through what Haider, as well as 

other men, think of Biba. Her character serves as an allegorical 

tale for the failures of cis-ness; Haider’s affair with Biba is less 

11

SUNDANCE 2023 

about his affection for her than it is about lashing out at his 

insufficiency at performing what is expected of him as a man. In 

what is supposedly a touching scene, Haider tells Biba: 

“Sometimes… I feel like I have nothing that’s my own. Everything 

feels borrowed or stolen from someone else.” These two lines 

would have been stunning had they been articulated by people 

who are on the receiving end of gender oppression. Yet in 

Joyland, it is Biba who comforts Haider’s sorrow over having the 

freedom to leave the house while his wife bears the brunt of 

misogyny. While men like Haider do suffer the consequences of 

oppressive gender roles — and Sadiq does a brilliant job at 

highlighting the nuances of this — it is the systemic misogyny 

towards women like Biba, Nucchi, and Mumtaz which sustains the 

patriarchy. 

Part of the marvel of watching a film like Sean Baker’s Tangerine 

is seeing trans characters exist as who they are — neither 

Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) nor Alexandra (Mya Taylor) are 

used as metaphors for the precariousness of cis-gender norms 

or the ways in which cis-ness disappoints. In an ironically cruel 

fashion, it is Biba who barely has anything of her own in Sadiq’s 

film beyond her figurative duty to make Haider’s 

self-actualization meaningful. Even scenes of intimacy between 

Haider and Biba are heavy-handed in illustrating this; during their 

first kiss, the light in the room shines on Biba, while Haider is 

shrouded in darkness. In Joyland, Biba’s characterization only 

occurs when tenuously contrasted against Haider’s. As a result, 

Biba isn’t afforded the narrative heterogeneity that she rightfully 

deserves. 

One of the most euphoric scenes in Joyland occurs when Nucchi 

and Mumtaz take some time off to go to Joyland, the titular 

amusement park. It is a rare moment where the two women are 

free from the gendered expectations that suffocate their dreams 

and ambitions. Womanhood, for Nucchi and Mumtaz, is most 

tangible when they are together without their husbands. Their 

solidarity highlights the squandered potentiality of Sadiq’s script. 

One can’t help but wonder whether Biba’s character would be 

more fully realized had she been in community with other trans 

women or given a standalone arc — these wonderful scenes do 

happen, but they are few and far between — instead of being 

used to literalize a cisgender man’s journey towards 

enlightenment. — SHAR TAN 

12


KIM’S VIDEO 

David Redmon, Ashley Sabin 

With streaming services yanking titles from availability and even 

disappearing completed work that may now never be shown, it 

might seem like the perfect time to eulogize physical media once 

again. We’ve had movies about obsessive collectors, we’ve had 

the story of the sole remaining Blockbuster video; now comes 

Kim’s Video, the cleverly titled tale of the legendarily huge catalog 

of the New York-based Kim’s Video chain. 

mountain of tapes and DVDs sat rotting in a crappy, locked 

basement. Redmon journeys to Salemi, where he finds not only 

this dismal sight, but encounters a shifty local politician, a 

possible mafioso, and even maybe a murder, before finally 

settling on a mostly tongue-in-cheek “heist,” referencing both 

Godard and the movie Argo, to liberate Kim’s collection and return 

it to the U.S. The performative nature of the whole thing is 

functionally pretty grating, and seeing what’s left of Kim’s Video 

wind up in the hands of a theater chain using it as a kitschy 

loss-leader to sell beer and T-shirts is disheartening at best. 

David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s documentary bounces back 

and forth between Redmon’s obsessive love of cinema and his 

feelings of a psychic bond with the store’s 55,000-plus collection 

and tales of clerks-turned-filmmakers (Sean Price Williams and 

Alex Ross Perry turn up here) or celebrity late fees (the Coens 

supposedly owed 600 bucks). Redmon can’t go thirty seconds 

without name-checking a famous movie, at one point likening his 

compulsion to that of Kane with Rosebud. It’s meant to be cheeky 

and playful, but then it becomes assaultive and annoying, like 

being trapped in a conversation with someone who doesn’t care 

about your half of it. 

Eventually, the film gets to its heart: in 2008, owner Yongman 

Kim decided to close the business, and dutifully sought another 

home for the collection. Bizarrely, he settled on the Italian town 

of Salemi, which promised to keep the archive available to any 

Kim’s Video member, hold festivals, and even project titles in the 

town square, all in an effort to boost tourism. But as Karina 

Longworth discovered in 2012, that never happened. Instead, the 

What’s worse, Kim’s Video has nothing to say about the value of 

the physical media Redmon is so intent on rescuing, nor does it 

spend any time discussing all of the other collections around the 

country (and indeed, the world) that are doing major work 

keeping that art alive and accessible. It’s mostly just a nerd’s 

prank. It’s not enough to just love movies, it’s not enough that 

that love has formed so much of your identity; you’ve got to have 

something to say about that. — MATT LYNCH 

SQUARING THE CIRCLE 

Anton Corbijn 

For those who’ve ever lit a doobie and stared at Pink Floyd’s cover 

art with glazed eyes, wondering what it all means, man, rejoice: 

Anton Corbijn’s documentary Squaring the Circle: The Story of 

Hipgnosis will engulf classic rock fans and design junkies alike in 

a haze of cheerful nostalgia. Well, unless the album in question is 

1970’s Atom Heart Mother, which bears the inscrutable photograph 

of a cow. If you’re wondering, “What has a cow got to do with Pink 

Floyd?” you’re not alone. But at this point, the only creature who 

can answer that question is the long-dead heifer herself. 

Hipgnosis, the pioneering design firm led by photographers 

Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell, came up in London’s 

Swinging ‘60s and soon became the go-to cover artists for the 

likes of Led Zeppelin, 10cc, Peter Gabriel, and many more. Their 

name was adopted from a piece of graffiti in their studio, a play 

13

SUNDANCE 2023 

on the word “hypnosis” that fused the modernity of “hip” with the 

ancient wisdom of the “gnostic.” This origin story neatly sums up 

their decades-long sensibility: punny and playful, stubbornly 

irreverent, and committed to the bit. Thorgerson, who died in 

2013, was widely recognized as someone who “couldn’t take yes 

for an answer”; Corbijn includes an entire montage of interview 

subjects reminiscing about what an asshole he was. But in 

Powell, he found a best friend and creative partner, someone 

who could execute his crazy ideas and manage the fragile 

rock-star relationships that kept their studio afloat. Their 

eventual estrangement in the early ‘80s, when the bright, 

artificial bleep-bloops of the MTV generation came to dominate 

airwaves, was as much a death knell for Hipgnosis as it was for 

the heavy, guitar-driven sound they celebrated and the surreal 

aesthetic they helped create. 

“Vinyl is the poor man’s art collection,” quips Noel Gallagher, who 

is definitely maybe unsure if he’s quoting himself and, in 

Thorgerson’s absence, serves as the documentary’s resident 

grouch. Yet the rock star excesses of the era — and a certain 

internationally recognized prism graphic — quickly elevated 

Hipgnosis from ratty art school kids to high-flying members of 

the entourage. Corbijn, himself a photographer and music video 

director for megabands like Depeche Mode and U2, clearly 

recognizes how much he and every other black coffee-drinking, 

cigarette-smoking, 35mm-shooting art director is indebted to 

the Hipgnosis legacy. The result is an affectionate documentary 

that’s roughly formatted as a Greatest Hits of their most iconic 

album covers. Actual human stuntman on fire? Easy. Escaped 

inflatable pig that closed air traffic? Obviously. Reclining sheep 

on a therapist’s couch in the Hawaiian surf? Child’s play. But the 

biggest I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-Photoshop moment came when 

Paul McCartney wanted an antique statue perched on a 

mountain, so Hipgnosis chartered a helicopter to the Swiss peaks 

to get the money shot. Of course, a pile of salt in the studio would 

have sufficed — but where’s the fun in that? — SELINA LEE 

14


LA PECERA 

Glorimar Marrero Sánchez’ 

La Pecera, Glorimar Marrero Sánchez’s feature debut, opens in 

mysterious fashion, offering little exposition and dropping 

viewers straight into a scene of Noelia (Isel Rodríguez) taking a 

bath. Eventually, her partner comes in to help clean a wound, the 

relic of a horrible battle with cancer, which seems to have 

returned though she is hiding this from her partner. This opening 

sequence acts as a nucleus to one of the film’s major themes — a 

contention with our own mortality. Noelia soons confirms that 

her cancer has indeed returned, and that the prognosis isn’t 

hopeful. Exhausted from the relentless treatment she’s already 

endured, she decides to leave her current home life and return to 

Vieques, an eastern island of Puerto Rico where she grew up. 

images butting up against distracting (and literal) shakiness of 

form. In general, the film lacks the stillness necessary to land 

with impact, surprising given the narrative; it only runs 90 

minutes long, but still feels frustratingly lacking in intent. It 

leaves some of the major plot points, especially in the final act, 

feeling rushed and landing with less impact than they ought to. 

