Even at its most fun, 1992’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle was a bit of a guilty pleasure. Hulu’s new update strips away the overdone pulp for a more focused, and more primally scary tale.
Caitlin (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is an L.A. lawyer who diligently screens her children’s food for sugars and aims to get a new stop sign for her neighborhood. Working at a tenants rights group, Caitlin helps Polly (Maika Monroe) with a landlord problem, and when the two cross paths again at a local market, fate seems to have dealt a good hand.
Polly has experience as a nanny, and she comes with a glowing recommendation from her last employer. She looks like the perfect choice to help Caitlin and her husband Miguel (Raúl Castillo) with young Emma (Mileiah Vega) and baby Josie (Nora and Lola Contreras).
Caitlin chooses poorly.
Screenwriter Micah Bloomberg (Sanctuary) updates the original story with some important twists, and director Michelle Garza Cervera sets a pace that lets the gaslighting, secrets and lies simmer nicely before boiling over.
Cervera crafted an impressive maternal nightmare three years ago with her feature debut, Husera: The Bone Woman. Here, she trades the religious imagery for symbols of upwardly mobile success, while still toying with anyone eager to check boxes of good mother/bad mother.
Winstead and Monroe are both terrific, bringing their characters into a dance of identity with menacing dread. There is more to Caitlin than her liberal guilt, and as Polly twists the knife with increasing sociopathy, Cervera’s instincts for a modern horror thriller are again solid.
Is any remake truly “necessary?” Debatable. But even back in ’92, the original film seemed like one that wouldn’t age particularly well. The questionable decisions remain, and one or two story beats are foreshadowed too heavily, but by the time all secrets are revealed, this Cradle rocks with some newly relevant bloodletting.
Subways can be very scary places. An American Werewolf in London knew it. Del Toro’s Mimic. Midnight Meat Train. Jacob’s Ladder. A Quiet Place: Day One. These films amplified the claustrophobic subterranean atmosphere for all its hellscape potential.
Luis Prieto’s Barcelona Underground (also variously called Last Stop: Rocafort St. and Rocafort Station) tries to tap into that mass transit terror. Laura (Natalia Azahara) has a new job manning the Rocafort stop on Barcelona’s subway system, which is legendary for its suicides. Three of every four subway suicides in the city take place at the Rocafort Street stop.
It all started back when Román (Javier Gutiérrez) was still a cop. He followed serial killer Elías Soro through the labyrinthine tunnels but wasn’t quick enough to save the family of four Soro had taken hostage.
Were they suicides? They were not. How is this connected to the suicides? And why is Laura haunted by hallucinations ever since she witnessed one? Who knows, honestly? I sat through the whole movie and feel confident in saying that Prieto never truly connects the folklore, exorcism, and police procedural threads to even begin to make sense of this plot.
Worse, he doesn’t capitalize on the horrific possibilities available in a subway tunnel.
Barcelona Underground is a hodgepodge of obvious cliches and worn-out tropes slapped together with nonsensical panache. Each piece is incredibly familiar, but not one fits snugly in place beside the next piece. It’s as if Prieto, writing with Ivan Ledesma and Ángel Agudo, lifted the most cliched scene from a dozen films and taped them together, hoping to create a single tale.
None of it works because none of it makes sense. Both Azahara and Gutiérrez do what they can with poorly written roles, but the senseless mishmash of a story arc keeps either from crafting a recognizable character.
Plus, it’s not scary.
An American Werewolf in London is scary, though. Do with that information what you will.
I was cautiously optimistic about director Scott Derrickson’s sequel to his creepy 2021 Joe Hill adaptation, Black Phone. And lo and behold, within the first ten minutes, Black Phone 2 had worked three of my favorite things into its tale: Pink Floyd, Duran Duran, and extreme profanity from children.
I’m listening.
Finney (Mason Thames) and his little sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) are struggling to find a new normal after Finney killed serial killer The Grabber (Ethan Hawke) a few years back. What Finn doesn’t want to admit is that he still sees that masked demon in a top hat everywhere he looks. Meanwhile, Gwen’s dreams have taken a decidedly sinister turn.
Last time out, Derrickson, writing with longtime collaborator C. Robert Cargill, filled out Hill’s short story with a just-strong-enough b-story about Gwen and her dreams. It gave the film a larger world to live in and enhanced the supernatural elements of Hill’s original nicely.
