InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 12

IN REVIEW ONLINE 

FEATURES 

SXSW 2023 

ONLY THE GOOD 

SURVIVE — 1 

FREMONT — 2 

BLOODY HELL — 3 

KITE ZO A: LEAVE THE 

BONES — 5 

HUNG UP ON A DREAM — 5 

THE ARC OF OBLIVION — 6 

MONOLITH — 7 

good. honest. fun. 

An Interview with Ratboys’ 

Julia Steiner — 9 

KICKING THE CANON 

THE HITCH-HIKER — 13 

FULL MOON 

OVER PARIS — 15 

FILM REVIEWS 

JOHN WICK: 

CHAPTER 4 — 17 

WALK UP — 18 

THE FIVE DEVILS — 19 

TORI AND LOKITA — 20 

A GOOD PERSON — 21 

THE LOST KING — 23 

THE WORST ONES — 24 

TODAY — 25 

TIMESCAPE — 26 

ALBUM REVIEWS 

100 GECS — 27 

FEVER RAY — 28 

March 24, 2023 

Volume 1, Issue 12

SXSW 2023 

ONLY THE GOOD SURVIVE 

Dutch Southern 

Best known as one of three credited writers on Joseph Kahn’s 14-minute Power Rangers (2015) short — 

alongside the director and James Van Der Beek, in what had to have been a pull-a-name-from-a-hat collaboration — 

Dutch Southern’s debut feature Only the Good Survive is the kind of film that feels lab-created to divide audiences. It boasts a 

massive, conspicuous personality, which will likely work wonders for those already attuned to its wavelength — basically, endless 

winking punctuated by lo-fi practical gore effects — while proving insufferable for the quirk-allergic. 

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Narratively, Only the Good Survive adopts the familiar Usual Suspects posture, with small town sheriff Cole Mack (Frederick Weller) 

interrogating young Brea (Sidney Flanigan) about the brutal events of the hours prior. The film is thus dominated by flashback, as 

recounts a twisty, unreliable recent past: after her boyfriend Ry (D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) discovers, by chance, some incredibly 

valuable gold coins at a local farmer’s home, he, along with local psycho — and apparent mint nerd — Erve (Will Ropp) and 

neighborhood enforcer Dev (Darius Fraser) concoct an unsophisticated

FESTIVAL COVERAGE 

heist scheme that relies on the God-fearing rubes going to 

church. Brea takes on the role of lookout, but of course things 

immediately go wrong; specifically, in the 

form of discovering not gold, but a baby in a cage. 

Only the Good Survive, then, reveals itself not to be the heist film 

it initially suggests — the machinations and orchestrations of the 

caper are only barely explicated in a brief planning montage, 

then immediately disrupted, then abandoned — but rather a fairly 

bald-faced attempt at camp horror-comedy. You see, what the 

quartet instead find is what they believe to be some kind of 

paganistic cabal who steals babies (by cutting them out of 

late-pregnancy women’s bellies) in order to use them for blood 

sacrifices and sex (yes, unconscionable child sexual abuse is 

lackadaisically used as plot fodder here). It’s clear that Southern 

is attempting to send up our current era of QAnon-driven 

conspiracy culture in the broadest terms possible — perhaps 

believing that by saturing the film in ludicrous affectation, he’s 

condemning the essential absurdity of America’s MAGA substrate 

— but it’s all undermined by the aggressively annoying smirk the 

film wears in every scene. A baby in a cage — we get it, the 

iconography is bluntly legible, but a better film wouldn’t have 

been so hyperactively excited by its own designs from frame one. 

That Wayfair isn’t namechecked is the only bit of restraint to be 

found in the entire film. 

Southern furthers the film’s oppressively grating sheen with 

nearly every visual choice here. The camera rarely rests across 

the film’s runtime, all manner of movements and angles 

employed to establish its particular coy character. The 

flashbacks are frequently lit in garish color, a few pointless 

animated overlays are tossed around, and performers are asked 

to affect a performative style of speech and plaster on the kind 

of smiles audiences saw in Smile, just to remind us that what 

we’re witnessing in these scenes aren’t the actual events. But it’s 

impossible for that ever to be far from our minds because the 

film also constantly cuts to an interrupting Cole, asking 

questions and poking holes; it’s unclear if this is all in an effort to 

reorient our perceptions or if Southern is under the impression 

that the formal tête-à-tête that Cole and Brea are sharing is 

somehow comedically appealing. 

And so, a film that initially appears to suggest something like the 

Nee brothers’ Band of Robbers proves instead to be angling for 

Edgar Wright lite, flailing wildly in the attempt. Passion is of 

course essential to the success of any project, but there’s an 

exasperating giddiness, barrelling into the self-satisfied, that 

pervades the whole of the film. All of its attempts at reference 

and homage and meta-ness are limp. At one point, a character 

observes, “I can’t tell if this is supposed to be comedy or horror.” 

Southern clearly intends it to be both, and it succeeds as neither. 

But the more damning indictment is in how difficult it is to even 

care to answer. — LUKE GORHAM 

FREMONT 

Babak Jalali 

The metatextual fortune cookie message (e.g. “Help! I’m being 

held hostage in a fortune cookie factory!”) is an obvious premise 

for a joke, indeed one so omnipresent that it has transitioned 

into the realm of urban legend. Babak Jalali’s Fremont takes this 

as a jumping off point and, though he does apply some of the 

whimsy that genesis suggests, he manages equally to examine 

the corridor of apocrypha with a disarming earnestness. The film 

follows Donya (Anaita Wali Zada), an Afghan refugee working in a 

fortune cookie factory. Fremont takes a lackadaisical approach 

to plot: the moment functioning as the premise, in which Donya 

sends out a message in a fortune cookie, doesn’t occur until the 

middle of the film and has largely incidental consequences. But 

in exploring Donya’s relations with her coworkers, bosses, and 

Afghan neighbors, Jalali creates an affecting portrait. 

Fremont’s black-and-white photography points less toward any 

sort of nostalgia for Hollywood classicism than it does to the 

early films of Jim Jarmusch or Aki Kaurismäki. Each shot is 

precise, but they seem to communicate the energy of the 

individual moment more than contribute anything to the editing 

flow. Shot/reverse shots with wildly varying distances and 

isolated zooms lead to some disorientation, but it’s not an 

entirely displeasing effect. Eventually, it begins to feel of a piece 

with the film’s lightly stilted dialogue, which takes on a slightly 

more familiar form aligned with the more tasteful end of the 

indie quirk spectrum. 

Where the film really takes off is in its performances. 

Specifically, two recognizable faces, Gregg Turkington (On 

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SXSW 2023 

supporting roles. Turkington plays a psychiatrist from whom 

Donya seeks a prescription for sleeping pills. His character 

initially appears to be a bureaucratic obstacle for Donya, as he 

refuses to let her take on the appointment of a neighbor 

uninterested in continuing treatment, and then becomes an 

absurdity: a psychiatrist who specializes in treating immigrants 

as a tribute to his idol — the title character of Jack London’s 

White Fang (who he is frequently eager to remind Donya is a wolf, 

not a dog). And though Turkington does indeed bring a 

delightfully specific comedic energy to the film, peaking in a bit 

of physical comedy where he attempts to open a fortune cookie 

package with his teeth, there’s a deep pathos in the tension 

between his character’s desire to help Donya and his myopia. 

When he finds out she has been promoted to writing the 

messages for the fortune cookies, he encourages her to use it as 

both a creative and therapeutic outlet. But when he tries the 

exercise himself, he is more proud of his own originality than he 

is capable of communicating the efficacy of the therapeutic 

process. White, meanwhile, appears in the film’s final stretch, and 

affects a similar tension in a simultaneous display of brooding 

movie star swagger and overwhelming loneliness. 

Jalali has frequently worked with non-professional actors, and in 

the lead Zada is generally on the reactive end of scenes. She 

grounds the performances of Turkington and White, as well as 

other first-time actors with more colorful characters. Zada is 

herself an Afghan refugee, and the film is certainly more glaringly 

topical than most of its low-key indie progenitors. It’s never 

didactic in its messaging, but neither is the political content 

cordoned off to the realm of extraneous subtext. And it’s this, the 

way that Jalali imbues the politics of film’s content into the 

essential conception and construction of the film, that makes a 

project that is already quite charming feel consequential, all 

without ever engaging in self-congratulation. — JESSE 

CATHERINE WEBBER 

BLOODY HELL 

Molly McGlynn 

Molly McGlynn’s sophomore feature, Bloody Hell explicitly reveals 

its core conceit from the very beginning, opening with two 

quotes on a symbolically pink-colored background: the first, from 

Simon de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, reads, “The body is not a 

thing, but a situation”; the other, from Jennifer’s Body via Diable 

Cody, observes, “Hell is a teenage girl.” It’s immediately evident, 

then, that this indie Canadian coming-of-age dramedy is 

supposed to first and foremost tackle the complex and crucial 

issue of one’s body — more specifically, the meaning of a 

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woman’s body — and the relationship between a person’s 

corporeality and the surrounding world as a means to perceive 

and understand it. 

Following her 16-year-old protagonist, Lindy (portrayed by Gen-Z 

teen idol Maddie Ziegler), McGlynn constructs her 

semi-autobiographical story through a quite familiar narrative: 

living with her single mother Rita (Emily Hampshire), who has her 

own struggles with dating apps, Lindy is a new arrival in 

suburban Sudbury, Ontario, a setup which immediately suggests 

the struggles she will face in terms of adapting to a new social 

environment and in her attempts to discover her own identity. 

But what distinguishes this cringe traumedy is not only its unique 

subject matter — Lindy unexpectedly finds out that she suffers 

from the MRKH syndrome, a rare congenital disorder that makes 

it impossible for her to have penetrative sex — but also the way 

McGlynn subjects a woman’s body to various identities: here, a 

female body is alternately (sometimes simultaneously) 

understood according to sexual, medical, existential, cosmetic, 

and athletic terms. And perhaps more importantly, in Lindy’s 

case, as a waypoint between girlhood and womanhood. 

It becomes obvious, then, how McGlynn follows the dictum laid 

out by Beauvoir’s opening quote and constructs the narrative 

precisely as a series of distinct, and distinctly awkward, 

situations. The problem, however, is that Bloody Hell, functioning 

as a situational dramedy, does not always succeed in remaining 

fresh across its roughly 100-minute runtime, which causes it to 

frequently feel a little too flat and repetitive. It’s an unfortunate 

development, perhaps reflective of a lack of complete control 

over the material, for a film as sensitive, insightful, and 

conceptually thought-provoking as Bloody Hell. Making things 

worse is the fact that, aesthetically speaking, McGlynn asserts 

the film’s visual character in far too safe and standard a fashion, 

operating in a familiar low-key lane that viewers will likely 

recognize from similar-looking films like, say, the works of Lena 

Dunham. 

