Close

Guardian Angel

Close
UK/USA 2019
Directed by Vicky Jewson
Jewson Film

Directed by Vicky Jewson, Close is a female dominated action thriller inspired by real life bodyguard Jacquie Davis. It’s also pretty much a typical Hollywood action vehicle in some ways but it has a few things going for it to elevate above a lot of the usual, often bland films of a similar nature out there these days. One of those things is the casting of Noomi Rapace as Sam Carlson, the character loosely based on Jacquie Davis.

The basic story is, Sam is a bodyguard or, as it is properly known, a Close Protection Operator. She is assigned to a rich teenager, Zoe (played by Sophie Nélisse), whose father has died and who has been left inheriting his large company, rather than her step mother Rima (played by Indira Varma), who is in something of a bad relationship with her daughter and just wants to make sure an important deal for the future of the company is set to go ahead successfully as planned. However, when Sam stays on a few hours more after delivering Zoe to a somehow ‘less than safe’ safe house, kidnappers come for Zoe and so Sam (who has her own mother daughter issues in the form of a child she abandoned years before) has to try and get Zoe to safety somehow in a foreign land, where the powerful masterminds behind the kidnapping are working with a corrupt police force to ensure that Zoe is brought into harms way.

So, yeah, like I said, it’s a typical set up and play out for a big blockbuster action movie but, asides from the superb cast being absolutely brilliant in this (with Noomi Rapace doing all her own stunts apparently... looking at some of the things going on here, she must have had a lot of bruises at the end of each day’s shooting), the director has a good understanding of just why these films fail or succeed and gives the thing a real feeling of suspense and tension, not to mention a certain brutality injected into the mix with some of the various punch ups throughout the story.

So, yeah, the pre-credits sequence (before a rather stripped down and less richer cover version of the excellent Kate Bush song Running Up That Hill is played over the credits) does exactly what you’d expect a film like this to do. Taking a cue from the James Bond films, we see Sam in a war zone protecting two members of the press in an action sequence, to show the audience that she’s a tough character and she can get people to safety in the face of considerable opposition. It basically shows the audience that she’s not the kind of person to just roll over in the face of adversity, instead being the individual who will look for every angle she can to swipe victory (and safety) from the jaws of defeat. And, yeah, there is a moment in this opening where one of the film crew is clearly visible on the back of a small truck that the character drives off in but, you know, these things happen and it doesn’t hijack the clear message to the audience.

So later, when Sam and Zoe go on the run and play a game of cat and mouse where they get captured, put in peril again and escape, while trying to build up a close trust to each other, it is familiar territory for sure but, it’s one of those films where all the clichés and tropes of the genre are actually done right and so we get a credible and exciting action film rather than a boring one.

For example, the cinematography is gorgeous... choosing warm colours such as oranges, yellows and browns with the two main characters dressed in colours complimentary to the environments they find themselves in... but it’s also very slow and surely paced for the majority of the film. So it’s lots of long, slow takes with fluid camera movement interspersed with static shots as the actors inhabit a world where everything plays out in a way where the audience has time to connect to the characters. For example, establishing shots of various locations will be held for much longer than you might expect and often involve slow approaches to the settings. What this all does, of course, is reveal that the director knows all about how you pace an action movie, using this kind of laid back style to make pauses which allow the action sequences to surface with more sped up, more frenetic camera work and faster cuts, to actually feel much more in contrast to the style of shots surrounding those scenes. This is something directors like Kurosawa knew about but it’s an approach often overlooked in Hollywoodland these days.  

Where this technique really comes into its own is in a scene where Sam kind of goes off and has a personal cry and panic about what’s going on, finding herself in a situation where she has no idea if there are any options left. Briefly, for that moment, the camera switches to a very slow handheld style, with slight movement to the shot rather than locked in a totally static moment... this really heightens the tension in the scene and sends a message to the audience, backed up by the camera movement hooking into the subconscious perception of the shot, that the character really is a little out of control at this point. But then, as soon as the character gets her head together and rejoins the girl she is protecting, the camera switches back to a very steady, fluid or static stream of shots again, to signal to the audience that she’s once more in control of the situation. Most people probably won’t even notice it but they sure will feel it and it’s a nice example of using the visual language to enhance the emotional state of the characters on screen.

Added to this is a moment when the rug is pulled in terms of just who the villain of the piece is... which actually took me by surprise for once. If I hadn’t been so pulled into the movie and thought about the way a certain character is written and pushed to be someone unsympathetic to the audience, I would have realised that it was a set up for a reveal later on when that character comes off as not being the source of the threat so, hats off to the director for this one, for distracting me enough with the beautiful looking visuals and standing back enough to let the central performances come to light better, so that I actually didn’t see the reveal coming. I don’t often miss those kinds of things (and, yeah, I must be getting really old now).  

