MaXXXine

XXX Factor

MaXXXine
Directed by Ti West
USA/UK/New Zealand 2024
A24
UK cinema cut.

Warning: Slight spoilers.

MaXXXine is the third and presumably final part of Ti West and Mia Goth’s successful X Trilogy, which started with the incredible X, reviewed here (where Goth took on the role of both Maxine Minx and Pearl) and continued with the prequel, Pearl, reviewed here (where she just played the title character). Once again, Goth (also on board as a producer, although she’s not one of the credited writers this time around) plays the part of Maxine and this is set some years after X, during the 1980s, with Maxine Minx now a hugely successful porn star, looking to make the crossover to acting in real, Hollywood movies.

After some footage of Maxine as a kid, which is purely there to establish something during the third act denouement, we start this film once again with a big door being opened... but this time it’s not the barn door from Pearl’s farm but a similar looking door on a studio set in Hollywood, where we see Maxine auditioning for a role in a sequel to a low budget horror movie, The Puritan, to be directed by the same director of the first, Elizabeth Bender (played by Elizabeth Debicki). However, although she’s successful in getting the part and, hopefully, cracking Hollywood, it looks like her past, as the final girl survivor and self defence murderer from the events depicted in X, is also about to catch up with her, in the form of someone who certainly wants to grab her attention and who does so through murdering her friends and securing the services of sleazy, private detective John Labat, played by Kevin Bacon.

Yeah, that’s a thing here, by the way... while the first two films felt like independent movies (which they kind of were, in a way), MaXXXine feels like it has a lot of famous actors in it, not least of all the two, central cops portrayed by the always watchable Bobby Cannavale and the equally brilliant, as she always is, Michelle Monaghan. Honestly, as good as Mia Goth is here (and, she really is, as you’d expect), the two cops are the reals stars of the film as far as I’m concerned. They don’t get too much screen time but I would like to have seen more of their characters, it has to be said.

Anyway, the first main question that comes up is, does this all have something to do with the real life serial killer known as The Night Stalker who was terrorising Hollywoodland at the time... or is someone using those murders as cover for their own. Either way, Maxine needs to find out so she can concentrate on being the standout star of The Puritan 2... and she does so in her own, ruthless manner.

Now there’s a lot of good stuff here, not least of which is the use of sets and references from other films, such as the old Universal Bates Motel and house from Psycho. In fact, there’s a moment in the film where Kevin Bacon’s character has chased Maxine into the Bates house and, for a minute there, I thought we were going to get a blow by blow replay of Arbogast’s death scene in the original Psycho (as it happens, Kevin Bacon’s death, when it comes, is far nastier).

So, all the actors are fine, the direction, shot design and editing is... all good. That being said, I’d have to say that this is the least satisfying of the X Trilogy. It just doesn’t seem as clever, maybe wastes an opportunity about exploring the title character’s lineage (because I may have misunderstood the point of the dual role in the first movie, as it turns out) and, though I was kind of expecting it to have a double ending at one point, it didn’t do it in the way I was expecting it to and, while that’s normally a positive experience for me (I want a movie to surprise me), I kinda thought the ending we did get just felt a bit off and, well, a bit hum drum. It also felt like the dual ending could have been a ‘flip a coin’ decision, in terms of where it leaves the characters for the last sequence.

The other big sin the film commits is that it doesn’t really make good on the XXX factor in the title. X was about a bunch of people going to shoot a porn movie (and just hiring the wrong location) and the boldness of the nudity and positive sexuality represented throughout the film was a breath of fresh air for modern movie making. Pearl skipped a lot of that but made up for it by the way it was shot and the call backs to old movies (although, it kinda felt the technical  call backs were an anachronism to a later time than being represented in that one). This one has pretty much no sex and the nudity is poorly lit or just not on screen. And yes, I was disappointed by that missing element. If a film is called Star Wars, for example, I want to see people having battles among the stars. If it’s a title referencing a term for hardcore, pornographic films, as this one is, then I’d expect to see some of that better represented here... especially when the character of the main protagonist is a world famous porn star.

All said and done though, I still quite liked MaXXXine and, while it wasn’t the ending of the trilogy I’d hoped for... it at least, kinda wraps things up and so, I can forgive it if the hyperbole of the marketing machine is selling the product as something it’s not, to be honest. My least favourite of the series but I’m still hoping they release a nice, X Trilogy box set on Blu Ray at some point soon (I deliberately didn’t buy the first two because I’m assuming/hoping a box set will be released in the near future).

Pearl

 

Before Swine

Pearl
Directed by Ti West
United States/Canada/New Zealand
A24

Warning: Some spoilers.

