Were The Girl with the Needle any less gorgeous, less poetically filmed or liltingly told, the misery of 1919 Copenhagen might be too grim to bear. But somehow co-writer/director Magnus von Horn’s hypnotic storytelling bathes the nightmare in beauty, compassion, even hope.
Vic Carmen Sonne’s vacant expression gives Karoline an inscrutable quality that suits the character of a young seamstress coming to terms with more and more dire circumstances as WWI ends. Pregnant when her husband, long presumed dead, returns from the war, she faces difficult choices.
Each choice—always a hopeful step toward the promise of something better—is punished in time. Between the grimness of the wartime sufferings, the unreadable expression of the protagonist, and Michal Dymek’s gorgeous black and white cinematography, The Girl with the Needle conjures Václav Marhoul’s 2019 ordeal, The Painted Bird. But von Horn’s story rings with authenticity, partly because he treats the suffering with some distance and restraint, and partly because the story itself is rooted in true events.
Which, of course, only makes the tale that much more difficult. Bravo to the filmmaker and actor Trine Dryholm for treating Dagmar—the woman who represents Karoline’s biggest leap toward something better—the way they do.
Dryholm’s beautifully tormented, conflicted performance never veers toward cliché, or even toward sinister. Though her acts are unthinkably villainous—the stuff of legend and nightmare—they are rooted in a logic that feels honest to the character.
The dual performances transform this true crime horror story into a fable of mothers and children, of collecting and discarding family. Sonne’s childlike trust and Dryholm’s tortured caregiving further distort an image von Horn’s been twisting since his remarkable opening shots.
Mercifully, he ends his film and its portrait of family on a hopeful note. You won’t find much other mercy here, but alongside these powerful performances and mesmerizing storytelling, just a glimmer is enough.
Well, Sasha Rainbow knows for sure that there’s an audience for body horror enraged at the pressure to fit a certain standard of beauty. The fact that her feature debut Grafted will face constant comparisons to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is less of a positive note. (There’s even a scene of someone gorging on shrimp, I swear to God.)
Rainbow introduces us to Wei (played in youth by Mohan Liu) and her father (Sam Wang). Both father and daughter are marked with some kind of red tissue across their faces, and while working on a cure, tragedy strikes, and Wei is left on her own.
Years later, she obtains a scholarship to a university in New Zealand and goes to live with her aunt (Xuai Hu) and cousin, Angela (Jess Hong). Try as she might, Wei (Joyena Sun) cannot fit in with Angela and her beautiful friends (Eden Hart, Sepi To’a), but she has other things on her mind—finishing her father’s research.
Rainbow, who co-wrote the script with Lee Murray and Mia Maramara, wraps social anxiety, assimilation, misogyny, sexual politics, the ludicrous nature of scientific advancement, racism, nationalism and more around Wei’s descent into madness, and it might be just too much to take on in 96 minutes.
Sun, Hong and Hart have fun, making the most of their onscreen personality swapping and Rainbow’s focus is most on target during these sequences. Jared Turner entertains as your typical vain professor, and To’a delivers enough empathy to give the film a touch of humanity.
But Grafted bites off more than it can chew. It too often feels unfocused, random, and superficial. It suffers not only in comparison to Fargeat’s film but to New Zealand’s pretty epic history of body horror.
That doesn’t mean it’s bad. There are some great ideas at work here, and every performance, large and small, brings its own weirdness to the screen. It’s certainly enough to keep me interested in seeing what Rainbow does next.
A lot of people will go into Wolf Man with comparisons to the 1941 Lon Chaney Jr. original on the ready. For Leigh Whannell fans, threads common to his 2020 gem The Invisible Man are easier to connect.
That’s partly because his new lycanthropic adventure is not a reboot, remake, or sequel to the original film, and partly because the underlying metaphor bears a little resemblance to his last movie.
Thirty years ago, young Blake (Zac Chandler) and his frighteningly protective, militia-esque father (Sam Jaeger) go hunting in the deep, isolated, picturesque Oregon woods near their property. They find something, and it isn’t a bear.
Flash forward, and adult Blake (Christopher Abbott)—a doting father to young Ginger (Matilda Firth, named no doubt as nod to Ginger Snaps in an applause worthy move)—gets the paperwork. His dad is finally, officially considered dead. He went into the woods some years back and just never came out. Now Blake, Ginger, and Blake’s wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) need to head back to Oregon to take care of the old farm.
Abbott and Garner hold the film’s insistent metaphor in check even when Whannell’s dialog (co-written with Corbett Tuck) veers a little too close to obvious. Blake is a good man, a kind man, a loving father—could he have enough of his old man in him to mean violence to the women in his life?
