Bursting with contrasts of art and ideas, Coma lands as a captivating time capsule of creativity, waiting to be savored by future viewers looking to understand a uniquely unsteady time.
Writer/director Bertrand Bonello casts his own daughter, Louise Labèque, as “L’adolescente,” a teenage girl trying to cope with life in lockdown. She FaceTime chats with friends and looks to YouTuber Patricia Coma (Julia Faure) for guidance on living in a present that has “come to a halt.”
Coma calmly and seductively stresses the need for achieving “limbo” – where we become “blank spaces waiting to be filled,” no longer needing to worry about making our own choices.
Bonello (The Beast) weaves together existential dread, dream and dreamlike narratives, and some black comedy with alternating live action and animation styles to create a hypnotic patchwork that probes a simple idea with utter fascination.
Among the understandable glut of lockdown films, this one stands out as a different animal indeed. The true effects of the pandemic – particularly on the young – may not be fully known for decades. Bonello wants us to realize that now, and Coma is an intriguing and insightful thought starter.
Modern-day cowboys are the focus of director Jake Allyn’s film, Ride.
Co-writing with Josh Plasse, Allyn has crafted an aching drama that explores the complicated relationships within a family struggling with several demons.
With his daughter ill, John Hawkins (C. Thomas Howell) engages in a desperate struggle to raise money to pay for treatments. His patience is thin as he fights with bureaucrats, hospital policy, and the outrageous amount of money needed to get his daughter the care she needs.
On top of the looming tragedy, Hawkins’s eldest son, Pete (Allyn, again, doing triple duty), has recently been released from prison. We’re given not-so-subtle hints as to what landed Pete in jail, but it’s compelling. Rounding out the family is the glorious Annabeth Gish, as the Hawkins’s family matriarch, Monica, who is also the town sheriff.
A backdrop to the family’s personal struggles is the rodeo. The Hawkins family has a history in the sport, which offers us a glimpse into what a contemporary cowboy does in this world.
This is a tightly constructed film that has only one or two faults. Some of the drama treads too close to things we’ve seen before, but for the most part, things are handled in ways that speak to the rawness of a family in crisis.
It’s hard not to sympathize with John’s desperation. The money he needs is a crushing amount; that any family would be on the hook for such large sums to save a child is despicable. It’s not hard to understand the lengths a person will go to in their desire to do right by their family.
How far would you go to support your family? To save a child? It can be hard to imagine making some of the choices John makes, maybe impossible to imagine it. However, it’s not hard to imagine the desperation that leads a parent to make terrible choices.
It’s often crises that drive a family apart. Allyn skillfully raises the tension as Ride progresses. At times, the dialogue falters as we careen toward the climax, but it’s impossible not to be drawn in to this compelling, heartbreaking story of a family struggling to survive in a ruthless world.
A descent into madness horror that relies almost entirely on two performances, writer/director James Drake’s Latency makes effective use of his single location to amplify themes and create tension.
Sash Luss is Haha, an agoraphobic professional gamer with a lot to lose. She’s months behind on rent, for one, and the last thing an agoraphobic needs is to have to find a new place to live. So, when she gets the chance to test new gear that enhances performance—which she can use to win a high stakes tournament before anyone else gets ahold of the tech—she jumps.
But the mind meld gear exacerbates some troubling aspects of Hana’s mental health, kicking off a rapid deterioration that blends memory with video game until she’s not sure what’s real and what’s not.
Latency feels a bit like a gamer’s Repulsion. Instead of mining sexual hysteria as Polanski did, Drake digs into the way seclusion and technology can intensify trauma and deepen mental illness.
Alexis Ren injects Latency with needed cheer and color, but it’s Luss who anchors the film. She’s in every scene. It’s a demanding role that asks, for instance, for magnetism while staring listlessly at a video game you can play with your mind. The arc of the character is dizzying and Luss can’t always deliver. While she transmits the fear and much of the regret authentically, the madness never feels quite mad enough.
The scares aren’t especially scary, either, but the narrative’s game like quality does build a sense of existential horror. Still, though the video game quality of the aesthetic cheats the need for realistic horror images, they’re still missed.
The film sees agoraphobia as a kind of macabre, inherited coping mechanism. But there’s something honest in the nightmare of days disappearing into other days, a timeless malaise of hyper-isolation.
Raw and full of representation, Queen Tut is a heartwarming film that makes you feel. Directed by Reem Morsi, it centers on Nabil (Ryan Ali), a young man from Egypt who moves to Toronto. After his chance encounter with Malibu (Alexandra Billings) outside her club, a safe haven for the LGBTQIA+ community, Nabil begins a journey to find where he truly belongs, realizing his true self through drag.
Comfortable being itself, this film feels real. It doesn’t try to perfect life; it is unfiltered in the best way possible. The effortless intricacies present in the lead performances,— the awkward pauses and subsequent misunderstandings, and the gentle moments in between— fully immerse the audience in the story of a queer community fighting for their rights and fully realizing them at the same time.
Additionally, the makeup and costumes for characters both in and out of drag feel instinctually right, mimicking life in a way that doesn’t seek perfection and instead embraces the quirks that make us human.