Ti West’s Pearl is a prequel to his movie X, which I reviewed here. It stars Mia Goth as the title character who, of course, played a dual role in X, one which completely took me by surprise as the old age make-up and performance of Pearl completely hid the actress from my perceptions in that one. This one was written, from what I hear, in a two week quarantine break in New Zealand, before the shooting of X, co-written over computer by West and Goth together. My understanding is that parts of this production were shot simultaneously with this one too.

And, it’s completely brilliant and, once again, Mia Goth amazes me with the power of her performance. Those expecting a film similar to X in tone may find this one slightly jarring at first. Now, I don’t usually like American made slasher films with X being one of the rare exceptions and, while Pearl is also, in essence a slasher film... it’s not a traditional slasher and it’s more in the lines of something like Hitchcock’s Psycho than, say, the Halloween or Scream films.

If you’re expecting nudity and goriness of X level proportions then you are probably going to be disappointed. The only nudity in this one comes in the form of an early 20th century, silent stag loop (one you might well have seen before if you have any interest in vintage erotica) and while there are some scenes of gruesome violence, such as a split screen sequence near the end where Pearl performs her own clean up by dismembering the corpse of her sister in law (Emma Jenkins-Purro), it’s far less frequent than in the aforementioned X. Although, of course, the pauses between the scenes where Mia Goth’s title character goes from naive, not too bright farm girl to completely derailed and unhinged not too bright farm girl... are much more potent for their diminished frequency.

The film is set in 1918 and I believe the director wanted it to play out in black and white. Alas, A24 refused that idea and so the film veers in the other direction. Starting off with a similar shot towards the barn doors and out onto the farm, which lovers of X will remember, it actually swings into full on technicolour levels of image saturation and, coupled with a really wonderful score by Tyler Bates and Tim Williams, it actually feels, sounds and looks (also helped along by the typography at the start) like a late 1940s/early 1950s movie... so the tone doesn’t seem quite right to the setting but, really, it does nothing to weaken the potency of the movie and the incredible performances at its centre.

We find out that Pearl has a domineering mother (Tandi Wright), a vegetable of a wheelchair bound, unresponsive father (Matthew Sunderland) and longs to leave the farm. Her husband is away fighting in the Great War and everyone is afraid of the Spanish Flu (indeed, people wear masks reminiscent of the start of the current Covid pandemic). Pearl is a dreamer and longs to escape and be a dancer in the movies, befriending and then later despatching the local town projectionist (David Corenswet). But we realise right from the start that Pearl is a little disturbed, as she pitchforks a goose and feeds it to a crocodile (or it could be an alligator, I barely know the difference).

As the film goes on, Pearl experiences more troubles and dwells on her horrible future... until her bouts of violent self expression become more frequent. But the movie still manages to be almost overwhelmingly entertaining as the stand out cinematography, the performances and the seductive, old Hollywood style soundtrack dazzle the viewer with their combined magnetism. Or at least, these elements pulled together certainly dazzled this viewer.

There’s the odd transition wipe on motion, the amazing split screen sequence which heralds in Pearl’s husband’s return home from the war and an amazing, held shot of Pearl’s face expressing a wealth of emotions behind her forced smile... not to mention a wonderful, stagey, song and dance number set against the trenches of the First World War.

My one disappointment came when the bohemian projectionist character, who shows the pornographic stag loop to Pearl in his projection room, referred to his job as a good ‘gig’. I checked it out after and found I was correct that this is an anachronism in the language, it would seem... as the term didn’t start to be used until the 1920s, at the very least two years after this movie is set. Or so I’m told.

However, it doesn’t really matter because Pearl is a truly entertaining motion picture and one which I will, of course, pick up on Blu Ray, along with X. I’m just waiting for the third installment in the trilogy, MaXXXine, to get a release and then, well, I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a nice Blu Ray box set of all three packaged together. Also, this is a rare prequel these days in that, other than to spoil the surprise, perhaps, that Mia Goth also plays this character in X... this is a movie which could easily be watched before seeing X and it will probably enrich the experience of seeing that original. Or at least add even more tension when you realise, prematurely, just what Pearl is capable of. And that’s me done with this one. If you are into very focused, quite intense gothic thrillers or, indeed, liked the first movie... then you should have a pretty good time with Pearl, I would say. I can’t wait to see the third installment in this franchise, for sure.

