The Eyes of My Mother will remind you of many other films, and yet there truly is no film quite like this one.
First time feature writer/director Nicolas Pesce, with a hell of an assist from cinematographer Zach Kuperstein, casts an eerie spell of lonesome bucolic horror.
Shot in ideal-for-the-project black and white, an Act 1 event could come from any number of horror films. A mother looks out her window to see her young daughter, playing alone in the front lawn, talking with a stranger. There is something clearly wrong with the stranger, and things take a bad turn. But for Pesce, this simple, well-worn set-up offers endless unexplored possibilities. Because this bad man doesn’t realize that the isolated farm family he’s come to harm is very comfortable with dissection.
His film is told in three parts. Part 1, with the stranger, sees the young Francisca (Olivia Bond) finding her role in her family. It changes after the stranger’s visit.
Parts 2 and 3 catch up with the family quite a few years later. The now-grown Francisca (Kika Magalhaes) takes some extreme measures to end her loneliness.
There is much power in dropping an audience into a lived-in world – the less we know, the better. Pesce understands this in the same way Tobe Hooper did with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and though The Eyes of My Mother lacks the cynicism, satire and power tools of Hooper’s farmhouse classic, it treads some similar ground.
Where Eyes differs most dramatically from other films is in its restraint. The action is mostly off-screen, leaving us with the sounds of horror and the quiet clean-up of its aftermath to tell us more than we really want to know.
As retrained as it is, The Eyes of My Mother hardly lacks in sensual experience. Stunning, gorgeously lit frames are matched with garish sound editing.
Kuperstein’s cinematography is sometimes almost Malick-like. Pesce focuses that camera on nearly silent moments full of traumatic images. He creates dissonance between the peaceful, idyllic scenes and the pinpoint imagery, the horrifying sounds.
The quiet amplifies Francisca’s isolation. The sounds amplify something else entirely.
Though Eyes of My Mother is reminiscent of several Seventies horrors, its muted telling exposes a patience rarely found in the genre. Pesce repays you for your patience.
Style, elegance and crippling loneliness – though Tom Ford’s two films seem to be wildly different beasts, the same solitude and heartbreak inform both.
Like George (Colin Firth) in Ford’s incandescent 2009 feature debut A Single Man, Susan (Amy Adams) is at a crossroads in life with a future that looks unbearably grim.
Nocturnal Animals follows present-day Susan, a successful gallery owner struggling to keep up appearances in her marriage and finances, who’s surprised to receive a manuscript written by her first husband, Edward. Alone in her austere LA home, she reads through the night.
We flash occasionally to the Susan of 20 years ago (also played by Adams), just settling into a nurturing romance with Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) – the sensitive writer dubbed “too weak” by Susan’s mother (played with bitter relish by Laura Linney).
But most of the film is dedicated to Edward’s novel, Nocturnal Animals.
Unlike the over-the-top style of the film’s “real world,” the novel-come-to-life has its own aesthetic – dusty, sunburnt and chaotic. As the novel’s hero Tony – also played by Gyllenhaal – drives through West Texas with his wife and daughter, he runs afoul of three not-so-good-old-boys.
Adams-lookalike Isla Fisher plays Tony’s wife, which hints at the themes driving the ex-husband’s work. The internal narrative plays like an arthouse twist on a traditional testosterone-laden revenge fable – and the film itself is about revenge, to a degree, just not the kind you might find in Charles Bronson’s Death Wish.
The world Ford creates inside the novel is its own surprising destination, playing with preconceived notions and haunting us with one startling image after another. The always wonderful Michael Shannon, along with a freakishly believable Aaron Taylor-Johnson, give the novel’s screen time a current of authenticity and terror.
Gyllenhaal and Adams – two of the strongest actors in film today – work wonders. Playing the same character caught twenty years apart, Adams reflects both the change the decades have left on Susan, as well as those elements of her personality that remain with her.
Gyllenhaal is likewise nuanced and powerful. While his two characters are separate entities, they are, in many respects, the same person. The strength across the film – and also its weakness – is the way the internal narrative informs and is informed by the real world of the characters.
The structure, the style, the sound – every aesthetic choice – is meticulous, but there’s a tidiness in the manufacturing of the movie that makes the way themes play out feel too orderly.
It’s a minor flaw, but it’s enough to keep Nocturnal Animals from reaching noir/pulp/arthouse mash-up heights of Blue Velvet or Drive. It’s not enough to keep it – particularly its many award-worthy performances – from being remembered at the end of the year, though.
