Screening Room: Morbius, The Contractor, Nitram, Let the Wrong One In & More
Monthly Archives: April 2022
Her Hidden Life
You Won’t Be Alone
by Hope Madden
To suppose that filmmaker Goran Stolevski is a fan of Terrence Malick seems fair. His tale of 19th century Macedonian witchery offers the same type of visual aesthetic, whispery voiceover and absence of dialog in much of Malick’s work, especially 2018’s A Hidden Life.
You Won’t Be Alone follows Neneva (Sara Klimoska), a teenager raised in isolation, hidden from the Wolf-eatress (Anamaria Marinca) who’s claimed her. Freed from hiding, the teen shapeshifter takes on different forms (Noomi Rapace, Felix Maritaud, Alice Englert) and learns of life.
The vast majority of the film’s spoken language comes in the form of Neneva’s thoughts via voiceover. Having grown up alone and unable to speak, Neneva’s language is disjointed and poetic, her musings untouched by traditional socialization.
These reflections are periodically punctuated by the bitter logic of her lifelong tormentor, the Wolf-eatress, whose own upbringing among the human race has left her horribly scarred, literally and metaphorically.
Sections of the film are quite lovely. Admirable performances all around help to keep you engaged. Klimoska’s physical performance reflects the primal beginnings of Neneva’s explorations. Rapace brings an awkward adolescence feel to the character’s early interpretations of normal human behavior. Englert carries the character into adulthood with quiet curiosity, never losing that animalistic inquisitiveness carried throughout the earlier performances.
Stolevski’s cast gives him all he could have hoped. Unfortunately, he doesn’t entirely deliver on his end. The story free floats, its style often overwhelming its substance. You feel every minute of its running time.
That’s not to say Stolevski’s approach is a failure, only that it’s taken too far. His fractured storytelling suits his purposes of exploring gender identity and the nature of humanity. He builds dread well and his fluid camera allows his tale to cast a spell.
The result is mainly entrancing, but too often frustrating.
It Takes a Village
Nitram
by Hope Madden
About a decade ago, director Justin Kurzel made one amazing true crime film. Working from a script by Shaun Grant, Kurzel took a notorious crime spree and created the most realistic and unnerving film of 2011 in Snowtown.
The pair reteamed for 2019’s underseen treasure based on true Australian events, True History of the Kelly Gang. They are back, once again digging into the seedier side of Aussie history with another true crime in Nitram.
In 1996, Martin Bryant murdered 35 people, injuring another 23 in Port Arthur, Tasmania. The horror led to immediate gun reform in the nation, but Kurtzel and Grant are more interested in what came before than after.
Playing the unnamed central figure (Nitram is Martin spelled backward), Caleb Landry Jones has never been better, and that’s saying something. He is one of the most versatile actors working today, effortlessly moving from comedy to drama, from terrifying to charming to awkward to ethereal. There is an aching tenderness central to every performance. (OK, maybe not Get Out, but that would have been weird.)
Kurzel surrounds him with veteran talent at the top of their games. Essie Davis matches Landry Jones’s with a fragile, winsome turn as the older misfit who becomes his friend. Anthony LaPaglia creates a believable, gentle presence as Martin’s father, while the formidable Judy Davis nails every nuance as his complicated, hard mother.
She’s mesmerizing and award-worthy.
Looking at the making of the monster is no new concept in film, and it’s often a misfire, either romanticizing or relishing in the lurid. Nitram does neither. Grant’s greatest gift as a writer may be his ability to mine difficult terrain without sentiment. (His script for Cate Shortland’s crushing 2017 thriller Berlin Syndrome is his greatest triumph in this area.)
Nitram looks at how nature and nurture are to blame. Socialization plus parenting plus bad wiring is exacerbated by the isolation and loneliness they demand. Everyone is to blame. It’s a conundrum the film nails.
But it’s Landry Jones you’ll remember. He’s terrifying but endlessly sympathetic in a bleak film that’s a tough but rewarding watch.