But despite such drawbacks, on top of McGlynn’s somewhat novel 

take on the film’s narrative material, what truly boosts Bloody 

Hell, at least beyond your conventional and plainly didactic 

treatment of this subject matter, is the Ziegler’s deeply relatable 

presence in the lead role, supported by an impressive troupe of 

young, empathic performers. Ziegler delivers a turn that is both 

bold and fragile, easily moving between joviality and a more 

guarded restraint, and it lends McGlynn’s Bloody Hell a tender 

emotionality and gentleness that helps translate its 

hyper-specific narrative considerations to messaging that will 

speak to a wider sphere of viewers. — AYEEN FOROOTAN 

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SXSW 2023 

KITE ZO A: LEAVE THE BONES 

Kaveh Nabatian 

In his landmark 1993 work Culture and Imperialism, historian 

Edward W. Said observes, “peoples being conscious of 

themselves as prisoners in their own land... returns again and 

again in the literature of the imperialized world. The history of 

empire... in Haiti, Madagascar, Burma, the Philippines, Egypt, and 

elsewhere, seems incoherent unless one recognizes that sense 

of beleaguered imprisonment infused with a passion for 

community that grounds anti-imperialist resistance in cultural 

effort.” Those phrases— “'a passion for community” and “cultural 

effort” — feel particularly apt when applied to Kite Zo A: Leave the 

Bones, an essayistic documentary that concerns itself with 

nothing less than the overflowing vibrancy and vitality of 

present-day Haiti. 

Director/cinematographer/editor Kaveh Nabatian smartly 

eschews much of the audience hand-holding endemic to 

contemporary issue docs, opting instead for an immersive 

collage of various performers and street-level subject 

interviews, all set to Malickian narration courtesy of poet 

Wood-Jerry Gabriel. A very brief introductory text acknowledges 

Bois Caïman, then continues, “where Africa meets the tip of a 

Caribbean island, where Boukman drowned the suffering of a 

race in the blood of a pig in 1791 to redefine the word liberty in 

1804 and trace a new tomorrow. Our history is long and has no 

end.” Bois Caïman was the site where the first large insurrection 

of the Haitian Revolution was planned; Dutty Boukman was a 

leader in that revolution, instigating a slave rebellion with a 

Vodou ceremony, considered to be a “sacred ritual.” History 

lesson aside, Nabatian then launches into a series of vibrant, 

even exuberant, explosions of movement — there are dancers, 

but also surfers (Nabatian supplied some people with Go-Pro 

cameras to film themselves in their respective moment) and a 

particularly fun tangent that explores the surprisingly large 

rollerblading sub-culture in Haiti. Interspersed with all of this are 

various religious ceremonies and assorted pageantry. There’s 

Vodou, of course, although the filmmaker is careful not to show it 

as some kind of horrific freak show, instead representing it as an 

essential spiritual practice. But there’s also a visit to a Christian 

church; as Nabatian explains in an interview with the website 

Awards Radar, Haiti is “50% Catholic, 50% Protestant, and 100% 

Vodou.” 

Much of the film’s last act, of a fairly brief film at that (it’s only 67 

minutes), is occupied by preparations for the annual Mardi Gras 

celebration, with ample footage of musicians performing in the 

street and people donning all manner of costumes. There are 

traditional, symbolic outfits, but also glimpses of someone made 

up like a blue Avatar alien and a young man who freely mixes 

Batman and Joker makeup together, remixing and 

recontextualizing American iconography into something new and 

unique. The threat of violence hovers around the margins of the 

film; even a cursory knowledge of contemporary Haiti is replete 

with stories of crime, political upheaval, and devastating natural 

disasters. The film recognizes this harsh reality, but Kite Zo A 

ultimately reveals itself to be about transformations, a document 

of a people in a still ongoing struggle to define themselves and 

build something from the ruins of an imperialism-ravaged past. A 

lovely bit of narration: “We travel with hope strapped to our 

shoulder; we are soldiers of time, our patience is never ending.” 

The past and present intermingle in an effort to carve out a new 

future. By allowing the film’s subjects to essentially dictate its 

form and content, Nabatian helps actualize this fundamentally 

important “passion for community.” — DANIEL GORMAN 

HUNG UP ON A DREAM 

Robert Schwartzman 

The music documentary is a pretty dependable product, sure to 

find space in a number of festival nonfiction lineups and, 

eventually, the programs of independent cinemas and arthouses 

across the country. With a built-in audience and not necessarily 

needing much in the way of production value or formal daring, 

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music documentaries are sure, inoffensive bets, though rarely 

are they all that creatively or aesthetically satisfying. 

These generalizations mostly hold true for Hung Up on a Dream, a 

new film profiling the iconic ‘60s British rock act The Zombies, 

fittingly premiering at the 2023 SXSW Film Festival in their 24 

Beats Per Second section (a sidebar consisting of 8 different 

music docs). Billed as the first-ever documentary on The 

Zombies and directed by Coppola heir/Rooney frontman Robert 

Schwartzman (backed by exec producer Tom Hanks), there’s 

certainly some reason to anticipate that Hung Up on a Dream 

might transcend the usual failings of this subgenre, or at least 

boast a compelling angle beyond access to its subjects. 

Unfortunately, that’s more or less the beginning and end of what 

this particular film has to offer. Which isn’t absolutely nothing, of 

course; after all, The Zombies are a hugely influential band with a 

pair of chart-topping, canonical singles, and the brevity of their 

recording career (two albums in a four-year window) has made 

them enduring cult figures. So there’s some satisfaction to be 

had in seeing the surviving members reunited and revisiting 

Abbey Road Studios and the like. Still, Schwartzman struggles to 

get enough material out of the band, who are uniformly rather 

open, humble guys, all sharing a tendency to undersell their 

accomplishments. It’s not exactly a flashy story as recounted by 

them, with the general sentiment being that they were lucky to 

have had their moment and to have been in the company of a 

number of top acts of the era (although some bitterness and 

disappointment remains regarding the industry exploitation that 

ultimately drove the band into premature retirement). 

Told as a sort of career survey that leads into a track-by-track 

analysis of the band’s masterpiece LP Odessey and Oracle, Hung 

Up on a Dream lacks narrative spark — the album breakdown is 

definitely the more engaging section — with Schwartzman 

running through several weak visual ideas in an attempt to keep 

things interesting (vaguely psychedelic animations of a man and 

a woman looking at each other, slow zooms on CGI TV’s playing 

archival footage), just barely getting by at this 109-minute 

runtime. A historic film in a very literal sense, the film 

nevertheless doesn’t manage to bring new light or perspective to 

The Zombies’ tale, instead trading mostly in info dumps and 

content to be more of a broad career overview. — M.G. MAILLOUX 

THE ARC OF OBLIVION 

Ian Cheney 

Most religions around the world have a flood story. Whether it’s 

Noah’s Ark, the manvantara-sandhya in Hinduism, or the 

Cheyenne saga of the Great Flood, the story of a man building a 

boat somewhere is embedded in a good deal of cultural histories. 

One such story, the flood myth outlined in the “Epic of 

Gilgamesh,” serves as inspiration for director Ian Cheney’s The 

Arc of Oblivion. Cheney, like many of us today, lives in a 

predominantly digital world. Where our grandmothers luxuriated 

in letters from lovers, we have unending text message threads. 

Where our parents had cupboards full of photo albums, we have 

folders on our phones. Where once there were massive VHS and 

then DVD collections (and less massive LaserDisc ones), in their 

place are password managers for the ballooning number of 

streaming services. For Cheney, this means stacks of hard drives 

filled with footage from past films, videos of his children, and the 

other digital miscellany we all accumulate over the years. When 

contemplating humanity’s continued transition to a world of only 

0s and 1s, and the inherent frailty of such an existence, Cheney 

wonders: “Are we insane to imagine that anything can last?” 

In an attempt to answer that question, the director decides to 

follow in the footsteps of all those flood narratives — because 

obviously — and build an ark in his parents’ backyard in rural 

Maine. With the help of a neighbor, he designs and constructs the 

ark throughout the course of the film, and while this central 

metaphor is an obvious one, Cheney leverages it to pose more 

thoughtful questions. Experts in a wide variety of fields visit the 

ark to weigh in on the nature of history and memory according to 

their specific area of study: dendrochronologists talk about the 

trees that are cut down for the ark and how their rings tell a 

history of the earth; Kirk Johnson, paleontologist and director of 

the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, speaks 

about fossils and the idea of the earth itself as an archive; Jamal 

Williams, a neuroscientist at Princeton who studies the role that 

music plays in our memories, visits, listening to a song for the 

first time so that he can connect those two memories forever. 

Meanwhile, Cheney also visits places far away from the ark, 

interviewing those who are trying to preserve our existence for 

the future. In Austria, he speaks with a ceramist who started 

“Memory of Mankind,” an archive created by putting information 

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SXSW 2023 

on ceramic plates and storing them underground. And later he 

visits the arctic and has a conversation with Ida Beathe 

Øverjordet, an ecotoxicologist who is searching for compounds 

in the sediment that could be used in pharmaceuticals. 

Throughout all these conversations, Cheney’s skill as an 

interviewer is what keeps his essential inquiries engaging and 

moving at an effective clip. Each question builds upon the last, 

each person adding another layer to the director’s metaphorical 

ark, all while the actual ark fills out around them. But what 

stands out most in Arc of Oblivion is Cheney’s facility with visual 

storytelling. While this material could have easily been explored 

through bland talking head interviews with the experts, the 

decision to center the ark, heavy-handed though the conceit 

may be, provides a visual throughline that keeps the film 

appealing on both formal and narrative levels. As viewers, we 

watch the ark grow alongside our evolving investment in the 

film’s questions, and it’s almost tricky the way Cheney uses this 

to encourage our investment in the physical project’s finished 

product. 

But what exactly is the finished product? While the ark itself is 

completed, the question of our fundamental “insanity” posed by 

Cheney at the film’s beginning doesn’t ever arrive at a tidy 

answer. Therein lies the film’s greatest strength — unlike so 

many traditionally narrativized documentaries, its embrace of 

the unknown is liberating, and leaves viewers space to draw their 

own conclusions. Value is here understood to come in the time 

taken to ask the questions rather than in any specific, reductive 

destination. Given all that, it’s not surprising to see Werner 

Herzog show up at the end of The Arc of Oblivion. Sure, he is one 

of the film’s executive producers, but even more so, in his 

nonfiction work he is known for his existential questing and 

crafting films that find summative answers limiting. Herzog, who 

famously doesn’t use storyboards and tells Cheney that he 

doesn’t keep any footage from his films after they are completed, 

notes that “oblivion is a blessing… it would be an unlivable 

existence if we remembered everything.” This, delivered in 

Werner’s soothing, eminently identifiable voice, is perhaps the 

bleakest but also most probable answer to Cheney’s question. 

The desire for everything to last is quite possibly insane, and so 

the question we’re left to ask ourselves — do we really want it to? 

— EMILY DUGRANRUT 

MONOLITH 

Matt Vesely 

It seems that — at least in the past few years — a considerable 

number of films have proven their ability to manifest new 

sensibilities for the sonic and aural aspects of cinematic art. 

From Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria to Todd Field’s Tár, 

and from Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi to an indie sci-fi like Andrew 

7


Patterson’s The Vast of Night, an audience can easily discern how 

any of these films’ endeavors, through their uniquely singular 

strategies, enrich one’s filmic experience in terms of audiovisual 

exploration. In the same manner, Matt Vesely’s debut feature 

Monolith is a deliberately thought-out work that immediately 

exhibits a clear concern for its soundscape. Following an 

unnamed journalist (portrayed by Lily Sullivan, who merely gets 

credited as “The Interviewer”), who after taking refuge in her 

parents’ remote house decides to run a podcast (named Beyond 

Believable) with a special focus on extraterrestrial theories and 

government conspiracies, the Australian mystery-horror 

showcases a peculiar formalism right from the start. With 

Sullivan as the sole on-screen actress, and surrounded by the 

unruffled and minimalist spaces of the house she’s inhabiting, 

Monolith shapes its narrative via the Interviewer’s conversations 

over phone calls and emails, investigating a puzzling story about 

an undefinable and bizarre black brick. Through each online and 

otherwise distanced interaction, not only is the audience able to 

fill in the bigger picture of this weird, rabbit-hole story, but more 

importantly, they get a chance to attend to the auditory fabric of 

the film, all while patiently observing Sullivan’s marvelous 

performance, largely built upon excellent, reactive facial 

gesturing that ushers us into her headspace. 

Perhaps it makes sense, then, to consider Monolith as akin to 

Kiarostami’s Shirin, only in reverse — if the latter’s narrative 

shaped itself via the facial reactions of various women to a 

single dramatic piece heard offscreen, here it seems that Vesely 

exposes the film’s one and only actress to the offscreen voices of 

unseen characters, who in turn eventually unravel the story so 

that we are able to discern exactly what role this half-paranoid 

and half-delusional interviewer plays within the clickbait plot. 

The film is entangled in a web of computer tabs and screens, 

mostly in front of the mansion’s enormous window, and Vesely, 

through a cold color palette of gray-inflected greens and blues 

and a steady, patient rhythm, beautifully and eerily intensifies 

the film’s slow-burning and supernatural atmosphere, which step 

by step blurs the defining line between the real and imaginary 

and tackles the very philosophical question of what truth is. 

While it’s true that, as Sullivan’s character remarks, “All you have 

to do is listen” — as this is a film wherein sounds and voices 

communicate what’s beyond the images — the way Vesely and 

his DP Michael Tessari articulate a sophisticated dynamism 

within their compositions is what gives Monolith a prismatic 

quality that, despite the film’s confined setting and 

claustrophobic mood, delivers an intricate sensorial work 

wherein the richness of sound, silence, and spatial minimalism 

are tightly integrated. Or at least that’s the case before the final 

act of the film, which admittedly feels a little dissonant and 

unnecessarily prolonged given that Vesely doesn’t seem 

completely assured as to when to cut. But despite a relatively 

loose ending, Monolith truly asserts itself as an impressive, 

grounded, and solid sci-fi/horror indie that should inspire plenty 

of excitement for Vesely’s future work. — AYEEN FOROOTAN 

8

good. honest. fun. 

An Interview With Ratboys’ Julia Steiner 

To twangy Chicago indie rockers Ratboys, making music is all about good, honest fun. Their new song, “Black Earth, WI,” lives up to 

that promise. An epic, eight-and-half-minute journey through the eye of a storm, the track boasts visual storytelling, a charming “Hey 

Jude”-adjacent refrain, and one of the best guitar solos you’ll hear this year. We caught up with singer and guitarist Julia Steiner for a 

chat about how the track came to life, whether Ratboys is bringing back the guitar solo (they are), and the secret sauce that makes 

their music so road-trip-ready. 

Nick Seip: Hi Julia! I wanted to start off just by saying congrats on “Black Earth, WI.” It's been on repeat. 

Julia Steiner: Thanks, man. We're really excited to have it out. 

NS: I just love the songwriting and imagery it conjures. The guitar solo. The vocal processing and piano at the end. 

JS: Thanks! Yeah, it's funny, we tried our best not to add too much to the song. But what's there we wanted it to really shine. But it was 

very exciting because when we went into the studio, we wanted to achieve this live band in a room sound. Specifically, that very open, 

almost ‘70s roomy vibe. And with this song, I think it really came through and it was just all one take and we were just so thrilled that it 

worked out. 

NS: So you recorded it live to tape in one take? 

JS: Yeah, it was an interesting experience. As our first time recording to tape, we had always wanted to experiment with that, but we 

never had the right opportunity. And so when we went into the studio, this tape machine was just there and fully functional and we 

started to try it out. It was a cool workflow, because we recorded the live band track (drums, the two guitars, and the bass) altogether 

to tape and then we bounced that into the computer and did a bunch of overdubs. So it was a cool combination of analog and digital 

recording styles. And very freeing. 

NS: Do you usually do everything live in the studio like that? Or do you typically layer your tracks? 

JS: The first time we tried that was with Printer’s Devil, a record that we put out in 2020. That whole record, with the exception of two 

songs, was recorded as a live band in a room. 

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And that was our first time doing it, so I was kind of unfamiliar 

with the way it works. Going into that, I was always under the 

impression that, if someone made a mistake while we were all 

playing, it would screw up the whole take and we'd have to start 

over. But we can isolate instruments. There's a lot more room for 

error than I realized. And so when we fully embraced that, leaned 

into it, it actually was very liberating and oddly enough made the 

whole process go way faster. All of a sudden, you play the song 

once, you have it recorded, and you're good to go. 

NS: I think that's a testament to your strength as a live band. 

Especially given the fact that “Black Earth” is over 8 minutes 

long. What made you want to do such a long song? 

JS: Well, thank you for saying that. The song developed a lot over 

time. Since it came out, I've been trying to hunt down the earliest 

iterations of it that I can find on my phone. Most of our songs 

start out as a little seed, where I'm playing by myself and just 

coming up with a chord progression or melody idea. And for this 

song, that seed came in like 2019. And then over the course of 

the next two-and-a-half years, we kind of just slowly started 

jamming on this idea. And that riff that Dave plays at kind of the 

climax of the guitar solo part was another part that was in the 

same key in the same tempo, so we just dragged it in. Over the 

course of playing the tune, with no real deadline, just enjoying 

ourselves and figuring out the best arrangement in a very slow, 

natural, organic way with the band. We kind of settled into this 

groove and this like length, for the song. I will say the final piece 

of the puzzle was that final verse that I sing at the end. For the 

longest time, we had the architecture of the shape of the song, 

but didn't know how to end it. And Marcus, our drummer, 

suggested to me, “You know, you need to add another verse.” And 

so I came up with that at the 11th hour, a few weeks before we 

went into the studio. So yeah, it came together very gradually, but 

it let us really enjoy ourselves, getting to figure it out over 

time. 

NS: Did you have any reference points for the track? 

JS: Yeah, kinda. I grew up really enjoying A Ghost Is Born by 

Wilco, and the song "Spiders" on that record is like nine minutes 

long, I think maybe ten. And I would always go to visit my friend 

when I was like 17 or 18 and just got my license, feeling like this 

new freedom and that song was the exact length of time that it 

would take me to drive home from his house. And so I just had so 

many special, wonderful memories of listening to that song and 

driving home and just getting lost in it. And so that feeling is kind 

of something that has always been very special to me. I don't 

presume to think that our song would have that impact for 

someone, but if it came close to something like that for anyone 

else that would be really cool. 

NS: I love that. I've always felt like Ratboys is such good road trip 

music. I was introduced to your music on a road trip and there's 

something about it that's so good for putting on in the car. Do 

you write a lot of songs in the car or on the road? 

JS: You know, not really. It's tough because I do most of the 

driving on tour. I'm kind of a control freak. I love to drive. So I 

don't have a ton of opportunity, especially when I'm with the 

guys. We're usually listening to music or listening to podcasts. 

But you're right – sometimes there's something about driving on 

the open road where your brain has so much room to wander, 

that little lines or snippets will just like pop into my brain. I've 

definitely, you know, had little moments where I'll write 

something down if it's safe to do so. Or especially if I'm alone and 

driving, I've definitely enjoyed just singing by myself and figuring 

stuff out. Just messing around. That spirit and that energy of 

moving and enjoying music with very few distractions and 

getting really lost in it is something that I think I'm able to 

channel or remember when working on songs. So it's nice to hear 

that. That might come through a little bit. 

NS: It definitely does. Before we move on from “Black Earth, WI,” I 

wanted to ask: There's this “whoosh” sound that's featured 

throughout, which is maybe my favorite part. What is that sound? 

JS: So that is actually a reverse tambourine hit. That was one 

really fun thing with recording to tape, playing with the idea of 

reversing things and playing with varispeed and all that stuff. It 

just sounds so much cooler than it would on the computer. So 

yeah, that was, I believe, a tambourine hit that Chris reversed. 

And then just placed it, like, at the end of each big bar. 

NS: It's a very cool effect. And Chris Walla is the producer on the 

track? 

10

JS: Yeah, we got to work with Chris Walla. It was amazing. 

Absolute dream come true. He's one of our favorite producers 

and musicians in general. He was in Death Cab for Cutie and 

produced a lot of their albums. He made The Con by Tegan and 

Sara which is one of my all-time favorites and a special record to 

me. He made a Foxing record that came out in 2018 that's just 

mind-blowing. Yeah, I could go on. 

NS: Is it fair to say that “Black Earth, WI” feels like a turning point 

for Ratboys? Is this an indication of what's to come? 

JS: Yeah, we have some more new music to share soon. And 

yeah, I think the song really speaks to the level of collaboration 

between us. It feels very fully realized to me from what it started 

out as. And I think that was something that we really had the time 

and space and like, energy to do with a lot of our new tunes. It 

just feels the most collaborative and “us” sounding record that 

we've made so far. So very excited to share more. 

NS: Is it fair to say that Ratboys is bringing back the guitar solo? 

JS: Dude, yes. I would be honored if someone said that. Ratboys 

is bringing back the guitar solo. I'm biased. I'm just a huge fan of 

Dave's guitar playing. And I feel like this is, like, the ultimate 

showcase of what he can do. 

NS: You're playing at SXSW this week and this is your first time 

back since the pandemic began. 

JS: Yeah. We haven't been to SXSW since 2019, so it's gonna be 

great. We always love going down there. There's just this insane 

circus energy that happens over the course of the week. You get 

to see so many awesome bands and see a bunch of friends all in 

the same place. It doesn't really happen any other time of the 

year. So we always really look forward to it. 

NS: Yeah, there's like a summer camp kind of energy. Do you 

have a mission, so to speak, for SXSW this year? 

JS: Well, that's a great question. There's a few different goals. We 

originally were thinking, like, “Ah, maybe we shouldn't go down 

this year.” Like, we don't have a new record out, you know, but we 

were thinking about it. We were supposed to play in 2020 and 

didn't get to. We had a new record out that year that we never got 

to play in Texas and at SXSW specifically. So the goal is to play 

those songs for the first time down in Texas, even though they're 

three years old now. We want to give Printer's Devil its due down 

at SXSW. We also put out a record a year after called Happy 

Birthday Ratboy, that's a bunch of old songs, but with new 

arrangements, and so we're gonna play some of those. And then 

throw some of these new tunes in the mix and see how people 

feel. And we might try to make a couple of music videos there, 

too. So it's gonna be a busy week, but it's gonna be really fun. 

