Screening Room: Haunting in Venice, Love at First Sight, Canary, Cassandro, Satanic Hispanics & More
Mucha Lucha
Cassandro
by Hope Madden
There’s rarely a good reason to miss a performance from Gael García Bernal. Even when the material around him doesn’t exactly work, he always does. His performances tend to be marked with a quietly observant, charming resilience.
In Cassandro, the narrative feature debut from documentarian Roger Ross Williams, Bernal amplifies that charm and resilience with an energy and magnetism that dares you to look away.
Bernal plays Saúl Armendáriz, a real life El Paso amateur lucha librador. Saúl loves wrestling, loves his mother, quietly loves another closeted librador, but wants more. Because of his size, he’s been pegged a “runt” which means, in the pre-determined and choreographed matches, he must always lose.
He doesn’t want to lose.
What Williams and Bernal channel is lucha libre – this unusual and rarely represented world – as a microcosm for society. The odds are stacked against Saúl. He cannot win. It’s not allowed. It’s not the role he gets to play.
So, he decides 1) to find a really good trainer (Roberta Colindrez, understated and excellent), and 2) play the “exotico” – that is, a wrestler who performs in drag.
Exoticos never, ever get to win.
And yet, the persona allows Saúl to be a little bolder, a little louder, a more vivid version of himself. It’s empowering. Cassandro still has to lose to the likes of El Gigántico because “lucha libre is a fairy tale and good must always triumph over evil.” But as his skill and charisma earn him fans, suddenly that old fairy tale feels less important to the promoters who decide match outcomes.
Ross’s documentarian instincts serve the film beautifully, as the world of lucha libre is never treated as a sideshow. There’s humor here, but we laugh with characters rather than at them. And though Cassandro hits the beats you’d expect from a dramatic biopic journey, moments feel authentic rather than manipulated for dramatic effect.
The entire ensemble shines, but Bernal owns the screen, his ever present smile a heartbreaking and beautiful image of the resilience and determination that fueled an icon of wrestling and LGBTQ culture.
Going Home Again
Amerikatsi
by Rachel Willis
With the historical drama Amerikatsi, writer, director and star Michael Goorjian explores the harsh, sometimes funny, reality of life in Soviet Armenia during the 1930s.
During the Armenian Genocide, four-year-old Charlie is smuggled out of Armenia and sent to the United States. He returns to his homeland as an adult (Goorjian) after Joseph Stalin offers survivors of the genocide scattered around the world a chance to return to Soviet Armenia.
However, after saving a young boy from a mob, Charlie runs afoul of a soldier who doesn’t like his public displays of religiosity or his Americanism. Accused of spying for the United States, Charlie is sentenced to ten years hard labor.
Charlie finds comfort in the view from the window of his cell: a glimpse into the lives of an Armenian couple. This unexpected view allows him the chance to form a connection with the outside world. It’s this link that sustains him during his imprisonment.
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Goorjian elicits humor where he can find it. There’s an absurdity to Charlie’s circumstances that skirts the line between the comedy and the tragedy. The score often emphasizes the irrationality of both Soviet hypocrisy and the day-to-day realities of life in a gulag.
At times the humor almost undermines the historical tragedies on which the film is based. But there are also moments when we truly feel for Charlie and his plight. The tightrope Goorjian walks between humor and heartache emphasizes his skills as both an actor and a director. The supporting cast, particularly Hovik Keuchkerian, helps the film strike the right balance.
There is also genuine feeling for Armenia and its people peppered throughout the film. Despite Charlie’s treatment at the hands of the Soviets, he can’t ignore the overwhelming pull he feels for the country of his origin.
At its heart, Amerikatsi requires the audience believe in the power of both human connection and hope. To weary the audience with too much focus on the tragedy of life while ignoring the joy would hamper the film’s message.
In the end, Goorjian delivers a heartfelt love letter to Armenia and the resilience of its people.
Blood in an Elevator
Elevator Game
by Hope Madden
Urban legends, paranormal hunter shows, teens making bad decisions – Rebekah McKendry’s Elevator Game rehashes a lot of ideas but banks on a new game and villain to elevate the familiar.
Elevate, get it? It’s in an elevator.
Which, to be honest, seems like the first missed opportunity because McKendry chooses not to heighten claustrophobic tensions by trapping anyone with a monster in a tiny, enclosed box suspended in midair.
Huh.
Instead, gullible thrill seekers (and the hosts of a paranormal investigation show) follow the rules of the online sensation, the elevator game. Press a specific sequence of floors. When it’s finally time to press the button for floor #5, keep your eyes closed the whole time. Do that and the 5th Floor Lady will pull your car up to the 10th floor for a glimpse of her red world.
Sneak a peek instead of keeping your eyes closed and you – and anyone else sorry enough to ride the elevator with you – will face nasty consequences.
