The Third Day

Sea Salt Of The Earth

The Third Day
2020 UK/USA
Episodes 1-3 - Summer (aired September 2020)
Live 12 hour event - Autumn (aired October 2020)
Episodes 4-5 - Winter (aired October 2020)

Warning: Some spoilers.

I first heard about The Third Day from listening to the Colours Of The Dark podcast during the pandemic and was looking forward to watching it for 2021’s Halloween week reviews, which were dedicated that year to folk horror, in honour of the then upcoming All The Haunts Be Ours folk horror box set from Severin. Alas, once I’d watched it I decided against that because, as far as the main parts of the show are concerned, nothing really supernatural happens which can’t also be explained away scientifically, therefore putting the series into the realm of drama or, at best, thriller. However, something in the live stream, one take, 12 hour real time broadcast bridging episode, airing between the two halves of the series and called Autumn, convinced me that something ‘out of this world’ possibly did happen and so I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt as far as the genre goes. Because, at the very least, it does use some of the tropes of the horror film and, like I said, Autumn just about lets people get away with pigeon-holing it into that genre.

Episodes 1 - 3 Summer
The basic plot set up is that Sam, played by Jude Law, is living with grief for his dead son and he is going through a yearly ritual where he throws one of the boy’s t-shirts into the stream in which his body was allegedly found. The stream is near to the small island of Osea in Essex, which is separated from the mainland by a causeway which disappears for many hours in the high tide, thus cutting off the island from the rest of the outside world... via roadworthy vehicles, at least. He has done something bad, probably criminal in his past (which you will find out all about, slowly revealed over the course of the show). He sees someone in the forest, a teenage girl, attempting to kill herself. He rescues her and drives her to her people on Osea but then gets caught up in the local politics of two warring factions on the island, many of whom see him as the new leader of the community, due to a link to the island from his past which Sam is not yet aware of.

Even though he has a wife and two surviving kids, Sam gets accidentally hooked up with Jess, played by Katherine Waterston... and ends up staying in the local inn run by a husband and wife played by Paddy Considine and Emily Watson. However, strange things are afoot on Osea, which sees itself as the heart of the world where, if harmony is lost on the island, it affects the rest of the planet negatively. Which means you get all the folk horror tropes like strange people worshipping a strange religion, unusual religious experiments and the ‘outsider’, meaning Sam in this case (although he’s not as much of an outsider as he thinks he is) not being able to get off the island during the three days he finds himself trapped there (almost like an episode of The Prisoner, in that respect).

And it’s nicely paced, by which I mean it’s slowly paced with long shots full of fluid camera movement and tremendous acting from all the main cast as the mystery of the island unfolds, culminating in a turning point at the end of episode three. For the whole time the ‘possibly supernatural’ moments are kept at arms length by the writers and directors. An example would be an absolutely astonishingly well made moment when Jess is leading Sam away from a village festival and into the forest... as they start walking you can’t help notice that various villagers have started floating in the air and, by the time Sam’s realised this, he too is being guided, floating through the night. However, for every supernatural yin there’s a possible scientific yang... in this case the fact that Sam and Jess just dropped acid before this scene and therefore what we are seeing may not be what is really happening.

Autumn
And then we get to Autumn. This special episode was broadcast live from the island in one take (although they apparently managed to sneak camera changes in there somehow... although how you could do that without using things like travelling mattes is anybody’s guess) and takes place over 12 hours from the morning to the evening. And, it’s an absolute technical marvel as the, now extremely slow moving camera, rambles in and out of various character’s lives throughout the island as Sam has to go through a set of trials similar to the Stations Of The Cross before dying, being buried in a grave (which we spent at least an hour watching Jude Law dig himself in the rain)... and then rising from the dead. And this moment is where, as far as I’m concerned, the show gives itself away as possibly being a horror show as opposed to just straight drama... the supernatural is obviously present unless there’s some way a human can survive that kind of treatment.

And watching this special event episode is a bit of a trial too, it has to be said. I like slow paced movies a lot but this one doesn’t have much in the way of plot and, frankly, it could all have been done in one hour long episode. So while some of it is absolutely gripping, quite a lot of it isn’t. Do I need to see a guy eating a sandwich for quarter of an hour, or Jude Law drag a wooden boat across the island for a couple of hours? Probably not but, while I didn’t need to be watching a close up shot of Jude Law taking a nap for half an hour, he certainly needed the rest... what’s come before this scene and what comes after it is pretty punishing and hugely demanding physically and, I’m pretty sure that’s Jude Law's actual blood seen in certain scenes and not a special effect.

