Jordan Peele loves horror movies. How cool is that?
It’s evident from the strangely terrifying opening moments of Us, when a little girl watches what is probably MTV from her suburban couch, the screen flanked by stacks of VHS tapes including C.H.U.D., and you’re pulled in to an eventful birthday celebration for this quiet, wide-eyed and watchful little girl (Madison Curry).
From a Santa Cruz carnival to a hall of mirrors to a wall of rabbits in cages—setting each to its own insidious sound, whether the whistle of Itsy Bitsy Spider or Gregorian chanting— Peele draws on moods and images from horror’s collective unconscious and blends them into something hypnotic and almost primal.
Then he drops you 30 years later into the Wilson family truckster as they head off for summer vacation. The little girl from the amusement park, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o – beyond spectacular) is now a protective mom.
And that protective nature will be put to a very bloody test.
A family that looks just like hers – doppelgängers for husband Gabe (Wnston Duke), daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), son Jason (Evan Alex) and Adelaide herself – invade the Wilson’s vacation home, forcing them to fight for their lives while they wonder what the F is going on.
Even as Peele lulls us with familiar surroundings and visual quotes from The Lost Boys,Jaws, then Funny Games, then The Strangers and Night of the Living Dead and beyond, Us is far more than a riff on some old favorites. A masterful storyteller, Peele weaves together these moments of inspiration not simply to homage greatness but to illustrate a larger, deeper nightmare. It’s as if Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland turned into a plague on humanity.
Loosely based on an old episode of Twilight Zone (which, not surprisingly, Peele is rebooting), Us is a tale full of tension and fright, told with precision and a moral center not as easily identifiable as Get Out‘s brilliant takedown of “post racial America.”
Do these evil twins represent the darkest parts of ourselves that we fight to keep hidden? The fragile nature of identity? “One nation” bitterly divided?
You could make a case for these and more, but when Peele unveils his coup de grace moment (which would make Rod Serling proud), it ultimately feels like an open-ended invitation to revisit and discuss, much like he undoubtedly did for so many genre classics.
While it’s fun to be scared stiff, scared smart is even better, a fact Jordan Peele has clearly known for years.
Songwriter Jim Steinman, best known for baroque and dramatically verbose musical epics often belted out by Meat Loaf, has said in interviews that he would love to write 3-minute pop toe tappers, he just doesn’t know how.
Filmmaker S. Craig Zahler can probably relate. Dragged Across Concrete is his third feature as writer/director, and he’s still clearly invested in the long game. Like Bone Tomahawk and Brawl in Cell Block 99, Zahler’s latest is full of strangely indelible characters and memorable dialogue, a film anchored in creeping dramatic dread that finally explodes with wonderfully staged brutality.
Brett (Mel Gibson) and Anthony (Vince Vaughn), street-smart cops in a fictional urban jungle called Bulwark, get popped when a bystander captures one overly zealous interrogation on video. A suspension without pay is something they’re forced to accept, but it isn’t long before Brett has a plan to make up for the lapse in funds with a little “proper compensation” on the side.
But of course, they’re not the only ones looking for a score.
Henry (a terrific Tory Kittles) is fresh out of the joint and needs money for his family. His old friend Biscuit (Michael Jai White) hooks them both up as drivers for a lethal bank robber (Thomas Kretschmann), and the long fuse to a standoff is lit.
This is Zahler’s slowest burn yet, but he keeps you invested with a firm commitment to character, no matter the screen time. From a new mother with near-crippling separation anxiety (Jennifer Carpenter) to a loquacious bank manager (Fred Melamed) and a shadowy favor-granter (Udo Kier), nothing in the film’s 159 minutes feels superfluous.
In fact, quite the opposite.
As Zahler contrasts the cops with the robbers, the sharply-defined supporters orbiting the core conflict only add to its gravity, despite a few moments than seem a bit too eager for Tarantino approval.