And that’s me pretty much done with Close. If you like your action films with a certain credible violence to them, where characters take time to recover from being punched and knife and bullet wounds are shown to hurt the characters and have some kind of impact on them (Noomi’s face is the worse for wear with small, healing wounds throughout the movie due to her experiences depicted in the opening credit scene) then you should definitely give Close some eyeball time. Despite the formulaic story line, I thought it was an impressive piece and would recommend this one above certain other action genre movies of recent years.

Yellowjackets

The Eat Is On

Yellowjackets
USA November 2021 - January 2022
Series 1 Ten episodes

Warning: Some spoilerage.

Yellowjackets is a fairly recent American TV show (if streaming can be considered television) in which a group of teenage girls comprising the high school champion soccer team, Yellowjackets, are heading off to an event when their plane crashes somewhere very remote, midst some forests in Canada. The first episode hits the audience right away with how things are going to go, with a scene which, I guess, we’ll eventually catch up to sometime in an upcoming season (if the show doesn’t get cancelled... that’s a big drawback of television these days, shows getting cancelled before their story has finished playing out, thus rendering watching all that’s gone before a waste of time).

The opening scene involves one of the teen girls (we don’t know which one and I had two best guesses, at least one of which was proved to be totally wrong before the end of the first season), being chased by something through the forest... presumably the other teens, who are all obscured by animal skins and seem to have taken the mantle of some kind of witchcraft coven. The girl is killed and then hung upside down, bled out, cooked and eaten by the others.

Then, the back story of the girls (plus three guys) leading up to (for the first episode) the crash and then how they attempted to survive their fate, is crosscut with a new story involving the lives of the four survivors in modern times... Taissa the senator (played by Tawny Cypress), Shauna the housewife (played by Melanie Lynskey) , Natalie the cool one, in and out of drug rehab (played by Juliette Lewis) and Misty, the psychopathic one (played by Christina Ricci). The teenage equivalents of these four characters are played by Jasmin Savoy Brown, Sophie Nélisse, Sophie Thatcher and Samantha Hanratty respectively.

And it’s a wild but very drawn out ride. As we see the girls trying to survive the wilderness with some quite brutal conditions, it’s ironic that it’s the quiet, unpopular girl Misty who is the one who shows them best how to survive. She makes the snap judgements like chopping off what’s left of the coaches leg with an axe and cauterising it so he can live etc. The coach can then, in turn, show two of the party how to hunt with a rifle. Meanwhile, in the modern day, there’s a blackmailer threatening the survivors and all kinds of things from their secret past suddenly coming back to haunt them... there’s also a nice subplot (which is neatly resolved although, I think it needs going back to in terms of a certain person’s real identity) where Shauna... Melanie Lynskey, gives an absolutely stand out performance in this and it’s the reason I kept watching, her comic timing is amazing... starts having an affair with a much younger man, after she rear ends him in the street. Meanwhile, one of the other survivors, Travis, has been murdered in a ritualistic killing similar to ‘the old days in the wilderness’ and the four of them have to pool their resources to find out what is going on.

And it’s a grim tale with some quite brutal blood letting, both in the past and present... and with enough slightly different twists as it goes to keep you interested. This is not like, say, From, where each twist is capitalised and screams at you from the rafters (which, to be fair, is very effective in that show)... this is a much slower burn of a tale. One of the things I really appreciated is that, while it’s building the personalities of the kids in the back story... it really takes its time to flesh out their adult selves with little adventures and the ways in which they relate to those closest to each other. There’s a wonderful moment in the... I think it’s in the first episode... where a marriage counsellor Shauna and her husband are seeing gives them some role play homework to get their sex lives back on track. They give it two goes where, to Shauna’s amusement, her husband's sex fantasy is just a customer coming in to his furniture shop to pick up some new equipment. Seeing these two twice try and act out an improvised role play on this stuff is pretty funny, I have to say. Meanwhile, the senator is sleepwalking, ending up in trees, eating dirt and getting up to all kinds of stuff (she suspects). Much like she did just after the plane crash when one such event was responsible for her girlfriend coming out the worst after an encounter with a pack of wolves.

Another thing is... I’ve no idea where this is going. At first I thought the ‘popular’ girl who was the team captain, Jackie (played by Ella Purnell) was the one who would be chased through the woods and eaten. Well, the story doesn’t develop that far into things by the time of the last episode of the first season but, it’s made pretty clear at one point that she definitely wasn’t the one. My other suspect, a girl called Lottie who has prophetic visions( played by Courtney Eaton), is also possibly not the one if the last few seconds of the last episode is anything to go by... although that’s not necessarily the case. The good thing, however, is that the show doesn’t ever do what you expect it’s going to do... when I figure out the next thing to happen, it either does something completely different or does a similar thing but focused on an entirely different person. So I do appreciate the writing on this one and, yeah, the performances and chemistry between the actors is brilliant.

So, yeah, loved Yellowjackets and would recommend it to people, for sure... my only caveat being that, from the third episode in, they bring in a title sequence and song and, yeah, it’s a truly terrible title sequence, like someone is trying to be really edgy but executed it with all the sensibilities of a child. Maybe that’s the point though but, either way, it’s a pretty good show and I’d get on it if you like horror themed TV.