Outtakes

High in the Middle

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Eenie Meanie

by Hope Madden

Remember how great Cleveland looked in Superman? Writer/director Shawn Simmons takes us back to The Land, as well as to Toledo, for his thriller set among Ohio’s low rent criminal underbelly, Eenie Meanie.

It’s not exactly as tourism friendly as Superman.

Samara Weaving is Edie, and when we meet her, she’s really struggling to make something of her life. A day job as a bank clerk, night classes, maxed out credit cards, bleary nights studying. And then her one mistake—she stops by to share some news with her ex, John (Karl Glusman, The Bikeriders, Watcher).

But John’s gotten himself into some trouble. And try as she might to leave him and his trouble behind, the semi-fatherly crime lord she used to work for (Andy Garcia, delightful) will kill John unless Edie saves him. And to do that, she falls back on some old skills as a getaway driver in a big score.

Simmons has crafted a fun, twisty, funny thriller full of sharp turns. Weaving effortlessly carries the film as the tenderhearted badass who knows better. Glusman is infuriatingly excellent as that epic dumbass you want to smack but can’t help but hug. And maybe also smack.

Solid support from Garcia, Steve Zahn, Mike O’Malley, and Randall Park fills every scene with laughs, pathos, violence, and fun. But it’s the sly way Simmons braids together tales of co-dependence, trauma, loyalty, and resilience that gives Eenie Meanie unexpected heft.

Weaving has proven her genre moxie again and again (Ready or Not, Mayhem, The Babysitter, Guns Akimbo, Azrael), so it comes as no surprise that she brings the goods as the lead in an action comedy thriller. What’s impressive is the honesty and the genuine emotional conflict she expresses within this relationship.

She and Glusman revel in the dysfunction, played for exasperated laughs in the early going. But as Simmons tale develops, unveiling more of their relationship and backstory, that same chemistry takes on a relevance and power that allows Eenie Meanie to deliver a climax more powerful than you might expect.

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Suspicious Minds

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Eden

by George Wolf

Eden tells a fascinating story. And it tells that story in a star-studded, well-crafted way that’s rarely dull, even when the weight of its melodrama gets heavy enough to be nearly undone by the film’s parting shot.

Director Ron Howard joins co-writer Noah Pink to recount a historical tale “inspired by the accounts of those who survived” as a parable of greed, power, suspicion and annoying neighbors.

“Democracy, Fascism, war. Repeat.” So yeah, still plenty timely.

In the years just after WW1, Dr. Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) and his partner, Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby), left civilization for a hardscrabble existence on the Galapagos Island of Floreana. Convinced that mankind was finished, Ritter became determined to write a new philosophy that would save humanity from itself, and in pain…find salvation.

His writings were picked up by the occasional passing ship, eventually attracting quite a following among others looking for a new life. And that, of course, led to the very thing Ritter didn’t want on his island: more people.

Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Brühl), and his wife Margaret (Sydney Sweeney) arrive first, inspired by Ritter’s vision and hoping for a better climate for their son Harry’s (Jonathan Wittel) tuberculosis.

The Wittmers – especially Margaret – prove tougher than Ritter imagines, but the Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas, scene-stealing and never better) is a larger-than-life problem no one expected.

The Baroness arrives on Floreana with servants/lovers and a grand plan to build an ulta-exclusive hotel for the wealthiest of tourists. De Armas digs in, crafting her as a shameless narcissist, so ruthless and sociopathic that she’d be cartoonishly absurd if not for the gaslighting cult of personality we wake up to every day.

The entire cast shines. And like her or don’t, Sweeney continues to impress with another film that challenges her range and physicality (Margaret must fight off wild dogs and give birth alone…damn!) while eschewing any shades of empty pinup girl glamour.

The running time pushes well past 90 minutes, but Howard keeps things humming right along. The dangerous motives, shifting alliances and double crosses create an over the top, sometimes darkly funny concoction that pulls us in, fascinated by who will emerge the victor in this battle for the unhappy high ground.

And when the inevitable historical update arrives with the credits, we see footage of the actual people who fought this fight…and they’re laughing, smiling, waving! Like the surprising Maria Callas footage in last year’s Maria, you wonder where these happy people have been hiding the last two hours.

Bet they could have shed more light on what life was really like on the island of lost smiles.

But would they have been as much primal, pulpy fun?

