So says the hand-carved display in the small but cozy living room of Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) and Soo-jin’s (Jung Yu-mi) apartment. What the struggling actor and his rising executive/very pregnant wife don’t know yet is that they’re about to have a hell of a problem to tackle.
Writer/director Jason Yu’s Sleep is a smartly scripted, playfully wearying horror with tension rooted firmly in how very much you like Hyun-su and Soo-jin.
At some point in Soo-jin’s ninth month, Hyun-su begins to talk in his sleep.
“Something’s inside.”
And then he walks in his sleep. Eats. Claws at his face. This, obviously, becomes somewhat frightening, but the couple aims to tackle this thing together. Of course, soon enough there will be three of them.
Yu slowly cranks up tension as Soo-jin struggles between a maternal desire to protect her baby and a deep-rooted commitment to working through every marital problem with her husband.
One of the anxieties Yu toys with is that bone-deep exhaustion of a new parent, amplified for Soo-jin by her wakeful watch to make sure her husband doesn’t do harm to the baby in his sleep. You’re exhausted for her, and when she seems to start making rash, even insane decisions, well, who could blame her?
The way Yu manipulates tone is a thing of wonder. The more desperate and bleary eyed the film becomes, the funnier it is, and that dark humor is both at home and wildly startling. But there is a sweetness to it, and a camaraderie between Jung and Lee (who died tragically last year) that insists on your investment in the outcome of their story.
The third act is almost brazenly unhinged, and Sleep is all the better for it. It’s a tricky tale meticulously crafted, but it has a sweetness at its heart and that’s what makes it memorable.
What is it about a deep hole that is so profoundly terrifying? Is it the worry about what could be down there, waiting? Is it the claustrophobic terror of falling into the pit without hope of escape? Horror writers and filmmakers have exploited this particular primal dread for centuries. How many versions of The Pit and the Pendulum do we need to see to know Poe had struck a chord? There are two different (very worthy) films called The Hole, plus the lunatic horror The Pit, as well as John and the Hole, and of course, all the “buried alive” terror, like Ryan Reynolds’s Buried.
We want to peer way down in the hole to dig up our five favorite films from down in the pit.
5. The Hole in the Ground (2019)
Sara (Seána Kerslake), along with her bib overalls and young son Chris (James Quinn Markey), are finding it a little tough to settle into their new home in a very rural town. Chris misses his dad. Sara is having some life-at-the-crossroads anxiety.
Then a creepy neighbor, a massive sink hole (looks a bit like the sarlacc pit) and Ireland’s incredibly creepy folk music get inside her head and things really fall apart.
Writer/director Lee Cronin’s subtext never threatens his story, but instead informs the dread and guilt that pervade every scene. You look at your child one day and don’t recognize him or her. It’s a natural internal tension and a scab horror movies like to pick. Kids go through phases, your anxiety is reflected in their behavior, and suddenly you don’t really like what you see. You miss the cuter, littler version. Or in this case, you fear that inside your beautiful, sweet son lurks the same abusive monster as his father.
4. Jug Face (2013)
Writer/director Chad Crawford Kinkle brings together a fine cast including The Woman’s Sean Bridgers and Lauren Ashley Carter, as well as genre favorite Larry Fessenden and Sean Young to spin a backwoods yarn about incest, premonitions, kiln work, and a monster in a pit.
As a change of pace, Bridgers plays a wholly sympathetic character as Dawai, village simpleton and jug artist. On occasion, a spell comes over Dawai, and when he wakes, there’s a new jug on the kiln that bears the likeness of someone else in the village. That lucky soul must be fed to the monster in the pit so life can be as blessed and peaceful as before.
Kinkle mines for more than urban prejudice in his horror show about religious isolationists out in them woods. Young is particularly effective as an embittered wife, while Carter, playing a pregnant little sister trying to hide her bump, a jug, and an assortment of other secrets, steals the show.
3. I’m Not Scared (2003)
Director Gabriele Salvatores (Mediterraneo) crafts a perfect, gripping, breathless thriller with his Italian period piece. In a tiny Southern Italian town, kids run through lushly photographed fields on the hottest day of the year. They’re playing, and also establishing a hierarchy, and with their game Salvatores introduces a tension that will not let up until the last gasping breaths of his film.
Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) sees a boy down a deep hole on a neighboring farm. The boy, Filippo (Mattia Di Pierro), believes he is dead and Michele is an angel. But the truth is far more sinister. I’m Not Scared is a masterpiece of a thriller.
2. Onibaba (1964)
Lush and gorgeous, frenzied and primal, spooky and poetic, Kaneto Shindô’s folktale of medieval Japan scores on every level, and Hiraku Hayashi’s manic score keeps you dizzy and on edge.
An older woman (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura) survive by murdering lost samurai and looting their goods.
Passions and jealousy, a deep pit and a dangerous mask, some of the most glorious cinematography you’ll see all combine with brooding performances to create a remarkable nightmare.
1. The Descent (2005)
A bunch of buddies get together for a spelunking adventure. One is still grieving a loss – actually, maybe more than one – but everybody’s ready for one of their outdoorsy group trip.
Writer/director Neil Marshall begins his film with an emotionally jolting shock, quickly followed by some awfully unsettling cave crawling and squeezing and generally hyperventilating, before turning dizzyingly panicky before snapping a bone right in two.
And then we find out there are monsters.
Long before the first drop of blood is drawn by the monsters – which are surprisingly well-conceived and tremendously creepy – the audience has already been wrung out emotionally.
The grislier the film gets, the more primal the tone becomes, eventually taking on a tenor as much like a war movie as a horror film. This is not surprising from the director that unleashed Dog Soldiers – a gory, fun werewolf adventure. But Marshall’s second attempt is far scarier. For full-on horror, this is one hell of a monster movie.
Speak No Evil is in a tough spot. Essentially, you’re either a moviegoer who will breathe easier this weekend knowing you’ll never again have to sit through the excruciating trailer, you’re a potentially interested horror fan, or you’re a horror fanatic wary that director James Watkins will pull punches landed by Christian Tafdrup’s almost unwatchably grim but genuinely terrifying 2022 original.
Well, Watkins does not pull those punches, but they do land differently.
Louise and Ben Dalton (Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy) are vacationing blandly in Italy with their 11-year-old, Agnes (Alix West Lefler) when a louder, more alive family catches Ben’s attention.
Paddy (James McAvoy) and Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) and their quiet lad Ant (Dan Hough) seem to be living life large, and Ben can’t help but envy that. So, after the Daltons are tucked blandly back into their London flat and he receives a postcard from their vacation pals inviting them out to the countryside, how can he say no?
We all know he should have said no, but that’s not how horror movies happen.
What follows is a horror of manners, and very few genres are more agonizing than that. Little by little by little, alone and very far from civilization, the Daltons’ polite respectability is jostled and clawed and eventually, of course, gutted.
Those familiar with Watkins’s work, especially his remarkable and remarkably unpleasant Eden Lake, needn’t worry that he’ll let you off the hook. This is not the sanitized English language version fans of the original feared.
Indeed, Watkins and a game cast highlighted by a feral McAvoy stick to Tafdrup’s script for better than half of the film. Watkins, who adapted the original script, complicates relationships and gives the visiting Dalton parents more backbone, but he doesn’t neuter the grim story being told. Instead, he ratches up tension, provides a more coherent backstory, and pulls out the big guns in Act 3.
If you’ve seen the original, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed by the direction the remake takes. Though it can feel like a correction aimed at pleasing a wider audience, it also makes for a more satisfying film.
Fanciosi is carving out a career of wonderfully nuanced genre performances (Nightingale, Stopmotion). We learned in 2017 with Split that McAvoy can do anything. Anything at all. He proves that here with a ferocious turn, evoking vulnerability and contempt sometimes in the same moment. It’s a compelling beast he creates, and no wonder weary travelers fall under his spell.
Watkins doesn’t make enough movies. For his latest he’s chosen a project with the narrowest chance of success. But here’s hoping he finds it.
Thirty-two years later, Spanish auteur Víctor Erice returns with his fourth feature, Close Your Eyes (Cerrar los ojos), a patiently exquisite study of memory, identity, and the reflecting power of film.
Former film director Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) spends his days in a fishing village on the coast of Spain. He reads, writes the occasional short story, and dodges the conspiracy theories that still exist about his old friend Julio Arenas (Jose Coronado).
In 1990, Julio was starring in Miguel’s film The Farewell Gaze when he disappeared without a trace. The mystery is being revisited on TV’s “Unresolved Cases,” and Miguel travels to Madrid for his guest appearance.