We're excited. 

NS: Yeah, I wanted to talk about Happy Birthday Ratboy, too. It's 

such a cool concept, revisiting older songs. Was there a song 

that stood out to you when you were revisiting it that maybe took 

on new meaning? 

JS: Yeah, that's a nice question. It was really strange and fun, 

inhabiting those songs again, and some for the first time. We had 

played some of them live from time to time, but a few of them 

we had never played live as a full band. And so diving back into 

those and figuring out how I played guitar when I was 18 was 

really wonderful and strange. It made me kind of appreciate the 

whole scope of my time playing music. The song "88 Fingers 

Edward" was something we demoed out for Printer's Devil. It's an 

old, old, old song that we never properly recorded. And it just felt 

like it fit on this project. The song was only a minute and a half 

long. It initially ended where the vocals end. And I don't 

remember who, it might have been Marcus again, suggested we 

add a jam to it as an outro. Kind of like a Built to Spill vibe. And it 

just was the best choice – the song feels very reimagined and 

new. And actually, that was the first time that we asked Dave to 

kind of do an extended guitar solo. And it went well. It kind of felt 

like it laid the groundwork a little bit for this new song, “Black 

Earth, WI.” 

NS: Yeah, it sounds like it's like Ratboys as a band whose 

members all throw in ideas. 

JS: Yes. I mean, that's always been all I've ever wanted. Like, I 

grew up playing music by myself, like in the bathroom, you know 

what I mean? I always wanted people to play with. I just didn't 

know anyone else who played music outside of like choir. So 

11

when I met Dave, and then by extension met a bunch of other 

friends and musicians, it just opened up all the possibilities. So, 

I'm just so thrilled to have bandmates who are so open to 

collaboration and just love music and want to make cool stuff. 

NS: I wanted to talk about the video for “Black Earth, WI,” which 

consists of footage of storm chasers paired with footage of the 

band. And I find in it this beautiful chaos of this band chasing 

shows from one city to another like one would chasing storms. 

JS: Totally. Our friend just mentioned that the other day. He's like, 

all these guys hopping in vans makes me think of going on tour. 

And I did not think of that at all while we were making the video, 

but that's such a cool observation. Because that is totally how it 

feels sometimes. It's funny, the gist of the song “Black Earth” 

itself was based around this idea of a bunch of friends driving 

around in, like, the rural Midwest in the middle of a tornado 

warning. And so that storm imagery was always top of mind when 

thinking about the song. And we had thrown around the idea of 

making a music video where we were storm chasers. But when it 

came down to it, we realized it's like the dead of winter in the 

Midwest, and would be very difficult to film an accurate storm 

chaser video because that stuff usually happens in spring and 

summer. So yeah, we ended up finding all of this crazy old VHS 

footage of actual professional storm chasers doing their thing. 

I've always been a huge fan of meteorology. My earliest dream as 

a child was to be a meteorologist, and so diving into this crazy 

rabbit hole of extreme weather was awesome. I can't even 

describe it. I just felt like I was underwater for two weeks, like 

just fully immersed in this footage. And then it was a total 

accident – we plugged in this old camcorder and it interacted in 

this really glitchy colorful way that we couldn't control. We were 

supposed to have band practice that night, and ended up just 

playing around with this camera for like six hours. We did not 

practice that night. It felt like something that was happening to 

us. You know, like we couldn't control it. It was really cool. It felt 

like a happy accident. 

NS: Your videos can be very cinematic and contain a lot of film 

references. Like "Alien With a Sleep Mask On" has big Gravity and 

Apollo 13 vibes. What kind of movies are you into? 

JS: Oh my god. That's so funny as I've been consciously trying to 

get more into film over the last few years because I always joked 

that compared to every other human on Earth, I haven't seen very 

many movies in general. But John, the director of the "Alien" 

video, made me watch Gravity the night before we filmed it. And 

honestly, I am kind of terrified of outer space. So it was actually 

a very good thing to do because it calmed me down a little bit in 

a weird way. I usually gravitate more toward, like, dark comedy. I 

am just simply obsessed with The Banshees of Inisherin that 

came out last year. I just watched it last night. Oh my god, what 

did you think? 

NS: I loved it. I love that director too, Martin McDonagh. I can be 

pretty late to the party when it comes to movies, too, sometimes. 

JS: It's the combination of morbid darkness and whimsical 

absurdity. When those two things collide, that is just my favorite 

thing. So that movie blew my mind. It was very sad, but I also just 

found it so funny. I've watched it like five times. I also love the 

movie Coraline. That's another one where it's just kind of, like, 

dark but whimsical. Wet Hot American Summer is another one. 

NS: Your video for "I Go Out At Night" captures that – it's got a bit 

of darkness but it's very cute and wholesome. 

JS: That video was really fun because it does play with those two 

things. Like, when you shine a light on your fears, you can find 

the lightness in it and find that everything's okay. Especially 

when you're with your friends or people you trust. That was a 

really, really fun video to make. And that was also John TerEick. 

Who we love collaborating with and who we're going to 

collaborate with again when we're in Austin. 

NS: Is there a core ethos to Ratboys? 

JS: I don't know. The other day someone asked, how would you 

describe your band in three words? And I was trying to think of 

an answer. And what I came up with was: good, honest, fun. So I 

think that's what we're after. We want to be good at what we do. 

And be ourselves authentically and write music that’s honest to 

who we are. And also just have a fucking good time. So that's our 

goal. It's just some good honest fun, I think. — INTERVIEW 

CONDUCTED BY NICK SEIP 

12


THE HITCH-HIKER 

Ida Lupino 

Our contemporary understanding of film noir tends to valorize the intricate 

psychological dimensions present within its frames of black and white — 

dimensions which lend themselves, at different junctures, to close, symptomatic, 

and even paranoid readings of sexual and queer anxiety. Perhaps it’s inevitable, 

with the likes of Nicholas Ray and Alfred Hitchcock, that such characterization has 

become commonplace, each onscreen artifact a literary symbol, each movement a coded gesture of deception and double meaning. 

But as undeniable as the literary potential of film noir may be, the genre does not quite forgo its rugged, external environment. The 

workings of the land shape the trappings of the mind, and much like the windswept frontiers of Johnny Guitar or the theatrical 

claustrophobia of Rope, the arid Mexican wilderness in Ida Lupino’s taut and terrifying The Hitch-Hiker proves both emblematic of and 

necessary for the rabid violence that ensues, first on the plains, and then among a trio of trapped and lost men. 

Roy Collins (Edmund O’Brien) and Gilbert Bowen (Frank Lovejoy) are two average Joes who temporarily leave the confines of nuclear 

conformity and inadvertently run into potentially fatal trouble in the form of an outlaw named Emmett Myers (William Talman). With a 

gun to their heads, Myers takes them hostage in their own car and makes his way southwest, away from the eagle eyes of the law. 

Armed with a cruel physiognomy and an equally sharp suspicion for his captives, the fugitive and spree killer towers over the frame, 

his shifty yet steely demeanor looming as an overwhelming and foreboding presence while time ticks and the inevitable closes in. In 

The Hitch-Hiker, grand theatrics are dismissed, relegated to a mythos of desperado glory all but sanctioned within a canvas of 

grayscale realism. There are no preternatural forces of good, nor that of evil, except for pure contingency and a forceful, persistent 

amoralism. Why does Myers kill? For survival, as well as a ruthless, Hobbesian view of nature that actively guarantees this survival. 

13


When the law arrives in the film’s closing minutes, it does so 

without righteous fanfare, but just as the consequence of logical 

deduction and undisturbed institutional efficiency. 

What strikes one, seventy years after The Hitch-Hiker’s release, is 

how enduring the film’s images are, how its apparently simplistic 

set-up still engenders taut, palpitating anxiety despite its paucity 

of motives or motion effects. In retrospect, perhaps, we 

experience such anxiety given our newfound reliance in the kind 

of prestige, “elevated” thrill that combines perfection of craft 

with auteurist signature and narrative intricacy; the modern 

Fincher vehicle, for example, has nary a shock without a spoiler, 

or a protagonist without an unconscious. Lupino, a 

boundary-pushing artistic voice even in today’s estimation, 

wasn’t some gun-toting performative feminist that overturned 

male-dominated convention in pursuit of aesthetic 

independence. She was a skilled filmmaker with subtlety, 

deploying the latter right within convention itself to encode and 

decode the ideological functions central to cinematic form. The 

Hitch-Hiker, a studio-funded feature despite its independent 

direction, was also indebted to the real-world figure of Billy Cook, 

a subject of controversy due to his destitute upbringing, and also 

a man who kidnapped and murdered in cold blood. In its 

dramatization, or fictionalization, of America’s uneasy 

confrontation with its repressed malaise, the film furnishes an 

equally veritable documentation of historical reality. 

Sans the retrospective gaze, however, Lupino’s most notable and 

accomplished work also achieves an immediate 

tactile clarity through its acute observations of 

masculine self-image within its economical 

seventy-minute runtime. Prior to the duo’s run-in 

with Myers, we witness two parallel acts of 

identity formation: Myers’ other killings, ever 

slightly off-kilter from the camera frame to 

refract and magnify their menace, and Bowen 

and Collins leaving the clockwork performativity 

of their traditional, middle-class lives possibly in 

search of another kind of performativity — the 

weekend fling, sworn to secrecy under an oath 

of brotherhood — disguised as a fishing trip. 

Whether or not we should read into these initial 

minutes and diagnose America’s Golden Years as 

a festering sore of window-dressed moralism is, naturally, a 

matter of debate, but an undeniable implication that follows is 

how the thriller’s genetic machismo quickly falters, is 

undermined by the emaciation of its characters into impotent 

figures atop a stage whose deterministic injunction — kill or be 

killed — dissolves the patriotism of a former era for a 

rejuvenated paranoia. 

Even The Hitch-Hiker’s denouement turns the typically lavish noir 

schema on its head, rejecting transcendent payoff and moral 

affirmation for a barely satisfactory resumption of justice: Myers 

apprehended, and Bowen and Collins walking away generally 

unscathed. But the surface presumption, of a weekend wasted 

and of a harrowing encounter happily resolved, belies a deeper 

existential question about the two other men. Where Myers is 

defined explicitly against the law, our two American subjects are 

blank ciphers, neither foregrounded by national exceptionalism 

nor spectacular enough to be recognized as anything more than 

a potential crime statistic. “You haven’t got a thing except that 

gun. You’d better hang on to it, because without it you’re nothing!” 

