Resolution

Cthulhu You Think You Are?

Resolution
USA 2012
Directed by Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead
Arrow Blu Ray Zone 2

Okay so... this is a movie I’m watching that’s technically an extra from the film I actually bought. I wanted to see this new horror movie called The Endless because the trailer looked good and I knew Arrow were bringing out this limited edition set the day after its, almost impossible to see, cinema release. Well, looks like I made a good call on that one because the set sold out on its initial run (I think before it even got to some customers... they may be repressing, which of course completely kills the point of having it as a limited edition in the first place) and it turns out there’s an older film by the two directors included as part of this set called Resolution.

Then I found out that the film, although The Endless is not technically a sequel, shares two characters played by the directors in that the two leads of The Endless are seen for about a minute as the same people in Resolution. So, yeah, I say it’s technically not a sequel but, frankly, any movie which shares a character is a direct sequel as far as I’m concerned (which is why Scream 3 should be called Jay and Silent Bob 6).

Anyway, I wanted to watch these things in order and so I gave this one a spin and... you know what... I’m still not 100% sure how I feel about it.

I looked on the IMDB after I’d seen it to try and gauge the reaction and it seems to range from 1 star reviews calling it the worst film ever to 5 star reviews calling it a masterpiece. I don’t think it’s either of those things but the fact that I’m still thinking about it a day after means I probably kinda liked it, I guess. It also allows me to feel happy that I wouldn’t resort to giving anything a ‘star rating’ because, you know, what would even be the point of writing a review if you’re going to kill it off with a hierarchical rating system.

I think the main reason this film works is because of the chemistry between the two lead characters/actors... Mike (played by Peter Cilella) and Chris (played by Vinny Curran). And, apparently, these two characters also turn up in some capacity in The Endless too... although whether it’s just repeat footage from this film or something else is not a question I can answer yet (I’ll hopefully watch it sometime this week). These two seem to go great together and the writing is of a quality that it all just works... at least in terms of these two.

The plot set up is very simple. Chris the artist has managed to alienate himself from all of his friends and is slowly killing himself with drugs in a patch of desert land on an Indian reservation. Mike is sent a video of him in this state and drives out to try and get him to go into rehab. When he doesn’t, Mike tasers him (done for real, apparently, at the insistence of the actor) and handcuffs him to the radiator for a week, staying with him at his dubiously acquired shack as he goes cold turkey. However, as the week goes by, an unusual trail of artefacts start showing up which initially show some kind of strange, cultish rituals before things get a little closer to home in what they’re depicting such as an old, dusty, unearthed record (possibly a 78 RPM by the looks of it) which has a distorted conversation of it on there... which only took place a day or so before between Mike and Chris.

It’s intriguing and it almost made me forget that the movie doesn’t have a musical score, for a while. Time passes very slowly and... you do kind of feel that to a degree (the person I was watching this with couldn’t make it past the 20 minute mark before he wandered off to do something else) but it kind of holds together due to the fact that the two lead characters are fairly likeable. Also, it’s got one of those ‘almost but not quite subtle’ hand held camera things going on where almost every frame is moving but, often only a little bit in reaction to things going on in the screen (which television has been doing for a while now and which has almost become a cliché in itself). Although a cameo scene from Bill Oberst Jr. as a somewhat sobering character called Byron seems to call for a rock solid, unshakeable attention from the camera in order to make one clever(ish) shot with a mirror work better.

I think it would be true to say that the dynamic between the two characters and their possible descent into madness brought on by supernatural shenanigans could be called a trifle Lovecraftian and certainly, as far as I’m concerned (although this movie is way open to different interpretations) the film gets a little Cthulhu like in its denouement... if denouement is not too strong a word for the final sequence in this movie.

Also, there are a fair few times where the media we are watching this on kind of jiggles around and has little glitches which brings into question the whole nature of the reality of the thing we are watching and, combined with some of the stuff which shows up on Mike’s laptop in the last third of the picture, certainly gave me cause to think of the camera itself as maybe being a camera-eye version of one of H. P Lovecraft’s Ancient Ones. One almost wonders if one of the books that Mike finds is a battered, old copy of the Necronomicon.

At the end of the day, Resolution is not an earth shatteringly great movie and, neither is it that scary but, putting some of the clichés of the way the media relates to the found artefacts aside, it is a kind of thought provoking scenario, at least in the sense that it doesn’t try and dish out a specific set of answers to the questions it keeps asking. I would say, however, that the idea that Mike does not want to leave danger and almost certain death and go home to his wife at one point is kinda silly when the video email that he received at home is obviously already part of the events that have been set in motion. It’s already at your door, man... not going home won’t stop it from including your wife in events. That being said, it’s the kind of poor logic that doesn’t stop the movie from staying credible within its own set of rules... you just have to figure out what those rules might be as you go along.

So, not the best movie I’ve seen but certainly something I’ll be thinking about for a while and, hooray, now I can watch The Endless (which is something I’ll hopefully be reviewing on here sometime in the next couple of weeks).

A Cure For Wellness

At The Mountains Of Wellness

A Cure For Wellness
Germany/USA 2017
Directed by Gore Verbinski
UK cinema release print.