There’s an effective backstory explaining the origins of the 5th Floor Lady and an occasionally impressive use of shadow. But McKendry’s network TV style staging and drama leach all tension from the story.
Not one actor convinces as a high school student, nor do most of them convince as long-term best friends or even as frightened prey. David Ian McKendry and Travis Seppala’s dialog doesn’t help.
Nazarly Demkowicz comes off best, playing the gang’s occult-nerdy camera operator, Matty. His performance borders on comic relief, but offers more nuance than what you can expect from the balance of the cast.
McKendry’s 2022 WTF horror Glorious, while flawed, spilled over with imagination and sewage in equal measure. Elevator Game is in want of more imagination. (The sewage would really be out of place, though.)
Nightmares in a Damaged Subgenre
Megalomaniac
by Daniel Baldwin
Martha (Eline Schumacher) and Felix (Benjamin Ramon) are the children of the legendary uncaught serial killer The Butcher of Mons. Each of these siblings contends with their family legacy in different ways. Martha works as a janitor amongst coworkers who treat her with contempt. Meanwhile, Felix has taken up his deceased patriarch’s monstrous profession: kidnapping, torturing, killing, and dismembering women.
Their home life is not great. Neither talks to the other much, with Felix insisting on living in near total seclusion from his sister, despite residing in the same home. Both have frequent hallucinations tailored to their individual fractured psyches as they live out their own private hells. That is, until things go south at Martha’s job. A violent encounter forces Martha and Felix together, sending them down an even more vicious and crazed path.
If any of that sounds cliched, it’s because it very much is. What we have here in Megalomaniac is a film homaging both violent ‘70s exploitation and ‘00s New French Extremity cinema. The latter in particular. The fingerprints of modern classics such Martyrs, Frontier(s), and High Tension are on full display here, as well as doses of older influences like Lustig’s Maniac and Scavolini’s Nightmares. Brutal, broken killers take out their rage on unsuspecting women. We’ve seen it countless times before and we have seen it done better.
From a filmmaking standpoint, the craft on display here is sound. There are some striking images to be found, particularly during the film’s more hallucinatory sequences. Unfortunately, the tone and color palette are both so grim and dour that any enticement within those images is immediately sapped away. What we are left with is yet another in a long line of torture & kill flicks. If there’s any solace to be had here, it is in Eline Schumacher’s performance in the first two acts. While the writing for her character ultimately becomes a lump of cliches in the final stretch, Schumacher gives a nuanced take on the degradation of a tortured psyche for the first two thirds of the film.
If this is a subgenre that you’re fond of, you might find some engagement within. All others would be better off seeking out one of the other films I mentioned above. This is a fans-only affair.
Vitruvian Man
The Inventor
by Hope Madden
The Inventor, a beautifully animated lesson on the life and times of Leonardo da Vinci (voiced by Stephen Fry), offers a lot to digest, and I’m not sure who they think is eating.
Writer/co-director Jim Capobianco (directing here with Pierre-Luc Granjon) draws inspiration from his 2009 hand-drawn short, Leonardo. A delightful sketch about trying to fly, the film ran just 9 minutes and celebrated Da Vinci’s genius in the most charming way possible.
The feature looks into da Vinci’s curiosity about the existence of the human soul. This gets him into trouble with Pope Leo X (Matt Berry), so da Vinci moves from Rome to France, where he thinks he can follow his curiosity in peace.
He cannot.
Capobianco and Granjon land on a lovely mixture media. The tale is told primarily using a stop motion Claymation style that recalls the old Rankin/Bass Christmas specials of the Sixties and Seventies. (This is especially true of the pope, who’s the spitting image of Burgermeister Meisterburger.)
Scenes are often punctuated with the same hand-drawn sketch style used in Leonardo, and together the result is lovely. But that doesn’t help the storytelling as much as it should.
Even with a great cast – Daisy Ridley and Marion Cotillard co-star alongside Fry and Berry – Capobianco can’t maintain interest. He delivers so much information so superficially that it’s equally hard to keep up and care what happens.
The story takes too big a bite. Is our focus the soul? The perfect city? Weapons? Flying machines? Because each of those has its own background, implications, experiments and host of characters. Skimming over all of it gives us too much and too little at the same time.
It’s hard to determine the intended audience for The Inventor. The humor and political intrigue are a little sophisticated for children, and the history lesson is far too long and involves far too many characters to keep a child’s attention.
And though the animation is reason enough for an adult to give The Inventor a go, the simplistic storytelling and characterization will likely leave them cold.
