Tag Archives: Hope Madden

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Sister Sleuth

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The Nun II

by Hope Madden

The Nun II has at least one thing going for it. If someone could figure out what to do with her, that villain is creepy as hell.

Why? Partly because no one cuts a terrifying figure quite like Bonnie Aarons. And partly because, let’s be honest, nuns are scary. Like clowns. It’s just true.

We first ran into this Bad Habit in James Wan’s adequate 2016 sequel The Conjuring 2, but the film divided its villains up: old coot in a rocking chair (“I’m Bill Wilkins!”), the Crooked Man and – well, best not to say her name. But her screentime was very limited.

Then there was the tease in another middling sequel, Annabelle: Creation (a mediocre film, but miles better than the first in that particular franchise). She finally got her own story in 2018, with Corin Hardy’s wildly mediocre The Nun.

Can this excellent idea for a villain be put to good use, finally, with Michael Chaves’s sequel, The Nun II?

Meh.

It’s fine. It’s rated R, so that’s a start, although I’m not certain how it was deemed so problematic as to deserve the “keep the kids away” rating. There are a few creative deaths, almost elegantly macabre.

Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) is back on the trail of the demon nun after a series of disturbing deaths. Most of our time is spent in a monastery-turned-winery-turned-boarding school where Sister’s Irene’s old friend Maurice (Jonas Bloquet) has a job as a handyman and a crush on a teacher.

And, if memory serves, an inverted cross seared into the back of his neck. That smells like trouble (and burnt skin).

The setting is spooky, stagey and often quite atmospheric. Several of the set pieces are designed gorgeously. Bloquet continues to charm, and we not only get a nun this time but a very alarming goat-man. Nice!

The perversion of religious imagery continues to be the downfall of the series. It’s hard to take seriously, of course, because the Catholic church has a history of doing that itself. (The diocese of Syracuse claimed bankruptcy this summer due to the $100 million it owes to victims of sexual abuse.) This series would be more effective if the evil nun represented the decay within the church rather than a rogue demon weakened by an emissary of the Vatican.

Alas, Chaves settles for a bit of theoretical silliness bolstered by a nice touch of feminism, which feels delightfully heretical. So at least there’s that.

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Method Acting

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8 Found Dead

by Hope Madden

There are a lot of important elements that come together to make a good horror movie: tension, dread, atmosphere, maybe blood and gore. But nothing is more vital than the villain.

8 Found Dead, the Airbnb etiquette horror from Travis Greene, brings the goods when it comes to villains.

It seems Liz (Rosanne Limeres, splendid) and her husband Richard (real life husband Tim Simek) don’t have much to do now that their little hometown theater closed. But they can still put on a performance. Like pretending the Airbnb is double booked. Without Wi-Fi, how can anyone prove who’s really supposed to be there? Guess they’ll all just have to make the best of it.

8 Found Dead picks the same etiquette horror scabs as Speak No Evil or Funny Games – not quite as effectively, but with a macabre sense of humor that thoroughly entertains.

Rather than taking a chronological approach, Jonathan Buchanan’s script uses nonlinear storylines to allow each set of victims its own performance. Why should anyone have to share Liz and Richard?

Influencer Sam (Alisha Sope) and boyfriend Dwayne (William Gabriel Grier) head to an isolated Airbnb to make an announcement to Sam’s many followers. Carrie (Aly Trasher) and Ricky (Eddy Acosta) expect to join them, but they run late. Meanwhile, a 911 call brings two officers – an estranged married couple – out to investigate.

Each pair could learn a thing or two about commitment from Liz and Richard. These two are in it to win it.

8 Found Dead dances around some of the obvious questions that films like Barbarian and Funny Games address head on. But it also gets points for homaging the greatest lodging horror film of all time.

The opening falls to purposeless ogling – Jenny Tran’s performance deserved better – which the film struggles to overcome. But impressive editing and that shifting storyline keep Found Dead from ever getting stale.

Plus, there’s the promise that we could get to know Liz and Richard even better.

The Screening Room

Screening Room: Equalizer 3, Bottoms, Perpetrator & More

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Equalizer 3, Bottoms, Perpetrator, Between Two Worlds, The Good Mother, Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose, Ernest and Celestine, Astrakan

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The Break Bones Club

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Bottoms

by Hope Madden

Bottoms essentially follows a traditional teen comedy path, from the first day of senior year (with the high expectations of finally turning your popularity and romantic luck around) through that fraught homecoming football game. Our underdogs hatch a scheme to win the affections of the hot cheerleaders.

But if you saw co-writer/director Emma Seligman and co-writer/star Rachel Sennott’s uncomfortably brilliant 2020 comedy Shiva Baby, you have some idea of what you’re in for. Expect a chaotic, boundary pushing satire unafraid to offend.