The broadcast prompts a call from a woman from an elder care home in another Spanish village. There is a handyman they call Gardel who tends the grounds and keeps to himself. She is sure it is Julio.
Miguel must confirm this for himself, and the journey back through his past includes reconnecting with his film editor (Mario Pardo), a former lover (Soledad Villamil), Julio’s daughter (Ana Torrent), and one painful, tragic memory.
Erice (El Sur, The Spirit of the Beehive) sets a pace that is unhurried but necessary, and he fills the nearly three-hour running time with exquisite shot making, insightful dialog and meaningful silences. He also crafts the film-within-a-film as a compelling narrative in its own right, one that adds important elements to the touching and deeply resonant finale.
Now in his mid-eighties, Erice makes Close Your Eyes more than just a rumination on “how to grow old.” Expertly assembled and deceptively understated, it is a beautiful ode to the pleasure, pain, friendships and memories of a life well lived.
Maybe Kevin Smith saw Sam Mendes, James Gray and Spielberg all come out of the pandemic with reflections on their film-loving early years. Or maybe he just liked the taste of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza.
Either way, The 4:30 Movie finds Smith looking back with wistful zaniness at a pivotal time in his own life: 1986.
High school Junior Brian David (Austin Zajur from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Smith’s own Clerks III) just can’t quit thinking about that time he made out with cute Sophomore Melody Barnegot (Siena Agudong, the Resident Evil TV series) in her backyard pool.
For some reason, Brian didn’t immediately follow up on that makeout sesh. But now he’s ready to ask for an official date, and they make plans to meet for the 4:30 screening of Bucklick (which, based on the theater poster, is the original Fletch).
But how they gonna sneak past the crazy theater manager (Ken Jeong) and into an R-rated flick? Turns out that’s just one of the obstacles standing between these kids and a movie.
You’ve also got Brian’s two friends (Reed Northrup, Nicholas Cirillo), their favorite wrestling entertainer (Sam Richardson), a Hot Usher (Genesis Rodriguez, and that is her character name), false accusations of perversion and a string of Smith regulars (Jason Mewes, Rosario Dawson, Jeff Anderson, Justin Long and Jason Lee).
I’ve laughed hard at some of Smith’s earlier movies, respected his blunt self-awareness and appreciated the moments when his frenetic dialog lands with earned insight. Here, while some overt Gen X reminiscing – bolstered by the closing Easter egg and blooper reel – may have a warmth about it, the charming core relationship between Brian and Melody gets lost. We’re pulling for them, but all the tangential and unnecessary diversions just end up working against the crude honesty that has marked Smith’s best work.
Few moments transcend beyond nostalgia, while the only laugh out loud sequence comes from mother/daughter Jennifer Schwalbach Smith and Harley Quinn Smith in Sugar Walls, the first of Kevin’s fake trailers. The other 85 minutes or so find humor that’s as obvious and forced as the speech from Hot Usher that lights a filmmaking fire in a young nerd.
The 4:30 Movie is certainly the Kevin Smith-iest of the filmmaker’s memory lanes we’ve been down recently. It’s also the most fractured and frustrating. Let’s hope his future is more rewarding.
Life isn’t going so well for construction foreman Nick (Michele Morrone). Stress is high in his professional life, now that every construction worker beneath him has been canned in favor of robot labor. Lucky for Nick, the law still requires that a human foreman be on site. At least for now, anyway.
Things at home are even more stressful. His wife Maggie (Madeline Zima) needs a new heart. Having a costly, life-threatening surgery hanging over their heads isn’t easing any tensions. With Maggie in the hospital, Nick needs some help taking care of the kids and their home. Enter Alice (Megan Fox). Alice is a robot assistant designed specifically for housekeeping and babysitting. If you think hiring a cyborg nanny that looks like Megan Fox to (temporarily) replace the woman of the house is a bad idea, you are 110% correct.
What transpires from that moment onward isn’t going to be a shock to horror fans or even Lifetime viewers. A mentally and emotionally exhausted Nick does the stupidest thing imaginable: he sleeps with the robo-femme fatale, it develops a fixation on him, and chaos ensues. This isn’t a spoiler, it’s the hook. It’s exactly what we watch movies like this for. As the late Roger Ebert said, “it’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.”