Infinity Pool

 

 Seconds Chances

Infinity Pool
Canada/Croatia/Hungary 2023
Directed by Brandon Cronenberg
Film Forge

Infinity Pool is director Brandon (son of David) Cronenberg’s third feature length movie and, I have to say, although I’ve only now seen two of his movies, I was a little disappointed in this new one. I’ve not seen Antiviral (yet... will do at some point) but I liked his movie Possessor, quite a bit more than this one, I think.

Now, I have to say that people on Twitter have been all over this one for a while and, it’s not hard to see why because, the released stills with some truly horrible face masks being worn by people are quite striking. And it’s been getting some really good reviews from followers I trust. There’s even been the usual ‘walkouts and fainting in the aisles’ kind of ‘so negative it’s completely positive’ style tales from early screenings. So I was a little puzzled to find that, for all the talk of being incredibly violent and sexy... it’s kinda not really straying too far into either of those terrains.

It is good sci-fi though and it does have a heck of a lot of good stuff going for it so... I think take any negativeness in this review with a pinch of salt. I think there are a couple of things which have maybe swayed my view of the film and let me get those out the way first, or at least qualify them to my readers... because I really wanted to like this movie and I happen to think that people like Brandon Cronenberg are cinematic visionaries who deserve to own the future of cinema.

I think I’ve either become too jaded by things I see in movies these days or, quite possibly, it’s not me and there’s just nothing new under the sun. That last shouldn’t be a problem for me... because when is it ever? But maybe my expectations of this writer/director at this point are a bit too high and it may be that I return to this film in ten years time able to appreciate it more for what it is, rather than for something it isn’t.

Secondly, it seems to wear some of those influences on its sleeve, not by dint of the fact that the plot (which I won’t get into here because I don’t want to post spoilers on this one) seems like it’s inspired by things I think I can easily see... but because, in this case, the film I’m absolutely convinced was at least a partial influence on this one, John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (the one starring Rock Hudson, remember?) is just not one of those films I can personally bond with. It might be something to do with the fact that upper classes can pay their way through any horrible accident or decision with no thought or consequence to the pain and misery they create for others they use to scapegoat their ‘adult playground’ attitudes but... yeah, this is not an area of cinema I particularly enjoy myself. Although I know many people love Seconds so, if there’s one thing I think I can safely say it’s that, Infinity Pool will at least have a lot of fans. Especially in the younger crowds, I suspect, who might not have been exposed to so many similar movies yet.

A special shout out goes, also, to the always incredible Mia Goth, who’s partying attitude throughout this somewhat mirrors, in my opinion, the psychological trajectory that Rock Hudson goes through in the earlier film. Okay... all the actors in this movie are amazing. Asides from the amazing Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgård (always very reliable) giving amazing performances, they are backed up by a load of other great performers like Cleopatra Coleman and Thomas Kretschmann. So all very strong actors in this film and, if you’re going to do science fiction of this internalised yet ostentatious manner, you need reliable performances like these to help build and retain credibility.

Asides from this you have the director’s handling of the camera and how it does and, more importantly, how it doesn’t reveal things. The movie starts in darkness with just two voices until curtains are pulled back in a hotel room. This is followed by a very dizzying montage of swirling, 360 degree horizontal rotation segments which, frankly, annoyed me almost as much as the annoying fast edits in the more hallucinogenic sequences of the film. Then I realised that this stuff was all done to deliberately disorient the viewer to maybe stop the brain box from kicking in quite so fast on the more obvious moments in the plot.

And another tactic the director uses in a similar manner is to repeat those obvious moments ad infinitum so that, even though you probably already know what’s going on, it’s rendered immaterial as a significant plot turn by a certain way through the running time. So, there’s a point early on, without giving any of the plot away, where an actor can either be playing character A or he could be playing, let’s call it character AB. I made a choice about what an obvious sleight of hand switch on identity was pretty early on but, this occurrence, like a series of Russian dolls being opened (maybe as represented by urns holding a dead character’s ashes, in the case of this movie), is then repeated where, well, it just doesn’t really matter anymore. Only to Skarsgård’s character who, to be fair, is obviously haunted by his own lack of ability to differentiate what has happened right to the very end of the film.  

That being said, while the end of the movie is deliberately vague and attempting to be haunting... it kinda felt a little too much like a cop out to me, it has to be said. Nothing wrong with it... I just felt like it wasn’t a strong enough ending myself. Like if you’d been conducting a science experiment and got a result which you didn’t really care about either way. And, in terms of entertainment levels on the obvious things it’s more or less being sold on... I didn’t think there was that much sex or violence as it’s been hyped for (put this against any 1970s or 80s B movie exploitation movie and this one would look decidedly low key and out of place, it has to be said). Not that this is particularly what the director was going for, to be fair but then, why have so many people concentrated on this aspect?

