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Unsafe House

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Unsane

by Hope Madden

Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy) is living your worst nightmare.

Having recently moved 400 miles from Boston to suburban Pennsylvania to escape her stalker, she begins seeing him everywhere. Shaken and without a support network, she visits an insurance-approved therapist in a nearby clinic.

She’s grateful for the ear, but upon completing her paperwork Sawyer finds that, due to the therapist’s diagnosis that Sawyer is a danger to herself or others, she is held involuntarily for 24 hours.

After punching an orderly she mistakes for her stalker, that 24 hours turns into one week. And now she’s convinced that the new orderly George is, in fact, her stalker David (Joshua Leonard—you know, doomed Josh from The Blair Witch Project!).

There a number of factors hard at work in Unsane‘s brisk 98-minute ride. Director Steven Soderbergh, by way of Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer’s script, lays bare some terrifying facts about our privatized mental health industry.

Seriously and deeply alarming.

He structures this critique with a somewhat traditional is-she-or-isn’t-she-crazy storyline. Anyone who watches much horror will recognize that uneasy line: you may be here against your will, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be here.

And the seasoned director of misdirection knows how to toy with that notion, how to employ Sawyer’s very real damage, touch on her raw nerve of struggling to remain in control of her own life only to have another’s will forced upon her.

Part of the film’s success is Soderbergh’s ability to put you in Sawyer’s headspace, which he does primarily through the use of iPhone 7. He claims to have filmed entirely on these phones, and whether or not that’s true, the shallow, oversaturated aesthetic creates the sense of delusion.

Foy’s performance is refreshingly unpleasant. Sawyer is tough to like, but she’s damaged and savvy in a way that feels authentic.

Leonard’s cloying neediness and bursts of violence match Foy’s formidable if brittle performance and a strong supporting cast including Juno Temple, SNL’s Jay Pharoah, Amy Irving and a spot-on Polly McKie.

Soderbergh relies on familiar tropes to say something relevant and in doing so creates a tidy, satisfying thriller.

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All You Need

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Loveless

by Hope Madden

There is a deep and deeply Russian melancholy to the films of Andrey Zvyagintsev.

Loveless opens on a sweet-faced boy meandering playfully through the woods between school and home. Once home, Alexey (Matvey Novikov) stares blankly out his bedroom window while his hostile mother (Maryana Spivak) shows the apartment to two prospective buyers.

Alexey’s parents are divorcing. Each has gone on to another relationship, each indulges images of future comfort and bliss, each bristles at the company of the other, and neither has any interest in bringing Alexey into their perfect futures.

So complete is their self-absorption that it takes more than a day before either realizes 12-year-old Alexey hasn’t been home.

Zvyagintsev’s films depict absence as much as presence. His dilapidated buildings become emblematic characters, as do his busily detailed living quarters. They appear to represent a fractured image of Russia, whose past haunts its present as clearly as these abandoned buildings mar the urban landscape where Alexey and his parents live.

TV and radio newsbreaks setting the film’s present day in 2012 concern political upheaval and war in Ukraine. They sometimes tip the film toward obviousness, Zvyagintsev’s allegory to the moral blindness of his countrymen becoming a little stifling.

Alexey’s parents Zhenya and Boris—thankless roles played exquisitely by Spivak and Aleksey Rozin—border on parody in their remarkable self-obsession. But this is a tension Zvyagintsev builds intentionally, and it is thanks to the stunning performances as well as the director’s slow, open visual style that his film never abandons its human drama in favor of its larger themes.

Like the filmmaker’s 2015 Oscar nominee Leviathan, another poetic dip into Russian misery, Loveless does offer small reasons for optimism. The volunteers—led by a dedicated Ivan (Aleksey Fateev), who has no time for bickering parents—brighten an otherwise exhaustingly grim look at familial disintegration.

Loveless doesn’t balance intimacy and allegory as well as Leviathan did, and its opinion of the Russian people feels more like finger wagging this time around, but Zvyagintsev remains a storyteller like few other. His latest is a visually stunning gut punch.

For Your Queue

I Don’t Want to Go Out—Week of March 19

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You know the best cure for a St. Patrick’s Day hangover? The Rock. That’s what he told me, anyway, and who am I to argue? His better-than-expected Jumanji comes out this week, as does the better-than-you-heard Downsizing and the worse-the-third-time Pitch Perfect 3. Let us help you choose.

Click the film title for a full review.

Downsizing

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

Pitch Perfect 3

The Screening Room

The Screening Room: Raiders New and Old

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This week in the Screening Room we hash out the good and the bac: Tomb Raider, Love, Simon, 7 Days in Entebbe plus everything out this week in home entertainment.

Listen to the full podcast HERE.

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It’s (Not) a Fair Court

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I Am Not a Witch

by Christie Robb

Zambian-born Welsh writer/director Rungano Nyoni’s first feature film is like Monty Python’s witch trial scene shot through lenses of patriarchy and economic exploitation.

It centers on a displaced young girl named Shula (Maggie Mulubwa), accused of witchcraft by members of her community.