Whannell’s instinct for horror set pieces and claustrophobic action wring that metaphor for all the tension it’s worth in the second act. But by Act 3, when the tortured love of a monster feels more akin to Cronenberg’s The Fly (due partly to Whannell’s writing, partly to Arjen Tuiten’s monster design), the allegory begins to crumble under its own weight.
Although many viewers may have already checked out due to that creature design.
There is a tidy little gift of thrills here, very traditionally constructed with limited complications, allowing for a bit more depth of character. But it all feels slight, and outside of some nifty bits of action, overwrought.
After a series of memorable supporting roles (including Thirteen, Funny Games, and Melancholia), Brady Corbet took a step toward filmmaking in 2012 as co-writer and star of the creepily effective Antonio Campos thriller Simon Killer. He moved behind the camera for The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and Vox Lux (2018), teaming with his co-writer and wife Mona Fastvold for two captivating features anchored in history.
But as impressive as Corbet’s filmography has been so far, the audacious scope (three and a half hours, with an intermission) and ambitious craftsmanship (Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley shoot in 70mm VistaVision – out of date in American since the early 60s) of The Brutalist arrives as an utterly shocking step forward. And even when it teeters on a late, self-indulgent precipice, the film heralds Corbet and Fastvold as filmmakers of impressive vision and skill.
Though their characters are again changed by history, this time they give those characters more of a chance to shape it. We arrive in post-WWII America with László Tóth (an astounding Adrien Brody), a Hungarian who has survived the Nazi concentration camps and come to work with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) in a Pennsylvania furniture store. Corbet’s gorgeous upside-down framing of the Statue of Liberty foreshadows both Tóth’s future in a new land and the nimble camerawork to come, with the memorable scale from Daniel Blumberg’s majestic score signaling the increasing stakes.
László has lost much to wartime trauma, and Brody makes the pain palpable. But as he waits for word as to when his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones, never better) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) may join him in America, László holds tight to his pride from working as a celebrated architect in Budapest.
When local tycoon Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce, terrific as the film’s Daniel Day-Lewis) learns of László’s talent, he hires him to design a long desired community center. The project will come to consume László’s very existence.
Corbet assembles the saga in two chapters, and after a fairly straightforward setup in Act One, motives and messaging become more abstract. On the surface is an epic tale of post war America’s give and take relationship with its immigrants, of beauty and art surviving the worst of humanity and of the deep complexities within the American capitalist dream. And if it stopped there, The Brutalist would stand as a grand achievement. But László isn’t the only architect thinking very big here, and Corbet builds up Act Two (and the accompanying epilogue) with grand ideas on personal legacy, Jewish history, sexual repression, power and shame, and ultimately, more questions than he’s intending to answer.
Corbet’s direction also becomes more insistent, adding shots that move away from what his characters would naturally notice to stress elements for audience benefit. The gorgeous photography, muscular framing and powerful performances ensure nothing goes to waste, but a road to a grand and profound statement begins to gather some stones.
While the film does feel overlong, it is never boring, as nearly every frame contains something, or someone, intriguing. Zsófia’s arc – that of a girl rendered mute from wartime trauma who grows to reclaim her destiny – could fuel its own feature film, as could Attila’s path to assimilation, and any number of supporting characters adding memorable moments to the landscape.
And The Brutalist is nothing if not memorable. Though the sheer accomplishment may stand a bit taller than the final statement, it cements Corbet as a voice that cannot be ignored.
The life of Terry Masear and the lives of the hummingbirds she cares for are the subject of director Sally Aitken’s documentary, Every Little Thing.
Deep in the heart of Los Angeles, Aitken manages to capture a pastoral beauty in the area as she documents Terry’s efforts to rehabilitate injured hummingbirds. Many of the hummingbirds that come Terry’s way are nestlings who have lost their mothers. Others have suffered an injury of sorts, such as being hit by a car or attacked by another hummingbird.
As we watch Terry’s day-to-day routine – feeding, caring for, and even rehabilitating wing injuries – we get snippets of her past. She talks warmly and lovingly about her late husband and his support for her endeavors to help the birds.
However, there are moments throughout the documentary that speak to deeper trauma, and this is a tough documentary for the tender-hearted. Though Terry’s compassion for the birds comes through in the way she handles and speaks to them, she has a brusqueness that conveys all too well that not every bird brought to her is going to survive.
If you can tough out the harder, more devastating parts of the documentary, though, you’re rewarded with several wonderful moments. Slow-motion video of hummingbirds in flight show that even slowed down, their wings move with remarkable speed and agility. Flowers bloom on screen, showcasing the beauty the natural world has to offer.
And Terry’s empathy for these tiny, magical marvels of nature is a joy to behold. She addresses each bird by name and knows them all. There is something truly beautiful in what Terry does, and Aitken captures it all with warmth and sincerity. Almost as if to balance out the speed with which a hummingbird moves, the film asks the audience to slow down, to appreciate the world around us. Especially when our tiny heroes can disappear in the blink of an eye.