It appears that Noelia seldom returns to her hometown; given the 

morsels of information doled out to viewers, which can 

sometimes abruptly interrupt the story, we find that Vieques is 

an island with a difficult history and a tumultuous relationship 

with the U.S. During the latter half of the 20 th century, America 

used the island for munitions testing, which involved pummeling 

the island with bombs and conducting military training 

operations. Permeating the entire film is the lingering trauma 

this horrifying practice has left with the island’s inhabitants; 

Noelia’s mother attempts to disarm and retrieve leftover bombs, 

while her friends conduct experiments on the water to test its 

toxicity. Unfortunately, this study of the legacy of colonialism and 

militarism is left underexplored, with its addition to the film often 

feeling more jarring than of genuine interest. 

Despite La Pecera’s first 20 minutes edging toward surrealism 

(or even a more spiritual realm), it largely remains strictly 

naturalistic, rarely delving into or indulging any sense of eeriness 

or mystery. It’s a texture that’s notable in both the performances, 

which are on the whole quite good, and the cinematography. 

Visually, the film boasts some arresting images — the murky 

hues of a sunset slowly fading on a desolate beach, a haunting 

reflection glimpsed in a mirror — but the handheld camerawork 

also too often lends a dissonance, the beauty of these static 

It’s perhaps best to view La Pecera as a treatise on taking control 

of one’s own life. Early in the film, Noelia’s partner continually 

tries to influence, to the point of almost controlling, her 

decisions. He soon becomes overbearing, which forces her to 

leave without him. And then there are the doctors, family, and 

friends who all attempt to exert some authority over Noelia’s 

actions despite her moves to defy them, repeatedly reminding 

them that she is not a child. It reflects the film’s most thoroughly 

fleshed out ideas, with the concept of self-determination being 

linked to the larger story of Vieques’ citizens attempting to 

regain control over their island from American influence. 

But given how primed the film’s various plot threads of both a 

damaged community and a woman confronting the stark reality 

of death feel for an complex dissection of identity, mortality, and 

trauma, Marrero Sánchez’ only musters disappointingly tepid 

ruminations on any of them. La Pecera remains a sufficiently 

solid debut on the strength of its interesting albeit sporadic 

considerations, instinct for compositions, and dedication to 

naturalistic minimalism, all of which suggest great potential for 

the director, but its shortcomings are tough to ignore this time 

out. — OLIVER PARKER 

15

KICKING THE CANON 

THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW 

MASSACRE 

Tobe Hooper 

When talking about the agonizingly slow death of his career, Orson Welles once claimed, "I began at the top and have been working my 

way down ever since.” Aside from debut feature Eggshells — an often forgotten experimental work about a hippie commune — this 

quote could also easily be applied to horror master Tobe Hooper, with his sophomore film, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, persisting as 

his most revered work almost fifty years after its release. Despite directing a variety of grimy and fascinating films, such as 

immediate follow-up Eaten Alive or the unfairly maligned and beautifully horrid late-period Toolbox Murders, Hooper was seldom able 

to recreate the surprise success found with Chain Saw, except for perhaps Poltergeist, which is a film most refuse to acknowledge 

Hooper even made. It seems strange that many of Hooper’s later films would not find any similar degree of success, although his 

obsession with strange, macabre tales persisted throughout his entire career. However, it’s easy to see why Chain Saw is regarded as 

his magnum opus. 

At the time of its release, there were few horror films that looked or felt like it. Up until the ‘60s, popular American and European 

horror was largely, although not entirely, defined by gothic tales, whether part of the Universal monster stable (Dracula, Frankenstein, 

etc.) or one of Roger Corman’s Poe works (House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum). Aside from singularities like Psycho or Night of 

the Living Dead, the genre frequently revolved around monsters, ghouls, or demonic entities, infrequently grounded in the horrors of 

reality, even when they were not as overwhelmingly harrowing as the ones made in the early 1970s. Hooper, along with other directors 

such as Wes Craven, helped bring a sense of verisimilitude and bleakness to the genre, shifting its focus toward the cruelty and 

16

KICKING THE CANON 

barbarity carried out by real human beings. No doubt this 

seismic shift was instigated not only by the dramatic changes in 

the sociopolitical arena at the time, but also by their ability to 

capture and air them on mainstream television. Hooper himself 

admitted that TV channels “showing brains spilled all over the 

road” as part of the Vietnam War coverage, alongside political 

corruption and more, contributed to the grim atmosphere felt 

throughout his film. 

This influence sees Hooper turn Chain Saw into something primal, 

although he never fixates on the film's more grotesque and 

violent elements for longer than necessary. As many others have 

pointed out, Chain Saw has very little actual bloodshed — Hooper 

himself was aiming to secure a PG rating from the MPAA, a fact 

which feels laughably implausible when viewing the final 

product. Leatherface’s entrance, for example, demonstrates how 

the film’s brutality is both entirely stripped back and punctures it 

at seemingly random intervals. Without hinting, he suddenly 

appears on screen before violently beating someone to death in 

quick succession. His hulking body and disturbing mask are 

enough to terrify, but there is hardly time to take it in; before 

long, he has disappeared out of frame. This lack of exposition on 

the Sawyer family's presence in the world is a testament to the 

film's power. Hooper explains nothing about this sadistic family, 

their motives, what exists in their past, or what will happen to 

them after the credits roll. He simply drops us into this already 

existing universe, with characters whose lives don’t start and end 

with the images onscreen. 

In her provocative essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag 

claimed that “by reducing the work of art to its content and then 

interpreting that, one tames the work of art.” Chain Saw needs no 

interpretation. Whatever can be said about the film’s politics or 

its deeply embedded meanings is sure to pale in comparison to 

the incredible power of its images, which see horror distilled into 

its purest form. Attempting to grapple with the film's meaning 

and deem it something that simply exists to serve a message — 

which is, unfortunately, the case for many modern flicks — 

detracts from its incredibly singular purpose — namely, to 

17

FILM REVIEWS 

INFINITY POOL 

Brandon Cronenberg 

Though still relatively early in his career, initial indications are 

that arterial spray and pulverized bones are to Brandon 

Cronenberg’s filmography what unnatural orifices are to his 

father’s. Cronenberg the junior’s most recent film, Possessor, was 

even released in an uncut version which restored assorted eye 

and teeth gougings in full to preserve the filmmaker’s unblinking 

approach to screen violence. It felt like a distraction then — a 

nihilistic stunt to pander to the midnight madness crowd — but 

it’s more purposeful and of a piece with the overall approach to 

conveying excess in his latest film, Infinity Pool. Equal parts 

dystopian sci-fi, treatise on the ultra-wealthy, and scurrilous 

black comedy, Cronenberg has devised a premise that takes 

unchecked privilege and the absence of legal guardrails and 

allows it to play out to its most Hobbesian end. While there’s no 

shortage of “eat the rich” takes in pop culture these days, you’d 

be hard pressed to find anything this pitiless or debauched over 

at The White Lotus. 

