No Escape

Owen Native

No Escape
2015 USA
Directed by John Erick Dowdle
UK cinema release print.

When I got kinda interested No Escape via the trailers for it at the cinema a month or so ago, I had no idea that this was the director whose last two movies, both horror films, I’d rated so highly - Devil (reviewed here) and As Above So Below (reviewed here). The reason I wanted to see this is because I’ve never been a big fan of Owen Wilson when he’s been involved with out and out comedy but I’ve always really enjoyed his performances in films where he's toned it down into a straighter or quirkier role, such as a fair few Wes Anderson movies like The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou or his great turn in Woody Allen’s excellent Midnight In Paris (reviewed here). So I wanted to see what he could do in a straighter role and, to be honest, in a somewhat harrowing looking film about people under sustained threat.

And harrowing is right.

It’s not as disturbing as a lot of movies out there but, from something which has been pumped out of the Hollywood machine, I’d have to say that the film is pretty intense and ‘full on’ a lot of the time. Wilson, it has to be said, acquits himself wonderfully, carrying on playing his nice guy personae and staying with it as he and the family he has with him - a wife and two daughters - find themselves having to vacate their hotel and fleeing for their lives one day after moving to the Middle East for a new job... after the whole region rebels against Americans and are killing all foreigners on site... men, women and children... often in most brutal ways.

Another reason I wanted to see this was because Pierce Brosnan also has a good role in this and he’s playing somewhat against type. It’s a real eye opener for those of you who still close their eyes and see Brosnan as either of his suave Remington Steele or James Bond counterparts and, although the character does kind of go through to a certain kind of reveal you are expecting later on in the film, he really brings together a completely different kind of flavouring to the character than you would expect him to bring to the table here. This is Brosnan like you’ve not quite seen him before and he does a really great job here.

Now the story is, to be honest, filled with absolutely all of the clichés you would expect from it... there really are no surprises here and each twist and turn and roll of the dice that Owen Wilson and his family take to escape almost certain death or torture goes exactly like you think it would, even in terms of the sound design doing what you expect it too for some sequences. However, in this case it really doesn’t matter because the director’s constantly roaming camera, coupled with some very skilled editing and an ability to ramp up and sustain the tension and align your sympathies with the characters, despite the chaos you are being shown, is absolutely fantastically well done. It’s like looking at a well oiled machine of a movie which, in this case, means there are some moments in here you will find almost unbearable to watch for fear of what will happen to the people you have come to empathise with.

The actresses playing the two young daughters are pretty good too but the real standout of the show for me here was an actress I’d not seen in anything else before. Her name is Lake Bell and she plays Wilson’s wife and mother of their two daughters and, I think it’s probably fair to say that it’s a role you might at first overlook as being the clichéd stereotype it mostly is... but hold on, there’s more to it than that. While Bell plays a frightened mother, she mixes and balances that with the fact that, if you take a step back and look at the way the movie plays out... she’s actually one of the strongest characters I’ve seen in a while in a Hollywood movie and, although you might overlook it because Owen Wilson has a fair few scenes on his own, she’s actually the one holding things together and she sees a lot more action than Wilson... actually helping to save him from almost certain death in two sequences, which leaves her one up on him in the action stakes, I believe. She comes off really strong in this, mixing a kind of soft femininity with a deep survival instinct which kicks in and ensures she kicks backsides when she needs to, in order to keep her family surviving. It’s actually quite a feat and much credit to the writers for approaching her this way... and big cheers for Bell who plays it so well that she really sells it and, in many ways, becomes the least cardboard of the characters on screen.

So, yeah, all that and an interesting score by Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders which, while getting buried in a few places, is full of interesting orchestration and really helps unsettle the audience in certain scenes, where the visuals alone might not necessarily kick up the tension to what it is when you hear the score against it. The movie has also got a nice little epilogue which, without giving too much away, kind of strengthens the less overt message which the whole film has been telling you all along... this is about a mother protecting her children and she is the part of the family who brings and maintains life.