Outtakes

Bagheads

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We’re Not Safe Here

by Hope Madden

The nightmarish images and unsettling sound design of writer/director Solomon Gray’s We’re Not Safe Here more than make up for its narrative stumbles.

A lot of films open on a scene of horror to be contextualized later in the movie. Likewise, Solomon sets the stage early with a swift, troubling little gem of a horror show. But interestingly, the tale he builds around it taps into a terror more subconscious and dreamlike than what you might expect.

Sharmita Bhattacharya is Neeta, a schoolteacher by day/artist by night who’s been unable to get started on her latest painting. Frustrated at the easel one night, she’s surprised by a visit from Rachel (Hayley McFarland), another teacher who’s been missing. Frantic and increasingly panicked, Rachel spills a story that began in her childhood. Something she thought she’d lost has found her again.

Aside from some very intimidating figures wearing bloody pillowcases over their heads (creepy!), We’re Not Safe Here is primarily a two-person show. McFarland is masterful, her paranoid madness tipped with a teacher’s command of the room. She’s mesmerizing.

Bhattacharya struggles a bit. Neeta is also troubled, and the performance feels stiff and unsure until the character gives into her demons. But there are moments between the two of them that are deeply upsetting. I mean that in a good way.

Gray’s use of setting—Neeta’s home, every wall cluttered with her sketches and paintings, every surface littered with books—creates a busy, fascinating space rich with potentially spookiness. A meandering camera and effective sound design capitalizes on what the set design has crafted: a lovingly lived-in space turned suddenly suspicious. The filmmaker evokes a kind of paranoia that feeds the perfect atmosphere for his film.

There’s a looseness to the script that often serves the film’s maniacal undercurrent. What’s delusion? What’s really happening? And is it contagious?

Gray refuses to fit all the pieces together, a choice that mostly pays off. The act structure and finale are rigid enough to give the tale a feel of completion. While a lingering vagueness in the backstory is frustrating, it also allows the imagination to veer into its own halls of madness.

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Don’t Speak

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Relay

by Hope Madden

It’s been nearly a decade since director David Mackenzie’s brilliant neo-Western Hell or High Water delivered a moseying goodbye to a long-gone, romantic notion of manhood. After a successful run of TV series and miniseries, Mackenzie’s back to the big screen with the twisty thriller, Relay.

Riz Ahmed stars, though he does not speak for at least twenty minutes and we don’t learn his character’s name until the final act, as a professional middleman. Whistleblowers who turn coward under the pressure of big, ugly corporate malfeasance and cover ups rely on him to broker deals. Evildoers get back all the evidence and, for a fee, they leave their former employee alone forever. Riz keeps a copy, just to be sure everybody sticks to the deal.

What’s most important is that nobody—not the client, not the company—ever knows who Riz is. Is this middleman a man? Is it a woman? Is it a group of interchangeable people? In a clever conceit, the middleman uses a relay service intended to help the Deaf and hearing-impaired conduct phone calls, which keeps all connection to client and company separate, untraceable, and unrecorded.

That’s a good setup, and Mackenzie—working from a lean script by Justin Piasecki—takes care to show us what we need to know, regardless of his very quiet leading man.

Ahmed is characteristically excellent, easily carrying the film in silence until Act 2. His performance is nimble, clever enough to trust that he’s one step ahead, vulnerable enough to believe he has a weakness. That’s Lily James, the would-be whistleblower who just wants her life back.

Though the two rarely share the screen, they do share a lonesome chemistry that elevates moments of contrivance in an otherwise taut piece of double crossing, out maneuvering, and personal growth.

A game supporting cast including Sam Worthington, Willa Fitzgerald, Jared Abrahahamson, and Matthew Maher keeps the surprises, tension, and humanity blooming. But it’s Ahmed whose wounded performance captures your sometimes breathless attention for the full 112 minutes.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Weapons

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Thought we’d veer slightly off course to take a deeper dive into Zach Cregger’s latest horror hit, Weapons. Poet and horror fan Scott Woods joins us!

Weapons

by Hope Madden

I’m not saying that Barbarian was anything less than a creepy, disturbing good time. Writer/director Zach Cregger’s 2022 bizarre, brutal minefield of surprises announced him as a master of misdirection, unsettling humor, and horror of the nastiest sort.

I’m just saying Weapons takes a lot of what worked in that film and sharpens it to a spooky edge. No throw-away laughs, no grotesque b-movie shenanigans, just an elaborate mystery slowly revealing itself, ratcheting tension, and leading to a bloody satisfying climax.