There’s something inherently satisfying when the everyman gets sucked into extraordinary circumstances. We all knew that Rambo wasn’t going to get killed by the bad guy. John Wayne didn’t get offed in a movie until near the end of his movie-making career. Did that necessarily dampen my enjoyment of any of those movies? Nope! However, it’s equally gratifying to see an Average Joe like John McClane drop Hans Gruber off of Nakatomi Tower.
College student Mady (Jonathan Feltre) spends his nights working as a locksmith to make ends meet. It’s a thankless job that puts him into contact with people in stressful situations and short tempers. Being the nice guy that he is, Mady bends protocol ever so slightly when opening an apartment for Claire (Natacha Krief). As Mady waits in the newly unlocked apartment for Claire to pay him, the real resident arrives and is none too pleased. From that moment on, Mady’s night turns into a break-neck race for survival.
Action movies are all about energy. The best of the bunch (think Die Hard, First Blood, HardBoiled) are symphonies of exciting sequences. Even their quieter – character based – moments can get the blood pumping. Night Call director Michiel Blanchart understands this and barely gives the audience any breathing room for 97 minutes. Given that this isn’t a big-budget film, Blanchart leans into character and clever plotting to wring out every ounce of tension that he can. That said, there’s still a pretty gnarly car chase and a few brutal fights.
Mady might be an everyman but he’s not without agency. The character is willing to do whatever it takes to survive. The audience is right there with Mady and his frustration and anger at being sucked into a situation that has nothing to do with him. The script – and Feltre’s performance – never questions Mady’s intelligence or drive. It’s a breath of fresh air in an era where a lot of action movies like to take the piss out of their leading men.
Night Call is Blanchart’s first feature-film and it’s one hell of a debut. From delivering a tight script, to knowing how to shoot and edit action that flows, Blanchart has shown that he understands the nuts and bolts of action cinema.
While it might not even match the catering budget of the latest Bond film, what Night Call has unquestionably is a copious amount of energy and creativity.
The films of Pedro Almodóvar often boast a mischievous wit that could, in other filmmakers’ hands, feel out of step with the source material. He seems able to infuse this magic into everything, no matter how serious or dire. Even his wonderful 2011 horror film The Skin I Live In possesses a whimsy that turns the bleakest moments into bold poetry.
The auteur’s latest, The Room Next Door, enters territory that pushes back against whimsy. The film follows the relationship between Martha (Tilda Swinton) and Ingrid (Julianne Moore), estranged friends who reconnect sometime after Martha’s cervical cancer diagnosis.
There are certain Almodóvar trademarks you can expect to find on full display. The Room Next Door is a movie about women, about intimate moments between women, about complicated relationships and enduring tenderness between women. It also boasts sumptuous color and vivid imagery evoking (sometimes quite intentionally) masterpieces of modern art.
There is also, characteristically, more than a little melodrama.
It is tough to imagine anything going amiss with that team of collaborators. This marks the first time the filmmaker has worked with Moore, and her first teaming with Swinton (who was showcased so gloriously in Almodóvar’s 2020 short, The Human Voice). The idea of spending a couple of beautifully framed hours with these three undisputed masters is endlessly appealing, no matter the subject.
But the subject and how to grapple with it does keep the film from entirely succeeding. Act 1 becomes a stagey slog of exposition, full of contrivance to allow the entire backstory to be laid out. There’s also a clumsy b-story involving a former lover (John Turturro). Once the film begins to build a lovely atmosphere that lets its leads shine, these moments with Turturro feel like abrupt, unwanted distractions.
Jarring storylines is nothing new in the Spanish filmmaker’s canon, but perhaps the language barrier limited his ability to conjure the necessary magic to balance things.
The Room Next Door is no failure, not at all. It offers a beautiful meditation on mature female relationships, loss, acceptance, and an incredibly smart philosophy on the fight against death. But with the boundless talent involved, it left me wanting more.
They say you can’t go home again. Horror filmmakers are more apt to say that you shouldn’t. For our latest episode, we look at some of horror cinema’s most memorable homecomings.
5. Coming Home in the Dark (2021)
Making his feature debut with the road trip horror Coming Home in the Dark, James Ashcroft is carving out a very different style of Kiwi horror than the splatter comedy you may be expecting.
A family is enjoying some time alone in the countryside when approached by two armed drifters. A car passes without incident. Mandrake (Danielle Gillies, chilling) say, “Looking back on today’s events, I think this will be the moment you realized you should have done something.”
Riveting, tricky storytelling to the last shot keeps you on your toes.