Collins sneers at the embittered Myers, whose lone working eye 

stares back, livid at the suggestion. In Myers’ case, his visual 

handicap proves a useful means to his ends: conjuring fear and 

corralling his victims. For his victims, nothing shapes them, and 

the bleak environs of The Hitch-Hiker is that which mockingly 

positions its newfound inhabitants, and that which Lupino 

subversively employs as a geographical marker of a deprived 

national psyche. — MORRIS YANG 

14


FULL MOON 

IN PARIS 

Éric Rohmer 

Despite the French New Wave being widely considered obsolete by the 1980s, all of its directors remained active, finding varying 

degrees of success in adapting to the dramatically shifting political world around them. Jean-Luc Godard found himself reborn after a 

decade of alienating fans with a bombardment of radically left-wing pieces of agitprop; Francois Truffaut released the largely beloved 

The Last Metro, before his tragic passing in 1984; and both Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol continued pushing their abstraction 

and dissection of Hollywood themes, with varying degrees of success. Éric Rohmer, however, found himself in one of the most prolific 

periods of his entire career, with his ‘80s work mostly consisting of his comedies and proverbs series, a selection of six films that 

ruminate on the classic Rohmerian themes of failing relationships, conspicuous love affairs, and embittered jealousy. Full Moon in 

Paris is the fourth entry in this canonical run, and despite its strikingly beautiful visual palette and poignant thematic concerns, to 

this day, it remains one of the auteur’s most underrated works. 

Pascale Ogier, in one of her final roles before a devastating early death in 1984, plays Louise, a free-spirited woman whose life in the 

Parisian suburbs with her partner, Remi (Tchéky Karyo), has left her desiring both the excitement of French nightlife and the ability to 

spend time alone. Remi’s boring and monotonous attitude seems to be the antithesis of Louise’s outgoing and vibrant personality, and 

an early scene showcasing an argument at a party highlights the dichotomy between the two lovers’ desires. Remi is unlike many 

classic Rohmerian male characters — he is physically strong, doesn’t speak in borderline insufferable intellectual jargon, and appears 

to be devoted to his girlfriend. Rohmer instead deposits his classical stereotypes of pathetic or fallible men onto Octave (Fabrice 

Luchini), a married man who, despite his continued efforts to instigate a sexual relationship with Louise, is repeatedly rejected in 

favor of platonic friendship (non-romantic friendships are one of the very specific social orientations at the heart of the film). 

15 

To escape from the mundanity of life, Louise decides to split her domestic life into two homes: her suburban house with Remi and a 

pied-à-terre in the center of Paris, where she mostly stays on Friday nights, allowing herself to go out to parties by herself. Full Moon in 

Paris largely takes place in the bustling streets of nocturnal Paris, making this an outlier in a Rohmerian oeuvre that typically visits 

the sunny settings of rural France or small but hectic coastal towns. But the film remains very obviously crafted by his hands: the


entirely static camera creates frames that look like paintings; 

the use of space is brilliant, seeing characters gracefully moving 

around one another; and Rohmer’s use of real locations allows 

this all, story and aesthetic, to feel authentic. However, the film 

also reveals an alternative side to Rohmer in many ways. An 

obvious departure from his usual style can be seen in the 

multiple, beautifully shot dance sequences — including a 

memorable one in which Louise dances to ‘80s French electropop 

— as the images overflow with an expression of pure happiness. 

Meanwhile, the final dance is spliced into a montage, an editing 

technique that feels somewhat alien to Rohmer. Here, Louise is 

seen dating a mysterious lover; that sequence is coupled with a 

serene moment where they ride a motorcycle together, the Paris 

streetlights casting gorgeous shadows on the open roads 

surrounding them. 

It’s hard to imagine anyone else playing Louise other than Ogier; 

she infuses her character with such charisma that it’s quite 

impossible not to be enticed. As the film unravels, Louise 

consistently finds herself conflicted between her committed 

relationship to Remi — whom she clearly loves despite his flaws 

— and the exhilarating yet enigmatic thrill of single life in Paris. 

While Rohmer never adopts a patently mournful tone, there is 

something deeply moving about Ogier’s ability to convey the 

pathos swirling within her character, a woman whose desires 

consistently appear to be in natural and irresolvable opposition 

to one another. It’s this clash of desires that drives Full Moon in 

Paris. Can you have total independence while requiting 

someone’s love? Is settling for a committed relationship a 

signifier of stagnation? How easy is it for love to move from one 

person to another? All of these are mystifying questions that 

trouble and captivate Rohmer, none of which he can answer by 

his films’ ends, and who could? 

Despite appearing to be a rather rudimentary story about 

relationships on its face, Full Moon in Paris is full of small grace 

notes that accumulate and transcend simple drama to become 

something far more profound. And while relatively short, the film 

sees Rohmer develop myriad morally complex and dynamic 

characters, each with clear flaws and dreams, deeply empathetic 

even as they slip into the darker sides of themselves. Rarely does 

Rohmer seek to judge or moralize them, treating each instead as 

humans desperately seeking fulfillment in whatever small 

capacity they can find. Unlike his Cahiers du Cinéma peers, 

Rohmer was far more conservative in his political views. It could 

thus be easy to see Full Moon in Paris as a subdued diatribe 

against a typically free-spirited, Parisian attitude: Louise, after 

all, by immersing herself in it, falls into tragedy. But the film 

mercifully never makes any direct ideological statement, instead 

simply highlighting the oscillating contradictions between the 

comforting safety of relationships and a desire for amorous 

liberty. — OLIVER PARKER 

16

FILM REVIEWS 

JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4 

Chad Stahelski 

It’s 2023, and while movies barely exist anymore, franchises 

certainly do. Hence John Wick: Chapter 4, a film that brings the 

whole John Wick series one step closer to something like the Fast 

and the Furious series, or — if Wick’s producers really wanted to 

dream — the white whale of the MCU. A John Wick spin-off just 

wrapped production, and a Mel Gibson-starring miniseries debuts 

later this year. But for now, we simply have star and executive 

producer Keanu Reeves, director Chad Stahelski, and Chapter 4 

itself, a solid retread of the three previous films’ clever action, 

wryly comic universe, and (basically) simple story structure. 

“Solid” might not be stellar, but it’s also no easy feat to 

accomplish for a film with the dreadful number 4 appended to its 

name, and a bloated three-hour runtime to boot; plus, when the 

series has proved as consistently captivating and well-delivered 

as the Wick films have been up to this point, solid definitely 

means something. 

When last we left Wick, he was waging war against an 

international network of assassins known only as the High Table. 

And when we find Wick again, lo, he’s still waging war against the 

High Table. Now, the shadowy organization has sent someone 

called the Marquis (Bill Skarsgård) after him, in turn hiring Wick’s 

ex-friend and blind ex-contract killer Caine (Donnie Yen) to take 

him out. Luckily, Wick is aided by Winston (Ian McShane), another 

former friend and former hotelier who turned enemy in the last 

film, but has since returned ally, who convinces Wick that his 

only hope is to rejoin one of the crime families that make up the 

High Table, in order to challenge the Marquis to a duel which, if 

Wick wins, will clear his name. Meanwhile, a mysterious figure 

calling himself “Nobody” also pursues Wick around with his dog 

in tow, alternatively aiding and attacking Wick as he sees fit. Oh, 

plus there’s ex-wrestler and DTV mainstay Scott Adkins, in a fat 

suit, as a German crime boss and club owner; Japanese-British 

pop star Rina Sawayama as a hotel manager who loses her father 

(Hiroyuki Sanada) to assassins; and the always great Laurence 

Fishburne, reprising his formerly inspired role as the Bowery 

King, the leader of a secret network of homeless assassins, who 

appears just so infrequently, randomly, and halfheartedly enough 

for you to think more about his paycheck and contractual 

objections than his performance. 

17

FILM REVIEWS 

Stahleski is certainly a skilled director, as evinced by almost any 

scene where someone lets off a bullet or throws a punch, but his 

ability to generate tension, engagement, and emotion on a 

narrative level is never more than functional and non-distracting. 

It might be something of a criticism to note that this critic never 

cared a lick about what happened in the plot, but it’s also a 

compliment to note that it doesn’t much matter — the action and 

revenge-story template are legible enough that the film actually 

thoroughly works on a scene by scene level. If anything, there’s 

even something comforting about Stahelski’s inability to 

convincingly pull off the heightened sense of scale and 

tacked-on epicness that’s tethered to the series’ ballooning 

budgets and runtimes. The Fast and Furious franchise may have 

eventually taken its small band of L.A. car thieves all the way to 

outer space, but Wick still finds Reeves punching, kicking, and 

shooting his way through the same sort of expressionistic night 

clubs and iconic urban locales that we’re used to from the start 

of this series. 

“[Stahleski’s] ability to generate 

tension, engagement, and 

emotion on a narrative level is 

never more than functional and 

non-distracting. 

To that end, Stahelski almost always keeps his camera at a 

medium distance when people are fighting — conveying as 

lucidly as possible the flow of action, while foregoing both 

panoramic wides that convey the scale of carnage and gritty 

close-ups that could develop psychological tension — and on the 

narrative plane, he’s not much different. Scenes work clearly and 

comprehensively so long as they stick to Wick’s simple, linear 

struggle to move up the ladder of the High Table and enact 

revenge. When the film suddenly drops Lawrence of Arabia 

quotes and randomly jumps to a horseback shootout in the 

Sahara, or whips together subplots about side characters stuck 

in endless cycles of revenge, it almost completely misses the 

mark. But when it sticks to simply exploring the many clever 

ways it can stage endless fight scenes in interesting locales, it 

soars. 

Stahelski’s main gift is his knack for picking recognizable urban 

settings and exploring their physical dynamics in ways both 

familiar and wittily transcendent. From a circular car chase 

around the Arc de Triomphe that results in a lengthy brawl 

amidst traffic and numerous car crashes, to a shootout that 

wends its way through a derelict building and is delivered in a 

floorplan-style bird’s-eye view shot that creates some 

gut-churning kineticism, to a Sisyphean melee up the stairs of 

the Sacré-Cœur, and then down again, and then up again, John 

Wick: Chapter 4 showcases some of the most ingenious and 

exciting action scenes around. And importantly, it does so in 

ways that go beyond technical skill, arriving at something 

uniquely expressive. 

Cinema has always had a knack for exploring the dynamics of 

our engagement with urban space, from Harold Lloyd dangling 

off a building to Adam Sandler dangling his cash out of a window 

WALK UP 

Hong Sang-soo 

“On the one hand, Walk Up presents his life as existing in linear, chronological time, with the four parts as episodes in a larger 

trajectory of withdrawal and decline…On the other hand, Walk Up allows us to see that single afternoon as a simultaneity of 

presents, to see the four parts as the same event played out in different ways, and, crucially, unfolded in a kind of empty time, 

detached from a linear succession of past, present, and future.” — LAWRENCE GARCIA [Originally published as part of InRO’s NYFF 

2022 coverage.] 

DIRECTOR: Hong Sang-soo; CAST: Yunhee Cho, Lee Hye-yeong, Kwon Hae-hyo, Song Seon-mi; DISTRIBUTOR: Cinema Guild; IN 

THEATERS: March 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 37 min. 