Spirits in the Material World
A Haunting in Venice
by Hope Madden and George Wolf
If we’re going to congratulate Rian Johnson for reviving the murder mystery, save a backslap for Kenneth Branagh. His Murder on the Orient Express came two years before 2019’s Knives Out, and though Branagh may be adapting decades-old Agatha Christie classics, he’s proven adept at giving them a stylish and star-studded new sheen.
Branagh also stars again as Hercule Poirot, the legendary Belgian detective who showed a friskier side (probably thanks to Johnson’s sublime Benoit Blanc character) in last year’s Death on the Nile. Now for the third in their mystery series, Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green embrace the season with a gorgeous and frequently engaging update of Christie’s 1969 novel “Halloween Party.”
It is 1947, when the now-retired and war weary Poirot meets up with his old friend Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) in Venice. Oliver is a famous writer who considers herself quite the smarty, but she needs Poirot’s help to debunk the work of Mrs. Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), a medium whose talks with the dead are pretty damn convincing.
The setting is a Gothic manor with a disturbing past, where Poirot agrees to attend a seance on Halloween night. There, after a children’s party, Mrs. Reynolds will attempt to give Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly) the answers she seeks about the murder of her daughter, Alicia (Rowan Robinson).
But another murder soon steals the show, with even Poirot himself questioning his own eyes as things in the night go plenty bumpy.
Branagh again teams with cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos (Belfast, Death on the Nile), enveloping the film in a haunted house vibe that is wonderfully foreboding. The camera explores the confines of the manor via angles that are often extreme and disorienting, while lingering on cloaks, masks and other various other articles of creep.
Poirot is a changed man since last we met. He’s seen too much evil, and believes in “no God, no ghosts,” as a cloud of trauma and grief that fits the film’s mood hangs over him. Branagh and his stellar ensemble (including Jamie Dornan, Camille Cottin and Belfast‘s Jude Hill) work their character edges well, making sure no one is ever quite above suspicion.
And those suspicions are easier to play with when the source material isn’t as well known. But while revamping a deeper cut is welcome, the chance for creepy surprise does come at a price.
The core mystery just isn’t as compelling. Branagh and Green make alterations that prolong the chill factor, but result in moments that seem more like a Christie disguise than the face of the master herself.
A Haunting in Venice‘s lingering impression is as a slice of well-dressed fun. It’s a Spooky Season movie for those who don’t like things too scary, and an Agatha Christie tale for those who’d rather not think so hard.
Ave Satán
Satanic Hispanics
by Hope Madden
For genre fans, a well-made anthology can be a delight. Sometimes, like Michael Dougherty’s classic Trick ‘r Treat, one filmmaker pieces together a set of related short works. More often, though, a framing story connects the tales of many different filmmakers. The Mortuary Collection is an example of a recent gem.
Satanic Hispanics falls into the second category. It’s a collection of shorts made by Latinx filmmakers. Like, really good filmmakers. Eduardo Sánchez instigated the entire found footage phenomenon with his genre classic The Blair Witch Project. Gigi Saul Guerrero delivered geriatric fun in her 2021 film Bingo Hell. Demián Rugna’s Terrified is a haunting and effective flick, and Alejandro Brugués’s Juan of the Dead is the most underseen and brilliant film of the lot.
There’s good reason to be excited about the potential of the shorts assembled for Satanic Hispanics. And, on the whole, these filmmakers deliver on that promise.
Mike Mendez (Gravedancers) starts us out with the framing story, “The Traveler.” It introduces the titular character (Efren Ramirez, Napoleon Dynamite’s Pedro), the last man standing at a crime scene where 27 are dead. As he’s interrogated by two well-meaning detectives, he shares tales meant to persuade them that a great evil is coming.
Those stories range from Rugna’s creepy and trippy “También Lo Vi” to Sánchez’s comedic “El Vampiro” to Guerrero’s creature feature, “Nahuales”, to the Brugués insanity, “Hammer of Zanzibar.” Each has its charms, and every genre fan will find at least one or two films to take their fancy.
Rugna’s mindbender about light refraction, algorithms and inadvertently opening a portal to something sinister is the standout. Brugués delivers a stylized comedic adventure – part Tarantino, part Evil Dead. And if you can get past the troubling fact that a jilted boyfriend beats his ex-girlfriend with a giant penis for laughs, you might like it.
But the collection absolutely boasts some inspired talent having a blast, and when is that ever a bad thing to witness?
Doing His Research
Canary
by George Wolf
“Science can only advance when you do things that other people say can’t be done.”
So says climate scientist Lonnie Thompson, PhD, and he should know. He’s been walking the walk for decades, and Canary finds him finally ready to start talking the talk.
And yes, the title does refer to the “canary in a coal mine” metaphor, but directors Danny O’Malley and Alex Rivest wisely spend half of the film’s running time on an extended introduction to a man who’s been described as “the closest living thing to Indiana Jones.”