Set at a heavily-fortified luxury resort on the fictional island 

nation of Li Tolqa, we’re introduced to occasional novelist James 

(Alexander Skarsgård) and his wealthy wife Em (Cleopatra 

Coleman) mid-vacation. James once wrote a 

not-terribly-successful book and has spent the ensuing years 

adrift: living off Em’s largesse (a visible strain on their marriage 

that they joke their way through) and desperate for inspiration. At 

the resort, they make quick friends with Alban (Jalil Lespert) and 

his actress wife Gabi (Mia Goth), the latter making a strong 

impression on James by gushing over his book. The film 

establishes a swingers and squares dynamic with Alban and Gabi, 

oozing sexual freedom and self-confidence, attempting to draw 

James and Em out of their shells, coaxing them into joining them 

for a picnic far outside the grounds of the resort (frowned upon 

due to the supposedly inhospitable locals). The two couples 

lounge in the sun and drink heavily; Gabi’s infatuation with James 

is impossible to ignore even before she sneaks up behind him 

while he’s urinating and brings him to completion in explicit 

detail (the film was screened in its NC-17 form with sequences 

19

FILM REVIEWS 

like this all but assured to be trimmed from the R-rated version 

being released theatrically by Neon). As day turns to night and 

the foursome piles into their borrowed car, it falls to James, 

allegedly the most sober member of the group, to drive them 

home. Distracted and impaired, James fails to spot a local man 

crossing the road in the dark, plowing into him with the car and 

killing him. Scared off by Gabi and Alban from calling the police 

with warnings of kangaroo courts and jailhouse sexual assault, 

an ashen James and Em agree to leave the body where it lies and 

slink back to the safety of the resort, hopeful to put the whole 

evening behind them. 






As the setup for a thriller, it’s familiar terrain (almost identical to 

the opening of last year’s The Forgiven), but Cronenberg takes the 

premise to some decidedly unconventional places. Rousted at 

their hotel the next morning by the cops and dragged to a 

dungeon-like holding cell, James is grimly informed of the local 

law that demands he be executed for his crime (in a bit of 

“Lanthimosian” deadpan humor, we’re told the act must be 

committed by the eldest son of the deceased; in instances where 

there is no male child, the state will step in to dispense justice, 

but “fortunately” the dead man had a 13-year-old boy). However, 

due to a cozy relationship between the local government and the 

tourist industry (along with some sort of fantastical yet rapidly 

waived-away scientific process), they are able to clone James, 

memories and all, and allow his double to serve as scapegoat, 

albeit for a hefty fee. The introduction of clones sets certain 

thematic and plot expectations (i.e., the nature of the soul and 

the ethics of manufacturing a living being for the express 

purposes of slaughter), but these are things Cronenberg isn’t 

remotely concerned with. Rather, it’s merely an entrée to explore 

the all-encompassing sense of invulnerability felt by James (and, 

as we come to learn, other guests staying at the resort). 

Watching “himself” plead for mercy only to be repeatedly 

skewered by a giant knife wielded by a small boy, James feels 

liberated, in stark contrast to Em’s horror. For the right price, 

James and his creepy new friends can get away with literally 

anything, and the effect on them is intoxicating. 

There are, no doubt, real-world parallels being exaggerated here, 

but Cronenberg seems more interested in the moral implications 

of absolute immunity; a system that not only allows the 

privileged to behave with impunity, but implicitly condones it in 

order to sustain its economy. If murder or assault were treated 

like a speeding ticket, how might that distort one’s internal 

compass or feed into any already raging sense of entitlement? As 

the characters go further down the rabbit hole of sex, drugs, and 

unabated criminality, every evening ending with little more than 

a pricy slap on the wrist (as well as the morbid catharsis of 

watching their doubles be bled-out for their nightly amusement), 

the question becomes less will they ever make it home alive and 

more what kind of person will they even be when they get there? 

With its scatological obsessions, extreme sex and violence, and 

its depiction of a “ruling class” degrading others to get their 

rocks off, the film recalls no less an act of cinematic provocation 

than Pasolini’s Salò (lest one think this to be a reach, we even get 

a sequence where a nude Skarsgård is dog-walked on a leash). 

But the film envelopes its extremeness in shimmering surfaces, 

drone shots, cool lighting gels, and trippy freak-out sequences 

(during these scenes, viewers are likely to find themselves 

wondering what they're looking at and exactly how pornographic 

it might be). The film arouses and repulses in equal measure, 

leaving the viewer feeling as unclean and compromised as the 

characters. In this setting, the only unforgivable transgression is 

leaving the party early, with the film doing its own spin on “Hotel 

California.” It’s in this late stretch, after primarily treating her as 

a sexpot, that the film finally finds a suitable use for Goth. With 

her slightly alien features and up-for-anything enthusiasm, the 

actress makes for a memorable foil; her malevolence inextricable 

from her hedonistic impulses and taunting 

20

FILM REVIEWS 

playfulness (a gun-packing Gabi astride the hood of a slowly 

moving convertible, a giant bucket of fried chicken by her side, 

feels designed to inspire a million memes). Diminished returns is 

always the risk with maximalism, and Infinity Pool isn’t immune 

from bloat or repetition (one hates to put a number on how many 

orgies in a film are too many, but this would seem to sail past it), 

but it recovers nicely in its closing moments, amplifying its 

self-loathing by counterintuitively burying it under banalities. 

Some remain defined by their transgressions, while the truly 

monstrous shed them like a summer tan. — ANDREW DIGNAN 

machine in the darkness of night, and when things start to heal, 

he depicts a baby. It seems that the shot of labor was purely 

incidental, and that loosely connected abstraction continues its 

reign. This is equally clear in Dhont’s debut, Girl, which has 

nothing other than a few of these visual metaphors which it 

shuffles around into different orders for a hundred minutes. 

Close does have some dramatic drive, at least temporarily. The 

boys don’t really get time to drift apart because as soon as one 

girl asks, fairly neutrally, if they are a couple, Léo starts to turn 

his back on Rémi. 

DIRECTOR: Brandon Cronenberg; CAST: Alexander Skarsgård, 

Mia Goth, Cleopatra Coleman, Thomas Kretschmann; 

DISTRIBUTOR: NEON; IN THEATERS: January 27; RUNTIME: 

1 hr. 57 min. 

CLOSE 

Lukas Dhont 

Running through a field of brightly colored flowers might seem 

an awfully clichéd image of childhood innocence, but there is 

some hope that Lukas Dhont’s sophomore feature Close — about 

two young boys whose relationship is too intimate for themselves 

or anyone else to understand — will complicate this simple and 

idyllic image, because soon after this sequence we witness the 

labor that goes into this field. Dhont doesn’t allow it to only exist 

as an abstraction or metaphor; it’s, conversely, a place in the real 

world that needs work and effort to maintain. This complication 

is realized with a lightness of touch that extends to the lead 

performances, which allows the ambiguities between Léo (Eden 

Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav De Waele) to clearly surface: that 

there is something more between these childhood friends is 

obvious, but what exactly that is is quite far from articulated, 

both for the audience and themselves. 

Their relationship doesn’t have to be worn down because Dhont 

imagines childhood innocence in an even thinner way than that 

first image suggests: it’s so fragile that even the lightest touch 

from the outside world can cause it to crumble instantly. It’s as if 

before the age of thirteen, they were hermetically sealed, not just 

from the world of adults, of relationships and sexuality — which 

would make some sense in this queer context, since those 

possibilities are often hidden away — but also from any social 

force at all, since such a small dose has yielded such dramatic 

effect. By the 30-minute mark, Léo and Rémi are glancing at 

each other from afar with looks of pain, anger, and longing for 

what might have been; they’ve reached the natural endpoint of 

their story, at least if it were as concerned with realism as the 

film’s visual style is desperate to suggest. 