At the end of the day, I was sadly just not impressed by Infinity Pool and I wouldn’t particularly recommend it to anyone unless they were going purely to see how the camera can capture things in a beautiful way and throw it around to create certain emotional responses (of sorts, I kinda didn’t feel much either, to be fair). This doesn’t mean it’s not a good film, by the way... quite the contrary. It just means I didn’t respond to it with the same level of appreciation that I suspect a lot of good people will. So lets see what happens and I’ll take another look at it in another decade, if I’m still around.

X

Boogie
Knives

X
USA 2022
Directed by Ti West
A24

I’ve not seen much of anything by Ti West before... just a couple of short segments of portmanteau horror films V/H/S (reviewed here) and The ABCs Of Death (reviewed by me here) and, I honestly don’t remember either of them making an impression on me. That being said, I’m certainly going to have to play catch up with this particular director because, what we have in the case of X is a very well put together movie in a genre that, I really don’t usually enjoy all that much.

And by that last comment, to explain, X is really not a horror movie... it’s a slasher film. I know many people, especially those who believe that slasher movies are somehow horror movies, would disagree with me here but, honestly, it doesn’t have the necessary genre tropes to make it into the area of horror for me (for further clarification on my thoughts about the genre here, check out a review of a book purporting to be about Italian Horror Cinema which I have scheduled to go up on the blog in a week or two). I’m pretty sure the director would disagree with me here too... especially since it’s stated by one of his characters in the movie that Hitchcock’s Psycho is a horror movie (it isn’t, it’s a straight thriller folks!). And if there’s one genre of cinema I’m not very interested in it’s the American slasher movie... which is possibly quite ironic considering I love Italian gialli but, well, there you have it.

I decided to see this one, however, because I found the hook of it being set in 1979 and being about a group of six people who rent out a cabin to shoot a porn movie, well... irresistible. And then, as it turns out, it’s so well shot and executed that, well, I certainly didn’t regret my decision.

I’m not going to sum up the modicum of a plot because the fact that I’ve told you it’s a slasher combined with the other information in my previous paragraph pretty much tells you all you need to know. And, also, I don’t want to be accused of spoilers on this one, although I’m sure veterans of the slasher genre will probably see every set piece coming, for sure... but that doesn’t matter.

The film opens very strongly and had me from the start, by almost parodying the opening camera placement of John Ford’s The Searchers to some extent, by having the camera looking out from behind the doorway of a cabin to the main house across the way as a police car slowly pulls into view and joins some others. However, what this opening shot also serves to do it set up in the mind the 4:3 aspect ratio of television and home video formats of the time period, because the sides of the screen around the opening of the cabin (or possibly it’s the barn, which also features in the story) are almost completely black, setting up that aspect ratio in your mind. The director than further pulls the audience into the world by zooming the camera in closer to the exterior view, causing the black vertical bands to disappear off the sides and bringing us into the widescreen format. Then, using a blend of static shots and slow camera movements which inform the whole film, we are taken on a tour of the bloody aftermath of an incident which has taken place at some point (without being shown any of the details). And then we flashback to 24 hours before, with stripper and budding porn actress Maxine, played by the always watchable Mia Goth, getting ready to go with her producer boyfriend Wayne (Martin Henderson), sound girl Lorraine (Jenna Ortega), director for hire RJ (Owen Campbell) and fellow porn actors Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) and Jackson (Kid Cudi) to the site of the shoot.

The two octogenarian antagonists of the film are Howard (Stephen Ure) and his wife Pearl (played again, in a dual role, by Mia Goth, who stayed on with Ti West at the location to film the prequel movie, Pearl, when X had finished shooting). Actually, when I figured out it was Goth behind the old age make up (one of my big problems with movies which use old age make up is that they always look fake), I figured that the film would steer into horror territory by the end of the story, expecting some kind of Elisabeth Bathory style twist reveal to the character but, alas, there is no story content reliant on the casting. Even so, Goth does a really good turn as the old lady who causes so much trouble for the young film-makers of the piece, it has to be said.

The film has a nice 1970s vibe to it, while still maintaining a clean, crisp look to the proceedings. It’s straight, no filter, as the saying goes but it does emulate the 1970s feel in other ways, such as using a wipe at one point and also, quite often, using that fast crosscutting into and out of the next scene and then back again and repeat... which I kinda hate but, heck, he seemed to do it in a, slightly, more palatable way than when Dennis Hopper used the same technnique in Easy Rider so, yeah, nicely done.