17 18

FILM REVIEWS 

in Uncut Gems. John Wick, then, is the rare action franchise to 

showcase such a sharp focus on physical reality in a cinema 

landscape that’s overladen with CGI. It could be better paced, 

sure, and could boast greater emotional depth, and could 

definitely shrug off some of its franchise bloat. But at the end of 

the day, it’s still a John Wick movie, and that is really starting to 

mean something. — JOSHUA BOGATIN 

DIRECTOR: Chad Stahelski; CAST: Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane, 

Bill Skarsgård, Laurence Fishburne, Scott Adkins; DISTRIBUTOR: 

Lionsgate; IN THEATERS: March 24; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 49 min. 

THE FIVE DEVILS 

Léa Mysius 

An overhead shot tracks a car’s snaking glide down a mountain 

road as a turquoise lake looms below. Credits appear, and the 

score begins to brood something like The Shining’s “Dies irae,” 

before revealing itself as an orchestral pop cover of Robert 

Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues.” “And I said hello Satan, I 

believe it’s time to go,” the vocal croons as the sweeping scenery 

churns. The cold open that precedes this bit of icy dread is 

actually red hot, all screams and fire as Adèle Exarchopoulos 

stares back at us in disbelief, her face hued in crimson — 

revealed as an image from a little girl’s nightmare — or was it 

something else? 

This is how Léa Mysius (who made her exhilarating feature debut 

Ava in 2017 and has since been collaborating with the likes of 

Téchiné, Desplechin, Audiard, and Denis) sets the stage for her 

directorial return with The Five Devils. If Mysius' screenwriting 

work across a French auteur bingo card betrays a 

chameleon-like adaptability, her directorial efforts carry an 

unmistakably auteurist stamp. Together with DP and writing 

partner Paul Guilhaume, she crafts textured coming-of-age 

stories where characters slip into flights of fantasy injected with 

pop, or sometimes into other genres altogether, amidst the glow 

of bright, expressionistic color palettes. 

The opening nod to The Shining is telling, as there is a good bit of 

off-kilter menace that rings more like horror here than the sense 

of futility that gave Ava its somber undercurrent. Out of her 

peers, Mysius’ wavelength may most closely resemble the work of 

Céline Sciamma, with a special focus on girls and young women 

yearning, searching, and discovering themselves in the process. 

Fragments here and there recall Water Lilies, Girlhood, and most 

obviously, the mother-daughter time-bending of Petite Maman. 

But there are also flashes of Lynch-tinged discomfort and 

meticulous interlocking symbols and allegorical modes hinting in 

the direction of Jordan Peele. 

Whatever the proportions of this concoction, Mysius prepares it 

with overwhelming confidence, delivering the story of Vicky 

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(Sally Dramé), a young girl who yearns to understand her 

detached mother, Joanne (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and who, much 

like in Petite Maman, is aided on her quest by metaphysical 

means. The arrival of her mysterious aunt Julia (Swala Emati) is 

as disruptive as it is revelatory, opening up a pathway into the 

mystery of Vicky’s mother’s past, a buried secret that the young 

girl begins to piece together through her journey across time. 

The twist here is that Vicky’s window to time travel is olfactory: a 

mysterious potion bottle from Julia’s bag forms a scent so potent 

that it, fueled by our young protagonist’s hyperosmia, allows brief 

sojourns into the past. These segments, which essentially find 

Vicky waking up within flashbacks, flesh out Joanne and Julia's 

backstory, a love affair between the two that ends with the 

traumatic inferno of the opening shot. After this, Joanne will go 

on to marry Julia’s brother, Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue), and 

settle down, while Julia disappears from the picture altogether 

until her sudden return, which sets off the action of the film. 

In a way, what Mysius accomplishes here with Joanne’s narrative 

is an inversion of the conservative underpinnings of Back to the 

Future, wherein Marty McFly must fix the past in order to save 

himself, restore his father’s masculinity, and preserve the 

traditional nuclear family unit. In her own way, Vicky faces the 

same existential threat as Marty, understanding that her origin is 

predicated on a sequence of events in danger of swinging the 

other way. Unlike Marty, however, she is forced to confront an 

uncomfortable truth: that perhaps her very existence is the 

outcome of a devastating mistake. 

The intricate interplay of past and present, mother and daughter, 

old lovers, and a betrayed friendship is woven together by Mysius 

with an assured sense of ease. Deeper within these intertwining 

narratives flows an undercurrent theme of racial identity. Vicky’s 

Blackness is a source of racist bullying at her predominantly 

white school, and so as a coping mechanism, she clings to her 

white mother, Joanne, and is distant to her Black father, Jimmy. 

Her hostility toward her aunt, Jimmy’s sister, encapsulates her 

alienation from this part of herself; thus, as the story progresses 

and Vicky journeys to understand and accept Julia’s place in her 

mother’s backstory, she is simultaneously able to see her aunt 

fully and understand the connective tissue that unites the two of 

them just as strongly. Indeed, though Mysius may conduct this 

symphony, the film hinges on the young Dramé’s sophisticated 

performance grounding these difficult ideas and symbols within 

her minute gestures, and the empathetic pull of her expressive 

gaze. 

Of course, just as in Ava, Mysius and Guilhaume take care to build 

out a cinematic playground on which the story unfolds, including 

quite a few dazzling sequences punctuated by remarkable 

fragments of pop. And much like last year’s Aftersun, The Five 

Devils gets tremendous mileage out of an outsized ‘80s classic 

that by all means and measures should feel exhausted and spent 

by now, yet somehow roars back to life here, driven by adept 

cinematography and what is seemingly nothing less than the 

song’s primordial power. The very same could likely be said for 

the whole of The Five Devils itself; from the over-ambitious script, 

to the odd genre-bending, to the unapologetic dedication to its 

conceit, it’s hard to anticipate all of this working. But once 

TORI AND LOKITA 

Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne 

“Across their filmography, the Dardennes have demonstrated a keen interest in character transformation, which is why their films 

so often build to moments of grace and forgiveness, scenes where the exterior viewpoint of the camera takes on the quality of 

an epiphany. No such moment is forthcoming in Tori and Lokita, which is to some degree exciting in the context of the 

Dardennes’ filmography, if somewhat flat in the context of the film itself.” — LAWRENCE GARCIA [Originally published as part of 

InRO’s Cannes 2022 coverage. 

DIRECTOR: Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne; CAST: Pablo Schils, Joely Mbundu, Alban Ukaj, Tijmen Govaerts; DISTRIBUTOR: Janus 

Films; IN THEATERS: March 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 28 min. 

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again, under Mysius’ careful watch, everything just clicks. Not 

only is it obvious from this second feature that Ava was no fluke, 

but it’s clear that the concoctions she’s crafting are only getting 

more potent. — IGOR FISHMAN 

DIRECTOR: Léa Mysius; CAST: Adèle Exarchopoulos, Swala 

Emati, Sally Drame; DISTRIBUTOR: MUBI; IN THEATERS: March 

24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 35 min. 

A GOOD PERSON 

Zach Braff 

As any “junkie” can tell you, at a certain point, Oxycontin stopped 

being Oxycontin, and many Oxy users in the United States turned 

to heroin. Almost overnight, the stock character of “the addict” in 

the middle-class American mind transformed from Skid Row 

ne’er-do-wells and failed rockstars to “somebody I actually know.” 

This — and the overdoses that came with it — formed what was 

called the opioid epidemic. It gave the Sackler family (the 

founders of Purdue Pharma and inventors of Oxycontin) the 

one thing they didn’t want: attention. And now, years later, the 

narrative may be most comparable to the AIDS crisis, where 

bands of survivors speak longingly of lost friends, the villains of 

the story are known but not held accountable, and, well, it’s also 

not really over. Though last year gave us Laura Poitras’ All the 

Beauty and the Bloodshed, there’s still plenty of cultural 

mythologizing about the opioid epidemic that can be made 

before a trend is identified, milked, and then tossed aside. And 

though it may sound like a Madlibs creation, Zach Braff’s 

indiewood drama about opioid addiction, A Good Person, dutifully 

arrives this year to mythologize further. 

In typical “written and directed by Zach Braff” fashion, A Good 

Person is a story about small-town drama, dissolving 

relationships, very serious conversations, and quirks in lieu of 

humor. It’s serviceable as an actor-heavy project, as the majority 

of the movie composes two or three characters in alternating 

medium shots as they scream or cry their way through 

paragraphs of confessional dialogue. It’s all very capital-A acting, 

with a serious enough subject to justify the emotions on display 

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here, and that’s the kind of movie Braff can comfortably make. 

No shots are held for dramatic effect, and no flashy cuts 

announce themselves. Instead, every formal choice is a 

utilitarian one in service of the next dialogue. This is not 

necessarily a bad thing: invisible studio style is far preferable to 

a parade of mismanaged visual quirks. But, by the fifth yelling 

match, the pleasures of A Good Person begin to resemble the 

pleasures of watching a series of audition tapes. Who among us 

has ever thought, “I would like to watch a series of audition 

tapes.” 

Braff paces the story itself such that at least one big dramatic 

revelation happens every scene or two, ensuring that 1) the 

characters have something new to yell about and 2) no plot 

description can be attempted without venturing into spoiler 

territory. The film starts before the yelling, as Allison (Florence 

Pugh) and Nathan (Chinaza Uche) host their engagement party, 

filled with schmaltzy jokes and ribbing (couples publicly calling 

each other out for their private “cute” eccentricities) that clearly 

signal we’re in antediluvian times. Then, after a few more 

conversations revolving around just how great everything is, 

Allison crashes her car, killing Nathan’s sister and brother-in-law, 

who rode with her to look at wedding dresses. Allison is 

prescribed Oxycontin, a year passes by, and voila: we’re in Braff 

county, New Jersey. A few vignettes with some locals catch us up 

with Allison’s failures before we’re treated to a shot of her 

smoking heroin on the street, which is an experience just 

unpleasant enough to compel her into Narcotics Anonymous. 

That’s where the small town curse hexes Allison, as she just 

happened to pick the chapter Daniel (Morgan Freeman), the 

father of her ex-fiance, attends. After the death of his daughter, 

Daniel memorized all the police reports related to the accident, 

blamed Allison, and now accepts her arrival as a challenge from 

God, much like his struggles to raise his orphaned hellion of a 

granddaughter (Celeste O’Connor). By the time that exposition 

falls into place, the film can finally settle into the acting reel of 

intense conversations about grief, addiction, and listlessness 

that drags these characters into a bizarre final act — one that 

betrays every value held by the first ninety minutes. 

Back in 2004, Zach Braff’s Hamlet adaptation, Garden State, 

helped solidify the ennui-prick archetype as the darling lead of 

big-budget indie productions. Prince Hamlet served as a good 

model for the Scrubs actor’s big, serious directorial debut, but 

where the melancholy Dane speaks with ghosts and fights with 

swords, the melancholy Jersey boy Large listens to The Shins 

and decides not to be fashionably sad anymore. Pugh plays A 

Good Person’s Allison as an updated Large, though her 

middle-class, addiction-riddled sadness works a bit better than 

Large’s floundering actor syndrome. Alas, poor Yorick’s skull 

remains unacknowledged in both as the emotional gravitas 

mutes all attempts at humor or literally any other register of 

acting. This is a death knell for an “actors’ film,” with Braff 

choosing extremity over range for his cast, forcing them all to 

play one loud note over and over. Though Allison’s mother (Molly 

Shannon) lends a bit of wonderful levity in her scenes, every 

other character uses their scars and fears to lash out or enter 

into confessionals. When veteran actor Freeman suddenly shifts 

to a completely different character at the end, it’s literally 

unbelievable. 