Either way, I’m sure some people will love the bits that I found hard to sit through in this special episode and, vice versa but, either way, it doesn’t detract from this being an absolutely historical achievement in live television, for sure. Most of the mistakes made in it... and I’m sure there must be a fair few... are such that people wouldn’t notice but I am glad a major mistake happens in a festival scene where a guy jumps into a vat of mud, in which the villagers are all getting re-Christened in and absolutely covers the camera lens (much more than the rain does, which only obscures sections of the screen at various points). It is at this moment when we see a hand come out with a succession of cloths to wipe the lens clear so, yeah, that’s a nice moment. Fans of the pop group Florence And The Machine might also like to view this 12 hour episode as Florence Welch is one of the lead actors in this one and she even does a little bit of singing (although I’ve not heard the band myself so I don’t know if her style is at all recognisable here).

Episodes 4 - 6 Winter
And then on to Winter, which at first seems totally unconnected to the previous three episodes, focussing on a new character entering the village... Helen, played by Naomie Harris, who has some pedigree in the horror genre after her early female lead in 28 Days Later but whom most people will remember for her version of Miss Moneypenny from the Daniel Craig era of James Bond films. She turns up with her two daughters to stay in a place she has pre-booked, which she says is for a holiday to celebrate her eldest daughter’s birthday but which, in fact, turns out to be a pretext. But I won’t say why because that really would be a spoiler... admittedly one I figured out early into the fourth episode but the quick reveal at the end of the fourth installment is nicely done and I don’t want to wreck it for you. Let’s just say that the Winter episodes don’t turn out to be totally unconnected to the Summer story arc at all and leave it at that.

Again, this block of episodes uses various folk horror tropes and treats us to visions of a dead and gutted half fish/half squirrel and a crowned sheep sitting on a throne with its uterus sliced open to reveal a human baby doll... but like the first three episodes, always has an alternative explanation implied as to what is really going on. For instance, is a vision seen by Helen in the final episode a real thing or is it because her body is going into hypothermic shock at this stage... who can tell?

What I can tell you is, asides perhaps for the 12 hour single take episode, which doesn’t have too much audible dialogue and is mostly filmed in long shot, I’d have to say that the entire series, with it’s allusions to folk horror spookiness, is pretty intriguing and The Third Day is a nice piece of televisual art, for sure. Certainly one to check out if you are a fan of TV shows of this ilk but not something I could honestly say I could sit through again unless it was given a nice Blu Ray release at some point, which I somehow doubt will be coming, it’s a shame to say. 

The Girl With All The Gifts

Gift It Through The X-Shop

The Girl With All The Gifts
2016 UK/USA Directed by Colm McCarthy
UK cinema release print.

Wow. This is amazing. It’s rare that a movie quite lives up to the intrigue and power of the way the trailer for the release has been cut and, since The Girl With All The Gifts had such a wonderfully intriguing trailer, I was expecting something quite good from it, to be sure but... nowhere near the powerful cinematic experience that this film delivers on pretty much every level.

I’ll start of with what is becoming an increasingly frequent caveat in regards to a lot of book to film adaptations recently, to my shame. This film is an adaptation of a novel of the same name by M. R. Carey and, alas, it’s not one I’ve read. I can’t, therefore, tell you how successful it is in terms of translating the source but I do know that, despite the novel and the screenplay being written kind of simultaneously (is my understanding of it), there are some elements from the book which didn’t make it into the movie and, also, the physical descriptions of some of the characters are way off.

That being said, and as I’ve mentioned many times before on here, movies aren’t books and adaptation from one format or another means making artistic choices which can benefit one medium at the expense of elements of the other and... this one is no different, I’m guessing.

What I do know for sure, and without giving away any spoilers, is that we have a British zombie movie which, while the writer and director disown the term ‘zombies’, instead going for the term ‘hungries’, is one of the best post-Romero zombie movies around and stands head and shoulders with other modern classics of ‘infected, zombie like’ creatures as the films in the [oREC] and 28 Later series. Whether the humans have died and come back or, in the case of some of these pseudo-zombie films, had their humanity and higher intelligence killed off by the virus to effectively create the same thing, is kind of a moot point in terms of this cultural phenomenon which started, as far as I can remember, in the early 19th Century.