Gibson is fantastic, drawing Brett as the real bulwark here, defending what he feels is his with a savage, unapologetic tenacity. Vaughn, re-teaming with Zahler after a standout turn in Cell Block 99, again shows how good he can be when pushed beyond his default setting of “Vince Vaughn.”
Finally, the steady march of battered souls, desperate measures and eclectic soundtrack choices comes to a bloody, pulpy head, staged with precision and matter-of-fact collateral damage.
Zahler’s command of his playbook is hard to ignore. Though the glory of Concrete‘s payoff never quite rises to the breathtaking heights he’s hit before, his confident pace and detailed observations make for completely absorbing storytelling.
After receiving a distressing video from a young, aspiring actress, Behnaz Jafari’s life is thrown into turmoil. Playing herself in director Jafar Panahi’s largely fictionalized narrative about cultural differences, honor, and the dreams of a young girl, Jafari abandons the set of her current project to travel to a remote village in northwestern Iran. Haunted by this plea for help, she feels compelled to seek out the young woman.
Panahi, also playing himself, accompanies Jafari on her search. Though the director is, in fact, in the midst of a 20-year filmmaking ban imposed on him by the Iranian government, he once again manages to make a thought-provoking films examining life in his country. Here he looks at the struggles of three actresses at different points in their careers: a pre-Revolution actress named Sharzad, current star Jafari, and the young actress in need, Marziyeh Rezaei.
Rezaei’s won an opportunity to study acting, which her parents have accepted as a condition of accepting an engagement. Learning that her parents have no intention of upholding their end of the bargain, Rezaei’s desperation compels her to reach out to Jafari, whom she believes can help convince her parents to let her go.
While searching for Rezaei, Jafari and Panahi find themselves engaging with a number of villagers. Most of the exchanges are comical. The residents are at times star-struck, sometimes suspicious, and often dismissive of the “entertainers.” The conversations revolve around an excellent stud bull, the magical properties of foreskin, and the pretension of people from the city, among other things. These interactions reveal a lot about the people in Rezaei’s village, and the kind of challenges she faces.
For the majority of the film, Panahi’s camera focuses on Jafari. Even during scenes where the story seems to follow another character, our focus remains on Jafari. When Panahi does shift focus, it can’t help but draw your attention. Again, during what appear to be meaty scenes – as when Jafari speaks with Rezaei’s parents—we are not privy to the action. Instead, this time, we remain with Panahi as he wanders away from Rezaei’s house and watches Sharzad from afar as she paints. It’s only through a car alarm in the background that we understand the possibility that not everything is well back at the house.
Minimalist in style and tone, Panahi’s film still mines the deepest wells of human emotion.
Still reeling from the loss of her friend, Grace, Aubrey (Virginia Gardner) finds herself facing the end of the world in director A.T. White’s film, Starfish.
After breaking into Grace’s apartment in an attempt to connect to her friend, Aubrey hears a walkie-talkie spring to life. The static coming from the device implies someone might be listening, and Aubrey is momentarily compelled to speak to whoever is on the other end. This is our first hint that not all was well in Grace’s life, with more hints coming before the film takes a deep dive into its world-ending scenario.
There’s a mystery involved that’s best not spoiled, and it isn’t always clear what’s real and what’s imagined, but it works well to us engaged, and haunting images feed the increasing unease.
As a metaphor for grief, Starfish is a curious, interesting take. Aubrey moves through the stages of grief while, outside the apartment, the world is falling apart. She spends time in an apathetic cycle, her only companions a box turtle and a couple of jellyfish (who eat desiccated starfish, apparently). Aubrey’s anger manifests in violent ways, and she’s utterly alone with her sorrow.
Gardner does an excellent job conveying the gauntlet of emotions roiling inside her character. Her performance is easily the film’s strongest element.
There are also a number of exciting and tense scares, and the effectively oppressive score amplifies the more terrifying elements. However, where the score is effective at producing tension, the soundtrack doesn’t always fit the mood. Some of the song choices are out of place. While many of them are meant to represent Aubrey and Grace’s friendship, they disrupt the film’s intensity.