But this is only a trick of the light. Dhont’s handheld camera and 

its shallow depth of field strain to convince of an immediacy and 

realism that belies the true banality of his vision: when the boys 

fall out, he shows the flowers being harvested by a loud, scary 

It seems that all Dhont has left to do is throw in a shocking twist, 

much like he did in Girl, the specifics of which don’t bear 

repeating other than to say it’s exactly the ending an ignorant cis 

man would give to his movie about a young trans woman; it 

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might have been even more offensive than it already is if it 

weren’t so deeply stupid. That ugliness isn’t as apparent in Close 

— it is a story much closer to Dhont’s own experiences, so he 

doesn’t have to stretch so far into callous presumption — but it’s 

still very much present. [SPOILER] As soon as Léo finds out that 

Rémi has committed suicide, it becomes clear that Dhont isn’t 

interested in it beyond the shock value it provides. 

Of course, there’s always some mystery around suicide and 

seldom some big reason to explain it away, but it’s not like the 

film is doing anything else instead of exploring it: all the more 

mysterious when it seems to be going out of its way to avoid it. 

Dhont almost lets the audience believe it was Léo’s fault, and 

maybe the director would argue that that aligns us with him, that 

he’d probably feel guilty no matter what, but if that’s the case, 

then it’s quite impossible not to notice that process; partly 

because it’s so clumsily done, but mostly because no sensible 

person would really believe that Léo was the sole cause. There 

might be something truthful in the way that Léo heals slowly and 

without revelation, but it pushes Rémi even further out of focus 

is death as only a means to an end. And that end is smuggling 

emotional weight into the second half’s banal scenes of Léo 

sadly wandering around as the most godawful musical 

melancholia — the kind typical of those cynically “emotional” 

adverts — blasts over the soundtrack, trying to engender emotion 

through brute force. 

Dhont wants to tell stories of inner turmoil, but he has no sense 

for, or interest in, interiority, and that’s part of why he latches 

onto the body in Girl. But if Close seems an improvement on Girl, 

it’s only because it’s better at hiding its insufficiencies without 

replacing its callousness and emptiness with anything because, 

well, Dhont has nothing to replace it with. How much of this could 

be attributed to malice and how much to stupidity doesn’t really 

matter, since it’s obvious that Dhont isn’t a filmmaker worth 

taking seriously. Based on the evidence he’s provided, only the 

most gullible could be convinced otherwise: anyone who would 

be moved by the final shot here, where Léo looks back before 

deciding to literally keep moving forward, has got the film they 

deserve. — ESMÉ HOLDEN 

DIRECTOR: Lukas Dhont; CAST: Eden Dambrine, Gustav De 

Waele, Émilie Dequenne, Léa Drucker; DISTRIBUTOR: A24; 

IN THEATERS: January 27; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 45 min. 

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GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE 

Jacquelyn Mills 

Sable Island is a thin crescent of land (twenty-six miles long and 

less than a mile wide) located southeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia. 

This sandbar planted at the lonely edge of the Atlantic 

continental shelf, burdened by histories of shipwrecks and ghost 

stories, is home to a quietly resilient ecosystem; horses roam 

wild, seals lounge in the sands, beetles scurry in the underbrush, 

and one naturalist Zoe Lucas keeps watch of it all as both guest 

and de facto caretaker. In Geographies of Solitude, Canadian 

documentarian Jacquelyn Mills delicately enters Lucas’ world. 

Shot on soft 16mm, the film aesthetic mirrors Lucas’s warmth, 

calm, and clear-eyed affection for the environment and her place 

within it. Meanwhile, experimental sections of the film allow the 

island to speak to us in a more direct way, and even Mills’ 

matter-of-fact descriptions of these invigorating fragments read 

like poetry: “horse hair, bones, and sand, exposed in starlight, 

developed in seaweed,” she notes over a particularly intense 

segment. And so, Geographies of Solitude is an organic balancing 

act between the more conventional documentary forms (somber 

reflections at the mountain of plastic washing up on the island’s 

shore) and something weirder and wilder (ambient electronic 

compositions constructed out of snail song) altogether. 

More so than a narrative disruption, Mills’ experimental 

digressions are, in effect, an attempt to probe and reflect the 

push and pull at the heart of Lucas’ environmentalism. Moments 

like Lucas’ introduction into the film, walking with a lantern 

amidst a pitch black sky perforated with stars; at once wholly a 

part of the environment, just another gleaming light, and yet 

distinct, somehow apart from the natural fabric of the place and 

relegated to forever be an observer. The true solitude of the 

film's title reveals itself slowly, in the uncomfortable middle 

ground that we seem to occupy somewhere between Mills' 

gorgeous compositions: the rugged mosaic of horse skulls and 

the cloying primary colors of plastic detritus. These are the grim 

undercurrents (72% of collected bird corpses have stomachs 

filled with plastic, as Lucas explains) flowing beneath the tender 

and soft exterior of the film, whose presence in someway recalls 

the more confrontational approach of Lucien Castaing-Taylor 

and VérénaParavel’s Leviathan, an avant-garde rumination on the 

fusion of man, animal, and machine on an industrial fishing ship. 

A similar type of fusion takes place here, within the bounds of 

Lucas’ work, whose spreadsheets capture the scale of the 

island's ecosystem in startling detail, from horses (the living and 

the dead) down to ladybugs, spiders, and flowers, a taxonomy 

that, just one worksheet over, shifts towards a seemingly endless 

hoard of plastic washing up on shore ranging from balloons, 

shampoo bottles, and microbeads — brand names are listed out 

like genera. Much like the Frankensteinian visions of Leviathan, 

which imply the domination of industrial machinery not simply 

over land and sea, but over us as well, Geographies of Solitude 

shares a somber melancholy over the impending, irreversible 

damage we have wrought to our natural ecosystems. A strain of 

positivity nevertheless lingers throughout and expresses itself, 

however guarded, through Lucas’ emphatic passion for her work. 

In a rare fragment from the past, intercut into the film, we see 

her over thirty years ago giving a tour of the island to the 

legendary Jacques Cousteau. Lucas is immediately recognizable 

by her spirited enthusiasm, the perseverance of which, to this 

very day, attests to a resilience sourced deeper than any 

individual ambition. There now on Sable Island, with its howling 

gale, walking amongst the seals and horses, a backpack dappled 

in snow, is a woman who bears down her life’s work with the 

determination predicated on a more natural instinct: survival. — 

IGOR FISHMAN 

DIRECTOR: Jacquelyn Mills; DISTRIBUTOR: Cinema Guild; IN 

THEATERS: January 27; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 53 min. 

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THE WANDERING EARTH II 


An unexpectedly maverick prequel/sequel hybrid to one of the 

biggest mainland Chinese blockbusters of this century, The 

Wandering Earth II ditches the more rigid genre framework of its 

predecessor (probably in part because it doesn’t have Liu Cixin’s 

short story source material to work with) and instead parcels out 

its apocalyptic sci-fi tropes over the course of a 

decades-spanning mosaic narrative concerned with capturing 

the minutiae of social change and scientific progress. To 

Western audiences, the vignette-like structure and various 

escalating crises will probably most resemble a more 

self-serious — and, of course, staunchly nationalistic — riff on 

gargantuanly-scaled Roland Emmerich disaster films like The Day 

After Tomorrow, 2012, and Moonfall. But there’s another, domestic 

influence here that’s worth considering. 