The film introduces us to Melanie (played by Sennia Nanua) and, indeed, takes her viewpoint during the whole running time. She is one of a bunch of children who share the same... shall we say ‘eating habits’... as the ‘hungries’ that the last pockets of humanity are trying to keep at bay and find a cure for. I won’t give you the full history of how and why these children exist because it’s got a classic horror twist and it’s a nice moment when Doctor Cladwell (played by Glenn Close) reveals this history to Melanie. The film centres around the child, her adoration for her teacher Miss Justineau (played by Gemma Arteton) and her role within a group of survivors of an attack on their base camp including Caldwell, Justineau, Sgt. Eddie Parks (played by Paddy Considine) and Dillon (played by Anthony Welsh).

It’s very much a road movie as the small group try to find their way to some kind of safety and, all the while, with the exception of Miss Justineau, they are as much afraid of Melanie, as they are of the ‘hungries’ who they spend so much of their time trying to avoid contact with. Like most good zombie movies, and I don’t know if this is also true of the book, we never really know the details of the apocalyptic virus and how it first started but, having plunged us right into this world, the Doctor (and the writer) does have a good idea of the life cycle of the virus and, by the time we get to the last third of the movie, it becomes a key thing to understand the way the story evolves... not necessarily taking you to the place you’re kind of expecting it to in the same way you thought it would. Not quite, anyway... although the ending is quite familiar but also so much more than you would normally get from this kind of movie. It’s a good ‘un but, again, in the interests of not spoiling this for anybody... I’ll keep that to myself. I think John Wyndham would have loved this movie, though.

As you would expect from a film with a cast like this, there is some absolutely powerhouse acting going on. I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for both Gemma Arterton and Paddy Considine and, as you would expect, they totally knock it out of the park and are ably supported by Anthony Welsh. Glenn Close, on the other hand, is an actress I’ve never really liked all that much. Don’t get me wrong, she’s an absolutely incredible performer and you can’t fault her work... but she’s never really appealed to me. However, having said that, I think she’s got a real great role here which is perfect for her as a kind of ‘almost but not quite, depending on your moral point of view villain’ in the form of Dr. Caldwell and, yeah, she owns the role totally.

And then we have Sennia Nanua’s central performance as Melanie.

What can I say? I don’t know where they get some of these child actors from but some of them are amazing and, surrounded by some interesting and incredible child co-stars for certain scenes, Nanau manages to deliver an absolutely gobsmacking performance filled with all the subtlety and nuance that you might expect from someone three times her age (whatever that is, there seems to be no information present about that at time of writing this). Given that it’s a movie that someone her age presumably wouldn’t be allowed to legally see in this country, she does wonders here eating and biting her bloody way through various life forms and I can only applaud her performance whole heartedly.

Saying that, it’s not a very scary movie, at least in terms of the expected jump scares that a modern ‘horror film’ might be expected to supply. As far as I’m concerned, however, that just cements the link between this movie and the wealth of zombie movies which have come before. Aside from, maybe, the [oREC] series, which is genuinely scary for the first two outings, this takes its cue from the traditional zombie ‘survival horror’ strand of cinema and it does it very well... with a visceral suspense that slowly builds throughout the movie to its, really very satisfying, conclusion.

And then there’s the music. Oh, I wish there was a CD release of this thing already because the score by Cristobal Tapia de Veer is almost overwhelming in its power and raw beauty and, for a change, it’s been mixed right into the foreground so the movie gets an amazing lift of emotional, brain churning intensity. The opening sequence, for example, is very good but it really gets a sense of rising dread infused into it by the slowly building chanting and humming that plays out throughout certain passages of the movie, sometimes with metallic percussion at points. It’s really a magnificent work and it would be a major crime against filmanity, not to mention musicology, if this remains unreleased on CD. Hopefully some smart record label will try and pick this one up.

And that’s about it as far as The Girl With All The Gifts is concerned. An all round major achievement of intense suspense, zombie mayhem, some very sly and dark humour (the audience I was with were very appreciative of a certain line about whether Melanie would like a cat) and, right near the end, a moral question about the nature of a life form which, when finally answered, seals the fate of the world. An absolutely blistering and brilliant piece of cinematic art and absolutely one to run to as quickly as you can if you’re a fan of zombie movies. A real gem which I will be telling everyone about.

The Double

Doubloon

The Double
2013 UK
Directed by Richard Ayoade
Playing at UK cinemas now.

I know I’m probably going to come off as being really stupid when I say this but, for someone who hasn’t read the Fyodor Dostoevsky novel that inspired and informed this movie, The Double is quite frighteningly Kafkaesque.