Unspooling as an epilogue followed by character-specific chapters, the film builds around a single event, developing dread as it delivers character studies of a town of hapless, fractured, flawed individuals in over their heads.

Julia Garner anchors the tale as a 3rd grade teacher who arrives to class one fateful morning with only one student in the room. Aside from little Alex (Cary Christopher, heartbreaking), none of Mrs. Gandy’s class made it to school today because every single one of them left their beds at 2:17 that morning to vanish into the night.

Since she’s what the kids have in common, the town suspects that she is to blame. This is especially true of young Matthew’s dad, Archer (Josh Brolin), who also gets a chapter.

As it did in Barbarian, this character-by-character approach allows for new information to bleed into what the audience knows, rather than what the characters know. But as each new tale opens our eyes to the mystery, it also lets this solid cast work with Cregger’s game writing to do some remarkable character work. Brolin’s angry, grieving confusion rings painfully true. And Garner seems to relish the opportunity to explore Mrs. Gandy’s unlikeable side.

Benedict Wong contributes the sweetest, and therefore most unfortunate, performance, but it’s the way Cregger lets each actor breathe and settle into idiosyncrasies and failings that keeps you invested. It’s the dark humor that’s most unsettling.

This is smartly crafted, beautifully acted horror. Those who worry Cregger’s left nasty genre work behind for something more elevated need not fear. As crafty as this film is, there’s not a lot of metaphor or social consciousness afoot. Weapons is just here to work your nerves, make you gasp, and shed some blood. It does it pretty well.

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Viva la Revolution

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Sudan, Remember Us

by Rachel Willis

“Each time one revolutionary falls a thousand others stand up!”

Sudan has appeared in the news off-and-on for years. The region has been plagued by coups, civil war, terrorism, genocide, and oppression of anyone who dared resist the regimes in power.

It’s poignant for Hind Meddeb to name her documentary Sudan, Remember Us, as she forces our attention once again to a region plagued by war and uncertainty.

A bit of history may be helpful for those unfamiliar with situation in Sudan. The coup that overthrew the 30-year rule of President Omar al-Bashir in 2019 was meant to lead to democratic, civilian rule. But the military council set up to act as a transitionary government has not released its hold on the citizens of the Sudan. The film assumes a certain knowledge, but even without any historical knowledge, it’s clear what the people want and who they resist.

For several young activists and artists living in Khartoum, the fight for democracy is a daily battle. Meddeb drops us into the realities of a sit-in, a form of civil disobedience. She lets several men and women speak to why they demand change. They discuss the best ways to protest, to keep fighting when those in power want to break them.

The footage of the sit-in is juxtaposed with a military crackdown, accompanied by scenes of chaos. Gunshots, explosions, and beatings are caught on camera phones, many wielded by the perpetrators of the violence. It’s a disturbing reaction to the peaceful nature of the sit-in.

The scenes of viciousness help underscore the words of the protestors who speak to the importance of continuing to oppose the military government. They recite poetry, sing songs, march, and find as many ways as they can to register their disapproval with the situation as it stands.

The ways in which Meddeb allows these young men and women to open up, sometimes addressing her directly, creates an intimacy between the audience and the participants. The film does as much as it can to make us feel like we’re witnessing history as it unfolds, even as the result remains uncertain.

It’s a powerful testament to the importance of film (and art in general) in the making of history.

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Holiday Road

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Nobody 2

by Hope Madden

Hutch still has trouble getting the trash out on time, but other than that, his life is considerably different than it was four years ago when Nobody turned Bob Odenkirk into an action star and Odenkirk turned the film into the most watchable riff on John Wick ever.

Hutch’s wife Becca (Connie Nielsen) has accepted her husband’s line of work, but that doesn’t make it any easier that he is never home. Where once he was the center of his household, now he watches from the curb, garbage bag in hand, as each member of his family goes their own way without him.

Not today! Nope, Hutch is going to take his family to the very spot that meant so much to him as a kid: Summerville. It’s a water sliding, amusement parking, duck-boat riding Midwest tourist trap where nothing could possibly go wrong.

Unless this is a sequel to a fun “particular set of skills” actioner, which it is, so instead Hutch and his family stumble into a duck-boatload of trouble.

Director Timo Tjahjanto, known mainly for Indonesian folk horror, directs this with a cheery energy that may not match Ilya Naishuller’s original in terms of action, but it does the job.