For the sequel, Cargill and Derrickson mine Gwen’s abilities for the bulk of the story, as her dreams lead the two siblings to a Christian sleepaway camp called Alpine Lake. Derrickson’s early 80s timeline allows for an analog look that lets him artfully conjure Friday the 13th, of course, as well as A Nightmare on Elm Street (the original and episode 4). There’s even a little Curtains thrown in there. Fun!
The script tries to close too many circles, find too many coincidences, and the story collapses on itself. Worse, a perfectly grotesque and bloody climax is kneecapped by an unfortunately saccharine ending.
Still, there is plenty of bloodshed and gore, and Hawke still cuts an impressive figure in that mask. We don’t see or hear enough of him in a story that feels rushed, but you don’t need much of The Grabber to be creeped out.
My real worry was that if Gwen and crew didn’t figure out what’s what and get home from camp in time, she might miss the Duran Duran show. Talk about tension!
Luca Guadagnino likes a provocative tale of challenging relationships, opportunists and lovers. With lush visuals. And sometimes peaches. His fruit free triangle of sorts, After the Hunt, considers and reconsiders a “he said/she said” in the ever-fluctuating moral landscape of higher education.
Julia Roberts is Yale philosophy professor Alma Imhoff. She and her husband, Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), are awaiting word on Alma’s tenure, alongside her very close colleague, Hank (Andrew Garfield). But when star student Maggie (Ayo Edebiri) makes an accusation, Alma faces a conundrum. She should believe Maggie, but does she? She should come to her aid, but will that be a risk to her tenure?
That barely scratches the surface of all the pathos and conniving, manipulation and secrecy, and above all, opportunism afoot in this fascinating but cumbersome thriller.
First time screenwriter Nora Garrett bites off more than she can chew, but her commitment to looking at every angle is both laudable and often fascinating. It’s rarely satisfying, but the densely textured characters provide rich opportunities for this talented cast.
Sure, these are caricatures of academia – like those dinner party people on South Park who like to smell their own farts – but Guadagnino, Garrett and cast are so entrenched in the melodrama you can’t help but be sucked in.
Roberts is an effective mix of conflict and entitlement, and Garfield is especially good as a man so sure of his superiority that an accusation against him seems like an affront to human evolution itself. Stuhlbarg finds his usual ways to make a supporting role memorable, especially when Frederik takes offense to Maggie’s suggestion that he may be a wee bit out of touch.
And ironically, that’s as issue that dogs the film. It wants to lead and provoke, but the worthy issues it raises are so malleable that much of verbal sparring already feels a half step behind the conversation. An epilogue that shrugs at the whole affair only neuters the search for clarity.
Like Ari Aster’s Eddington, After the Hunt is bound to offend people because of its absolute refusal to take sides or tidy up motivations. Like Aster’s film, Guadagnino’s latest is far more interested in philosophy and the muddy concept of morality in the context of success—particularly when everyone involved is damaged in one way or another.
David Moreau makes enough really fascinating horror movies that there’s always reason for optimism when a new one releases. The filmmaker often plays with the language of film to refocus attention and generate dread. Last year’s MadS used point of view filmmaking and the concept of a single, unbroken shot to remarkably tense results.
Other, Moreau’s latest feature, is another opportunity for narrative experimentation. Olga Kurylenko plays Alice, a veterinarian called back to Minnesota to deal with her estranged mother’s remains. Alice hasn’t been home in many, many years and the house, isolated in the middle of the woods and surrounded by surveillance cameras and barb wire fencing, is no more inviting than it was when she left.
Kurylenko has a lovely face, which is good because it’s the only one we see clearly in the entire film. There are other characters, but their faces are obscured, either by broken screens or odd point of view, or masks, which many of the characters wear. Moreau is making points about a surveillance state, the objectification of women, and identity with this move. It’s an interesting idea, or set of ideas, but he never manages to pull them together into a cohesive or rewarding theme.
Because you see no faces clearly, Moreau isn’t obligated to use dialogue from any of the actors, aside from Kurylenko. And he doesn’t. The result is the kind of dreamily absurd voiceover work Lucio Fulci was known for: adult women doing voicework of young boys and European actors badly attempting American accents. In the context of the delightfully nonsensical logic of a Fulci film, this can be acceptable, even entertaining. But Moreau is taking his film and its mystery seriously, so the painfully unrealistic Minnesota accents feel comical.
Not that American actors would have had much better luck with this script. There’s too little for Kurylenko to work with for two thirds of the film, leaving her to her own devices to compel interest, and she’s just not strong enough an actor to pull that off. When the film falls off its rails in Act 3, Kurylenko’s shortcomings and the silly voiceovers just seem par for the course.