Kafkaesque in the sense that it shows the little guy trapped in a world of corporate red tape and misunderstanding... a victim of the society that he lives in. To be fair, the original Dostoevsky novel apparently shares that common stance but, honestly, I invoke Kafka because it’s the only thing I personally have that I can compare to the experience of watching this quite brilliant, as it happens, movie version.

The film is vaguely surreal and, I have to admit, I was surprised when I found out the identity of the author of the original source. When I saw the trailer for this I was pretty sure that it was a modern reworking of Edgar Allan Poe’s  doppelgänger story William Wilson and, it turns out, that Poe’s own exploration of this theme predated Dostoevsky’s version by seven years. In fact, Thomas Mann compared the original 1846 novel unfavourably to Poe’s earlier endeavours on this proposition.

All of which means absolutely nothing here because, frankly, the movie is entertaining as hell.

It’s been promoted, perhaps lazily, as a comedy and, certainly, many of the cast play it as such. Jesse Eisenberg’s favourable take on the shlemiel type of character often found in early Woody Allen comedies is perfectly backed up by the often astonishing Mia Wasikowska and such inconceivable luminaries as Wallace Shawn, Noah Taylor and Paddy Considine. But for all of the laughs and moments of humour that this movie delivers by the bucketful... it’s also really, unbelievably depressing. Which I guess also fits with Dostoevsky’s modus operandi... unless Hal Hartley movies have been lying to me all these years.

It’s a movie which seems to have had very little publicity. I only first heard of it after I saw a trailer for it with Under The Skin a couple of weeks ago. Which is a shame really since, in addition to the wonderful performances which bring it to life, the film is a tour de force of brilliant set design, lighting, music (with some interesting needle-drop choices) and some really amazing sound design to it which brought to mind, nothing less than Alan Splet’s work on David Lynch’s Eraserhead. There are also some nice things going on in the editing which startled me at first, as the film will do things like cut between a mid shot of someone, then a long shot of something else, and then back to a close up of the original person which is kinda unsettling and jars you out of your comfort zone in certain places. Which is just excellent.

The film deals with a character who has his life invaded by a person who is an exact physical duplicate of himself and who is, for all intents and purposes, a much more extroverted and successful version. This double slowly and meticulously invades the main protagonist’s life by befriending him, then using him and ultimately usurping him and stealing the objects and goals of his desire until he becomes a bitter rival... this much you can get from just the trailer. It’s almost like he’s an evil version of Eisenberg’s character... like that episode of Star Trek, The Enemy Within, where Kirk gets split into two different versions of himself by the malfunctioning transporter. And it’s great that a film like this can be done now in a way that the illusion of having two Eisenbergs on screen is totally believable. I guess that we have David Cronenberg’s pioneering work on Dead Ringers to thank for that but it’s not the kind of movie where you’re always looking for the split in the screen like movies of yesteryear... although I’m aware that, to some of my younger readers at least, Cronenberg’s work on that movie probably does belong in the “yesteryear” category. But there’s definitely no seams showing here and, although the occasional “cheat shot” may be observed if your looking for it (the very first scene on a rickety, almost deserted train, for example... if I’m reading the meaning of that sequence correctly), the illusion is impressively maintained throughout the whole of the movie.

I mentioned earlier that the movie was somewhat Kafkaesque and there’s certainly a parallel with another great work of motion picture art that would share the same label, that of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. This film is almost as detailed in the environmental design like that one was and also similarly surreal in places. It also pulls off a trick that is common to both the Gilliam movie, Tim Burton’s two Batman movies and a whole range of 1930s and 1940s Universal Horror movies in that it is deliberately, or so it seems to me, shot out of period. There are significant props and design decisions from past, present and future references found in various guises throughout the film’s running time which all blend together to make trying to place this in a specific time zone absolutely impossible. Which is kinda cool and puts you in a self contained fantasy world right from the outset.

The films is quite dark (and I’m not talking about the lighting here) but it’s never dull and I found myself absolutely engrossed in the narrative twists and turns waiting to be discovered in this one. I think there’s a lot on offer here to entertain the visually jaded modern film-goer and I even think I’ll get around to revisiting this one again a couple more times in years to come. Whether I do that or not, though, I think this film is something which deserves to be seen and I wish that it could have had a greater marketing push levelled at it than I’ve seen so far. If you’re into cinema then you’ll probably be into the cleverness and bleak charm of this movie. It put me in a bit of a dark place... but that’s not always a bad thing. This one will haunt you a little, I think. Go check it out before it disappears.