Growing up poor in West Virginia mining county, Lonnie took his scientific mind to Ohio State University to explore coal geology. But a research job studying glaciers changed the course of his life, and ultimately, the very nature of climate research.
Since 1989, Lonnie and his wife Ellen Mosely-Thompson, PhD, have run OSU’s Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center, spearheading groundbreaking work that earned Lonnie a National Medal of Science.
Lonnie’s background and achievements are extraordinary, as O’Malley and Rivest show us a man that none but the most rabid ideologue could ever accuse of grandstanding. His only agenda is scientific fact. But after decades of climbing mountains, drilling into previously unexplored ice caps and collecting indispensable data on the effects of climate change, Lonnie had to face some colder, harder facts.
“What do you not see? Why the disbelief?”
Though he long believed his work would speak for itself, and that the different sides of the political spectrum could “debate solutions, but accept the facts,” Lonnie saw things begin to change in the early 2000s. Canary connects some dots of the misinformation campaign that turned the tide, with evidence of some high-profile politicians quickly shifting their stances.
Lonnie came to accept how hard people will fight back against a forced change in lifestyle, and we see that play out with irony in his own home. Lonnie himself ignored the science of his doctor’s advice and kept climbing until it nearly killed him.
And now, as he sees global CO2 levels still rising, Lonnie realizes his time may best be spent not by collecting another ice core, but by spreading the word of what a lifetime of “doing his research” has revealed.
The film is an awe-inspiring and important step on that journey. Lonnie still believes that if humans can cause a problem, then humans can also solve that problem. And Canary‘s biggest success comes from giving you no reason to doubt the man, even if you want to.
Fright Club: The Baby Made Me Do It
Pregnancy changes you. Your body betrays you, your personality takes of fin wild directions, and it can feel like there’s a little monster growing inside you. And maybe there is!
Quick shout out to the trashy options that we never seem to be able to fit in: Baby Blood and Inseminoid.
5. Antibirth (2016)
This one is nuts. Chaos reigns some blighted wasteland where Lou (Natasha Lyonne) squats in an abandoned trailer, picks up shifts as necessary cleaning a motel, and abuses her body so relentlessly that it becomes the perfect breeding ground for…something.
There’s a lot going on in this movie, most of it unrelated to the plot but aesthetically in line. Writer/director Danny Perez basically creates a fairly realistic town just this side of Street Trash.
Lyonne is unhinged, unperturbable genius in this piece of insanity.
4. Honeymoon (2014)
How well do you really know the person you marry? Leigh Janiak’s Honeymoon taps into that anxiety and blends it a bit with pregnancy horror to basically make everything about that new, conjoined life feel alien and weird and murdery.
Rose Leslie is particularly effective as a woman in transition. Her performance is simultaneously tender and sinister.
Janiak nails the smalltown horror, conjuring a kind of sci-fi Let’s Scare Jessica to Death.
3. Huesera: The Bone Woman (2022)
Michelle Garza Cervera’s maternal nightmare is bright and decisive, pulling in common genre tropes only long enough to grant entrance to the territory of a central metaphor before casting them aside for something sinister, honest and honestly terrifying.
While it toes certain familiar ground – the gaslighting of Rosemary’s Baby, for instance – what sets Huesera apart from other maternal horror is its deliberate untidiness. Cervera refuses to embrace the good mother/bad mother dichotomy and disregards the common cinematic journey of convincing a woman that all she really wants is to be a mom.
Huesera’s metaphor is brave and timely. Brave not only because of its LGBTQ themes but because of its motherhood themes. It’s a melancholy and necessary look at what you give up, what you kill.
2. Prevenge (2016)
Anybody with any sense at all is afraid of pregnant women. With unassuming mastery, Alice Lowe pushes that concept to its breaking point with her wickedly funny directorial debut, Prevenge.
Lowe plays Ruth. Grieving, single and pregnant, Ruth believes her unborn daughter rather insists that she kill a bunch of people.
Why such bloodlust from Ruth’s baby? Lowe, who also wrote the script, divulges just as much as you need to know when the opportunity arises. At first, there’s just the macabre fun of watching the seemingly ordinary mum pick off an unsuspecting exotic pet salesman.
1. Swallow
Putting a relevant twist on the classic “horrific mother” trope, writer/director Carlo Mirabella-Davis uses the rare eating disorder pica to anchor his exploration of gender dynamics and, in particular, control.
Where Mirabella-Davis’s talent for building tension and framing scenes drive the narrative, it’s Bennett’s performance that elevates the film. Serving as executive producer as well as star, Haley Bennett transforms over the course of the film.
When things finally burst, director and star shake off the traditional storytelling, the Yellow Wallpaper or Awakening or even Safe. The filmmaker’s vision and imagery come full circle with a bold conclusion worthy of Bennett’s performance.
