Monthly Archives: February 2025

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Driver’s Seat

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Something Is About to Happen

by Rachel Willis

After losing her job as IT support staff for a dental supplies company, Lucía (Malena Alterio) seeks employment as a taxi driver in Antonio Méndez Esparza’s Something is About to Happen.

I’ll admit I was immediately intrigued by the opening credits. The black text on red background and the string-heavy score sets a compelling tone for the film.

Following the energetic opening, things slow down a bit. We follow Lucía through several day-to-day tasks, including supporting her elderly father. But a fleeting conversation with a taxi driver sets Lucía on a new path.

And what could very easily be a mundane venture into new territory for Lucía is anything but. It sometimes starts to feel a little like Taxicab Confessions, but rather than something tawdry and banal, instead we watch a woman opening herself to a new world in exciting, curious, sometimes dangerous ways.

The film’s naturalism helps ground it as sinister elements weave their way into the fabric of Lucía’s life. There’s a haunting melancholy underneath Lucía seemingly boundless enthusiasm. As her façade slips, we can’t help but watch in fascinated horror.

There are some scenes that are a bit too long, but on the whole, each one compliments the next as we follow our hero as she navigates life, love, and loss in the driver’s seat of her taxi. More often than not, we’re given new information with each scene, learning more and more about Lucía and what makes her tick.

Crows populate the film, sometimes in unexpected ways. The birds have often been used as symbolism, and it’s not too difficult to tease out what they represent to Lucía and the film overall. Their appearance in the film, however, fluctuates between non-existent or heavy-handed. It’s a bit much when they could have been utilized in subtler ways. It’s hard to anticipate what might come next for Lucía, which makes the film and enjoyable watch even as it meanders off course from time to time.

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Mommy’s Little Angel

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Armand

by George Wolf

If you’re the parent of young children, your first reaction to troubling accusations against them is likely to be denial.

There must be some mistake, right? My child would never do such a thing.

It’s a catalyst that almost demands taking sides, and one that writer/director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel explores to unique effect in Armand.

The mesmerizing Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World, Handling the Undead, A Different Man) is Elisabeth, a Norwegian actress who is summoned to her son’s school for an urgent conference. Six year-old Armand has been accused of bullying his friend Jon in the boys restroom. The incident apparently involved acts of “sexual deviation.”

Jon’s parents, Sarah (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) and Anders (Endre Hellestveit) are waiting at the school with two administrators and the boys’ teacher. And what begins as a calm attempt at fact-finding slowly dissolves into a fascinating unraveling of mystery, fantasy, and outright curiosity.

Ullmann Tøndel and cinematographer Pål Ulvik Rokseth keep us inside the sterile school building for nearly all of the film’s two hours, puncturing the strained decorum with an array of devices. There are persistent nosebleeds, the sound of heels echoing on hard floors, moments of psychological performance art, and one alarming fit of laughter that purposely strains your patience.

It all helps to distinguish the film from similarly themed dramas such as The Teacher’s Lounge or even Mass, but also threatens to keeps us detached through self indulgence. The can’t-look-away excellence from Reisve never lets it happen, and Armand – which won the Caméra d’Or, for Best First Feature last year at Cannes – rewards audience commitment with a satisfying, if not exactly revelatory, resolution in Act Three.

The characters may be talking about children, but the film is talking about adults. Armand presents a challenging, but ultimately haunting take on the lingering dangers of convincing ourselves that everything is fine.

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Somewhere in Time

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Timestalker

by Hope Madden

Back in 2016, Alice Lowe wrote, directed and starred in the charmingly dark horror comedy, Prevenge. It’s been a long wait, but her absurd wit, impeccable timing and delightful attention to sight gag detail return with the dark reincarnation rom-com, Timestalker.

Lowe is Agnes. No matter when you catch her—mid-1600s, Napoleonic era, 1980s New York—Agnes is feeling lost. Unmoored. As if something in her very soul is lacking. And then suddenly, over and over and over again throughout the ages, Agnes realizes what she’s missing is Alex (Aneurin Barnard).

Alex never seems to agree.

A handful of souls orbit the star crossed never actually lovers (Nick Frost, Tanya Reynolds, Kate Dickie, Jacob Anderson), but that never really registers with Agnes. She’s too attuned to her longing, and then eventually, her need to change her fate because, in each life, Agnes dies (pretty horribly) so that Alex can live.

What Lowe has penned is a clever subversion of romance tropes—“I have crossed oceans of time to find you”—without entirely mocking that aching sense of longing that fuels an obsession. Lowe’s most clever device is positioning a man as the object of infatuation. Playing that idea off a later introduction of Agnes’s own stalker further pokes holes in a century’s worth of romance cliche.

Timestalker is funny, sometimes brutally so. Anderson shines as a mischief-maker and instigator popping in from age to age with very dark suggestions, and an underused Dickie’s priceless deadpan delivery adds value to each of her scenes.