The film takes risks. Some of them work, and some of them don’t, but it’s always intriguing to watch something different, something that challenges us to think outside the box on what a movie can be.
A couple of excellent options this week in home entertainment. The year’s best super hero movie expands its home release to DVD, and the strangely underappreciated Mary Poppins Returns comes home (so get that bedroom cleaned up!)
This week in the Screening Room we run through the many little movies that come out the week after Captain Marvel: Climax, Captive State, Five Feet Apart, Wonder Park, Birds of Passage, Ruben Brandt Collector plus everything new in home entertainment.
Imagine, if you will, that someone bullied their way to a takeover of the government. Imagine that they exploited the poor for labor while gutting Earth’s natural resources for their own gain, leaving a husk of a planet behind.
Imagine that they enacted blunt order with no thought to human rights, as they built walls, separated families and cordoned off neighborhoods to keep the poor a safe distance from the wealthy.
Let’s say they also passed themselves off as some almost holy enterprise that rewarded compliance and adoration.
Right, not such a stretch.
Oh, it’s aliens? That would actually be a lot easier to accept.
Filmmaker Rupert Wyatt returns to the theme of his greatest success, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, with his latest SciFi adventure, Captive State.
Wyatt drops us into the heart of Chicago some ten or so years after an alien invasion. Earth has long since accepted the aliens as their new legislature, and terrestrial natives are now either blindly following command with the hope of reward, or they are not.
Gabriel Drummond (Ashton Sanders, Moonlight) can’t quite make up his mind. His brother Rafe (Jonathan Majors) is the symbol of the revolution, but Gabriel just wants to get out of Dodge and try for a new life.
Lawman William Mulligan (John Goodman, wonderful as always) won’t let him. What emerges is an intricate and often clever thriller about submission and resistance.
Though Wyatt’s allegory is clear, it doesn’t drown the story itself. Even the most thinly drawn character has purpose and dimension, the ensemble talent assembled here delivering memorable but understated turns.
Vera Farmiga offers a particularly poignant performance, though her screen time can’t reach past 2 minutes. Likewise, James Ransone, Alan Ruck and Lawrence Grimm balance desperation, courage and hope in brief episodes that help Wyatt create the bleak but almost optimistic tone.
The look is a bit murky, the 1984-style occupations a tad convenient and the lack of one single point of view character limits audience investment in character, and therefore, in the outcome. But the aliens look pretty cool, John Goodman offers a twisty, melancholy performance that’s worth seeing, and there’s rarely a bad time to be reminded of the power of resistance.
Haley Lu Richardson is a very talented young actress. Director Justin Baldoni seems to have very good intentions. Neither can save Five Feet Apart from crawling through the heap of Young Adult angst as the unholy love child of Nicholas Sparks and Lars von Trier.
Richardson is Stella, an optimistic cystic fibrosis patient who vlogs about her experiences with an encouraging smile. Hospitalized for a new drug trial, she meets fellow “CF’er” Will, a dreamboat with an attitude and a darker prognosis.
Fears of bacteria bring strict orders for Stella and Will to always remain at least six feet apart. But when love blooms…..
Stories of young forbidden love have been sprouting since the Capulets and Montagues, but the biggest surprise in Five Feet Apart is that it didn’t start as a YA novel. Screenwriters Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis wear the hats, here, working through as many formulaic and manipulative opportunities as possible.
Though many health care issues are conveniently skirted, some honest moments about the struggles of CF patients find a mark, thanks mainly to some warm chemistry between Richardson (Columbus, The Edge of Seventeen, Split) and Sprouse (Big Daddy, TV’s Riverdale). But as the overly orchestrated suffering continues to mount, the entire CF storyline starts smelling of the easiest path to teenage tears.
Baldoni, whose My Last Days web series benefits a variety of charities, may have his heart in the right place. And there is certainly talent in this cast, which Richardson leans on to deliver the line “Thank you for saying something real!” without a trace of irony.