4. Salem’s Lot (1979)
Novelist Ben Mears decides to focus his next book on that creepy old Marsten House from his hometown of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine. At around the same time he arrives, townspeople start dying and disappearing. It could only be Ben, or the antique store owner Richard Straker, who bought the old Marsten hours in the first place.
Tobe Hooper’s miniseries version of the Stephen King novel is still the best retelling. So many individual images stand out: the kid at the window, the Count Orlock (original) style vampire, the always saucy James Mason.
3. Possum (2018)
Sean Harris is endlessly sympathetic in this tale of childhood trauma. Philip (Harris) has returned to his burned out, desolate childhood home after some unexplained professional humiliation. His profession? Puppeteer. The puppet itself seems to be a part of the overall problem.
I don’t know why the single creepiest puppet in history—a man-sized marionnette with a human face and spider’s body—could cause any trouble. Kids can be so delicate.
Writer/director Matthew Holness spins a smalltown mystery around the sad story of a grown man who is confused about what’s real and what isn’t. The melancholy story and Harris’s exceptional turn make Possum a tough one to forget.
2. The Orphanage (2007) Laura (Belén Rueda) and her husband reopen the orphanage where she grew up, with the goal of running a house for children with special needs – children like her adopted son Simón, who is HIV positive. But Simón’s new imaginary friends worry Laura, and when he disappears it looks like she may be imagining things herself.
A scary movie can be elevated beyond measure by a masterful score and an artful camera. Because director Antonio Bayona keeps the score and all ambient noise to a minimum, allowing the quiet to fill the scenes, he develops a truly haunting atmosphere. His camera captures the eerie beauty of the stately orphanage, but does it in a way that always suggests someone is watching. The effect is never heavy handed, but effortlessly eerie.
One of the film’s great successes is its ability to take seriously both the logical, real world story line, and the supernatural one. Rueda carries the film with a restrained urgency – hysterical only when necessary, focused at all times, and absolutely committed to this character, who may or may not be seeing ghosts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7FD6tR6zOc
1. Halloween (1978)
The night he came home.
No film is more responsible for the explosion of teen slashers than John Carpenter’s babysitter butchering classic.
From the creepy opening piano notes to the disappearing body ending, this low budget surprise changed everything. Carpenter develops anxiety like nobody else, and plants it right in a wholesome Midwestern neighborhood. You don’t have to go camping or take a road trip or do anything at all – the boogeyman is right there at home.
Michael Myers – that hulking, unstoppable, blank menace – is scary. Pair that with the down-to-earth charm of lead Jamie Lee Curtis, who brought a little class and talent to the genre, and add the bellowing melodrama of horror veteran Donald Pleasance, and you’ve hit all the important notes. Just add John Carpenter’s spare score to ratchet up the anxiety. Perfect.
We also want to thank Derek Stewart for sharing his short film Possum with us! If you didn’t get to join us for Fright Club Live, give yourself the gift of his amazing animated short:
You’ve never seen a film quite like RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys. The filmmaker, with an inspired Jomo Fray behind the camera, delivers a visual poem of tragedy, resilience and American history.
Ross, along with Joslyn Barnes, adapts Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, but brings such human and humane treatment that the nonfiction roots cannot be ignored. Whitehead wrote about the Dozier School for Boys—the same American institution that fueled Tananarive Due’s horror novel, Reformatory. But Ross does not mine the institution’s 110-year history of dehumanization, abuse and murder for horror. Instead, he shows us how powerful that evil was by allowing us to see it through the eyes of two best friends.
You might find point-of-view filmmaking in bursts in other films—Michael Myers watching his sister through the eye holes of his Halloween costume, for example. But Ross never deviates, never leaves the most intimate and personal perspective of the events unfolding. His camera represents either the view from Elwood’s (Ethan Herisse) own eyes, or his best friend Turner’s (Brandon Wilson).
Elwood’s a good kid, smart, kind, and devoted to his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and we see what he sees in lyrical bursts: a party in his childhood, his grandmother praying for him, successes and trials at school, an opportunity to begin college while he’s still in high school, the approach of white police officers, incarceration, the first small piece of kindness offered by a fellow teenage inmate.
And then, for the first time, we truly see Elwood because the camera becomes that one friend, Turner. This is not Turner’s first run-in with the law. He’s begrudgingly protective of the innocent Elwood.
The perspective shift, the elements of Whitehead’s novel that made it seem too difficult to adapt, becomes Nickel Boys’ greatest strength. You cannot watch this film and distance yourself from the injustices or from the small joys. This remarkable subjective intimacy is what made Ross’s documentaries so magical and moving—you come away with a personal relationship with the film and its subject because you have born witness as the subject.
Wilson, Herisse and Ellis-Taylor guarantee that the style is more than gimmick, bringing their characters so tenderly to life that their story will devastate you. The story of a school that dehumanized and murdered Black young men for over 100 years should do that.