Toward the end of the last century in China, a new generation of 

filmmakers suddenly found themselves with more latitude to 

comment freely on the volatile events of their country’s recent 

history than was typically tolerated, and many responded with 

sweeping melodramas concerned less with sticking to 

screenplay convention than offering a survey of the times, albeit 

anchored to the personal experiences of a handful of characters 

who usually spanned several generational perspectives. This 

strain of Chinese cinema is sometimes referred to as the 

“historical passage film”’ and its early practitioners included 

fifth-generation luminaries Zhang Yimou (To Live), Tian 

Zhuangzhuang (The Blue Kite), and Chen Kaige (Farewell My 

Concubine). The trend never really went away, and in fact, has 

arguably become more mainstream: Feng Xiaogang’s 2010 

blockbuster Aftershock framed its “historical passage” around a 

disaster movie, and, even more notably, perhaps the most 

influential filmmaker in China since Zhang Yimou, Jia Zhangke 

created the precedent for a “historical passage” sci-fi film by 

setting the final act of 2015’s Mountains May Depart a then-distant 

20 years in the future. 

Now, Frant Gwo has made probably the first “historical passage” 

film focussed squarely on the future. The events of The 

Wandering Earth II take place a few decades before those of 

2019’s The Wandering Earth, and open on a period that’s only 

about 20 years from our present day. That era being so close 

makes the wild technological advancements (notably, a “space 

elevator” that can transport passengers from the surface of the 

earth all the way into the stratosphere) seem fanciful enough to 

consider this an “alternate” history. Nonetheless, as Gwo did in 

the original Wandering Earth, the specific challenges and moral 

and ethical questions grappled with by the characters are very 

much informed by those of our present reality, and by China’s 

cultural values of collective action in particular. Gwo’s 

attentiveness to the most thought-provoking implications of his 

sci-fi premise — which encompass a global government response 

to save Earth from various intergalactic threats and a 

burgeoning movement, labeled as “terrorism,” advocating instead 

for a mass migration to “digital life” — keep this film engaging 

and surprising even as it moves with a montage-like pace 

through skirmishes and political upheavals. And the one-time 

painter and graphic novelist not only knows how to build an 

immersive and carefully architected sci-fi world, but also craft 

some exceptional compositions — including one at the start of 

the film where a soldier’s reflection is cracked by the force of his 

own combat boot. 

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For about two of its three hours of running time, The Wandering 

Earth II plays as an incredibly audacious movie motivated 

foremost by a probing exploration of its core concepts and the 

effort to present itself as a visceral, pulpy experience, like the 

best longform sci-fi series rather than the various theatrical 

releases (Interstellar, Sunshine) that the first Wandering Earth 

took as obvious inspiration. Even at its best, though, one still has 

to contend with an avalanche of bad English-language dialogue, 

bad English-speaking actors imitating Russian accents, some 

typical racial insensitivity pertaining to China’s role in Africa, and 

the non-sentient, CCP-engineered biological lifeform that is 

48-year-old actor Wu Jing. Wu plays astronaut Liu Peiqiang, also 

one of the main protagonists of the first film, and because 

China’s most bankable action star is such a bafflingly 

uncharismatic blank slate, you won’t bat an eye at him playing a 

20-something rookie at the start of this film even though his 

character in the last would have to be well into his 50s (or 60s) 

for this timeline to make sense. He also splits lead duties here 

with the more cerebral Andy Lau’s Tu Hengyu, a computer 

scientist haunted by an accident that killed his daughter — and 

tempted by the technological means to preserve her memory. 

Unfortunately, the last hour of The Wandering Earth II largely 

retreats to a more standard narrative redux of the first, 

hunkering down in one constant moment in time as a large array 

of characters all band together to solve the (absurdly complex) 

present threat to the planet, which we know they’ll eventually 

manage because that leads us right into the events of the 

original Wandering Earth. This lengthy set-piece is fitfully 

exciting, and a post-credits stinger adds a fascinating new 

perspective on the series, but the conformity is nonetheless 

disappointing, and has the effect of sidelining the film’s most 

provocative ideas and conflicts in favor of a (very derivative) 

form of spectacle. The middle entry in what’s already been 

confirmed to be a trilogy should stoke anticipation for its finale, 

but by the end of The Wandering Earth II, the gambit of 

prequelizing leaves the series feeling somewhat 

exhausted — Gwo is a huge talent, but in order to — SAM C. MAC 

DIRECTOR: Frant Gwo; CAST: Andy Lau, Jing Wu, Xuejian Li, Yi 

Sha, Li Ning; DISTRIBUTOR: Well Go USA; IN THEATERS: January 

22; RUNTIME: 2 hr 53 min. 

SHOTGUN WEDDING 

Jason Moore 

The death of the mid-budget studio rom-com is a topic that has 

been commented on and analyzed ad nauseum by countless 

entertainment websites and social media users, all of whom 

decry the fate of one of the more financially lucrative film 

genres. The advent of streaming and evolving moviegoing habits 

(which Covid only accelerated and exacerbated) have certainly 

played a role, but if anything, it’s the likes of the Hallmark 

Channel that have robbed this particular brand of entertainment 

of its novelty. When basic cable networks are churning out 

literally hundreds of these types of films every year, is it at all 

necessary to spend $30 just to see so-called “Hollywood stars” 

reenact the exact same scenarios, especially when the art of 

filmmaking itself has entered one of its blandest phases in 

recent memory? Despite all of this, two of the biggest hits from 

2022, The Lost City and Ticket to Paradise, were indeed romantic 

comedies, proving that paying audiences for such fare still exist. 

Yet that still didn’t stop Lionsgate from dumping its latest 

romantic offering, Shotgun Wedding, online, as its planned 

theatrical release was quickly scrapped and the rights sold to 

streaming giant Amazon. In the ultimate irony, the film is best 

described as The Lost City meets Ticket to Paradise, leaving one 

to assume that the final product must be a total dumpster fire to 

elicit such an extreme response from its original studio. 

Truth be told, Shotgun Wedding is no better or worse than those 

aforementioned offerings, a predictable action-comedy/romance 

that affords attractive stars the opportunity to endlessly banter 

in exotic locations, doing their best to disguise the banality at its 

core. Yes, you’ve seen it all before, but it all goes down rather 

easily, thanks to solid 

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direction from Jason Moore (Pitch Perfect; Sisters), a few 

hilarious stray one-liners, and the luminous, 

holy-shit-how-is-this-woman-53 Jennifer Lopez at its center. 

She stars as Darcy Rivera, a former Peace Corps volunteer — 

seriously, this film never even states her current job, a rather 

remarkable achievement for a genre where its every female 

protagonist is strictly defined by her career — who, as the film 

opens, is welcoming her loved ones to a small island in the 

Philippines for a budget-friendly destination wedding where she 

is set to marry former minor league baseball player and diehard 

romantic Tom (Josh Duhamel). 

Credit to writer Mark Hammer for cutting straight to the chase 

and kicking things off at the rehearsal dinner on the eve of the 

couple’s nuptials, as there is nary a second of dead time to be 

found, the film clocking in at a welcome 100 minutes. Darcy and 

Tom seem to have the perfect relationship, even as their parents 

— Robert (Cheech Marin) and Renata (Sonia Braga), and Carol 

(Jennifer Coolidge) and Larry (Steve Coulter), respectively — 

annoy the ever living shit out of them. But cracks begin to appear 

in the façade with the arrival of Darcy’s former fiancée, 

the wealthy and hunky Sean (Lenny Kravitz), forcing the couple to 

reevaluate their entire relationship mere hours before the big 

event, as long-standing grievances and resentments are finally 

revealed. As fate would have it, this coincides with the arrival of 

literal pirates, who take the entire wedding party hostage just as 

Tom and Darcy scrap their entire future together. It is now up to 

the couple to put aside their differences and save their loved 

ones — that is, if they don’t kill each other first. (See, it’s funny, 

because their lives are literally in danger, but they hate each 

other now.) 