“Though Braff’s overly sincere 

cascades of dialogue fall once 

too often into the reviled 

aesthetic category of cringe, A 

Good Person clearly wants to be 

helpful. 

What is believable is Pugh’s portrait of addiction. Even when she 

starts taking bigger and bigger leaps toward helping herself, she 

still might self-medicate for an NA meeting by taking half an Oxy 

and rationalizing it: “I’m half-fucked-up.” Any setbacks are met 

with four shots of tequila, and Tequila Allison wants Oxy or, as 

America found out, the more easily acquirable heroin. Braff 

clearly cares about addiction; otherwise, he would’ve given her 

an easier recovery. It’s perhaps the film’s only real strength, and 

that’s enough to make it a historical curio. It’s certainly not 

interested in pointing fingers or rhapsodizing about politics — 

the very fact that a white woman killed two black people is 

literally never addressed, not even by Freeman’s Daniel at his 

angriest moments — and that may be for the best. After all, what 

would a Zach Braff movie about the ins and outs of the Sackler 

dynasty and 2020s racial relations look like? If God loves us, He 

will keep us as His happy, ignorant children. 

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Though Braff’s overly sincere cascades of dialogue fall once too 

often into the reviled aesthetic category of cringe, A Good Person 

clearly wants to be helpful. But its Hollywood ending opts for 

fantasy, as if the movie thought itself too cruel and hungered for 

the simple, saccharine notes of the first scene. As our prince 

reminds us: “I must be cruel only to be kind; Thus bad begins, 

and worse remains behind.” — ZACH LEWIS 

DIRECTOR: Zach Braff; CAST: Florence Pugh, Morgan Freeman, 

Zoe Lister-Jones, Molly Shannon; DISTRIBUTOR: United Artists 

Releasing; IN THEATERS: March 24; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 9 min. 

THE LOST KING 

Stephen Frears 

At the very start of his career, Stephen Frears was seen as part 

of a wave of exciting British filmmakers, many of whom often 

worked with publicly-owned broadcast companies: the BBC made 

films with Alan Clarke and Mike Leigh in their Play for Today 

series (1970-1984), before the latter went onto work with Channel 

4, who even produced films with queer iconoclast Derek Jarman 

towards the end of his life. They also produced what’s arguably 

regarded as Frears’ most famous film, My Beautiful Laundrette 

(1985), and it seems those connections never faded for him. Most 

of his recent films have been partially funded by the BBC, though 

they truly speak to the reduced state of these institutions. It 

seems impossible to imagine a time when they would make 

something as bold, experimental, and challenging as Alan 

Clarke’s Elephant (1989) — which reflected on the ongoing 

Troubles by showing only scenes of decontextualized violence — 

especially when looking at films as safe and empty as Frears’ 

recent run of Florence Foster Jenkins (2017), Victoria & Abdul 

(2019), and his latest, The Lost King. 

It might seem wise of Frears to build up to this film’s premise, in 

which Phillipa Langley (Sally Hawkins) — the woman who will go 

on to discover the body of Richard III long after it was considered 

lost — speaks to the spirit, or perhaps just a hallucination, of the 

titular King (Harry Lloyd). At first the two only exchange looks, 

and then just a handful of words. But instead of keeping the film 

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FILM REVIEWS 

from feeling silly and compromising the sense of realism in this 

true-story narrative, the decision unintentionally results in a 

movie that’s dead on arrival. It stops it from reaching the level of 

cutesy, though it remains nonetheless stylized, and further sands 

the edges off of an already rather edgeless project. It’s easy, 

then, to let one’s eyes glaze over in the face of such commitment 

to inoffensiveness, but to an extent, that response lets it off the 

hook too easily, allowing the film’s ideas to slip through 

unchallenged. That’s not to suggest this is a conscious strategy 

on Frears’ part, though that level of cynicism would seem a good 

explanation as to how he ended up here, but still it makes its 

ideology more conspicuous by hiding it under a sense of flat, 

boring normality that the modern-day BBC works so hard to 

maintain. 

The Lost King frames itself as feminist, with its opening titles 

reading: “Based on a true story — Her story.” And in its early 

scenes, Phillipa is shown missing opportunities at her unfulfilling 

advertising job because she’s looked down on as a woman, and 

especially as one entering middle age. Though another reason is 

because of her disability: she has ME (myalgic 

encephalomyelitis), and often finds she must insist that it is a 

real condition, which of course later aligns her with Richard, 

when she sees his alleged hunched back used as a symbol for 

some inner deformity in Shakespeare’s famous play. This might 

all seem plenty nice and progressive, if gently so, but much of it 

plays into the tropes of “girlboss” feminism, in which feminism 

only exists to expand the same limiting boundaries in order to 

allow some women into them. It’s driven by the same fantasy of 

the individualistic outsider who comes in to bring innovation in a 

way that’s only possible under the alleged freedoms of 

capitalism; the exact kind of images that Steve Jobs and Elon 

Musk worked so hard to cultivate. 

This isn’t to say that Phillipa didn’t face real institutional 

opposition. The film’s presentation of the University of Leicester, 

and the way that they stole credit for the dig that Phillipa 

organized and led, has been controversial, but mostly with those 

who are portrayed, some of whom have threatened to sue. But 

Phillipa wasn’t put on the panel of the first and most important 

press conference — as it was the one that all the press attended, 

where the history was written — for the discovery of the body, 

and was instead left only to function as the last of thirteen 

speakers. Frears takes pains to make a point of comparing a 

university to a corporation, which rings increasingly true as they 

move ever further from a necessary part of any education. But 

criticism of capitalism being subsumed into the larger capitalist 

mythology is hardly new, and in fact, is a core precept of this 

idea of the innovator: for an individual to be needed to bring life 

back to a company, it must assume that those structures 

naturally fade into emptiness. 

It’s interesting that, in real life, Phillipa founded the Scottish 

branch of the Richard III society, while in the film, she only 

comes across a much smaller Edinburgh branch. But either way, 

these seven or so outsiders don’t become a group in which 

Phillipa finds community, but are instead simply supporters to 

rally around her. Their only contributions to the “Looking for 

Richard” project are choosing between two potential names and 

helping to find funding for Phillipa’s bold vision. That vision isn’t 

solely driven by her extensive knowledge, however, but by 

something far stranger, which reveals, quite nakedly, the magical 

THE WORST ONES 

Lise Akoka & Romane Gueret 

“But as Akoka and Gueret focus on their leads, a few of the other kids disappear into the background, given only flashes of real 

personality before being dropped entirely… The Worst Ones is sensitive, intelligent filmmaking, but its even-handed nature toward 

both the population of Picasso and Gabriel’s film sometimes feels like an elision of perspective, like it’s walking up to the line but 

ultimately letting everyone off the hook.” — CHRIS MELLO [Originally published as part of InRO’s Cannes 2022 coverage.] 

DIRECTOR: Lise Akoka & Romane Gueret; CAST: Mallory Wanecque, Timéo Mahaut, Johan Heldenbergh; DISTRIBUTOR: Kino 

Lorber; IN THEATERS: March 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 39 min. 

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FILM REVIEWS 

thinking within the idea of the visionary: her powerful intuition. 

When she finds herself standing in the car park, where she will 

later find Richard buried beneath, and before she has any reason 

to believe that he could be there, she seems to be able to feel 

him. 

This also connects to the film’s rather bizarre royalism, passively 

promoting the notion that royalty is a position both innate and 

deeply, almost spiritually, meaningful. Phillipa doesn’t just want 

to find Richard, she wants to redeem him: to restore his rightful 

nobility after his alleged disability, amongst other things, led to 

him being seen as a usurper. When arguing with a lecturer about 

him, she says that actually, “he brought the country the strong 

leadership it needed.” In fact, a large conflict in the film’s latter 

half, once the body has been discovered, is whether or not it will 

be buried in a coffin with a royal crest, to which this writer 

humbly responds: who cares. But royalism runs so deep in the 

mind of Frears — and based on reactions to the recent death of 

Queen Elizabeth II, the British public at large — that he can’t see 

the blatant contradictions. These include the film’s final scenes, 

which contrast Phillipa giving a talk to a small school of girls with 

a cross cut of the university usurpers who are mingling amongst 

the big wigs, the out-of-touch elites. But if royalty is so honored, 

then it can’t be power as such that’s the problem. These elites 

can only be less worthy of respect because they aren’t imbued 

with the same divine rights as kings and queens. 

Phillipa starts her speech by saying that she’s going to tell a story 

“about a person who was judged unfairly in life, and never given 

the opportunity to show their true potential,” which is obviously 

supposed to reflect and draw parallels between herself and 

Richard. Though if that could be said to be true of her, at least to 

some extent, it’s a truly absurd thing to say about a literal king. In 

The Lost King’s final moments, Frears shows the crest on 

Richard’s coffin, the king that was restored to his rightful 

position, and Phillipa is given the happiest ending the film can 

imagine, justifying her in a way far beyond what any class could 

offer: she is given an MBE, an honor awarded by the Queen 

herself. — ESMÉ HOLDEN 

DIRECTOR: Stephen Frears; CAST: Sally Hawkins, Steve Coogan, 

Harry Lloyd, Mark Addy; DISTRIBUTOR: IFC Films; IN THEATERS: 

March 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 49 min. 

TODAY 

Su Friedrich 

Documentarian of the personal, Su Friedrich's latest film, Today, 

begins with a story. A friend reads aloud a passage from The 

Odyssey, in which Odysseus prepares to get rid of accumulated 

suitors as he returns to his native shores. We hear this passage 

and are inclined to wonder what the allegory behind its inclusion 

is. Friedrich is fully aware of this, and toys with our instinct to 

associate images and ideas with our own experiences and 

knowledge. When the ponies of Chincoteague are observed riding 

on the beach, she superimposes the cover of Margaret Henry's 

Misty of Chincoteague, recognizing the immediate childhood 

association before we do. White text appears on screen, voicing 

instinctive reactions and frustrations, and her images 

accompany us. 

The imposition of this predictive text begins with generalized 

sentiments, like a flashing “oh fuck off PETA” when a protestor 

gets too close to the filmmaker while soliloquizing to New York. 

These moments soon turn toward Friedrich’s own elaboration on 

the background of who is on screen. She intersperses the 

universal with the personal, placing us and our prior stated 

relation to the images instead into the position of her own 

personal history. Her childhood anecdotes and memories are no 

less a part of the moment than our reaction as observers, and 

that moment is no less in the present than an amalgamation of 

pasts and hoped-for futures. These unspoken asides begin to 

disassemble the myth of the film’s central conceit — how can 

“living in the moment” truly be possible with all of the history we 

perpetually inhabit? 