Wrestling with Family
Brighton 4th
by Brandon Thomas
Georgian filmmaker Levan Koguashvili’s Brighton 4th is a charming drama that surprises with some subtle comedic flourishes. It’s a film that never gets lost in a self-serious tale of immigrants “roughing it” – instead staying firmly grounded in interesting and likable characters.
Kakhi (Levan Tedaishvili), a former Olympic wrestler, travels from the central Asian country of Georgia to the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn to visit his son. He finds him living in a shabby boarding house and learns that his son owes serious debts to a local mob boss. Hoping to get his son out of this jam, Kakhi begins looking for ways to raise the money to pay off his son’s debt and return home to Georgia.
Tedaishvili wows with a beautifully stoic performance. Kakhi is a character that happily takes on the burdens of those he loves. From committing a “minor” case of kidnapping to help two women get the pay they’re owed, to letting that same man free out of a sense of respect, Kakhi is a man with a strong – but quiet – moral code. Tedaishvili’s performance is all the more amazing as this is only his second film. His debut was all the way back in 1987’s Khareba da Gogia.
Brighton 4th wonderfully blends drama and comedy. There’s a grounded absurdity to the comedy that makes it entirely relatable. Whether it’s the chaos from the kidnapping plot, or Kakhi’s family members continually losing money over minor annoyances, the laughs are good-natured and always centered in character.
The most striking part of Brighton 4th is the spotlight it puts on basic decency. It would be easy to focus on the ugly parts of life when depicting the struggles of immigrants. That part is apparent in the film for sure, but Koguashvili’s interest is in how people treat one another when times get hard. Kakhi continually puts the hardships of his friends and family on his own shoulders and does so without complaint. One scene in particular – when the newly kidnapped man helps soothe a woman with epilepsy while she’s having a seizure – showcases the film’s core belief: that when things are hard, people will rise up to lend a helping hand.
While not being an overly complicated tale about the strife of new immigrants, Brighton 4th does offer a sweet, uplifting tale of a family doing what they can with what they have to help each other.
Dr. Feelbad
Morbius
by George Wolf
For a movie about a guy with a serious taste for blood, Morbius shows hardly any of it being spilled. That’s just one of the reasons the film feels hamstrung from what it wants to be.
What Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) wants to be is healthy. Born with a strange DNA abnormality that paired a genius mind with a broken body, Michael put “Dr.” in front of Morbius at age 19 on the way to becoming the foremost expert on blood borne diseases.
And now, his research with vampire bats from Costa Rica has yielded a breakthrough…with a catch. He gets super human, downright monstrous powers, but they wear off without more servings of blood. And while he’s getting by with the artificial variety for now, Morbius knows the time is coming when only human blood will do.
So the clock is ticking, and not just for Morbius. His colleague Martine (Adria Arjona) is feeling the heat, while Milo (Doctor Who‘s Matt Smith, who seems to enjoy hamming it up), Michael’s childhood friend who suffers from the same DNA abnormality, is eager for the cure – and fine with the consequences.
Director Daniel Espinosa (Life, Safe House) has plenty of fun with the CGI, and while the facial morphing is mighty impressive, the increased battle sequences end up trending more toward soulless, Van Helsing-style gymnastics.
Abrupt editing does Espinosa no favors, either, and the pace that initially feels nicely brisk leads to a narrative that just seems impatient. Many of the themes at work here are common to comic book adaptations, but just checking off the boxes is no substitute for development.
Screenwriters Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless (the duo behind Gods Of Egypt, The Last Witch Hunter and Dracula Untold – all dreadful) try to inject some humor via a pair of detectives (Tyrese Gibson and Al Madrigal) hunting the “vampire killer,” but what the script needs most of all is to take Milo’s advice.
Embrace what you are!
This Morbius seems too desperate to sit at the cool Spider-Man table right now, skirting the commitment to a more fully formed, standalone character that would only reap dividends down the road. And yes, sit tight during the credits for two extra peeks in that direction.
But come on, this is vampire stuff, right? Throw off those PG-13 shackles and really dig in! Go for the jugular, if you will. Man, that could have been a rush.
This isn’t.