The one thing which did make me sit up and take note at certain points is the enormous amount of montage sequences, both before and after the inhabitants of the region start going after American blood. Sometimes they cue you in on the current mood of the population and other times they help keep the tension going but the director seems to use a lot of them. The most interesting thing about the montage sections, though, is that they’re really not there to save time. The sections are rarely shorthand for hours passing because they are sampling through such small amounts of time... it just seems to be a way that this director seems to like to work. Although they did pop me out of the experience a few times, they don’t kill the atmosphere at all and they just about work when these sections come up throughout the course of the film. Perhaps a bit heavy handed but it’s not the kind of movie I would have expected this director to take on anyway so perhaps his background in horror has given him this approach as a solution to shooting kinds of things before. So... yeah, if it works for him then why not? I’m pretty sure he, like most people I should think, will learn more about what techniques are and aren’t working for him with every film he makes. Some directors really couldn’t have pulled this movie off and made it as suspenseful as he does, I’m sure... he’s delivered a well made product for the Hollywoodland factory, and he deserves a lot of recognition for this.

And that’s about it, I think. Short review for this one, I know, but there’s not a heck of a lot to say about No Escape other than it’s action packed, unbearably intense in places and has some great performances from the three leads to help pull you in to the point where you’re anxious about the characters every time they just take a few steps out into the open. I wouldn’t exactly class it as essential viewing by any means but, for what it is, you are in for a bit of a ride if you choose to go and see this thing at a cinema, where this kind of movie works best. I’d certainly recommend it if action, suspense and upholding family values are your thing... just be aware that, although it’s not all that graphic, it is quite suggestively brutal in certain scenes. And well done to Owen Wilson for choosing to be in a film of this nature... he does a really great job in it. And talking of Owen Wilson... isn’t it about time that MGM and EON Productions realised that the straw-headed Texan character of Felix Leiter in Ian Fleming’s James Bond books bears an uncanny resemblance in type and build to this actor? What about it people?

As Above, So Below

Hell Low There

As Above, So Below
2014 USA
Directed by John Erick Dowdle
UK Cinema release print.

As Above, So Below is a found footage horror film that... woah, wait... don’t go away.

Look I know these “found footage” horror movies are all a bit cliché and done to death at the moment but, you know, you don’t see people complaining about other kinds of cinematic techniques in relation to a specific genre, do you?

The fact is, found footage horror is as legitimate a sub-genre as any other, you are going to get good ones and bad ones and you’ll just have to do what you always do with every other movie you’re faced with in the course of your life... just give it a try.

Now I went to this film knowing it was already getting bad word of mouth on my timeline on twitter but I wanted to persevere with it anyway, since I’d kinda liked the trailer and it looked like a new spin of the old “Gate to Hell” plot which used to get a lot of play in movies, especially in the 1980s if I recall correctly.

So I went and sat down in my allocated seat in the cinema, only to find that the only other person in the cinema had chosen the seat right next to mine to be allocated. Which was interesting actually because the guy was a lot younger than me and had a passion for horror and action movies. It gave me another perspective to look at when I was chatting to him about recent movies he’d seen down my local. Kinda interesting and he seemed pretty cool and genuinely enthusiastic about film, which was a good thing.

Okay... so back to where you came in then...

As Above, So Below is a found footage horror film that follows the exploits of a young, amateur (or at least roguish) archeologist who has recently just gotten over the death of her father. She illegally enters some underground cave systems in Iran, just as the government there is about to bomb them to bits, to explore the archaeological findings there and, within the first five or ten minutes of the film, she already discovers a kind of occult version of the Rosetta Stone, which gives her a clue of where to find the Philosopher’s Stone which she is looking for. Already within these early sequences the director, who also directed Devil (reviewed here), is piling on the tension and suspension. Throughout the sequence, a siren is constantly sounding, which seems quite clear is a countdown to the detonation of the cave system our young protagonist finds herself in and, as she tries to flee and survive the explosion, she catches a glimpse of something which, if you’re paying attention as an audience member, you will immediately figure out will be used as repeat imagery in the later parts of the movie.

After this, we are introduced to our main protagonist formally and are with her as she gather’s her former friend (and reader of Aramaic) and then garners the service of some “guides” as she embarks on a journey through (and beneath) the tunnels of Paris in her quest to find knowledge and truth. And its in these early scenes that the director/writer gets two very important things right.

Number one is... pretty much all the main protagonists are likeable people who you wouldn’t mind spending time at a bar with. This makes a change to various recent movies such as V/H/S and Into The Storm (reviewed here), where you don’t care about being around the characters at all and wouldn’t fear for them when they get into the kinds of situations our heros here find themselves in. So it’s a big bonus, especially in a horror movie, when you find yourselves in the company of people who you care about enough that you don’t want to see them die.