The use of color creates a visual aid: Nabil’s home is filled with neutral tones and grays, while Malibu’s club is teeming with vibrancy. Fabric also plays a central role in Nabil’s character development, and the film takes such care to make every scrap special and charged with meaning— whether through flashbacks or a simple close-up of shimmering sequins in Nabil’s hands, the audience can feel the significance. Through simple yet effective devices, QueenTut lets us develop a strong sense of empathy for the narratives of many characters.
Religion heavily features in the film, looming in the background as a ceaseless pressure in Nabil’s life. Although overbearing in certain settings, it is also a key to Nabil’s growth and acceptance of himself. Queen Tut shows us that religion doesn’t have to be interpreted in one way— it can be whatever best serves us.
One aspect of the film that did not quite click was the pacing. At points, time felt unclear and disorienting. This doesn’t detract from the viewing experience too much. Time can be tricky in life, ebbing and flowing with different emotions and situations, and Queen Tut, although perhaps not intentionally, acknowledges it.
All aspects of the film contribute to the central idea of community as a family that you choose— one that is accepting and grounded in the face of change. This film welcomes the audience into its family, leaving viewers with a sense of hope and self-acceptance.
To say that relationships are ripe for mining when it comes to horror movie material might be the king of all understatements. The complex nature of romantic human relationships involves the entire spectrum of emotions and said emotions tend to burn at their brightest during a courtship’s beginning and at the perilous end. With Kill Your Lover, filmmakers Alix Austin and Keir Siewert have crafted an intimate analogy about what happens when the person you’ve loved for so long changes into something darker.
Through flashes back and forth from the past to the present, Kill Your Lover tells the story of Dakota (Paige Gilmour) and Axel (Shane Quigley-Murphy). The most passionate portions of their relationship are juxtaposed with the present and Dakota’s feelings that the relationship has run its course. It’s not that simple though, and Axel’s changes have less to do with his personality (or do they?) and more with the sickness overtaking him.
Austin and Siewert wisely spend the majority of Kill Your Lover’s scant 77 minutes just spending time with Dakota and Axel. It’s easy to see why these two characters would’ve fallen so hard for one another. It’s equally easy to see why Dakota wants to break things off. However, with clever plotting, the film also peels back layers and floats the idea that maybe things weren’t so great in the past either. Gilmour and Quigley-Murphy’s fiery chemistry gives the film a sense of life it might not have with lesser performers.
Kill Your Lover gets a lot of mileage out of essentially being a single-location film. The isolation of the small apartment only increases the anxiety and tension around the situation Dakota finds herself in. From a character standpoint, the awfulness of Axel’s transformation is mirrored by Dakota’s memories of the good times they shared in the same space.
Despite being a very character-centric bit of horror filmmaking, Kill Your Lover doesn’t skimp on the carnage. The “creature” (if you will) make-up is icky and gruesome and has an outstanding originality to how it behaves and spreads. Still deeply rooted in story and character, when the battle of wills between Dakota and Axel turns into a physical one, the gooeyness of the film increases tenfold.
By leaning heavily into character and the sometimes claustrophobic nature of spiraling relationships, Kill Your Lover offers an exciting and emotional bit of genre filmmaking.
What better way to have some breezy fun with our identity-challenged times than by embellishing the true-life story of one Gary Johnson?
Johnson was a phony hitman in Texas who would don different disguises working undercover work for the police. After a 2001 article in Texas Monthly profiled his adventures, various screenwriters toyed with the project. And though Johnson died in 2022, he can sleep well knowing Richard Linklater and Glen Powell’s Hit Man finally does him proud.
In the Linklater/Powell take, Johnson (Powell) is a mild-mannered psych professor at a New Orleans college who likes birding and jean shorts. A proficiency for tech gadgets lands him a moonlighting gig doing surveillance with the cops. But when their undercover man gets suspended for shady activities, Gary emerges from the van as “Ron,” fake hitman for hire.
Turns out, Gary has a knack for this new identity, and impresses his team with some suave method acting.
“Okay, Daniel Day!”
He also impresses Maddy (Adria Arjona from Morbius) who wants her abusive husband dead. “Ron” talks her out of the hit, they begin a steamy affair, then the husband turns up dead anyway.
And so the heat (the Body Heat?) is on.
Powell is all charm and charisma as he bounces from one persona to the next (the Patrick Bateman impression is particularly hilarious), Arjona is a captivating possible femme fatale, and the chemistry between them is undeniable.
Linklater’s direction is slick and well-paced, with a vibe that recalls a winning mix of Fletch whodunnit, Spy humor and Ocean’s 11 sex appeal. But Hitman still feels very much in-the-moment, with a repeated focus on how our point of view can shape our reality, and how our path to change starts by being honest with ourselves.
That’s right, Powell and Linklater find room for a serious message in Hit Man. But don’t worry, you’ll be having so much fun it won’t hurt a bit.
In the middle of the long transition from child to adult, high school freshman Abby (Sierra McCormick, The Vast of Night) loses her primary caregiver. Now, she has to move in with a distant father (Jason Butler Harner, Ozark) and his much younger partner and navigate her grief and the horrors of adolescence without much of a safety net.