Odenkirk still cuts a funny figure as an action star, and he makes Hutch’s longing for a nice, normal family feel sad and sweet.

Nielsen continues to impress in an underwritten role, and Sharon Stone lends some fun villainy, although both are hampered by the script. Derek Kolstad, working this time with Aaron Rabin, has no idea how to write women because he is so hyper-focused on the fact that these characters are women. We don’t always have to refer to our gender when we speak. No one needs to call themselves a bitch or a mama bear. It’s just a lazy man (or two) not working very hard to craft actual characters.

Still, supporting work from John Ortiz, RZA and Colin Hanks helps to offset the problem, and the whole she-bang ends in a cheap amusement part, which is undeniably fun.

Plus, who doesn’t want to see Christopher Lloyd with a Tommy gun? Isn’t that what summer is all about?

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Daddy Issues

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Descendent

by Hope Madden

Vampires are scary. Werewolves. Clowns! Clowns are scary. Dudes in horse head masks. You know what’s scarier still? Those last weeks leading to the birth of your first child. Damn, nothing on earth will make you feel more unprepared or likelier to die (if the baby is in your belly) than that.

Andrea (Sarah Bolger) and Sean (Ross Marquand) are feeling it. Andrea’s about 8 weeks out, and it would seem Sean’s biggest anxiety is the worry that his gig as a private school security guard won’t cut it. But as writer/director Peter Cilella slowly unveils information in his sci-fi thriller Descendent, we learn there’s a lot more plaguing Sean than underemployment.

Climbing on the roof of the school one evening to change a lightbulb, Sean is mesmerized by a light in the sky. The next thing he knows, he’s in a hospital bed trying to shake nightmares of an alien abduction and get his head straight so he can get back to work and stop being a burden on his very pregnant wife.

But Sean is not the same since the fall. Or since whatever happened that night on the roof.

Cilella shows sharp instincts for creating trippy tension. His script manages to blur reality without abandoning logic. More importantly, as Sean’s jarring bouts of unreality reach a crescendo, Cilella never lets go of the truth of the film’s emotional core. We are all terrified to become parents.

Bolger makes sure Andrea is always a partner, a full character, never the beleaguered but supportive wife. These two feel like an actual married couple, buddies and partners, each shielding the other from their own fear of inadequacy. But Descendent rises and falls with Marquand.

Haunted and occasionally frightening without ever losing your compassion, Marquand’s authentic and sympathetic performance grounds the fantastical and allows the metaphor at the center of the horror to ring true.

Descendent is an impressive piece of homegrown intergalactic horror worth your time.

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Feels Like Injustice

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The Knife

by George Wolf

Suspicion, fear, perception and manipulation all converge in The Knife, a briskly-paced thriller that examines action and consequence as it picks at the scabs of modern anxieties.

This is the feature debut as a director and co-writer (with Mark Duplass) for Nnamdi Asomugha, a former NFL star who began a second career in film shortly before his playing career ended in 2013. Asomugha also stars as Chris, a construction worker whose night – and maybe life – is quickly unraveling.

After some very late night flirting that gives us a warm and effective introduction to the characters, Chris and his wife Alex (Aja Naomi King) decide they’re just too damn tired for any sexy time. They’ve got three young kids in the house, and that morning alarm is coming way too soon.

But sleep has to wait thanks to some bumps in the night. Chris gets up to investigate, and finds a strange, haggard woman in his kitchen. By the time Alex arrives for backup, the old woman is unconscious on the floor with a knife nearby, and Chris doesn’t remember what happened.

Alex is plenty wary of inviting cops into the situation, but things could get worse if they don’t. So their “bad” neighborhood gets lit up with cruisers, and Detective Carlsen (Oscar winner Melissa Leo) arrives to ask some increasingly difficult questions.

There are issues raised about memory, medications in the house and whether or not that knife may have been tampered with. Asomugha and Duplass make sure these can seem justified, just as much as the interrogations feel escalated by assumption and profiling.

With a run time of barely 80 minutes, the most glaring weakness in The Knife is its lack of investment in a more satisfying payoff. The tension is relatable and relevant, with complexities of truth-gathering added organically until a nice little pot of motivational stew is boiling. It’s enough to make you eager for a memorable, world weary punch that never gets thrown.

Though it feels unfinished, Asomugha’s step up the film ladder is taut, self-contained and promising. The Knife may ultimately offer more questions than answers, but the conversations it could start are well worth having.

Hope Madden and George Wolf … get it?