There are some other things which he does too which are very interesting. For example, shooting some of the shots from very low down angles and then just throwing them into the edit alongside shots taken at eye level, somehow without managing to pop the viewer out of the movie in a jarring manner. It all flows pretty well. There are some nice split screen moments too, when West pushes the method and actually has characters and situations switching sides of the split frame and, in one wonderful case, the same things overlapping to make a single image but just slightly out of kilter on the angle (or the way it’s been spliced in) and I thought this looked pretty cool.

Another interesting thing he does is subvert the visual syntax of the film via the audiences familiarity of the medium. For instance, a 4:3 shot from the porn movie the actors are shooting might follow on or precede a shot of another character somewhere else but, it will still be exactly the next follow on shot the subconscious mind is expecting it to be, just with a different character and in a different aspect ratio. And, yeah, once I’d got the hang of that after he’d done it a couple of times, I'd say I was having a good time with the way the material had been edited too.

Now, in terms of jump scares... there are a couple of good ones but none of them relating to the set piece kills. Frankly, if you are reasonably cine-literate, you’re going to see all the kills coming before they happen (you don’t go looking through holes in barn doors and you don’t poke your hand through a hacked out door panel to reach around for the lock, for example). Now, in many of the cases, I’m pretty sure this is done intentionally by the director, who seems to delight in getting away with well worn clichés and, well.. he gets away with them perhaps but I don’t think the average viewer will have any surprises and, honestly, I’m not so sure all of the kills (perhaps the final one where one of Mia Goth’s characters takes out the other one) are supposed to be as obvious. There was one moment that annoyed me because, there’s a famous Lucio Fulci ocular gore moment in Zombi 2 (aka Zombie Flesh Eaters) where it totally looks fake and, frankly, a similar sequence here didn’t look any better. However, even with the fake looking effects, the movie was quite fun in the execution of them and I still had a good time with most of it, to be fair. And the artistic decision during the first stab scene to suddenly have the assailant and the victim bathed in red lightning for the remainder of the shot, to emphasise the idea of blood in an almost Dario Argento/Mario Bava non-sequitur lighting manner, was actually very impressive.

One last thing... the score for the film by Tyler Bates and Chelsea Wolfe also was quite 1970s/1980s in its approach and I quite enjoyed what they did with it here. I mean, it’s not so blatant as, say, the Disasterpeace score for It Follows (reviewed here) but, yeah, it did remind me of something like, say, The Amityville Horror to a certain extent and I thought it was subtly done. Alas, the score has not been released as a proper CD, merely a substitute electronic download, so it doesn’t look like I’m going to be able to hear it away from the movie anytime soon, it would seem.

But, yeah, that’s me done with X and, I have to say, it was so much better than I thought it was and, despite my aversion to the slasher genre, I have to admire the film for what the director and the rest of the cast and crew managed to achieve here. This was definitely the first feature I’ve seen directed by West so, yeah, now I’m going to have to go back and catch some of his other movies, for sure. Very much worth a look!

High Life

Semen Meringue

High Life
2018 UK/France/Germany/Poland/USA
Directed by Claire Denis
UK cinema release print.

If I’d had seen High Life when I was ten to twelve years old, it would have been an absolutely classic movie to me.

However, I’m not ten and... it’s not.

I’ll explain that comment by the time I get to the end of this little review, I’m sure but, I think in all honesty I’d have to call this as being a fairly interesting failure of a film. I’ve wanted to watch a film directed by Claire Denis for quite some time now and... I just wish it hadn’t been this one.

Certainly part... but only a small part... of the problem, for me, is lead actor Robert Pattinson. I just can’t get the hang of him and while he, kind of, holds his own in this one... it really is centred around his character and, apart from a toddler, it’s only him on his own for the first twenty minutes or so. Then, once he starts flashing backwards (and other ways) to moments in the story, what there is of it, we get to meet some of the other characters. Two of them are played by actresses I really like too... the always brilliant Juliette Binoche and the, relatively, new to the scene but already very interesting actress Mia Goth. However, Pattinson is kinda okay in this but, even with some great co-stars for some of the scenes, the wonderfully sombre and memory driven tone of the movie is kinda wrecked by a lack of follow through on the part of the story, I felt.

Also, it does feel like a bizarrely, over eclectic, post modern pop video in terms of it seeming like an empty knock off of other great films which the director maybe admired along the way.