Found guilty, she’s turned over to a government-run witch zoo filled with old women tied by ribbons to enormous spools who are by turns photographed by tourists and rented out as agricultural laborers. Thrilled to have a “young and fresh” witch in town, the Boss (Henry B.J. Phiri) selects her for choice assignments. Shula functions as a judge of sorts in a small claims court and takes a stab at predicting the weather before Boss brings her on national television as a mascot for an egg-selling scheme.

At first, Shula seems to try to make the best of it. After she successfully outs a thief, the Boss takes her home for a taste of the good life. Shula sees bougie furniture, nice clothes, an electric chandelier, and the Boss’s Wife—a former witch. Wife tells Shula that if she does everything she’s told, Shula might end up just like her and achieve “respectability.”

But, as it turns out, a wedding ring and a veneer of dignity aren’t all they are cracked up to be.

Satirical and quietly devastating, I Am Not a Witch is a fairy tale rooted in the dust.

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All Rivers End in Waterfalls

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Tomb Raider

by Cat McAlpine

Halfway through the new Tomb Raider, I thought to myself: “Well, you can’t have this kind of movie without those archetypes.” You know the ones: reluctant hero, loyal sidekick, irredeemable bad guy, henchmen with machine guns.

And then I second guessed myself, “Can you?”

That’s Tomb Raider’s most damning feature—it’s so familiar that it’s forgettable.

It’s not that Tomb Raider ISN’T fun (it is) or exciting (bike races, waterfalls, and bringing a bow to a gunfight, oh my!). It’s just that the relentless action is tired. The few connections between characters are forced or thrown away.

Alicia Vikander (Ex-Machina, The Danish Girl) gets few genuine moments to act, and she crushes it, but director Roar Uthaug seems afraid of the intimacy between Vikander and the camera. Every time she connects with a real emotion, the camera cuts away to a wide shot.

The exposition and key plot points are repeatedly spoon-fed to the audience. Lara Croft (Vikander) has to repeat each clue out loud as she discovers the answer to a riddle. Ugh.

And I’ve never seen a flashback that couldn’t be replaced with better writing. Tomb Raider has a lot of flashbacks.

“But Cat!” You say. “You’re a notorious hater. Didn’t you like anything?”

I’m so glad you asked.

When I sat down in the theatre, I wrote down a few primer questions, betraying my predictions for the film. They were these:

Is the male gaze present? Are the fight scenes realistic or stylized? Does it accurately echo the video game? How is the dialogue? Is there romance or just action? Are there other women in the film? People of color? Is there comedy? Is it predictable?

Good news: the male gaze is noticeably absent and Lara Croft is a genuine badass.

All the hand-to-hand combat feels realistic though many feats are delightfully improbable. Those improbable feats crisply reflect the basic mechanics of a video game: swinging from a hanging rope, traveling hand over hand along a railing, moving quietly through an encampment unnoticed.

There are other women and more diversity than expected, but not enough. A story that starts out vibrantly quickly narrows focus to a bunch of white people (plus sidekicks) fighting over a mystery of the Orient, while laborers (POC) who don’t speak English are gunned down for dramatic effect. #yikes

While I was glad that Lara got to kick ass without any romantic entanglements, I was genuinely disappointed that there wasn’t any real tension between her and Lu Ren (Daniel Wu, a great addition).

In summation, if someone wants to go to the movies this weekend, Tomb Raider is a fine pick. There’s a badass heroine, a handful of chuckles, and enough action to numb your brain for an hour and a half.

But it doesn’t redeem nearly as many sins of its genre as it repeats. It’s a predictable action adventure. No more, no less.

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Like to Do Drawings

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19th Annual Animation Show of Shows

by Hope Madden

Whimsy, melancholy, existential dread—the absurdity of human existence. What can tackle it all?

Cartoons can.

The 19th Annual Animation Show of Shows returns, jam-packed with tales both celebratory and cautionary. Human interconnectedness becomes a theme that runs throughout the program, one that feels simultaneously contemporary and retro.

From the brief, flippant Unsatisfying—a quick montage of irritating moments—to the lengthy morality tale Hangman, the film finds a wonderful balance in tone and mood, shifts mirrored in the ever-changing and always wonderful artistic styles of the shorts.

Traditional hand-animation, chalk and pencil, computer-generated art and even animation drawn directly on film stock, the choices made by the animators create unique atmospheres where each story can breathe and show off.

Kobe Bryant’s Oscar-winning Dear Basketball figures into the film, but its real highlights include Niki Lindroth von Bahr’s odd and amazing My Burden, Max Mortl and Robert Lobel’s bright Island, Tom Eshed’s charming Our Wonderful Nature: The Common Chameleon and David O’Reilly’s philosophical mind-bender, Everything.

There’s not a weak moment, truth be told, as headier fare is punctuated with musical flourishes or a quick laugh. The variety within the program and the sequencing of the shorts strengthens not only the overall experience but the human-ness that underlies the program’s unifying themes.