PJ (Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri, so funny earlier this summer in Theater Camp) are their high school’s ugly, untalented gays. PJ is always scheming to get some cooch, and this will be their year. Her idea? Start a fight club for the girls in the school. Or, you know, a self-defense club. Where you wrestle around and hit and get excited and sweaty and close.

Josie is not down with this, but PJ usually gets her way and the next thing you know –well, you saw Fight Club, right? Because those men were only convincing themselves they were being pushed around, bullied and disempowered.

Part John Hughes, part Jennifer Reeder, part Chuck Palahniuk, Bottoms exists in a bizarre world of deadpan absurdism so littered with smart, biting commentary that you’ll need to see it twice to catch all of it.

Sennott and Edebiri are as fun a set of besties as Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever in Booksmart. Maybe even as fun as Beanie Feldstein and Saiorse Ronan in Lady Bird. Nicholas Galitzine is a riot as the quarterback, Jeff, and Ruby Cruz delivers as the one earnest lesbian hoping to empower and create solidarity with this club.

Seligman’s tone, her image of high school and high school movies, is wildly, irreverently funny and fearless. It’s hilarious, raunchy, and so much fun.

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How It Happens

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Astrakan

by Hope Madden

A confounding, beautiful, effective feat of visual storytelling, Astrakan delivers a poignant study in the creation of a troubled youth.

Samuel (Mirko Giannini) has recently come to stay with foster parents Marie (Jehnny Beth, Paris, 13th District) and Clément (Bastien Bouillon, Night of the 12th) and their two sons. Director David Depesseville opens on the family’s zoo trip. All seems well until they stop at Marie’s parents’ farm for some milk.

Marie’s exhausted from chasing the boys around. Clément is angry at the amount the family spent. Samuel’s to blame, but there’s not much they can do, they need the pension he brings in. It’s a conversation ­– one of many – where a quiet, observant Samuel witnesses with some confusion his place in this world.

There’s nothing preachy or maudlin about Depesseville’s film as it shadows a year or so in the life of a boy who wants to feel loved, a boy who’s simultaneously drawn to and revolted by sex because of its confusing sense of powerlessness. Of a bullied boy, never self-pitying, who longs for some kind of protection and, without it, little by little finds ways to feel powerful and noticed.

The entire cast is sublime, but young Giannini captivates attention every moment he’s on screen.

Depesseville’s approach, based on a scrip he co-wrote with Clara Bourreau, delivers a sensitive exploration of a very rocky coming-of-age. There are few real villains here, and fewer still heroes. The physical manifestations of Samuel’s untold prior traumas are seen by Clément as rebellious outbursts requiring a beating, while Marie enlists the help of some kind of family aura reader. If Children’s Services thought the family was not doing well together, they might take Samuel from them. She immediately points out that they need the pension.

The film amounts to a series of beautifully filmed, emotionally moving sketches, tender, empathetic and tragic. The gorgeous cinematography, though welcome, feels almost at odds with the realism of the content, but Depesseville brings the entire vision to an unusual and somewhat mystical conclusion that benefits immeasurably from the almost impressionistic beauty of the entire tale.

Astrakan is an impressive, moving slice of life that understands what turns a child into something troubling.

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Rikki-Tikki-Chatty

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Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose

by Hope Madden

In the 1930s, the Lock Ness Monster had a competitor for the attention of the world’s most gullible. On the Isle of Man, one seemingly normal family claimed that a talking mongoose lived on their property. His name was Gef (sounds like Jeff, which is just funny).

This really happened.

A psychologist named Nandor Fodor traveled to the Irvin family’s farm to prove or disprove these claims. His visit is the basis of writer/director Adam Sigal’s dramedy, Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose.

Simon Pegg plays Dr. Fodor with a mixture of insecurity and vulnerability that’s appealing. Fodor is a skeptic, naturally, although – like probably all who investigate the supernatural – he wants to believe. He wants to prove that something beyond us is possible. Not that he’d admit it.

He certainly wouldn’t admit it to his assistant, Anne (Minnie Driver). Driver’s performance is delightfully bright, logical and yet open. Fodor may see this farce for what it is, but the experience is letting Anne see Fodor for what he is.

The film feels most relevant and transgressive when working as a clear theological allegory.

“All anyone wants in this world is to be happy,” the Irvin estate manager tells Fodor. “Maybe you’d be happy if you let people believe what they want to believe. People love that mongoose.”

“The one that doesn’t exist?” Fodor responds cynically.

“Yes.”

As religious metaphor, Nandor Fodor delivers a tale far more empathetic and compassionate ­than you might expect. But Sigal changes focus from “what makes people choose to believe in Gef” to “what makes someone create such a fabrication?”

Both questions have merit in an investigation or an allegorical film. But Sigal pivots so quickly that the “why believe?” question feels entirely unresolved and the “why lie about it?” resolution seems almost patronizing.