Okay, so the story set up is quite good. Death row convicts are given the opportunity to instead go into space to try and create life in the wombs of the females and get that life to survive... via sperm donations from the male crew. Bearing in mind the preciousness of their fluid since the ship’s doctor, played by Binoche, is not having very good results at keeping the fetuses and sometimes their mothers alive, one wonders why the crew also have a recreational “fuck box” which is, pretty much, this film’s version of the ‘orgasmatron’ in Woody Allen’s Sleeper. Or maybe it was just another way of harvesting fluid... I’m not sure. And, of course, it’s a ship full of convicts... including the authority figure played by Binoche... so what could possibly go wrong then?

The film is slowly paced, which is fine... I prefer that to the fast paced, cause and effect headlong rush of a lot of American movies but... I dunno, it feels like there’s a lot of work going on for so little reward. There’s a nice point, to be fair, where the identity of one of the characters is revealed and you realise the structure of the film was a little more convoluted than perhaps one first realised. There’s also an extraordinarily nice visual moment, also included in the trailer and as the title card goes up, of corpses floating in space but perhaps this sequence and the general structure of the film is one of the reasons I was less engaged than I should be with the movie. Since you already know the majority of the crew die, seeing their back story, including Mia Goth’s bizarrely crazy character, didn’t let me invest any time or let me empathise with the cast. Not that I was going to root for a bunch of characters who are at the extreme criminal end of the spectrum anyway. So maybe that’s why I just wasn’t that into it.

Also, this is a film that really wears its influences on its sleeve and becomes almost like a humourless echo of Carpenter’s Dark Star mixed with Silent Running and re-filtered through Tarkovsky’s humbling adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. It seems obvious that the creative team here are more than just a little fond of these movies and, certainly, the way Pattinson keeps remembering flashes of his childhood as his crimes become revealed seem like they were lifted straight from the cinema of Tarkovsky. Alas, it also feels like a cheap facsimile and even the corridor sets seem a bit more do-it-yourself and less ‘space worthy’ than you might want. At least, that’s the way it seemed to me. And this is why I suspect very young audiences will respond to this film a lot more enthusiastically than people out of their early teens... because they probably haven’t got around to watching the key inspirational source movies to know that this is almost a second hand experience as portrayed in this film.

The one saving grace is maybe the music, which I really liked and which is, thankfully, available from Milan as a CD. Although, to be honest, I really didn’t need to hear Pattinson singing on the end credits song. The score seems pretty good and appropriate to the pacing of the film though and I will definitely be picking this one up at some point.

Other than that, though... not really impressed with High Life, to be honest, although, as I said, I reckon the kids will love it. Worth going for the music and some of the key performances but not something I could get attached to at either an emotional or technical level, it has to be said. What is on the screen is good and, mostly, competently executed but... it feels less rewarding than the films it seems artistically descended from. I still want to see some of this director’s other work though which, judging from the word of mouth on this one, are possibly more original than High Life.

Suspiria 2018

Entrail Acte

Suspiria 2018
2018 Italy/USA Directed by Luca Guadagnino
UK cinema release print.

Well this is a worryingly problematic film which I’d be tempted to sum up in just a line or two but, since some of it seems to be fairly well made, I’ll give the project its due. Fair warning though... I’ve not seen any other films by this director so I can’t comment on how his particular sensibilities find any commonality with any of his other projects.

Let’s get all the preliminary nonsense out of the way first by clearly stating that there’s no reason and, really no way, that you should... or could... attempt a remake of Dario Argento’s masterpiece Suspiria (which I reviewed here). The original/real Suspiria is a unique film and is also unshakeably bound by the artistic sensibilities of its director. I would no more think of remaking this classic than I would any other classic of cinema such as Citizen Kane, Star Wars or Taxi Driver (and you can bet at least two of those are coming in the next 10-30 years). It’s almost impossible to subvert Suspiria to a modern sensibility with another creative team behind the film and... in some ways it’s a relief to find that this is, in fact, not what Luca Guadagnino has done here with his new, ‘updated’ version.

In fact, the approach to this version seems almost childlike in that he’s almost gone in exactly the opposite direction from all the things that made the original so unique in order to not be compared to it. If that was the case, "well done" because it’s certainly true that this could never be compared to the original. It’s just too different. The original had two things which are common to the majority (not all) of Dario Argento’s work... bad acting and a not so great story. It also had absolutely stunning mise en scene, shot in bright, primary colours via a technicolour printer and an absolutely awesome score by Goblin. It is incomparable to most any other film (even to Argento’s equally superb sequel Inferno) and stands alone as the piece of art it is.