I’m curious. Is every film going to take on sharper, darker political meaning post-election? Because Miss Sloane definitely does.
First time screenwriter Jonathan Perera’s much-lauded screenplay documents Elizabeth Sloane, DC super-lobbyist. Driven and single-minded to a nearly sociopathic degree, Sloane finally finds a line she’s unwilling to cross when the gun lobby wants to hire her to make guns more appealing to women.
She abandons the big time firm that demands she rethink her gun-control stance and goes to work instead for the liberal opposition.
Though far from flawless, Miss Sloane has a lot to offer. Mainly, Jessica Chastain.
Her fierce performance and comfort with ambiguity come together in a turn that mesmerizes. This is an anti-hero, and Chastain gives her enough savvy, contempt, drive, self-loathing and vulnerability to make her fascinating. Not knowable, but forever provocative.
Though no other character in the film is nearly so fleshed out, a game supporting cast – including the welcome Michael Stuhlbarg and a pitch-perfect Mark Strong – help balance Chastain’s blistering presence.
Director John Madden – whose work tends toward the safer and tamer (Shakespeare in Love, Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) – here amplifies Chastain’s fiery delivery with frenetic camera movement and sudden close ups. He creates a pace that keeps attention, even when the screenplay begins to slog.
What’s exceptional about the film, aside from Chastain, is the way its core plotline and its greater themes work together. The us-versus-them battle, with each lobbyist one-upping the other in the most unconscionable (yet clever) ways, commands attention. But beneath all that Miss Sloane clarifies the way in which the American public is never privy to true information.
What we get, in its stead, is the narrative being pushed in increasingly obfuscated ways by different stakeholders.
The film builds to speechifying and heavy moralizing, often feeling too clever for its own good. It settles, while its titular firebrand would not. But before all the self-righteous Aaron Sorkinisms, Madden, Perera and Chastain get an awful lot right.
They push envelopes when it comes to a female anti-hero, answering only as many questions as necessary and leaving room for Chastain’s performance to fill in some gaps.
Together they also unleash an appropriately cynical view of a political system that is rotten.
Finally! We’ve been kicking this one around for a long time, but this week – with the help of Vince and Grant of the podcast In the Record Store – we finally tackle the best black and white films in horror.
What a list! We had no choice but to employ fuzzy math for this one, and even so we had to leave off so many greats – including some that Grant and Vince would have included.
6. Night of the Living Dead (1968)
From the brightly lit opening cemetery sequence to the paranoid power struggle in the house to the devastating closing montage, Night of the Living Dead teems with the racial, sexual and political tensions of its time. An unsettlingly relevant George A. Romero knew how to push societal panic buttons.
As the first film of its kind, the lasting impact of this picture on horror cinema is hard to overstate. Romero’s inventive imagination created the genre and the monster from the ground up.
They’re dead.
They’re back.
They’re hungry for human flesh.
Their bite infects the bitten.
The bitten will eventually bite.
Aim for the head.
Romero served as cinematographer for this project, likely choosing black and white as a cost saver, but we’d later learn that this format is 1) highly forgiving of zombie makeup, and 2) spookier. The color palette turns the Waltons-esque setting of the farm house into something isolated and sinister.
The shrill sense of confinement, the danger of one survivor turning on another, and the unthinkable transformation going on in the cellar build to a startling climax – one that utterly upends expectations – followed by the kind of absolutely genius ending that guarantees the film’s eternal position in the annals of horror cinema.
5. Eraserhead (1977)
There truly is no film quite like David Lynch’s first feature, eh?
Eraserhead defies simple summarization. Easily the most surreal of all Lynch’s films – which is a huge statement – the film follows sad-sack Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) dealing poorly with fatherhood.
The film becomes a nightmare of paternal angst and existential crisis – indeed, it may be impossible to name a film or filmmaker more able to bring a nightmare to life.
It’s also among the finest examples of corporeal horror you will find. The shadowy, grimy b/w photography – partially handled by Lynch’s longtime cinematographer Frederick Elmes – amplifies the dismal stagnation facing Henry.
At the same time, it gives a weird, nostalgic camp factor to the Lady in the Radiator and adds a particularly lurid element to that whole bleeding “chicken” thing.
Plus, the baby. Yikes. Alive with the most disturbing imagery, Eraserhead is impossible to forget.
4. Psycho (1960)
Among the four Oscar nominations the film garnered was one for John L Russell and his gorgeous black and white cinematography.