But the boxes for plaintive music, closing narration, and the gay best friend are all checked. Plus, the life lessons that are dictated to us because that’s easier than building a story that resonates strongly enough to let us realize things on our own. So much YA drama is anchored by this cheap enlightenment, and there is plenty here to wallow in.
So depending on your side of that fence, the bar may have been raised. Or lowered.
Credit any film that can tap into the audience’s sense of wonder.
Wonder Park is that movie. I wonder why the film was called Wonder Park when the amusement park at the center of the film—and of little June’s imagination—is actually called Wonderland.
I wonder who directed the film, because there’s no one listed on imdb or the film’s own credits.
I wonder if there was no director at all, and that’s why the first act runs for 35 minutes, dumping us headlong into a second act full of characters we don’t feel connected to, regardless of the fact that they are the talking animals we’ve been trained to love and want to purchase.
(Fun fact: Wonder Park may or may not have been directed by David Feiss, who reportedly took over after Dylan Brown was fired over sexual misconduct allegations but is uncredited here. Makes you wonder.)
I also wonder how that bear ended up at the top of the roller coaster hill, because there is literally no explanation for it at all and yet it leads to a climactic scene. I wonder if the filmmaker – whoever that might have been – knows that there is no payoff, no matter the visual wonder, if there is no set up. The bear can’t just be at the top of the roller coaster hill. If he can magically wake up there without having to get up there, then he can magically wake up at the bottom, so where’s the fun in that?
There’s not a lot of fun in this movie. There is a lot of talent: Jennifer Garner, Mila Kunis, John Oliver, Ken Jeong, Kenan Thompson, Matthew Broderick. And the animation looks good. There is also an admirably nerdy underpinning that encourages kids—girls, in particular—to appreciate the excitingly destructive qualities of math and science.
As is often the case with powerful and memorable animated films – Up, Bambi, Dumbo – Wonder Park is also about grief. It’s grief and fear that cause mischievous little genius June (Sofia Malie and Brianna Denski, depending on the age of the character) to lose her spark.
With the help of science, math, girl power and imagination, she can face her grief and fear and come out the other side.
Wait, is that how it works?
No. Math and science can help with a lot of things, but grief is grief and it just needs to be accepted. This trickery to overcome it is a cheat, as is the film’s ending, not to mention that roller coaster bear moment.
The Law figures heavily in horror films. Most of them depict crimes. Bloody, bloody crimes. So, in many cases, the authorities must be brought in. And there are some outstanding genre films depicting a law enforcement officer as hero—Jaws and Slither spring to mind. They are also villains as often as bumbling side characters (we’re looking at you Inside and Last House on the Left).
Today we want to celebrate the films that dive into the police work, that focus squarely on The Law and its investigators. And, again, bloody, bloody crimes.
6. Baskin (2015)
Welcome to hell! Turkish filmmaker Can Evrenol invites you to follow a 5-man police squad into the netherworld, where eye patches are all the rage, pregnancy lasts well under the traditional 40 weeks, and you don’t want to displease Daddy.
The serpentine sequencing of events evokes a dream logic that gives the film an inescapable atmosphere of dread, creepily underscored by its urgent synth score. Evrenol’s imagery is morbidly amazing. Much of it only glimpsed, most of it left unarticulated, but all of it becomes that much more disturbing for its lack of clarity.
The further along the squad gets, the more often you’ll look in horror at something off in a corner, that sneaking WTF? query developing along with your upset stomach.
The central figures in this nightmare are one eye-patch wearing helper who enjoys tossing his or her hair over one shoulder, and the breathtaking father figure played by Mehmet Cerrahoglu. There is no one quite like him.
Cerrahoglu’s remarkable presence authenticates the hellscape. Evrenol’s imaginative set design and wise lighting choices envelope Cerrahoglu, his writhing followers, and his victims in a bloody horror like little else in cinema.
5. Se7en
Serpentine and dark as the sin it depicts, David Fincher’s Se7en marked him as a director willing to work your subconscious and take you to unseemly places. The film compares the strict and merciless justice of an old school God with the rotting corpse of NYC police work as two homicide detectives – one a grizzled veteran (Morgan Freeman), one a hot headed rookie (Brad Pitt) – try to keep up.