In this new version, it’s hard to find much of any common ground. You have the basics of Daria Nicolodi and Dario Argento’s story of a dance academy housing a coven of witches, also remotely inspired by a certain couple of essay pages written by Thomas De Quincey about the three mothers, often published in compendiums of his writing bundled with Confessions Of An English Opium Eater. And... that’s about it as far as connections go. You have characters who aren’t necessarily fulfilling the same kind of story roles as they did in the original. Dakota Johnson’s Susie Bannion is a completely different kind of protagonist and she has a much different arc here... as does, surprisingly, the character of Helena Marcos (played as one of three roles by Tilda Swinton)... who has a kind of demotion from her status in the previous version (I won’t go into spoiler territory here though).

You also have a great cast... with Johnson and Swinton having to hold their own among equally gifted actors such as Mia Goth, Chloë Grace Moretz and Angela Winkler. One thing this film is big on is acting talent. There’s even a cameo from Jessica Harper in this but the character she’s playing (again without giving too much away as to the true nature of her role), is connected to an element of the film which is in no way present in the original story. Indeed, Swinton’s turn as the male Dr. Josef Klemperer is one of many different avenues the film goes down into a story, set the same year as the original release of 1977, which seems to be more about fallout from World War Two and, also, the whole Bader-Meinhof thing than it does to the witchy goings on in a dance school.

Furthermore, the famous primary colours have been dropped in favour of an almost exclusively washed out colour palette and, although there are a few sequences with smooth, longish camera movements there is also, it seemed to me, an abundance of short, static shots in an edit which is something which pretty much removes this film’s right to be compared to Argento’s opus even more. So you really have to look at this movie on its own terms as, frankly, anything you could use to compare it to the former is taken away from you.

As a film in it’s own right then... well, it starts off really strong and builds up a nicely unsettling and powerful atmosphere which it manages to sustain for the first two thirds of the movie... which it then somehow manages to waste completely by getting truly dull and uninspiring by the time it reaches the last third. This last third includes scenes of orgiastic goriness which, frankly, should have left me shocked and gasping but which... and maybe it’s just the way it was cut and paced... distanced and comforted me in a kind of dull, passive way almost, rather than confront me with the visceral jolt of horror I was expecting. I mean, people having their entrails pulled out, limbs twisted and heads half severed to spray fountains of arterial blood over the rest of the cast sounds like a great and visually ostentatious, fun time should be had by all but, the way it was shot and presented here it just felt a little too much like David Cronenberg-lite, to be honest.

The most interesting things about the film were the bits where it built up the political and redemption sub plots but, honestly, they seem to amount to nothing by the end of the movie and when it comes to Tilda Swinton, one of the great actresses of our time, playing Dr. Klemperer in this one... a character who isn’t even in the original... one has to ask the obvious question here. Why? She does it well but... could they not afford another male actor?

And then there’s Thom Yorke’s celebrated score. It’s just fine. It’s mostly appropriate... although I could do without the songs... but the film is really not as special or as visually striking as the 1977 movie so it doesn’t have to serve the same function as Goblin’s absolute masterpiece of the original. It must be a hard thing to score, knowing you’re going to be compared to Goblin in this way but, there you have it. It’s not nearly as strong but it doesn’t have to be and so, being appropriate and probably a nice enough listen away from the images is absolutely fine. It’s pleasant rather than essential but, frankly, that’s no mean feat anyway so I’m not complaining. I’ll be picking up the CD of this one soonest, I suspect.

And that’s all I’ve got for you as a first impression. This is really not a remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria. Instead, it’s a nice but somehow muddied (plot wise) horror film which starts off phenomenally well but which then gets burdened with an overlong and excessively dull final third which kind of felt like it wasn’t living up to the strength of its set up. Still, it’s an interesting curio but... why call it Suspiria? I’d hate for youngsters today to think this is in anyway a substitute for the real thing. A nice enough attempt to do something interesting but a failed one (not necessarily a bad thing... spectacular failures can be as interesting as successes) and something which seems unnecessary to be birthed in, quite, this ‘named branded’ manner. I couldn’t watch it over and over again like the original but, then again, I really wasn’t expecting that to be the case anyway.

The Secret Of Marrowbone

The Fours Of Perception

The Secret Of Marrowbone
(aka Marrowbone)
Spain 2017 Directed by Sergio G. Sánchez
UK cinema release print.

Surprisingly... since I didn’t rate the trailer for this one much and especially in regards to the fact that I generally expect films that have had a name change before they’re released in England to be quite bad (thus warranting said name change in the first place... this film was originally titled, plainly, Marrowbone in the stateside release)... it turns out that The Secret Of Marrowbone is actually quite a well put together movie.