By 1960, most folks had abandoned black and white – including Hitchcock. But with his truest foray into horror, the master returned to the high contrast imagery for a number of reasons.
Sure, one of those was that it freed him up with the blood. Had all that stuff in the shower been red, he’d never have gotten away with it. Mrs. Bates wouldn’t have looked quite right, either.
Russell’s visuals also gave the film its lonesome American Gothic quality. Norman seemed more innocent, Marion Crane seemed more mysterious, and the old Bates house seemed spookier.
Of course, was there ever a question Hitch knew what he was doing?
3. Frankenstein (1931)
James Whale’s genius was in finding the monster fascinating, rather than the doctor. Nearly every other Frankenstein made before or since has been preoccupied with the doctor, but Whale understood that it was this unique beast, baby and man, evil and innocent, that should compel our interest. Who cares about one more doctor with a god complex?
Luckily for Whale, he had Boris Karloff. Karloff’s gift was in seeing the monster as a neglected child. His monster is sweet and tragic, characterized by the terrible freedom of a loosed child full of fear, unbridled excitement and shame. Karloff nails this childlike energy and ignorance married to a grown man’s strength in a way that no other actor truly has.
Obviously, in 1931 Whale had no choice but to film in black and white, but how fascinating that a movie without color created a green monster. What a testament to the film’s vidid imagery – created with the help of make-up guru Jack Pierce. A nightmare of greying flesh, black stitches and mechanical pieces, this image of the monster speaks of death, mad science and bad intentions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McUce_xwxeA
2. Nosferatu (1922)
Not the seductive, European aristocrat, cloaked and mysterious, oh no. With Count Orlock, filmmaker F. W. Murnau explores something more repellant, casting an actor who resembles an albino naked mole rat.
Given that Murnau equates the film’s vampire-related deaths with the plague, this vermin-like image fits well. But more than that, thanks to a peculiarly perfect performance by Max Schreck, Murnau mines the carnality of the vampire myth for revulsion and fear rather than eroticism.
Murnau’s gift was not solely in casting. The shadows danced, the dead rose and Europe writhed with the dead and dying. His skill with the camera was unparalleled. Between his casting and his camera, he made the most authentic vampire movie – perhaps ever.
Sure, the silent film style of acting appears nothing short of quaint today, and the Dracula tale has been told too, too often at this point. But Max Schreck is a freak, and in his bony, clawlike hands, Count Orlock remains the greatest vampire ever undone by a sinless maiden.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk70lSUqaM8
1. The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
James Whale and Boris Karloff – with tag along make-up man Jack Pierce – returned to Castle Frankenstein for an altogether superior tale of horror. What makes this one a stronger picture is the dark humor and subversive attitude, mostly animated by Frankenstein’s colleague Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger).
Thesiger’s mad doctor makes for a suitable counterpart to the earnest and contrite Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive, again), and a sly vehicle for Whale. This fey and peculiar monster-maker handles the most brilliant dialogue the film has to offer, including the iconic toast, “To gods and monsters.”
The sequel casts off the earnestness of the original, presenting a darker film that’s far funnier, often outrageous for its time, with a fuller story. Karloff again combines tenderness and menace, and Elsa Lanchester becomes the greatest goth goddess of all film history as his Bride.
Aaron Eckhart is a conundrum, isn’t he? He’s talented enough to land any indie gem, granite-jawed and handsome enough to elevate it to mass market appeal. Think Thank You for Smoking.
And yet, for every Rabbit Hole there’s an I, Frankenstein; for every In the Company of Men, an Incarnate.
His latest – his fourth of this calendar year – sees Eckhart as the wheelchair-bound, unshaven, grimacing Dr. Seth Ember. He’s damaged, damn it!
Don’t call him an exorcist. He doesn’t exorcise demons; he evicts supernatural parasites. He has an ability. You see, when he was young, he realized, “When I was asleep I could go into the minds of the possessed.”
How did he figure this out? How often did he get drowsy in the proximity of a possessed person?
No matter – can’t you see he’s damaged?!
When a liaison to the Vatican (Catalina Sandino Moreno) – don’t even get Dr. Seth started on the church! – lures him to a case of a possessed 11-year-old, it isn’t to save the boy. Oh no.
No?
No. It must have something to do with his damage. I’ll bet director Brad Peyton (that genius behind San Andreas) will soap-opera direct some weirdly stilted, flat and extreme-close-up-laden bit of ponderousness explaining the whole thing, but you will have lost the will to live before it’s all clarified.