It’s lovely—sometimes funny, often sad, genuinely nutty and forever charming. If you’ve seen these celebrations of the art and glory of animation in previous years, you know the treat being offered. If you have not, this is your year.

For Your Queue

I Don’t Want to Go Out—Week of March 12

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It’s Oscar week, people. Not the week of the Oscars, but the week the Oscar winners and nominees come home to us. All told, five Oscar nominees (including the best picture winner) are available for home entertainment. And, if you prefer bad movies, Justice League is also out. Choice!

Click the film title for a full review.

The Shape of Water

Call Me By Your Name

I, Tonya

The Disaster Artist

Ferdinand

Justice League

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Good Breeding

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Thoroughbreds

by Hope Madden

Directing his first feature, Cory Finley adapts his play about teenage girls planning a murder. It’s a buddy picture, a coming-of-age tale, Superbad, if you will. No, not really.

Finley draws us into the palatial estate where Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) reluctantly tutors Amanda (Olivia Cooke). The two were friends in middle school, but that was a lifetime ago. Now seniors, Amanda is an outcast, having personally euthanized her family’s suffering thoroughbred horse.

Lily has her own problems.

Wicked, surprising, unapologetic, cynical and buoyed by flawless performances, Thoroughbreds is a mean little treat.

Amanda doesn’t feel. She’s not a sociopath, exactly. She just doesn’t feel anything—joy, sorrow, regret, fear. Empathy.

Lily, who tears up quickly and is forever retracting statements or pausing to perform the correct social cue at the acceptable time, isn’t sure whether she relates to or envies Amanda’s plight.

Not that Amanda sees it as a plight, exactly. She doesn’t care, does she?

Cooke mystifies, her observant but emotionally disinterested performance a magical thing to witness. Amanda has nearly perfected the art of pretending to be normal, pretending to care.

The fact that Lily can see the advantage of this is what sets this coming-of-age tale apart from others. Because, yes, from her perch inside the mansion, Lily is coming of age. Just not like the rest of us.

If Cooke is great, Taylor-Joy is better. An actor who wears her vulnerability in her every expression, she gives great depth to this character on the precipice of adulthood, learning, as she must, that to prosper in her world you need to rid yourself of human emotions and replace them with acceptably false facsimiles.

In the way that Oliver Stone, by way of Gordon Gecko, proselytized that greed is good, Finley uses Lily and Amanda to suggest that empathy is bad.

Their ultimate foil, the societal underling as disposable to their class as an animal—a horse, even—is Anton Yelchin, in his final role. Digging deep into an underwritten character and turning up more authenticity and personality than Finley can fit onscreen, Yelchin’s pathetic loser offers all the humanity lacking from this pristine world.

It’s a fascinating look at how the other class comes of age, blackly comedic and biting.

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Tamara’s Not Home. Leave a Message.

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The Strangers: Prey at Night

by Hope Madden

Sequels are hard. Especially when you don’t understand what made the original so unnerving and memorable.

A decade ago, Bryan Bertino released the almost unbearably slow burn of a home invasion film, The Strangers. The underappreciated gem quietly terrified attentive audiences, beginning with the line, “Is Tamara home?”

Director Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down) and screenwriter Ben Ketai (The Forest) pick up the story of three masked, bloodthirsty youngsters still looking for Tamara.

A loving but bickering family spends the night at a lakeside campground and trailer park. A great deal of exposition ensures that you catch on, but the main gist is this: problem child Kinsey (Bailee Madison) is at odds with her beleaguered parents (Christina Hendricks and Martin Henderson) and her golden-child brother (Lewis Pullman).

Yes, our three masked malcontents have also settled into that same lakeside trailer park, now mainly vacant in the post-season.

Where Bertino’s horror had the languid melancholy of the old country blues tunes scratching away on a turntable, Roberts prefers the power ballads of the early Eighties. In fact, instead of the cinema of the Seventies that inspired Bertino, Roberts prefers 80s fare, from the early MTV soundtrack to the Argento-esque title sequence to the campground setting.

This is a self-conscious slasher with jump scares, frequent bloodletting and a marauder who is profoundly difficult to kill.

Roberts borrows a lot. Not just from Bertino’s original, but also scads of other horror gems from across the eras (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Town that Dreaded Sundown, Friday the 13th, Bava’s Carnage and so many more).

And while cinematographer Ryan Samul cannot grip you with dread the way Peter Sova’s creeping camera and quiet wide shots did ten years back, he can frame a shot.

That shot 1) has usually been lifted from another source, and 2) often contains a nearly-ludicrous image. Still, there are more than a few beautifully macabre sequences in this movie. One poolside episode is particularly impressive.

Still, the main problem with The Strangers: Prey at Night is that it gets comfortable in clichés, where the stinging original subverted them. That doesn’t make it a bad movie. It’s not. It’s a nasty little piece of entertainment, unoriginal but competent.

And you cannot expect originality from a sequel, of course. You just hope it can be memorable. The Strangers: Prey at Night is not.