There are no surprises to be found in Shotgun Wedding, but there 

is also something rather freeing in knowing this upfront, allowing 

the viewer to luxuriate in the simple pleasures at hand. Lopez 

and Duhamel share a fair amount of chemistry — even when they 

are at one another’s throats — and they actually possess 

something in the way of comedic timing, which is more than can 

be said for other performers of films of this ilk. It’s unfortunate, 

then, that Lopez is forced into shrew mode for most of the film’s 

runtime, dampening her natural charms in the process, or that 

the overqualified supporting cast is given nothing to do but 

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literally stand fully-clothed in a pool while occasionally delivering 

some tired punchlines. Coolidge is underutilized to the point that 

it feels criminal, while Marin seems comatose. But God love the 

great cinematographer Peter Deming, who has worked with the 

likes of David Lynch and Wes Craven and actually delivers a 

streaming rom-com that looks like an honest-to-goodness film, a 

few moments of wonky greenscreen notwithstanding. It 

ultimately reinforces the fact that, while not exactly what one 

would describe as a great work of art, films like Shotgun Wedding 

deserve the theatrical experience, where strangers can come 

together and occasionally laugh for a couple of hours before 

tossing out a half-hearted, “That wasn’t too bad” as the credits 

roll. Sometimes, mediocrity is more than enough for a solid 

night’s entertainment, as Shotgun Wedding casually proves. — 

STEVEN WARNER 

DIRECTOR: Jason Moore; CAST: Jennifer Lopez, Josh Duhamel, 

Jennifer Coolidge, Sonia Braga, Cheech Marin; DISTRIBUTOR: 

Amazon Prime Video; STREAMING: January 27; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 

40 min. 

embodies organizational and planning skills, Anto typifies the 

emotional peacemaker and is often the most anxious, and Laia — 

a film director and possible self-insert — is a leader with the 

perception that she’s in control of the relationship. 

Acting as a refrain throughout the film, the women give musical 

asides, alluding to their individual loneliness, or perception of 

coupledom, depending on their immediate behavior within the 

triad dynamic. These half-sung words constitute the film’s theme, 

“one of three is not enough,” which plays over the end credits as 

well. There’s no prescriptive direction given to the health of the 

throuple dynamic: is Laia’s “alpha partner” status in what was 

initially a vee shaped relationship causing an imbalance of 

priorities and sense of competitiveness, or is it that once Anto 

and Marti spend enough time alone together, the relationship 

then becomes a balance of different romantic styles? Caudeli 

cleverly avoids a clear judgment, preferring to draw from 

personal experiences and the gray areas that come with them. 

The three-way domestic bliss isn’t idealized, and there’s no 

strong conflict or resolution. It simply exists as an environment. 

PETIT MAL 

Ruth Caudeli 

Spanish-language filmmaker Ruth Caudeli has developed a 

surprisingly consistent and quantifiable body of work in the past 

few years. Her films are relatively plotless, centering queer 

women in transitional periods of their relationships or outlooks 

on life, and they tend to draw from her life experiences as an 

independent filmmaker. Petit Mal hits all three. Laia (Ruth 

Caudeli), Anto (Ana María Otálora), and Marti (Silvia Varón) are a 

queer polyamorous throuple in Bogotá. They are artists, still 

learning to define how they all relate to one another when two 

are alone. Laia is the center of the relationship, as their company 

stems from her not choosing between two partners. When she 

leaves for a work trip, Anto and Marti have to solidify how they 

relate to each other outside the construct built by having a third 

partner around. The three women each represent a need in a 

healthy relationship, especially in polyamory; Marti (an editor) 

Petit Mal certainly displays its small-budget DIY roots, but 

although some clever visuals can elevate it, the switch between 

black and white and hazy, muted color feels gimmicky at best, 

and thematically incoherent as to when or why these changes 

occur. Sure, most of the color segments pop up when Laia 

physically returns to the relationship, but the other interludes of 

colored artistic creation aren't as definitive. Even if these are 

meant to symbolize her emotional presence as the artist of the 

relationship, this ignores the fact that Marti is a 

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screenwriter/editor herself, and is making her own documentary 

about a throuple. Petit Mal is filled with shallower personal 

gestures that increase the pseudo-documentary feel without 

giving too much away, and it comes with mixed results. There is 

a clever shot of two of the women wearing sheet masks, that 

when in black and white is lit to resemble the well-known Eyes 

Without a Face countenance. The imagery recalls the uncanny 

nature of obscured identity — a common feeling in the early 

stages of a relationship. Conversely, the “dinosaur kisses” recall a 

much lower-brow memory of a middle school relationship 

aphorism (“rawr” means “I love you” in dinosaur). All in all, the 

meandering artificial autofiction (and half-baked meta-film 

elements) frequently end up more tedious than enlightening, 

especially with how little Marti and Anto’s relationship progresses 

beyond what’s expected. These characters exist in a plotless 

mood piece, which is no sin of its own, but aside from their 

personality archetypes, there’s not much reality to them. We see 

their worries but less of their flaws; and no matter how truthful 

cinéma vérité can be here, it’s always shadowed by wordless 

peacekeeping. — SARAH WILLIAMS 

DIRECTOR: Ruth Caudeli; CAST: Silvia Varón, Ruth Caudeli, Ana 

María Otálora; DISTRIBUTOR: Dark Star Pictures; IN THEATERS: 

January 27; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 29 min. 

THE LAIR 

Neil Marshall 

In his canonical text Hollywood Genres, author and theorist 

Thomas Schatz proffers a still useful distinction, that being 

between “the film genre and the genre film.” In his words, 

“whereas the genre exists as a sort of tacit ‘contract’ between 

filmmakers and audience, the genre film is an actual event that 

honors such a contract. To discuss the Western genre is to 

address neither a single Western film nor even all Westerns, but 

rather that system of conventions which identifies Western films 

as such.” Like a less pretentious (and less talented) Tarantino, 

Neil Marshall has made a career out of mining the various 

“systems” that make up the action film, the sci-film, the horror 

film, and so on. Ideas are pilfered whole-cloth alongside certain 

key images, like a specific shot from Aliens or a font from John 

Carpenter. 






In other words, Marshall takes signifiers and divorces them from 

their original contexts, severing their indexical relationships and 

placing them into a void of spot-the-reference. It’s a game, and it 

can be fun, like in his Dog Soldiers or especially The Descent, the 

two films which made Marshall’s name as a key figure in modern 

horror filmmaking. But it’s been a couple of decades since those 

early successes; the resounding failure of his attempted Hellboy 

reboot in 2019 and brief sojourns in episodic TV both 

once-invigorating enthusiasms now diminished. Schatz suggests 

that “as we undergo the same type of experience we develop 

expectations which… tend to harden into rules.” Marshall’s genre 

playfulness has indeed now calcified into something static and 

stale, going through the motions with an air of exhaustion. 

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that The Lair could’ve 

been, even should’ve been, an easy layup. Clearly designed to 

harken back to his earliest films, The Lair is rigged almost 

entirely out of spare parts from Dog Soldiers and The Descent — a 

squad of ramshackle soldiers, an isolated location, cramped 

underground photography, ferocious creatures, and a tough 

female lead. It’s second-hand stuff, cheap-looking and poorly 

acted, all of which adds up to a film that ultimately functions as a 

rough draft of itself. The Lair is a dress rehearsal to work out the 

kinks, not a final product released to an unsuspecting public. 

That Marshall keeps it somewhat watchable is a testament to his 

lingering talent, as well as his still-sharp eye for bloody gags and 

delightfully disgusting special effects. 

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Here, Charlotte Kirk plays RAF pilot Kate Sinclair. While flying a 

mission over a barren Afghanistan landscape (actually shot 

somewhere in Hungary), she’s shot down and almost taken 

hostage by insurgents. Finding refuge in an abandoned Russian 

bunker, Sinclair discovers an underground laboratory and a 

series of tanks containing vaguely humanoid shapes. A prolonged 

shootout with insurgent forces ruptures one of the tanks, 

unleashing a goopy monster from within (clearly a man in a suit). 

Sinclair eventually escapes and is taken in by a squad of U.S. 

soldiers stationed at a nearby camp. They don’t believe her story 

about these super-strong, super-fast creatures until it’s too late. 