There is one moment – not a scene, but a single moment – in this film where I believed Peyton might, maybe, possibly do something interesting.
Nope.
Worst thing about Incarnate? It’s not the made-for-SyFy-CGI. Not the superficial storyline, not the flatly uninspired direction. (Honestly, if Peyton had directed from inside a coma the film couldn’t have looked or felt more lifeless.)
It’s not the tedious ensemble performances, not the wildly predictable series of twists. It’s Eckhart. It’s as if he’s angry at us that he took this dog.
We didn’t make you do it, Aaron. We only sat through this festering corpse of a movie because you were in it.
There’s a moment in Christine – Antonio Campos’s clinical character study of ‘70s on-air reporter Christine Chubbuck – when a violently depressed Christine chastises her mother’s parenting. Had she been a better parent, maybe Christine would understand how the world worked.
There is such honest, bewildered frustration in that moment. With that single thought, a career-best Rebecca Hall exposes Chubbuck’s isolated, lonely, crippled soul.
We’re invited to join the stormy decline of Chubbuck’s life. An awkward, severe professional at odds with the era’s sensationalistic news trends, Chubbuck clashes with her Sarasota station’s news manager (Tracy Letts) and pines for its handsome anchor (Michael C. Hall).
Chubbuck’s professional frustrations and personal isolation come to a head simultaneously. Thanks to Hall’s meticulous performance, what we can see is that the emotionally brittle, deeply depressed Chubbuck hasn’t the resilience to contend with it.
Hall’s body language, her gait, her facial expressions and her speech amplify her character’s growing turmoil. It’s a creeping darkness that grows to be almost unbearable before bursting into an eye-of-the-storm calm that’s even eerier for its realism.
Though Craig Shilowich’s screenplay leans too heavily on frustrated spinsterisms as a handy excuse for Chubbuck’s behavior, and Campos’s direction intentionally keeps Christine at arm’s length, Hall’s harrowing turn guarantees that Christine Chubbuck makes an impression.
Campos’s disturbing 2012 horror Simon Killer remained intentionally distant as well – a provocative approach that suited the mystery of the titular sociopath. Here, though, it feels too chilly, almost heartless.
That seems inappropriate, because neither Chubbuck nor those she left behind were heartless. In fact, one of the great successes in Hall’s performance is her ability to personify Chubbuck’s amazingly off-putting, alienating behavior while simultaneously pointing out that most of us are only a few social misjudgments away from pariah status ourselves.
Inevitably, the film feels like a 110-minute prelude to Chubbuck’s infamous on-air suicide, and that’s where Campos and Shilowich’s weaknesses show. What was at the heart of Chubbuck’s final display – institutional sexism, unending loneliness, mental illness, professional integrity, irony?
The filmmakers showed a great deal while exploring very little, but thanks to a performance likely to be remembered come awards season, Rebecca Hall makes sure Chubbuck’s struggle resonates.
In turns grand and intimate, Allied blends pulp and melodrama with old Hollywood glamour.
We open on a dashing Max Vatan (Brad Pitt), landing in a North African desert where he’ll be met by a mysterious driver delivering his new identity. Vatan will join French Resistance fighter Marianne Beausejour (Marion Cotillard) in Casablanca on a mission to assassinate a Nazi official.
Director Robert Zemeckis’s vintage spy thriller begins with a bang. Stylish and gorgeous, the first act embraces an old-fashioned dazzle that suits both Pitt and Cotillard.
Problems arise – for Vatan and Beausejour, as well as the film – once the couple relocates to London. Vatan takes a desk job with the Royal Air Force while his new wife and child wait lovingly at home. But when command turns up evidence that Marianne could be a German spy, this ideal life begins to crack.
Both Cotillard and Pitt perform respectably with a script involving tensions that reach toward the ludicrous. Pitt carries himself with a weird stiffness, but his face wears joy, weariness and emotional tumult in a way that the actor has rarely managed.
Cotillard is characteristically excellent, her own demeanor turning the edge of every expression with a hint of something sour. She is effortlessly mysterious, a characteristic required for the part.
Steven Knight’s screenplay loses momentum once the couple settles into their homey London life, and for all Zemeckis’s visual wizardry, the balance of the film never recaptures the thrill of their early adventures.
Instead, we settle for several gloriously shot sequences – a love scene inside a car beset by a sandstorm, a party interrupted by an air raid. But even the tensest late-film moments feel staged, even borrowed.