The look of the film offers endless enjoyment, and Lowe is a hoot in every situation.

Don’t look for much in the way of a plot, though. Where Prevenge unveiled a bit more of its backstory and detail with each new scene, Timestalker feels like a really fun Groundhog Day with no underpinning story. The film is disappointingly slight given the clever points it makes.

Shudder Premiere

Rizz Up

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The Dead Thing

by Hope Madden

The clever, underlying theme in Shaun of the Dead is that every Londoner was already basically a zombie.

Elric Kane, co-writer and director of The Dead Thing, looks at a culture of app hook ups and sterile, fluorescent work spaces and sees something similar. A whole generation of people seems to already be dead.

They’re not exactly alive, anyway.

Beautiful Alex (Blu Hunt) fits that bill. Her job is mindless, she keeps her headphones in and avoids eye contact with her one co-worker, Mark (Joey Millin). After work and another swipe right hookup she sneaks into her apartment to avoid conversation with her longtime best friend (Katherine Hughes). Sleep. Wake up. Repeat.

Then she meets Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen), and it’s as if she wakes from a trance. It starts off the same as every other meet up, but Kyle is different. They connect. He stays all night, they laugh and draw pictures of each other and hate to say goodbye the next day when her uber for work arrives.

She decides to keep in touch, but he never responds to a text. So, she shows up where he works, and a mystery begins.

Each act in The Dead Thing tells a different story. Hunt anchors the evolving storytelling with an authentic display of ennui, of disconnectedness—partly chosen, partly inevitable. Smith-Petersen’s vacant sweetness gives each change in the narrative an underlying sinister quality that also evolves nicely from one act to the next.

By Act 3, Kane abandons the film’s original metaphor in favor of a different analogy. While this change offers more opportunity for visceral horror, the result is less satisfying than the original, insightful image of modern romance.

Though the more traditional wrap up disappoints after such a stylish and intriguing premise, The Dead Thing—including Iona Vasile’s dreamy camerawork and deceptively creepy performances throughout—keeps your attention and manages to subvert expectations and entertain.

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Real In

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Rounding

by Hope Madden

Filmmaker Alex Thompson has already developed a good track record across multiple genres. His 2020 dramedy Saint Francis was a bold, impressive feature debut. Last year’s Ghostlight won critical acclaim and not an insignificant number of festival awards.

Somewhere between the two he wrote and directed a brooding medical mystery called Rounding that’s just now getting a theatrical release.

The film follows Dr. James Hayman (Namir Smallwood) as he navigates his second year in residency. As the film opens, James has an episode on his rounds in a large, urban hospital. It’s quite an episode, and after taking some time off, he decides he’d rather finish his residency in a more rural location where he can “have a bigger impact.”

There he studies under Dr. Harrison (Michael Potts, who elevates every scene, as is his way) and meets the 19-year-old asthma patient, Helen (Sidney Flanigan, Never Rarely Sometimes Always). James is convinced that there is something very wrong with Helen’s case.

Rounding is a slow build, essentially unraveling two mysteries simultaneously. As James sleuths the ins and outs of Helen’s illness, deteriorating mentally and physically as he does so, his own past trauma begins to take shape in front of our eyes.

That second mystery comes laden with the occasional supernatural imagery. Never once does it suit the film Thompson is making. Each of these scenes of horror feels spliced in from an entirely different movie. Although, these flashes are welcome bits of excitement in an otherwise laborious slog.

Thompson, who co-wrote Rounding with Christopher Thompson, keeps all information very close to the vest. It isn’t possible to unravel either mystery with what’s depicted on the screen, so nothing wraps up satisfactorily. Tidily, yes, and far too late and too quickly and with too little evidence to support it.

A slow burn thriller can work, but the thrill has to be worth the wait, the climax earned. We have to be building to something. Rounding boasts some solid performances, a few unnerving moments, and a oppressively creepy aesthetic. But they don’t amount to much.

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Seattle Was a Riot

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Heart Eyes

by Hope Madden

There is an undeniable goofy sweetness to Josh Ruben’s horror films, no matter the body count or blood flow or number of people with holes so big in their throats that you can see the characters behind them.

Heart Eyes is the latest from the Werewolves Within and Scare Me director. The new film, fit for the holiday, trails a serial killer slicing and dicing through couples every Valentine’s Day. It’s Year 3, and the marauder has moved from Boston to Philly to set up shop for this year’s gore soaked romance in Seattle.

Just as Ally (Olivia Holt)—still stinging from how quickly her ex moved on after their breakup—has to work with advertising fixer Jay (Mason Gooding) to right the marketing campaign she seems to have tanked beyond repair.

But when the Heart Eyes Killer mistakes the colleagues for lovebirds, a cross-city chase begins.