The final effect leans into a video diary spontaneity a little too 

much to fully establish a consistent throughline. Though it 

touches on pandemic isolation, and change, this 

day-after-day-in-a-life is a möbius 

strip that connects without incident. But when Friedrich remarks, 

in white typewriter text, on childhood memories of a bird like the 

on screen one who flew away, she hints at a clearer picture of 

Today’s loose concept, where every moment is punctuated by its 

history. What’s commendable, then, in this exchange between the 

internal and external, is how adept she is at following the 

viewers’ whims with her camera. The handheld tracking shots 

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are attuned to what catches our eye — panning down as a child 

pours out her bucket of water on a hot summer day, scrolling text 

along a train ride, and the stretch of a baby bird reaching for its 

mother. Her instincts as a filmmaker are no different than ours 

as an observer, drawn to capturing and studying motion and 

change. 

Today’s structure isn’t as defined as Friedrich’s magnum opus, 

Sink or Swim, which portioned its diary into an alphabet in 

reverse order. Using that structure, she toys with distance, and 

what’s on screen doesn’t always match the essay being read. 

Today builds on that approach somewhat, in that its subtitles can 

go on digressive tangents, offering background information and 

personality to the subjects that isn’t always directly depicted. A 

more direct corollary from Friedrich’s catalog, then, would be the 

loose and observational The Head of a Pin (2004). In that film, 

viewers can glean a rough draft for the anti-chronology diary 

that Today is today. — SARAH WILLIAMS 

DIRECTOR: Su Friedrich; CAST: —; DISTRIBUTOR: Icarus Films; 

IN THEATERS: March 17; RUNTIME: 57 min. 

TIMESCAPE 

Aristomenis Tsirbas 

“Roughly 20 minutes into the film, it’s quite obvious that Timescape is striving to be a collage of many things: a kind of fusion of 

Spielberg’s E.T. and Jurassic Park, a combination of Joe Dante’s Twilight Zone and Explorers with Richard Donner’s The Goonies, 

and even some Home Alone sprinkled in — particularly when Jason pulls a Kevin McCallister by screaming directly into the 

camera. But what’s quite vague, at least in the beginning, is whether — and if so, in what way — Tsirbas intends to pay tribute to 

all of these at-hand millennial nostalgias. Unfortunately, as the film progresses, all viewers are left with is a very unimaginative, 

inauthentic series of winks and nods that do nothing but flirt with overfamiliar clichés and mimic everything from the dialogue to 

the drama that we’ve seen played out multiple times in much better works. ”— AYEEN FOROOTAN [Originally published as part of 

InRO’s Fantasia Fest 2022 coverage.] 

DIRECTOR: Aristomenis Tsirbas; CAST: Sofian Oleniuk, Lola Rossignol-Arts, Nathaniel Amranian; DISTRIBUTOR: XYZ Films; 

STREAMING: March 23; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 20 min. 

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ALBUM REVIEWS 

10,000 GECS 

100 gecs 

For an era-defining band like 100 gecs, it’s 

surprising that so few conversations 

about the group tend to involve talking 

about their actual music. The duo of 

singer/producers Dylan Brady and Laura 

Les, gecs’ debut album 1000 gecs — one of 

the final masterpieces of the 2010s — was 

mostly overlooked when it dropped in 

2019, with critics tending to favor the 

music of safer contemporaries like Charli 

XCX and Caroline Polachek. Perhaps 

realizing their mistake, this tastemaker 

subset kicked into sweaty overdrive to 

explain gecs the following year, identifying 

their embrace of “low culture” signifiers, 

Laura Les’ trans identity, and the group’s 

engagement with digital life as being 

reasons for their unique now-ness. While 

these qualities do speak to gecs’ 

significance, their next release — 1000 

gecs and the Tree of Clues, a full-length 

remix album with an astute guest list 

that’s practically a monument to 

hyperpop — was also overlooked, despite 

being a pulverizing work of similar 

consequence. And gecs’ glacial timeline 

for releasing a follow-up, during which 

artists like Jane Remover and brakence 

embellished the contours of sounds that 

gecs molded, has prompted some 

epitaph inscription for the duo, in effect 

declaring gecs deceased before awarding 

them in life. Fittingly, given these 

unflattering meta-narratives, the 

provocations of the excellent, finally-here 

10,000 gecs are largely musical. Adopting 

a crunchier, guitar-centric guise, gecs’ 

new record sees the group shed some of 

their computerized allure while 

remaining the silliest of polyglots, “selling 

out” in the most eccentric terms 

possible. 

The duo’s shift towards Y2K-era 

terrestrial radio was signaled in advance 

by pre-release singles like “doritos & 

fritos” and “Hollywood Baby,” whose tidier 

structures suggested that gecs were not 

necessarily interested in being 

mind-blowing shape-shifters any longer. 

While 10,000 gecs is more oriented 

around traditional riffage, the 26-minute 

record ultimately achieves a more 

holistic balance than these singles 

suggested, presenting ten genre 

exercises that match the extreme tonality 

of gecs’ previous works (if not their 

specific sonic character). Following the 

familiar shimmer of the THX theme, a 

serrated guitar lead declares gecs’ intent 

to rock on opening song “Dumbest Girl 

Alive,” its synthetic bass squelches 

resembling torpedos bouncing off an 

energy shield, and Les’ magnetic 

performance capturing the desperation 

and exhilaration of freefall. “757” overlaps 

the most with gecs’ earlier style, its 

auto-tune oscillations entwining with 

gated drums that boom loud before 

eventually fading in an emotional 

denouement, the song emerging as if 

from the digital ether in its coda. 10,000 

27

gecs’ singles are also improved by album 

context; in particular, “Hollywood Baby” 

now sounds less like a “Beverly Hills”-aping 

victory lap than a poison pill pretending to 

be one. And where “One Million Dollars” — a 

thick slab of 3OH!3 homage — might have 

been an electronic abstraction on 

previous albums, here it’s a 64kbps 

dubstep track affixed to a funk metal 

bridge reminiscent of Mr. Bungle. Though 

the song doesn’t make having seven-figure 

wealth sound especially fun, its 

compressed collisions embody 10,000 gecs’ 

flexibility with genre and form in 

microcosm. 

10,000 gecs’ non-rock homages are also 

dynamic, if initially head-scratching. On 

rager “Billy Knows Jamie,” gecs’ 

longstanding affinity for nu-metal is 

codified in song, its twisty riff and record 

scratches recalling — yes — Limp Bizkit, 

and chunky chords/Cookie Monster vocals 

later taking things into not-so-nu metal 

territory. Meanwhile, the Cypress 

Hill-sampling “The Most Wanted Person in 

the United States” — with its 

Neptunes-esque bounce and spoken word 

delivery — brings gecs close to genuine 

hip hop; while an uncertain prospect on 

paper, gecs’ self-effacing playfulness keep 

the reference-heavy song from ever 

sounding disingenuous. The most divisive 

cuts may end up being gecs’ winsome, 

goofy forays into ska (the bouncy “Frog on 

the Floor” and “I Got My Tooth Removed,” 

which resembles Reel Big Fish run through 

a Kidz Bop filter at 1.5x speed). If an 

objectively less cool package for gecs’ 

omnivorous footprint, both songs could 

plausibly be subverting genre and 

metaphor to disguise darker content — a 

violent squatter in the case of “Frog,” and 

a painful romantic rupture on “Tooth.” Or 

they could simply be songs about a frog 

on the floor and getting your tooth 

removed. gecs aren’t anonymous per se, 

but on 10,000 gecs the duo are so in on 

their own joke that it’s hard to know how 

much veracity to ascribe to their songs’ 

narratives; as Brady repeats in closing 

song “mememe,” “you'll neverreally know 

anything about me.” His and Les’ carefully 

cultivated generality has long been a core 

component of the 100 gecs project: both 

members obscure their faces on album 

covers, and their persona as 100 gecs is 

instead defined by the hyper-specificity 

of their musical and pop-cultural 

interests. This ethos of building one’s own 

identity out of everything else in sight is 

arguably this modern band’s most modern 

quality, and on 10,000 gecs their reach 

extends to impressive lengths. — 

MICHAEL DOUB 

LABEL: Atlantic Records; RELEASE 

DATE: March 17 

RADICAL ROMANTICS 

Fever Ray 

Karin Dreijer returns with Radical 

Romantics, their highly collaborative third 

album under the solo moniker Fever Ray 

— with production from heavy hitters like 

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and 

multiple features from Karin’s 

brother/former bandmate in the Knife, 

Olaf Dreijer. Opener “What They Call Us” 

reflects on the fear behind the 

experience of queer relationships in the 

context of an increasingly hateful world 

(“Did you hear what they call us? / Did you 

hear what they said?”), and in a way 

creates a framework for the whole 

ALBUM REVIEWS 

album. Subsequent tracks follow this 

lead, exploring similar narrative and 

thematic territory, enriching the record’s 

conceptual core as it goes along. Which 

isn’t to say that this is a particularly sad 

record; it takes on the many emotions 

that love can elicit, ultimately favoring a 

joyous approach rather than a cynical 

one, a celebration of that full spectrum of 

feeling despite the challenges that come 

with it. 

The Knife reunion here is likewise born 

out of a sense of purpose — rather than 

mere convenience — as the tracks that 

feature both Dreijers extend the record’s 

considerations beyond romance and into 

the realm of familial love. There’s both an 

intimacy and intensity to these particular 

songs, as heavy synthesizers and intense 

pop beats surround and threaten to suck 

the listener into a whirlpool of emotions, 

creating a palpable tension throughout 

the eclectic, varied record — a forceful, 

but not unpleasant, presence in which to 

let oneself be enveloped. Radical 

Romantics closes with a meditative, 

seven-minute ocean soundscape that 

acts as a sort of cooldown. It’s a bold 

choice, one that most artists couldn’t pull 

off without some assumption of pompous 

pretension. But here it feels almost 

necessary, a welcome release from 

spending so much time toeing the edge 

of an abyss. And it’s intuitive choices like 

this that help push a good album toward 

being a great one — one that should both 

please Fever Ray’s old fans and entice 

new ones. — ANDREW BOSMA 

LABEL: Atlantic Records; RELEASE 

DATE: March 10 

28

Photo Credits: 

Cover - Lionsgate; Page 1 - SXSW; Page 3 - Laura Valladao; Page 4 - Bloody Hell Productions; 

Page 5 - Kaveh Nabatian; Page 7 - Wicked Delicate Films; Page 8 - Ian Routledge; Page 9 - Manda 

Specht Photography;Page 13 - Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded 

Sound Division; Page 14 - Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound 

Division; Page 15, 16 - Les Films du Losange; Page 17 - Lionsgate/Murray Close; Page 19 - MUBI; 

Page 21 - Jeong Park/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures; Page 23 - IFC Films; Page 26 - Courtesy 

Icarus Films ; Page 27 - Atlantic Records; Back Cover - Cinema Guild

InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 12

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