Not every experiment works, and Moreau deserves credit for once again stretching. But I’d recommend watching or rewatching his 2006 masterwork Them instead of Other.
We are horror movie superfans. Maybe you are too. So today, let’s celebrate our own. Would we eat the object of our affection just to keep them close? No – think of the cholesterol! But we can get behind some of these behaviors, we’re not going to lie.
5. The Fan (1982)
The first thing Eckhart Schmidt’s film has in its favor is that the audience is meant to empathize with the fan, Simone (Désirée Nosbusch). Generally, we see the fanatical from the celebrity’s point of view, but this makes more sense because every member of the audience is more likely to have lost their shit over a teen idol than they’ve been worshipped themselves.
And yet, Simone clearly has a screw loose. Schmidt’s approach to her obsession as seen through the eyes of worried parents, apologetic postmen and other adults is confused and compassionate. Teenage girls – who can understand them? The tone is ideal to set up the explosive heartbreak you know is coming, as well as a third act you couldn’t possibly see coming.
4. Perfect Blue (1997)
This psychosexual thriller might feel garden variety if it had been made into a live action film. A young woman trades in her innocent image to take on more suggestive roles as an actress, only to find her fans turning on her in violent ways. Or is it an internal conflict over the way men and the media need to sexualize her that’s fragmenting her own mind?
In director Satoshi Kon’s anime vision, those familiar thriller tropes take on an unseemly dreamy quality. The animation style suggests more about the way mass media consumes a sexualized idea of innocence than any live action film could muster, and the hallucinatory quality achieved in the film would never have played this well in any other style.
3. Play Misty for Me (1971)
Clint Eastwood made his directorial debut with this cautionary tale. Free-wheeling bachelor and jazz radio DJ Dave Garver (Eastwood) picks up a fan (Julie Walter) in a local bar, but it turns out she’s an obsessive and dangerous nut job.
You can see this film all over later psycho girlfriend flicks, most notably Fatal Attraction, but it was groundbreaking at the time. To watch hard edged action hero Eastwood – in more of a quiet storm mode – visibly frightened by this woman was also a turning point. We’re told the shag haircut sported by Donna Mills also became quite the rage after the film debuted in ’71.
Eastwood capitalizes on something that all the rest of the films on this list pick up – that voice on the radio is actually a person who’s somewhat trapped. You can hear him, but you can’t necessarily help him. He’s both public and isolated. Eastwood’s slow boil direction and Walter’s eerie instability infuse the soft jazz sound with an undercurrent of danger that generates unease in every frame.
2. Chain Reactions (2024)
Not everyone believes Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a masterpiece of American filmmaking. I find those people suspicious. Luckily, those are not the people filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe (Memory: The Origins of Alien, 78/52) talks to for his latest documentary, Chain Reactions.
Philippe’s approach is that of a fan and an investigator. When Patton Oswalt compares Hooper scenes to those from silent horror classics, Philippe split screens the images for our consideration. When Karyn Kusama digs into the importance of the color red, Chain Reactions shows us. We feel the macabre comedy, the verité horror, the beauty and the grotesque.
What you can’t escape is the film’s influence and its craft. The set design should be studied. Hooper’s use of color, his preoccupation with the sun and the moon, the way he juxtaposes images of genuine beauty with the grimmest sights imaginable. Chain Reactions is an absolute treasure of a film for fans of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
1.Misery (1990)
Kathy Bates had been knocking around Hollywood for decades, but no one really knew who she was until she landed Misery. Her sadistic nurturer Annie Wilkes – rabid romance novel fan, part-time nurse, full-time wacko – ranks among the most memorable crazy ladies of modern cinema.
James Caan plays novelist Paul Sheldon, who kills off popular character Misery Chastain, then celebrates with a road trip that goes awry when he crashes his car, only to be saved by his brawniest and most fervent fan, Annie. Well, she’s more a fan of Misery Chastain’s than she is Paul Sheldon’s, and once she realizes what he’s done, she refuses to allow him out of her house until she brings Misery back to literary life.
Caan seethes, and you know there’s an ass-kicking somewhere deep in his mangled body just waiting to get out. But it’s Bates we remember. She nails the bumpkin who oscillates between humble fan, terrifying master, and put-upon martyr. Indeed, both physically and emotionally, she so thoroughly animates this nutjob that she secured an Oscar.