She’s got her friends, sure—a few she seems to have known since kindergarten. They all seem smart, stable, sensible.
But they aren’t what she’s craving right now. Abby is looking for distraction and drama. And she finds it in Caroline (Ryan Simpkins, Fear Street), an underage drinker and Bad Influence willing to trade sexual favors for drugs or booze. With Caroline, Abby experiments with a new persona and new experiences, some of which veer toward the dangerous.
The film could have become a morality play, but the debut feature-length writer/director team of Sophia Sabella and Pablo Feldman aren’t here for that. Instead, they depict—without judgement—a slice of what can be a hugely complicated time in a person’s life, even when they aren’t flattened under a glacier’s worth of grief.
With its short run time, The Edge of Everything could have stood to flesh out some of the relationships and characters a bit more, particularly that between Abby and her father. But what we do have is good. McCormick delivers such a subtle, natural performance that at times it’s hard to remember you are watching an actor at work. She’s a talent to keep an eye on.
Tales of Irish fae folk can be terrifying. Often part ecological horror, part folktale, they can hit a primal fear of powerlessness and loss of identity. Ishana Shyamalan’s feature debut The Watchers, which she adapted for the screen from a novel by A.M. Shine, tackles these notions and adds a comment on voyeurism as entertainment.
Mina (Dakota Fanning), an unhappy American girl working at a pet store in Galway, agrees to drive a day to get a rare bird to a zoo. “Good chance to see the Irish countryside.”
GPS is shite in heavily forested areas, the road becomes just muddy tracks, then the car seizes and stops. One terrifying thing leads to another and suddenly she’s racing, birdcage in hand, toward a metal door being held open if she can get to it in 5, 4, 3, 2…
Credit Shyamalan (or my enduring fear of the woods?) for ratcheting tension early on. If you’ve seen the trailer, you know what happens next: she’s trapped inside with three others, one wall is a window, and at night those damn fae folk come to watch those inside.
It’s a great set up and a compelling, strange premise—the kind of thing the filmmaker’s father might make, and just as fraught with possible missteps. Remember how cool the trailer for Old was?
The Watchers is heavy with symbolism, from the bird in the cage to Mina’s personal roleplay games to the reality TV DVD collection someone left for the trapped to watch. There’s no denying the film is impeccably structured, Shyamalan unveiling complications and backstory as the structure dictates. Performances are solid as well.
Fanning’s portrayal is a bit faraway and dead inside, which suits the character but makes for a relatively lowkey lead. The ever-formidable Olwen Fouéré is charismatic enough to make up for that, and both Georgina Campbell and Oliver Finnegan fill out their roles with raw tenderness.
Mina’s name (her twin sister is Lucy) is a clear nod to Ireland’s most iconic horror writer, Bram Stoker. The entirety of the film feels just that superficially Irish. Nor is there any authenticity to the ecological horror, although there’s plenty of opportunity. But the real issue—as is so often the case in a creature feature—is the monster FX.
Not good. Bad, even.
That’s unfortunate because, though hardly revolutionary and rarely scary, The Watchers is an often-intriguing thriller. But it doesn’t hold up to the great Irish horror that came before it.
With his source novel and screenplay for Let the Right One In, John Ajvide Lindqvist mixed vampire bloodlust and emotional bonds. Handling the Undead (Håndtering av udøde) finds Lindqyist turning similar attention to zombies, teaming with director/co-writer Thea Hvistendahl for a deeply atmospheric tale of grief, longing, and dread-filled reunions.
We follow three families in Norway, each one dealing with tragedy. An old man and his daughter (Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World) have lost their young son/grandson; an elderly woman still grieves for her lifelong partner; while a man (Anders Danielsen Lie from The Worst Person in the World and Personal Shopper) and his children struggle to accept that the wife and mother they depend on (Bahar Pars) may now be gone.
Hvistendahl sets the stakes with minimal dialog and maximum sorrow. Characters move through sweaty summer days in a fog of grief that’s expertly defined by cinematographer Pål Ulvik Rokseth. They grasp at memories and battle regret over feelings left unexpressed.
And then an unexplained electro-magnetic event hits Oslo…and the dead aren’t so dead anymore.
In the film’s first two acts, Hvistendahl unveils these awakenings with a barren and foreboding tenderness. Everyone knows this can’t end well, but the tears of joy that come from seemingly answered prayers create moments that straddle a fascinating line between touching and horrifying.
How much of our grief is defined by selfishness? And how far could it push us before we finally let go?
Those may not be new themes for the zombie landscape, but the way Hvistendahl frames the inevitable bloodshed goes a long way toward making her shift of focus less jarring. While so much time is spent exploring the pain of those left behind, we know that eventually zombies gonna zombie.
And indeed they do, but Hvistendahl sidesteps excess carnage for a more subtle form of gruesome. The interactions between the living and the undead take on a surreal, experimental quality that seems plenty curious about whether we’d really think dead is better.
After all, the grieving family in Pet Sematary went asking for trouble. Here, the trouble comes calling, and Handling the Undead answers with a bleak but compelling study of desperation meeting inhuman connection.