What follows is a pretty decent action set piece, as the creatures 

lay siege to the military base and a quickly diminishing number 

of soldiers attempt to fend them off. This is the kind of basic 

stuff that Marshall excels at — putting a few people in a cramped 

space and having them get picked off one by one. None of the 

soldier characters make a real impression, despite Marshall’s 

attempts at giving them each a cliched personality tic (he’s 

credited alongside Kirk with the screenplay). 

But the biggest issue is Kirk herself, who gives a painfully stilted 

performance. The film intends her to be a Sigourney 

Weaver/Ripley figure, but Kirk has almost no screen presence 

whatsoever, seemingly possessed of only one facial expression 

regardless of whatever situation is currently unfolding. She looks 

awkward on camera, her movements halting and forced. There’s 

simply no there there. (One wonders what Olga Kurylenko could’ve 

done with the role.) Still, there are a few merits here, and anyone 

looking for an undemanding creature feature with ample 

decapitations, torn limbs, squished heads, and even a detailed 

mutant autopsy will be rewarded. Fans of a certain kind of DTV 

genre film can consider this a halfhearted recommendation, but 

one still wishes for the day when a new Neil Marshall film won’t 

come saddled with so many caveats and special pleadings. — 

DANIEL GORMAN 

DIRECTOR: Neil Marshall; CAST: Michelle Monaghan, Skeet Ulrich, 

Finlay Wojtak-Hissong; DISTRIBUTOR: RLJE Films/Shudder; IN 

THEATERS: January 27; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 48 min. 

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TO LESLIE 


It has been a mere two weeks since a bevy of the Hollywood elite, 

ranging from Cate Blanchett to Gwyneth Paltrow to Edward 

Norton, bombarded social media with praise for actress Andrea 

Riseborough’s performance in the little seen indie drama To 

Leslie. That this coincided with the submission date of the 2023 

Oscar nomination ballots seemed more than a tad suspicious, as 

did the various copy-and-paste tweets that literally repeated the 

same phrase over and over: “A small film with a giant heart.” Kate 

Winslet even hosted an online Q&A regarding the film, in which 

she claimed that Riseborough delivered “The greatest female 

performance ever,” a statement so hyperbolic that one is 

cynically left to ponder if it was written by Riseborough’s PR team 

on the back of a check. Armchair prognosticators guffawed, but 

it was Riseborough herself who had the last laugh, landing an 

Academy Award nomination this past Tuesday morning as 

attendees could be heard gasping out loud. Yes, she did it, and 

now various online publications and curious viewers are 

scurrying to finally check out a movie that opened in a handful of 

theaters last October and made less than $30,000 total. 

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Academy Awards 

knows that the nominations mean very little in the grand scheme 

of things, with worthy films and performances overlooked year 

after year in favor of whatever has captured the voters’ fancy 

and/or the cultural zeitgeist at that particular moment. Yet for a 

film like To Leslie, it means far more, as such publicity will likely 

fuel viewership that initially eluded it, a Cinderella story for the 

literal dozens upon dozens of no-budget indie flicks released 

every year that fall through the cracks like so much filmic dust. 

But one question remains: is Riseborough really that good? Far 

be it for this critic to call out Hollywood royalty like Winslet, but if 

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this is indeed the greatest female performance she has ever 

seen, one wonders just how many movies she has actually 

watched in her life, with the over/under seemingly around 11.5. 






To Leslie finds Riseborough playing the titular character, an 

alcoholic fuck-up and all-around bad mom who, as the movie 

opens, is being thrown out of her cheap motel room for failure to 

pay rent. Such roles are catnip for performers, as it allows them 

to access nearly every emotion on the spectrum, running the 

gamut from manic highs to depressive lows, usually within 

seconds of each other. There’s a reason why various thespians, 

from the likes of Meryl Streep to even Will Ferrell, have ventured 

down this actorly road, the type with “range” baked into its DNA. 

Riseborough has certainly proved her mettle over the years, 

delivering 110 percent in everything from little-seen passion 

projects (Nancy, Mandy) to big-budget genre fare (Oblivion, The 

Grudge) to — *gulp* — a feature film directed by Madonna (W.E.). 

And to her credit, that same level of commitment is on full 

display in To Leslie, with Riseborough taking what is essentially a 

stock character and infusing her with a recognizable humanity 

that seems wholly absent from the written page, a film as flat 

and safe as its lead protagonist is complex and thorny. 

But there are ultimately few surprises to be found here, a tale of 

personal redemption so rote that the biggest shock is that it 

wasn’t directed by Darren Aronofsky — instead, television 

director Michael Morris, who got his start directing episodes of 

the Sally Field-starring ABC drama Brothers & Sisters, takes the 

reins, which seems fairly apt given the melodrama that fuels the 

film. Still, Riseborough does manage to steady this ship whenever 

it feels in danger of tipping, refusing likability at every turn as 

her character ping-pongs from one caretaker to the next, finally 

realizing that the only person who can save her is… 

herself. Profound stuff. Oh, and there’s a kindly motel manager 

played by Marc Maron, delivering a turn so gentle and sweet — a 

balance to Riseborough, who he matches beat for beat — that it’s 

hard not to fall in love with him. (Where is his goddamn 

nomination, Academy?) Allison Janney also pops up as a former 

friend of Leslie’s, but is so atrocious in her limited screen time 

that she somehow makes Margo Martindale’s similar portrayal of 

enfant terrible white trash in Million Dollar Baby seem subdued in 

comparison. 

The one novel approach the script takes, courtesy of 

screenwriter Ryan Binaco, is that it immediately reunites Leslie 

with her abandoned son, the now-grown James (Owen Teague), 

and promptly boots him from the proceedings minutes later, 

forcing Leslie to get her shit together virtually entirely on her 

own, and sparing audiences from yet another tired retread of The 

Wrestler and everything else of its ilk. That’s not to say there isn’t 

more than a bit of wish fulfillment going on in To Leslie come 

film’s end, but honestly, anything even remotely innovative — no 

matter how small — is a welcome enough development in 

cinema’s current rinse-repeat landscape. To Leslie isn’t 

threatening to go down as some hidden masterpiece, and 

Riseborough’s performance is, ironically enough, the 

scenery-chewing kind for which Oscar nominations were 

invented, but as another entry in the ever-growing genre of 

misery porn cut through with a ray of hope, audiences could do a 

lot worse — as could have the Academy. — STEVEN WARNER 

DIRECTOR: Michael Morris; CAST: Andrea Riseborough, Allison 

Janney, Marc Maron, Stephen Root; DISTRIBUTOR: Momentum 

Pictures; IN THEATERS & STREAMING: October 7; RUNTIME: 1 

hr. 59 min. 

31

12 

Ryuichi Sakamoto 

Electronic music pioneer Ryuichi 

Sakamoto looks back on a long and 

illustrious career which spans six decades, 

a variety of collaborators and genres, and 

quite a few soundtracks — most notably, 

for Nagisa Ôshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. 

Lawrence and Bernardo Bertolucci's The 

Last Emperor. But having recently turned 

71, the Japanese musician, composer, and 

former member of the Yellow Magic 

Orchestra shared that he had been 

diagnosed with rectal cancer; his second 

cancer diagnosis. His first — throat cancer 

— came in 2014 and would lead Sakamoto 

to create the introspective, mournful 

async in 2017. The album glistened with 

profound sadness and moments of 

auditory decay, such as on the haunting 

"ZURE," a pensive electronic number which 

deteriorates continuously as it is 

consumed by nasty white noise. The throat 

cancer would eventually go into remission, 

but news of the rectal cancer soon 

followed. "From now on, I will be living 

alongside cancer," he said in a letter to 

fans. "But, I am hoping to make music for 

a little while longer." 

Now, forced to confront his mortality yet 

again, Sakamoto released 12, an LP which 

sees him doing away with the eclecticism 

that marked async a few years earlier, 

opting for sparse, melancholy minimalism. 