Take the frenetic desperation of The Blair Witch Project‘s final minutes, move it to a more urban battleground and layer it with plenty of first-person shooter sequences, and you’re in the ballpark of Bodycam, director Brandon Christensen’s shaky cam shakedown of two cops and one very bad choice.
Officer Bryce (Sean Rogerson) and officer Jackson (Jamie M. Callica) respond to a domestic dispute, and we follow along thanks to their bodycams. The house is dark and plenty creepy, and things escalate to the point of a fatal shooting. The possible fallout spurs Bryce to panic.
He has too much to lose for this situation to go public and convinces Jackson to help him cover up what happened. But when a techie colleague tries to scrub the cam footage, she notices some strange graffiti on the wall, and realizes it’s already too late to keep the killing a secret.
At least from certain, very scary people.
Uh oh. Bryce and Jackson are in for a bad time.
Christensen (Night of the Reaper, Z, Superhost, The Puppetman), co-writing again with his brother Ryan, doesn’t waste any time getting down to nasty business. And once the 75-minute film hits the midway point, the bloody fun is amped up a notch or three as the two cops come to grips with the promise of retribution for their actions.
“Why couldn’t you have done the right thing?”
In today’s climate, that question from one cop to another carries some serious weight. And though the implications are clear, Christensen is more committed to the repercussions.
Bodycam dishes them out in frenzied, crowd-pleasing glory.
Dallas Richard Hallam’s mesmerizing, beautifully shot, and quietly audacious feature Interaction lulls you, then hypnotizes you. But you have no idea what you’re in for.
House cleaner Rebecca (Suziey Block) hides little recording devices in all the homes she cleans. Never without her headphones, and right under the noses of clients with the means to pay for housekeeping, she listens to their most banal and most intimate moments.
But she listens all the time—in the car, in bed at night. The keepers are even labeled, for when she needs to relax, when she needs to laugh, when she needs a good cry. And for quite a while, this unapologetic invasion of privacy plays like a poetic reflection of modern social isolation.
The quietly beautiful image of loneliness and disconnect is a sleight of hand, though, and the film slowly – with zero exposition – turns more and more sinister.
Nearly the only dialog in the entire film comes from these recordings. When someone does speak, it feels like an invasion. This, too, suggests a director in absolute command of his medium. Though we may believe we have nothing in common with Rebecca, we come to connect with her. We worry when she seems too at home in someone else’s living space, fear that she should remove the headphones before she commits to certain acts, in case someone is around the corner, or returns home unexpectedly.
Hallam tightens tensions minute by minute, so quietly and efficiently you may not even recognize your own anxiety. He’s helped immeasurably by a masterpiece of understatement from Block, whose performance is unnervingly authentic and, for that reason, shocking when it needs to be.
Filmmaker Claire Denis has built an immaculate career making movies about the moments in the story other directors ignore or leave out. The same story is told, she just uses different beats within the same tale to tell it. Hallam, who co-wrote the script with A.P. Boland, approaches the film in much the same way.
At no point does his choice feel like a gimmick, which is success in itself. But when the film begins to veer toward true thriller, when it turns genuinely mean, it’s unsettling in the way a Denis or even a Michael Haneke film might be. Interaction is hard to forget.
Remember the simple genius of 30 Days of Night? Vampires were roaming Alaska, in a town with no sunlight for a month! We all wondered why we didn’t think of that.
LandLord is built on a similarly clever foundation. Vampires have to be invited in, right?
Not if they own the property.
Go on.
Writer/director Remington Smith could have steered that premise toward a basic bite-fest, and it might have been good fun. But here he has something more ambitious in mind, with a patient, understated approach that makes sure the wounds go a little bit deeper.
A Black Bounty Hunter (a terrific Adama Abramson) cuts quite a figure as she travels alone, on foot and dealing only in cash. The bills she throws at the manager of a rundown apartment complex get her some keys with no questions asked, and plenty of time to surveil a man who carries a valuable briefcase.
But a chance meeting with a bullied youngster named Alex (Cohen Cooper) slowly draws the Bounty Hunter away from her mark, and toward Alex’s outrageous claims about a white vampire stalking the housing community.
The apartment setting coupled with the teenage perspective calls to mind 2016’s excellent The Transfiguration, while the prevailing subtext of a disposable population echoes Jorge Michael Grau’s masterful We Are What We Are. Still, Smith is able to make sure his own voice his heard.
LandLord is a story of survival. Getting out alive is going to take wits, courage, and a good friend watching your back. You’ve just got to know who the bloodsuckers are.