The script penned by Phillip Murphy (Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard), along with Christopher Landon (Freaky, Happy Death Day 2 U) and Michael Kennedy (Freaky, It’s a Wonderful Knife), trots out rom com tropes as often as machetes. From meet cute to grand gesture at the airport to a string of classic romcom titles worked into dialog, Heart Eyes wears its influences on its sleeve.

The glossy “the city is its own character” filming, the amiable chemistry between Holt and Gooding, and their unreasonable good looks center the romance, but Ruben does not go light on the gore. Nor is he skimpy with comedy, although he can’t seem to settle on a tone for the humor. He veers from witty to broadly comedic to gallows and back, leaving the film feeling slightly haphazard.

Heart Eyes is also drawn out a bit too long. The finale, though plenty bloody, feels more forced than satisfying. But it’s a fun, gory, sweetly romantic waste of time, just like Valentine’s Day.

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Family’s Feud

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Bring Them Down

by George Wolf

Just weeks ago, Christopher Abbott was wrestling with wolves. Now it’s sheep, and the bloodlines still get bloody.

In Bring Them Down, Abbott is Michael O’Shea, a sheepherder who lives with his ailing father Ray (Colm Meaney) in the Irish countryside. Their farm shares a grazing hill with the Keelys – Gary (Paul Ready), Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone) and their son Jack (Barry Keoghan), and Irish eyes are seldom smiling.

Michael and Caroline share a past, as well as a painful tragedy that the villagers still whisper about. So relations are already chilly. But when Michael catches the Keely boys trying to sell two O’Shea rams as their own, things escalate quickly.

This is grim stuff, as desolate as the Irish landscape. And much like the bare-fisted feuds that the Irish travelers in 2011’s Knuckle cannot exist without, the Keely and O’Shea men seem held by an enabling bond of generational trauma shattered only occasionally by the more pragmatic Caroline.

In a feature debut that fluctuates between the English and Irish languages, writer/director Chris Andrews crafts a taut family drama fueled by pain, violence and a tight circle of engrossing performances. Abbott’s intensity shows Michael has learned to navigate his guilt and anguish with quiet resolve, while Keoghan again proves adept at fleshing out the vulnerable shades of a dangerous character.

These are deeply committed and affecting turns, consistently elevating a story that’s left searching for that final thread to make its truly memorable. And in the third act, Andrews does introduce a sudden time shift, rewinding to reveal new angles of previous events. The attempt at an added layer of narrative depth is warranted, but this one lands with a curious and negligible effect.

Still, with a solid sense of setting, cast and framing, Bring Them Down heralds Andrews as a filmmaker of great potential. Once his actors get a little more character to chew on, he may start building his own legacy.

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Past Tense

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I’m Still Here

by Hope Madden

Walter Salles’s beautifully understated true story I’m Still Here benefits from a powerful central performance, a poignant naturalism, and the timeless truth that dictatorships offer only cruel injustice.

Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) adapts friend Marcelo Paiva’s book, written to record the life of his iconic mother as her memories faded due to Alzheimer’s. Paiva’s mother, Eunice Paiva, is brought to life with deeply felt humanity and power by Oscar nominee Fernanda Torres.

As the film opens, Eunice floats in the ocean, her five children on Ipanema beach nearby. A military chopper breaks her peace. Her older daughters play volleyball, her younger daughter plays in the stand, her one son, Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira) nabs a stray puppy and, knowing that his mother would deny him the pet, runs home to convince his sweetly indulgent father, Rubens (Selton Mello).

Many films present a wholesome, loving family unit in Act 1 so that the tragedies of Act 2 hit harder. But for Salles and the onscreen Paivas, the investment in this family time grounds every moment after. There’s genuine joy, bonds between and among family members that ring true and continue to ring until the final credits roll some 137 minutes later.

In 1971, shortly after Christmas, Rubens Paiva was taken from their home by Brazil’s military dictatorship. Like thousands of other Brazilians, he was “disappeared”. The balance of I’m Still Here participates in Eunice’s struggles in his absence.

Salles and Torres sidestep sentimentality at every turn. The graceful direction and formidable central performance pull you through every day—Eunice’s own arrest, fear for her children, her inability to even access the family’s bank accounts without her husband’s signature or a death certificate, and her aching worry and fear for Rubens.

We flash forward twice: once to the day, years after Eunice Paiva’s gotten her law degree and devoted her life to social justice, that Rubens’s death certificate is finally handed to her. When asked by the press whether it made sense to focus on Brazil’s ugly past when there was so much else fighting for attention, Paiva responded clearly that it was imperative. When government criminals go unpunished, they learn that their heinous acts are acceptable.

Parallels to our current climate certainly invest I’m Still Here with a particularly nightmarish urgency.  The timeline spreads the tale too thin, but it’s done to honor Eunice Paiva, whose strength in the face of right wing dictators inspires awe.