"20210310" — like all the songs, named for 

the date it was recorded — opens the 

album with gentle, spacey synths that 

oscillate between ominous lows and 

ecstatic highs, the piece's faint melody 

remaining firmly rooted in the abstract. 

The somber piano of follow-up "20211130" 

is interspersed by a cool zephyr of sine 

waves, its subtle hums filling out the 

space between the fragmented notes 

with misty fascination. There is nothing 

of the jolty piano tinkering or wild jazz 

freakouts heard on tracks like 

"Grasshoppers" or the Sun Ra and Albert 

Ayler-inspired "MWSIK Part 1." Instead, 

Sakamoto's reflective approach carries 

him into something vaguely sinister on 

the haunting "20220202," as well as the 

elegiac "20220207," his meditations 

regularly taking a turn for the gloomy. 

While the mostly instrumental async 

made room for vocal samples which 

frankly touched on mortality on 

"fullmoon" and "LIFE, LIFE," there are no 

such literalist comforts offered on 12. The 

otherworldly soundscapes of "20220214" 

ALBUM REVIEWS 

perhaps best exemplify Sakamoto's 

disinterest in concretizing his emotional 

state beyond what the impressionistic 

vignettes allow. Textures, tones, and 

timbres entwine, coalescing before 

melting away, ethereal whispers giving 

way to forlorn drones; it might just be the 

album's most powerful moment. The final 

twelve minutes offer some respite from 

the emotionally taxing near-hour that 

preceded them. Doing away with synths, 

"20220302 (sarabande)" introduces the 

album's piano-only coda with surprisingly 

playful nods to Bach, while the 

penultimate "20220404" radiates 

last-round melancholy, its classy barfly 

sorrows occasionally punctuated by 

unresolved chords. 

When hearing Sakamoto ponder his life 

and legacy, one can't help but be 

reminded of Blackstar, the final album of 

his fellow Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence 

cast member, David Bowie. But unlike 

Bowie's busy art-rock swan song, 

Sakamoto looks back with a more quiet 

sadness, content with letting his 

compositions linger in their sketch-like 

state. 12 feels like a sonic diary, affording 

an intimate look into an acclaimed 

artist's most vulnerable thoughts and 

feelings, and the sounds and melodies it 

reveals are breathtaking in their 

restrained, understated beauty. Here's 

hoping he gets to make music for a little 

while longer.— FRED BARRETT 

LABEL: Milan Records; RELEASE DATE: 

January 17 

32

ALBUM REVIEWS 

STAMP ON IT 

GOT the Beat 

“Who do you think you’re looking at?… You’d 

better shut your mouth and stand back,” 

began GOT the Beat’s debut single “Step 

Back” last January. The all-star 

supergroup consists of seven of the most 

talented vocalists and dancers to have 

passed through the halls of SM 

Entertainment in the last two decades — 

soloist BoA, Taeyeon and Hyoyeon of Girls’ 

Generation, Wendy and Seulgi of Red 

Velvet, and Winter and Karina of Aespa. 

Delivering on the musical promise of this 

K-pop fantasy league-worthy lineup was 

always going to be a tall order, but 

kitchen-sink singles by other SM acts do 

come to mind (ex. Red Velvet’s “RBB,” 

SHINee’s “U Need Me,” NCT’s 

“Superhuman,” aespa’s “Girls”), songs that 

are packed with so many different 

instrumental, melodic, and vocal ideas 

that they’re practically playgrounds for 

their performers and thrilling roller 

coasters for the audience. Surely a 

complex track like EXO’s “Tempo” would 

be the best way to mediate within a 

supergroup whose performers each have 

distinct and iconic styles to take into 

account. Instead, “Step Back” was a shrill, 

metallic track that sounded like a group 

of girls fighting in a warehouse while a 

few Gregorian monks try to hold them 

back while knocking away collapsing 

merchandise. It was polarizing, to say the 

least, but also enough of a hit in South 

Korea that GOT the Beat followed it up 

with a proper mini-album this year. 

33 

20

Stamp on It isn’t a good album, at least not 

consistently, but it is interesting to 

consider where it fits within the current 

landscape of K-pop. 

Title track “Stamp on It” follows the same 

formula as “Step Back,” but adds in a few 

more interesting musical ideas for better 

results. Both songs are built around a 

left-field vocal sample; both call on their 

performers to be aggressive; both, with 

their gritty yet knife-sharp instrumental 

layers, show off how co-producer Dem 

Jointz does texture better than anyone 

else in K-pop. Even their bridges have 

similar parts: the classic SM slowdown, the 

rap, the dance break. But the vocals, 

rather than losing all their personality to 

too-high belts and compression, have a 

little more space to breathe in “Stamp on 

It,” and the still-strong singing feels like 

it’s actually adding a new element because 

the production isn’t as abrasive. Writers 

Dem Jointz, Yoo Young Jin, and Tayla Park 

throw in a few fun quirks: why not add 

some random modulations? Why not drop 

four bars of meditative music in the 

middle of the bridge? Why not make the 

bridge six distinct sections? (SM 

slowdown, meditation, dance break, rap, 

return of the title refrain, and prechorus.) 

In other words, it offers the same 

foundation as “Step Back,” but is more 

playful and complex in execution. This 

time, when the dance break and rap hit, 

the grinding instrumental backing 

genuinely feels new, and the energy level 

skyrockets. And the song still has places 

left to go after that. 

Just as there’s a fine line between 

excellent and tragic in GOT the Beat’s title 

tracks depending on execution, the 

mini-album also bounces between 

fantastic and awful B-sides. The chilling 

metallic percussion, rubbery synths, and 

cold staccato vocals of “Rose” are a more 

vivid version of the “Step Back” 

soundscape (it’s another home run from 

the SAAY, DEEZ, and Yunsu writing team.) 

But immediately before it is “Goddess 

Level,” which is practically falling apart 

around its limp, farty brass riff. “Alter 

Ego” is the most conventional, 

melody-driven pop song on the project, 

and it’s a fun breather amidst the 

intensity, but immediately after it comes 

“Outlaw,” which smashes a couple loud, 

crude noises together and calls it a 

chorus, to even worse effect than “Step 

Back.” Surprisingly chill final track “Mala” 

lands in the middle: it’s a decent, vibey 

take on the hyperpop percussion stabs 

that punctuate the album (this time 

chased with flute and light vocals), but it 

does sound like the second-best B-side 

on an Itzy album. 

There are admittedly some moments of 

greatness on Stamp on It, but it lacks a 

consistent point of view. The entire 

selling point of the group is its members, 

yet their music is more about the 

production than the singers. But if GOT 

the Beat is meant to be most interesting 

for the new aggressive, edgy pop sound 

they bring to the table, this album does a 

poor job defining or justifying it. K-pop is 

flooded with girl groups doing a huge 

ALBUM REVIEWS 

variety of interesting concepts right now: 

the girl crush market (i.e. Blackpink-style 

cooler-than-you electronic songs) has 

been one of its most saturated corners 

for years, and, in a post-NewJeans world, 

there’s also currently a huge musical shift 

away from excess and toward simplicity. 

If the music is inconsistent in polish and 

style, and it’s off-trend, and only a 

handful of tracks actually make any kind 

of strong statement… what is its 

purpose? There are very few moments 

on this mini that will make the listener 

stop and think, “Wow, I can’t believe these 

women are all singing together!” 

compared to moments of “Hmm, why 

does it sound like that?” (Just look at how 

many times this review felt compelled to 

mention individual vocal or performance 

moments. Or don’t; it was zero.) For a 

project in heavy dialogue with SM 

Entertainment’s legacy, Stamp on It 

doesn’t seem to care much about the 

musical background of its performers, 

but it also doesn’t present a clear vision 

of the future. It’s a fascinating album, but 

largely for unintended reasons; wipe the 

dust off in two years and see how much 

has changed in the landscape 

surrounding it. — KAYLA BEARDSLEE 

LABEL: Frant Gwo; RELEASE DATE: ddd 

34

InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 4

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