Knight’s writing tends to play better with grittier, more street-savvy direction (think Eastern Promises or Dirty Pretty Things), but Zemeckis likes a big stage. The result, though often entertaining because of solid performances, is too much of a mishmash to really work.
Like Barry Jenkins’s miraculous Moonlight, the new film from Jeff Nichols offers a needed, optimistic reminder that progress is not dead and the ugliness of hatred need not win – even when it looks like it has already won.
Like so many of Nichols’s films – his 2012 Huck Finn-esque Mud, in particular – Loving boasts an intimate, Southern storyteller’s lilt. Here the writer/director quietly shares the triumphant story of the couple whose Supreme Court case made interracial marriage legal in the US.
In 1958, Mildred (Ruth Negga) and Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton) married. Richard was savvy enough to have the ceremony conducted in D.C., but upon returning to their rural Virginia home, the two were arrested for breaking the state’s anti-miscegenation laws.
What follows, with admirable restraint, is a look at the couple’s struggle to live as they want, where they want.
Nichols conducts the effort with an understatement that gives certain small moments and images true power. Never splashy and far from preachy, Loving sits with an otherwise ordinary family and lets their very normalcy speak volumes about the misguided hate that would separate them.
His is a beautiful film anchored by Negga’s graceful, modest turn. Though legalizing the union was Richard’s idea – formally marrying and hanging the framed license in their home – it’s Mildred who is unbending, and in Negga’s hands, this will spills over with compassion and hope.
Edgerton’s Richard is a tougher nut. A man of few words, Richard would just as soon avoid the flashy lawyers and press that draws attention to his life. He just wants everyone to leave his family alone and, in return, his family won’t bother anyone.
Nichols may dial the drama down a bit too much, truth be told. Though the outcome of the court case hangs over the last reel like a dark cloud, the true, national impact of this victory and the potentially dire consequences of a defeat are barely whispered.
The approach does give the film a lovely intimacy, though. And it reminds us that progress, though hard-won and often ugly in its pursuit, can be won.
Disney’s no Pixar, but in 2016 that doesn’t seem to matter. In an ocean of excellent animation this year, Disney’s Zootopia stands out as quite possibly the best – certainly the most relevant. While their holiday release, Moana, returns to some tried-and-true-and-tired tropes, it frees itself often enough from Disneyisms to become yet another strong ‘toon from the studio.
The animation behemoth never strays for too long from its merch-encrusted path. Yes, Moana (Auli’i Cravahlo) is a Disney princess. She’s the daughter of a Polynesian chief, but as demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) points out, “You’re wearing a dress, you have an animal sidekick – you’re a princess.”
Yes, she’s a princess who yearns for more than the responsibilities life affords her. (Mercifully, that dream never does involve a beau.) There are songs of self-actualization and the thrill of adventure. There’s a lot that’s familiar.
Set generations ago in the Polynesian islands, the film tells of the ancient demigod Maui – a shapeshifter who used his magical fishhook to steal the heart of the earth goddess, dooming the islands to eventual peril. Moana is called by the sea to find Maui, retrieve his hook and return the heart to save her people.
Moana draws comparisons to The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Pixar’s Brave – hell, there’s even a bit of Mad Max on the high seas (nice!). But the film ultimately carves out its own presence, partly due to a refreshing cultural change.
From music to art to tattooing, the film offers more than a patronizing nod to Polynesian historical context. Also refreshing: sturdier looking characters, a lack of (creepy, pre-adolescent) love story, quiet mockery of standard Disney motifs, one fantastically jewel-encrusted crab.
Jemaine! The always welcome Jemaine Clement voices one of the many dastardly creatures Moana and Maui encounter on their trek, and he’s almost Tim Curry glorious. (He also has the best song in the film.)
He’s just one baddie in a film littered with fascinating menaces – from the coconut pirates (no, they don’t steal coconuts – they are coconuts) to various undersea dangers to the lava demon the heroic duo must defeat to save the world.
Johnson steals most of the film. With broad humor to match Maui’s enormous, ornately tattooed body, his chemistry with the teen voyager is nearly as entertaining as his struggles to shape shift.
The film has its troubles, including a slog of a first act, but Moana contains more than enough freshness to offset its weaknesses and guarantee holiday family fun.
It’s been too long since we took a trip around the world to see how certain corners view horror. Today we head to the cluster of chilly Norse and Scandinavian countries to seek trolls, wolves, Nazi zombies – and to steer clear of household tools, if possible.