I’m not the greatest fan of Gore Verbinski as a director, it has to be said, although I did like his very first Pirates Of The Caribbean movie, at least. I would never had bothered with this one if I’d only heard the title, A Cure For Wellness, which isn’t the most inspiring title in the world. However, I was lucky enough to catch a trailer for this a few weeks ago and what I saw appealed to me very much... looking on the surface like something H. P. Lovecraft might have dreamed up if he were alive today and writing screenplays. As it happens, although this film isn’t without its little problems, I was pleasantly surprised by this B-movie horror yarn built with A-list production values.

After a brilliantly designed and shot, low key “big city America” skyline opening credits sequence, taken at a much slower and meticulous pace than we are used to seeing this kind of thing and significantly rendering it one of the greatest architectural opening montages in recent cinematic memory... we have a short prologue to the movie and shortly after we meet the newly promoted, totally unsympathetic protagonist Lockhart. He is blackmailed/tasked by the board of his new company to bring back a former employee who has gone to a clinic in Switzerland for their ‘hydro treatment’ and not returned. Lockhart is played by an up and coming actor who I have a lot of time for called Dane DeHaan. I’ve only seen him in two other movies, the brilliant Chronicle (reviewed by me here) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (reviewed here), where he played a sort of good person turned evil in both films. I’m actually worried he’s going to get type cast playing unsympathetic characters if he carries on like this but, you know, he does it so well. And he does it again here in a less black and white way, as his character is definitely the ‘hero’ of the piece but, simultaneously, not someone you would really want to give the time of day to, in all honesty.

The rest of the movie, after the first ten minutes or so, takes place at the castle sanatarium in the mountains of Switzerland and the neighbouring village... both, curiously, shot in different locations in Germany. The film details a story arc pitching him up against the head of the sanatarium, Doctor Volmer (played by Jason Isaacs) while befriending a mysterious girl there, Hannah (who is played by an amazing actress called Mia Goth). He also encounters a puzzle loving lady who is joyfully played by Celia Imrie in exactly the kind of role I wouldn’t expect to see her in. She is absolutely excellent in this too... as are pretty much all of the cast.

The film details a complicated, in its untangling, mystery about the fall out of something which happened at the previous version of the castle three hundred years ago. My overall impression of this, even after it was explained to me, was that it was a little impenetrable in terms of its convolutedness. At the same time, though, it gives the piece a nicely ambiguous feel and my title to this review really fits here, I think, as it’s ultimately a very Lovecraftian affair and has more of the atmosphere of one of his tales than many ‘straight’, actual adaptations of the writer’s work over the years.

Now there are a few problems with the movie, as I see it, and I’ll detail those now.

One is the continuity in some places. Since the film focuses, for good reasons, on people drinking various fluids, there are a lot of shots of half filled glasses and, I have to say, a lot of the cuts between long shots and close ups did have some discrepancies in the level of the top of the fluid in proportion to empty glass, it seemed to me. There are also some discrepancies, I felt, in the timing of sequential scenes and moods of characters in some sequences where the film almost looked like it was heading for a completely different kind of denouement. In some scenes, to me at least, felt like they were completely contradicting each other in tone and character progression and there was, I felt, at least one crucial 'escape' sequence missing. I am wondering if there were two versions of the script as the shoot went on and stuff was shot for both, with the director maybe not wanting to lose certain scenes. So things may have been kept in which screw up the linear flow of the movie, maybe? I’m guessing here but it would make sense to me if that were the case. It would also maybe explain why I was left a little unsure about certain elements of the mystery as it played out. The ending did feel kind of ‘tacked on’ too, to be sure.

One other thing I might say is that, at almost two and a half hours, the film seemed very much overlong in its execution. An hour could have been chopped out of this and it might have played as a much more satisfying and succinct piece. That being said, though, it does have it’s own, European pacing and I’m also quite a fan of this kind of slow burn kind of affair, which didn’t drag at all throughout the course of its length. So, not too worried about this and perhaps one of the reasons it all held together so well was because it has a very nicely put together score by composer Benjamin Wallfisch, which is quite striking and appropriate for the film. Indeed, one of the first things I did when I got home was to pre-order the CD soundtrack and congratulations to the label for actually putting it out in a proper format... so many movies these days are coming out as download only which is a truly horrifying treatment of music.

And that’s pretty much all I’ve got to say about A Cure For Wellness. It’s a great little horror movie with an ambiguous, lurking horror filled with some nicely grotesque set pieces involving eels and dentistry which might test the resilience of some audience members but it all makes for an unusual experience at the movies and I would definitely recommend it to certain types of horror film fans who are okay with a slowly developing story arc. The cinematography is beautiful and the shot design meticulous. It’s a little muddled, perhaps, in its editing but more in what was kept in the movie, I think, than in anything jarring on any other level asides from content. I don’t think it will play at cinemas for very long so maybe it’s one to catch sooner rater than later, if you’ve a hankering to see this one. A flawed but intriguing movie which I will probably take another look at some day. If I don’t, there may be eel to pay.