The other big plus here is that you see that every member of the “expedition” is fitted with their own headgear which is a torch/video camera... so we can happily follow different people around via head-cam without worrying about the source of the shifting POV shots used to build the movie. Neither do we, in fact, have to worry about the fact that the various shots have been edited together but... I don’t really want to highlight why because that might constitute a spoiler later on down the line.

Of course, from here on in it all becomes one big, claustrophobic, shaky cam romp through darkly lit tunnels and grim, uneasy and sometimes even fairytale-like horror imagery. There’s a slightly false note early on in the “run around in fear” shenanigans where I believe the director was trying to pay homage to the famous “phone ringing” moment from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker but, because he doesn’t have the same kind of slow pacing to build it up (as you would expect from this kind of movie), it doesn’t have anything like the same kind of impact this early on in the proceedings and it does kinda fall flat at that point, for a few heartbeats.

However, this doesn’t stop the rest of the movie from being a scary and suspense filled prospect as the characters slowly descend to, and then take a tour of, some kind of low budget rendering of Hell. The film isn’t as jump scary as something like, say, Neil Marshall’s The Descent, although I’m pretty sure there is a definite homage scene to this film in here too, but it is still quite expertly handled and certain moments even made me jump... I’m happy to say. There was even a moment where the director deliberately sets up your expectation of where a certain scare is going to come from and just basically uses your awareness of a very vivid presence in a room to distract you from seeing where the real scare is going to come from.This is impressive in itself but, when some of our surviving protagonists come across a similar place later in the movie, with exactly the same visual set up (a dead knight that looks like he’s stepped off the set of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade), Dowdle manages to repeat the exact same trick and sucker you into checking out the wrong parts of the screen again. So I was really pleased about that.

One of the reasons this movie works so well is that the main cast are... all of them, every man and woman of them... giving fantastic and naturalistic performances. I already said that the characters are all quite likeable but they’ve also got a kind of innocent, naiveté about them, which is of course a good thing to exploit in a horror movie, and they can all make a really credible job of “losing it” when the tension gets too unbearable for the characters...  and possibly some of the audience members too.

The other reason is because the sets and sequences are littered with little details and almost dream/nightmare-like flourishes which are pitched in the backgrounds or sides of a shot. Little things which are tailored to catch the eye and dwell on the scary part of your brain while you watch our motley crew either miss them completely or spend time reacting to what they thought they saw. It’s good stuff and it all pulls together well, with some good editing, into a neat little “found footage” horror opus which I was very happy to be watching and which delivers some nice little twists and touches, not all of which are as easy to see coming as you might at first think (although some of them obviously were).

This is all supported with some really fear inducing sound design in subtle and, lets face it, some far less subtle but chillingly effective passages throughout the movie... more so than in a lot of horror movies which tend to employ the same tactics these days. It’s got some nice audio self referencing in it too... for instance in the constant soundings of “the trumpets” in Hell which become a regular pulse in an echo of the siren countdown in the tunnels in Iran at the start of the movie.

There’s a shot right near the end, it’s the second from last shot of the movie in fact, where it could be said the director fumbles the ball and we are confronted with a trick shot that, while giving the UK movie poster its relevance, also manages to negate the logic that it’s a found footage film. However, by this point I was happy to forgive the director for this because the lead up to this sequence was pretty amazing and there have been a lot worse mistakes recently in films of this nature and this one pretty much misses all of the traps it could have fallen into. I was also pleased that the movie didn’t just end in the way I’d expected it to. Instead, taking me to a place which I certainly didn’t see coming and this, if you are familiar with my writings here, is no easy thing to pull off.

Now I don’t know why this film has had such a lacklustre response, although I know people do seem to be having a kind of knee-jerk backlash kind of reaction to horror films using found footage as a method of delivery at the moment. All I can do though is call them like I see them and this is a movie I will be picking up on blu ray (when it hits the sales) and which I would recommend to any of my friends who like horror movies. It’s not a “scary as hell” kind of movie, although it does have its moments, and I suspect one or two people might want to put this on their “comfort-horror” list... but all I can say is that I really enjoyed my time with this one and it’s something I would love to see a sequel to at some point in the future. Not that I expect there to be one, to be honest.