Fincher shrouds the mystery in some of the most memorably horrific images set to film. Who can forget that first victim, facedown in his spaghetti? How about Lust? “Get it off me! Get it off me!”
Let’s not even discuss Sloth. Still trying to recover from that, and the film came out in 1995.
Great performances and sleight of hand keep the story itself breathless as you work toward the now legendary climax.
What’s in the box?!!!
4. The Wailing
“Why are you troubled,” Jesus asked, “and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself. Touch me and see — for a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”
Though the true meaning of this quote won’t take hold until the final act, it presents many questions. Is this film supernatural? Demonic? Or, given the corporeal nature of the quote, is it rooted in the human flesh?
Yes.
That’s what makes the quote so perfect. Writer/director Hong-jin Na meshes everything together in this bucolic horror where superstition and religion blend. The film echoes with misery, as the title suggests. The filmmaker throws every grisly thing at you – zombies, pustules, demonic possession, police procedural, multiple homicides – and yet keeps it all slippery with overt comedy.
3. I Saw the Devil (2010)
Min-sik Choi (Oldboy) plays a predator who picks on the wrong guy’s fiancé.
That grieving fiancé is a police investigator played by Byung-hun Lee (The Magnificent Seven), whose restrained emotion and elegant good looks perfectly offset Choi’s disheveled explosion of sadistic rage, and we spend 2+ hours witnessing their wildly gruesome game of cat and mouse.
Director Jee-woon Kim (A Tale of Two Sisters) breathes new life into the serial killer formula. With the help of two strong leads, he upends the old “if I want to catch evil, I must become evil” cliché. What they’ve created is a percussively violent horror show that transcends its gory content to tell a fascinating, if repellant, tale.
Beneath the grisly violence of this unwholesome bloodletting is an undercurrent of honest human pathos – not just sadism, but sadness, anger, and the most weirdly dark humor.
If you can see past the outrageously violent images onscreen, you might notice some really fine acting and nimble storytelling lurking inside this bloodbath.
2. Big Bad Wolves (2013)
A mixture of disturbing fairy tale and ugly reality, Israel’s Big Bad Wolves takes you places you really don’t want to go, but damn if it doesn’t keep you mesmerized every minute.
The particularly vulgar slaughter of several little girls sets events in motion. One teacher is suspected. One cop is driven. One father suffers from grief-stricken mania. It’s going to get really ugly.
Filmmakers Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado (Rabies) implicate everyone, audience included. They create intentional parallels among the three men, pointing to the hypocrisy of the chase and making accusations all around of a taste for the intoxicating bloodlust that comes from dominating a weaker person.
Their taut and twisty script keeps surprises coming, but it’s the humor that’s most unexpected. Handled with dark, dry grace by Lior Ashkenazi (the cop) and Tzahi Grad (the father) – not to mention Doval’e Glickman (the grandfather) – this script elicits shamefaced but magnetic interest. You cannot look away, even when the blowtorch comes out. And God help you, it’s hard not to laugh now and again.
1. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
It’s to director Jonathan Demme’s credit that Silence made that leap from lurid exploitation to art. His masterful composition of muted colors and tense but understated score, his visual focus on the characters rather than their actions, and his subtle but powerful use of camera elevate this story above its exploitative trappings. Of course, the performances didn’t hurt.
Hannibal Lecter ranks as one of cinema’s scariest villains, and that accomplishment owes everything to Anthony Hopkins’s performance. It’s his eerie calm, his measured speaking, his superior grin that give Lecter power. Everything about his performance reminds the viewer that this man is smarter than you and he’ll use that for dangerous ends.
Demme makes sure it’s Lecter that gets under our skin in the way he creates a parallel between Lecter and FBI investigator Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster). It’s Clarice we’re all meant to identify with, and yet Demme suggests that she and Lecter share some similarities, which means that maybe we share some, too.