Following a quite long pre-credits sequence involving a mother and her four children fleeing to a new, relatively isolated home after allegedly horrendous events involving her husband, the film’s credit finally comes up (after the mother has died and the children’s worrying father has just found them), with the titular secret still firmly in place. Time has moved on after the credits and the four children are waiting out the months, hiding in plain sight and maintaining the fiction that the mother is still alive until the oldest of the four, Jack, turns 21 and they can no longer be separated by the authorities.

The solid cast of four... Jack (George MacKay), Billy (Charlie Heaton), Jane (Mia Goth) and Sam (Matthew Stagg) have already befriended local librarian Allie during that opening sequence... played by Anya Taylor-Joy, who I’ve loved in everything I’ve seen her in so far with special shout outs to The VVitch (reviewed here), Morgan (reviewed here) and, to a lesser degree (although she was no less brilliant in it), Split (reviewed here). She is their ally but knows nothing of the hidden secret lurking in the new family unit, the discovery of which will eventually lead to a shift in her perceptions of what’s happening, to some extent.

Now, it would be inaccurate to say that I didn’t figure out the conclusion of the movie’s reveal here as we are getting fed clues as to what’s going on with regards to the ghosts of the house and such like all the way through the narrative. However, it would also be true to say the film took me by surprise at the end purely because, like one of those good old giallo thrillers of the 1970s, The Secret Of Marrowbone kind of presents us with so many possibilities of just what that secret could be that, by the end, you are bound to be focussing on one more than the other and, alas, I somehow failed to concentrate on the solution to the mystery that lay within for favour of another. So, unusually for me, the film retained its secret to some extent because of the almost needle in a haystack pursuit required to hit upon the right combination of story elements. Of course, once all is revealed you can look back at how things have been referred to in the story and how the true facts of things can sometimes lend possibilities which aren’t necessarily signposts to the true destination. For instance, when the importance of avoiding mirrors is raised a number of times early on in the film, it threw me off my original solution due to other possibilities that could be deduced from such a warning and all I can say about this is... very well played Mr. writer/director Sergio G. Sánchez.

The cast of the film all acquit themselves more than admirably and help lend credence, with the smoke and mirrors of their trade, to the mystery which slowly unfolds, in its own good time, as it is revealed to the audience a little before the people in the story, regarding their secret. And if that seems an absurdly enigmatic thing to say about the film here... I’m sorry but I don’t want to post any spoilers so these kind of verbal gymnastics are necessary to protect the secret as much as the Marrowbone children in the film would.

In some ways, the main protagonists, especially the four children who live in the house, are just like the inhabitants of an old Enid Blyton book like the Famous Five or Secret Seven and, honestly, I’d say that this is exactly how the movie plays out, in some respects. Like a children’s Enid Blyton adventure but, using the syntax of horror cinema in a few key places to add coal to the fire of the secret at the heart of the mystery. Whether this is, or is not, an actual horror film I shall leave for you to decide... except I shall say that, within my own strict definition of what comprises such an affair, I would argue that it definitely isn’t in any way a horror movie but that’s not to say the film doesn’t have some sinister and scary moments which horror fans will appreciate. And that stuff is all fairly well done here, too.

Mr. Sánchez’ direction, editing and use of slow camera over some nice shot compositions are all excellent and the score by Fernando Velázquez is typical of that composer’s work in this vein... that is to say it’s excellent, appropriate and possibly great as a stand alone listen (although I will have to wait until the CD arrives before I can confirm that last comment). Also, although she isn’t in it as much as the four other main protagonists, Anya Taylor-Joy’s presence lends the production a certain weight, not just in terms of her acting, which is always fine but, also, in the striking and slightly off kilter beauty she manages to project to the camera... a face not easily forgotten.

Perhaps the most unusual thing about The Secret of Marrowbone, though, is that it manages to tip its hat on the most important of the end reveals in a way that doesn’t provoke disappointment (at least not in this viewer) but in a way that one could go back to the film again and watch it as a completely different kind of experience to the first viewing. That is to say, the weight of the finality of the end solution and the, strange but possibly welcome ray of hope for at least two of the characters at the end of the movie, is not something that crushes the weight of the build up of the rest of the film and, instead, works hand in hand with the central logic of the piece in a way that doesn’t stifle your interest in the characters. Which sometimes happens in films with this kind of 11th hour plot reveal, it has to be said.

The Secret Of Marrowbone is a better movie than it’s currently being given credit for and certainly worthy of your time if you like a good old fashioned mystery with elements of the horror and supernatural thrown in as seasoning to the dish. Definitely one to check out if you have nothing else on.

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.