5. Trollhunter (2010) (Norway)
All ancient cultures generated fairy tales. They passed on stories that wrapped the virtues most respected at the time inside common dangers to tell tales of heroism and humor. Norway’s fairy tales all involve trolls. Indeed, their entire national culture seems weirdly identified with trolls. Why is that? Well, writer/director Andre Ovredal’s Trollhunter suggests that maybe it’s because trolls are a real problem up there.
Ovredal’s approach is wry and silly – adjectives that rarely hang out together, but maybe we haven’t seen enough of Norway’s cinematic output. The FX are sometimes wonderful, and especially effective given the otherwise verite, documentary style. Ovredal makes droll use of both approaches.
Trollhunter is definitely more comedy than horror, as at no time does the film actually seek to scare you. It’s a wild ride into a foreign culture, though, and it makes you think twice about the Norway section of Epcot, I’ll tell you what.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy2nAOdBUlw
4. Dead Snow (2009) (Norway)
Nazi zombies, everybody! Hell yes!
Like its portly nerd character Erlend, Dead Snow loves horror movies. A self-referential “cabin in the woods” flick, Dead Snow follows a handsome, mixed-gender group of college students as they head to a remote cabin for Spring Break. A creepy old dude warns them off with a tale of local evil. They mock and ignore him at their peril.
But co-writer/director/Scandinavian Tommy Wirkola doesn’t just obey these time-honored horror film rules, he draws your attention to them. His film embraces our prior knowledge of the path we’re taking to mine for comedy, but doesn’t give up on the scares. Wirkola’s artful imagination generates plenty of startles, and gore by the gallon.
Spectacular location shooting, exquisite cinematography, effective sound editing and a killer soundtrack combine to elevate the film above its clever script and solid acting. Take, for example, the gorgeous image of Norwegian peace – a tent, lit from within, sits like a jewel nestled in the quiet of a snowy mountainside. The image glistens with pristine outdoorsy beauty – until it … doesn’t.
3. Antichrist (2009) (Denmark)
Saturated in the cinematic equivalent of melancholy poetry, punctuated with truly, deeply shocking moments of violence and brutality, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist takes the cabin-in-the-woods horror to brand new places, sharing his auteur cred with the horror genre.
A nameless couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) is wracked with grief after the death of their young son. They retreat to their remote cabin, hoping to speed the healing process. Things do not go well.
Dafoe and Gainsbourg give terrific, courageous performances. They are the only two actors onscreen for 99 percent of the film, and they do not shrink from the challenge. These are deeply flawed characters, and the performances are haunting.
Von Trier’s film is so gorgeous to see and so punishing to watch, the result is an amazing if bruising experience. His tone ranges from somber to insane, and one or two of the more vivid weirdisms feel terribly out of place. But there is no forgetting Antichrist, hard as you may try.
2. Hour of the Wolf (1968) (Sweden)
An atmospheric masterpiece, Ingmar Bergman’s meditation on artistic conflict and regret is a haunting experience.
Bergman favorites Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman are a married couple spending time on an isolated, windswept island. Ullman’s Alma is pregnant, and her relationship with her husband becomes strained as his time and attention become more and more consumed by visions, or demons – or maybe they’re just party people.
Von Sydow’s character is tempted with the decadence missing from the wholesome life that may be dissatisfying to him. But it’s Ullman, whose performance spills over with longing, that amplifies the heartbreak and mourning that color the entire film.
Shot in incandescent black and white, with Bergman’s characteristic eye for light and shadow, Hour of the Wolf is a glorious, hypnotic nightmare.
1. Let The Right One In (2008) (Sweden)
In 2008, Sweden’s Let the Right One In emerged as an original, stylish thriller – and the best vampire flick in years. A spooky coming of age tale populated by outcasts in the bleakest environment, the film breaks hearts and bleeds victims in equal measure. Kare Hedebrant‘s Oskar, with his blond Prince Valiant haircut, falls innocently for the odd new girl (an outstanding Lina Leandersson) in his shabby apartment complex. Reluctantly, she returns his admiration, and a sweet and bloody romance buds.
As sudden acts of violence mar the snowy landscape, Oskar and Ali grow closer, providing each other a comfort no one else can. The film offers an ominous sense of dread, bleak isolation and brazen androgyny – as well as the best swimming pool scene perhaps ever. Intriguingly, though both children tend toward violence – murder, even – you never feel anything but empathy for them. The film is moving, bloody, lovely and terrifying in equal measure.