Thankfully, the execution is mostly on point. While the world-building could have been stronger and the eroticism could have used a bit more steam, this is an entertaining high-concept yarn that wisely leans on its core cast. Subservience marks Megan Fox’s second teaming with director SK Dale, following on from their underseen 2021 thriller Till Death. While Fox isn’t given as much to chew on here due to the sheer nature of the role, she remains a standout.
Morrone carries himself well as the male lead and Zima is great as the wife who really shouldn’t have to be dealing with a stupid man or a crazy android on top of her life-threatening medical condition. Then again, maybe the bad luck is just all on Zima herself? After all, as the star of the ‘90s sitcom The Nanny, as well as both Mr. Nanny and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, this underrated actress seems to be a magnet for psychotic babysitters!
If you’re a fan of science fiction-tinged thrillers, check it out.
There’s a particular feeling that often accompanies grief. It’s the feeling of being unmoored, of somehow not really knowing who you are without the person you’ve lost. Writer/director Mary Dauterman details that feeling as well as the mixture of depression, numbness, confusion, and a desire to escape your own reality with her weirdly gross feature debut, Booger.
That’s the name of a cat. Izzy (Sofia Dobrushin) let the mangy stray in through the window one day, much to the dismay of best friend and roommate Anna (Grace Glowicki). It was filthy. Nasty. But Booger grew on Anna, and then, the same day Izzy dies in a bike accident, Anna realizes Booger is missing.
Her aimless quest to find her dead friend’s missing cat and her own slow transformation into a mangy, filthy, nasty beast give Anna the opportunity to avoid dealing with Izzy’s death.
Dauterman gets points for puncturing the nobility of grief and tapping into its necessary selfishness and cognitive dysfunction. Additional points for just being as gross as possible about it.
Glowicki’s awkward, strangely relatable performance helps Dauterman create a tone that’s simultaneously fantastical and banal. Anna’s own loosening grip on reality is balanced by a wonderfully honest turn from Marcia DeBonis (Sometimes I Think About Dying) as Izzy’s mom. Heather Matarazzo delivers a fine cameo in a role, like several in the film, that offset the unpleasantness with broad but dark humor.
The body horror elements are never done to terrify, but they may very well make you gag.
The dramedy doesn’t dig terribly deep, and Dauterman does not complicate the plot. We’re along for the ride as Anna lets her life crumble around her while she imagines she’s turning into a feral cat so she can avoid facing her friend’s death.
The character study pretty studiously avoids letting us get to know Anna’s character. She’s lost who she is and can’t seem to move on. Still, a committed, wryly comical turn from Glowicki and Dauterman’s insightful if unexpected direction ensure a memorable and strangely affecting film.
Right from the start, director and star Brande Roderick lets you know what kind of film you’re in for with Wineville—and it’s not a warm family reunion. Something sinister waits for Tess (Roderick) when she takes her son to settle her father’s estate, inadvertently left to her after he dies without a will.
Still living on the family vineyard is Aunt Margaret (Carolyn Hennesy) and Joe (Casey King). Joe’s presence at the vineyard is one Tess doesn’t expect, but the audience knows right away that something is amiss.
Unfortunately, the promise of the film’s opening isn’t realized during the bulk of the move. What unfolds is a mishmash of genres and tones.
Often, the film’s tone wreaks havoc on what we’re is supposed to pick up from certain scenes. Actions take on unintentional comedic undertones rather than building tension. Flashbacks are so over-the-top that their traumatic occurrences don’t carry the gravitas they should. It makes for some confused viewing.
Despite Tess’s past trauma, she isn’t the most compelling character. Her son seems to exist only to give importance to what lies ahead. Unfortunately, the characters never come to life in a way that makes you worry for them or care what happens. It probably would have been better if Tess had brought a dog along with her instead of a son (and I say this as the mother of a son).
The best part of Wineville is Joe. He’s the most compelling character, and the one who truly seems to carry the weight of the family’s traumatic past. Tess flippantly states “she’s over it” after recounting a series of horrific events and the film doesn’t do much to show that she really isn’t. On the other hand, Joe seems to have suffered less but carries the pain with him more honestly. How the past manifests in his present is the most interesting part of the story.
It’s a shame there is too much going on for the film to really hone its focus. This one leaves a lot to be desired.