The World’s End

Kind Hearts And Cornettos

The Worlds End
2013 UK
Directed by Edgar Wright
Playing at cinemas now.

So here we have what has been loosely termed by it’s creators, depending on your source, as either the “blood and ice cream” trilogy or, making more sense after having seen the third one, “the Cornetto trilogy”... in much the same way that Sergio Leone’s first three totally unrelated spaghetti westerns were dubbed “the Dollars trilogy” when they promoted those films in the US, perhaps.

Now I seem to have a track record with products written by the director Edgar Wright and actor Simon Pegg in that, I usually “quite like” them the first time around but, when seeing them for the second time, I usually get more into it and embrace the thing wholeheartedly. This was the case of, in the order I watched them in, Shaun Of The Dead, Spaced (the TV show which ran for two series’ and pre-dated Shaun Of The Dead) and Hot Fuzz. I have to say that, given this puzzling relationship with their past work, I was a little trepidatious about seeing this one for the first time... although, of course, I knew I’d probably love it the second time around.

Well, I have to say, that pattern has finally been broken by their new movie, The Worlds End. While I’m sure I’ll still love it the second time around, I am happy to say that I was also was quite fond of it the first time around too, and had a thoroughly good time with it at the cinema last night... although I didn’t bring it flowers or take it to dinner before it manifested itself before my eyes in my local flea pit, to be sure.

The Worlds End tells the story of a larger than life character, Gary King, played by Simon Pegg, who gets his old school buddies together for a reunion 20 years or so later, to have another crack at “the golden mile”... the epic crawl of 12 pubs culminating in the final one, The World’s End... a task at which they’d failed at miserably “back in the day”. Unfortunately, Gary’s comrades in arms, played by Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan and Paddy Considine respectively... with the added touch of glam and sprinkle from Rosamund Pike as the film’s leading lady... are not exactly big supporters of Gary anymore. But, as you know they will, they go with Gary to start their epic journey and, as it turns out, instead find themselves in jeopardy fighting most of the town who have been replaced with alien simulucra.

What can I say? Wright and Pegg basically take the classic plot of Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers, add in a classic British obsession (pubbing) and riff on the collision of these two ingredients throughout the whole movie while not forgetting that all important element that makes you feel and root for all the characters... a touch of heart.

And not only that... they don’t really drop the ball throughout the whole thing and they do it all very smartly.

It maybe takes a little while to get going on the set up but only because the characters are slightly more complex than usual for these writers and you want to understand how they’ll come to work together (which is why I suspect my second viewing will be even more enjoyable), but all the way through the wittiness of the dialogue is crisp and even (if not always especially deep*) and although my main comedy enjoyment usually comes, almost exclusively, from either The Marx Brothers or Woody Allen, I have to say that when you get Wright and Pegg together, they continue that kind of cool cleverness with syntax and terminology that lights my fire when it comes to this kind of word play.

There are also some good fights in it.

No joke, there’s some great set-piece, full-on, blue-blooded alien gore, pub brawls in this which will knock your socks off. And with blue being the colour of the blood on the menu, they manage to do it all behind the censor’s backs, as it were, who must have been too conditioned to looking for signs of crimson to notice the huge amounts of violence contained within a 15 rated movie... but that’s okay by me. Although I was disappointed that Wright and Pegg didn’t put a paraphrase of one of their famous Shaun Of The Dead recurring jokes in it... I was just waiting for the line... “You’ve got blue on you” but, unless I missed it somewhere, it didn’t happen. And like their last collaboration, Hot Fuzz, it’s even got an unexpected, for me at least, Bond villain... and I mean, Bond/villain. You’ll see what I mean.

My one real complaint though is, after finishing the film off with an almost perfect ending with Nick Frost’s character telling the tale of what happened next (which also includes this film’s nod to Cornetto), they elected to put one final scene in with one of the main characters which, while it was okay as a set up for something else, could have left a much stronger ending without it. But that might not have been commercially the best ending, especially in other countries, so I can understand why they did this.

So that’s all I got to say then, I think. Other than the sound design and choice of music is incredible (and relevant to the on screen shenanigans in a rather integral manner at one point near the end) and it was also nice to see modern art getting some legs on it, which I’m not going to spoil for you here, you’ll just have to live with my mundane attempt at being cryptic and go and see the thing for yourself. All in all, a good night at the movies and certainly a lot more fun, I suspect, than attempting to get through “the golden mile” in real life. Go drink your celluloid fill.

* I hate the word deep, but it was the only way I could make my lame pun work and still convey my exact meaning... so cut me some slack, okay?