But a cast of eclectic, sometimes weirdly melancholy characters , Pegg’s angry befuddlement and Driver’s charm are almost enough to make up for it.

New In Theaters, Shudder Premiere

Teenage Dream

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Perpetrator

by Hope Madden

Jennifer Reeder is preoccupied with missing girls. Her 2019 gem Knives and Skin watched a town fall to pieces around one such absence. Where that film was full of melancholy absurdities, Reeder’s latest, Perpetrator, is a little bolder, a little angrier. 

As Jonny (Kiah McKirnan) approaches her 18th birthday she goes a tad out of control. Her dad (also in some kind of crisis) doesn’t know what to do with her, but an out-of-town aunt (Alicia Silverstone, a sinister delight) offers to take her in. So, Jonny goes from a fairly anonymous, if reckless, urban life to something far more noticeable in her aunt’s small town.

And there is something deeply amiss in Jonny’s new hometown. Girls just go missing. All the time.

McKirnan’s fish out of water performance is so much fun here because Reeder forces the audience to identify with this feral creature. The rest of the town is so odd, almost willing victims after a lifetime of systemic herding. Jonny’s humor, cynicism and enjoyable streak of opportunism give the film a constant sense of forward momentum, though the just-this-side-of-surreal atmosphere has a dreamlike quality.

Silverstone’s prickly, unpredictable performance is nothing but twisted fun, and all the supporting turns contribute something simultaneously authentic and bizarre to the recipe. (That’s a cooking metaphor because of Aunt Hildie’s birthday cake, an ingenious and foul plot kink worth acknowledging.)

Reeder’s work routinely circles back to peculiar notions of coming of age, but John Hughes she ain’t. Goofiness and seriousness, the eerie and the grim, the surreal and familiar all swim the same bloody hallways, practice the same open shooter drills, and speak up at the same assemblies honoring the latest missing girl.

Reeder’s interested in the way women are raised to disregard one another, to compete with each other, to be adored and consumed, sexualized, victimized and vilified. Her reaction to this environment amounts to a reclamation of blood. Perpetrator swims in blood and gore and humor and terror and feminism galore.

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Atonement

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Golda

by Hope Madden

The Agranat Commission, a 1974 panel investigating the intelligence mishap that left Israel unprepared for the 1973 Yom Kippur War, creates the framing device for Guy Nattiv’s latest, Golda.

The venerable Helen Mirren dons sensible shoes, knits heavy brows and chain smokes her way through a terrific performance inside a superficial, if perfectly time stamped, historical drama. As Prime Minister Golda Meir, Mirren stands out, not only because the film delivers constant opportunities for the Oscar winner to showcase her skills. Mirren is a movie star and Nattiv films her as one – lengthy close ups, moments of vulnerability, moments of breathtaking savvy, crushing failure and overwhelming grief.

Her performance is never showy. But the direction is.

Much has been made of the fact that the English actor was perhaps an inappropriate choice to play Israel’s first woman Prime Minister. Mirren is capable, of course – she is an amazing talent. But she is hard to miss as Helen Mirren in the war room surrounded by Israeli actors including Lior Ashkenazi (as Chief of Staff David Elazar), Rami Heuberger (as Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan) and Dvir Benedek (as disgraced General Eli Zeira).

But Mirren’s appropriateness is not the problem with this film. Her performance certainly isn’t. The problem with Golda is how inexplicably bland it is. Writer Nicholas Martin penned the delightful Florence Foster Jenkins after a career in TV, but neither suggest a knack for nail-biting suspense, which is what this film both required and deserved.

Golda is no biopic. Indeed, the decision to include archival news footage of Meir only demonstrates how poorly this film captured the spirit of the Prime Minister.

It’s not a war movie by any stretch – there’s no action to speak of – and as a political thriller, it’s a bit too plodding to keep your attention. Frustrating is what it is.

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Sparking a Revolution

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Ashkal: The Tunisian Investigation

by Hope Madden

The haunting visual poetry of a cityscape littered with abandoned buildings and new developments is home to Youssef Chebbi’s latest, Ashkal: The Tunisian Investigation. The apt title describes not only the film’s plot – a mystery concerning a string of suspicious suicides – but also the identity of a country itself.

As Fatma (Fatma Oussaifi) and Batal (Mohamed Grayaâ) investigate the apparent self-immolation of a security guard at a high-rise construction site, they uncover evidence of an earlier, similar death that had been hidden by their police department colleagues. Why hide it? In a country where self-immolation – that astonishing act of defiance – triggered a revolution in 2010, these deaths feel particularly ominous. Especially for the corrupt.

As tyranny and its allies, police and corporate corruption, once again thwart justice, an epidemic of self-immolation spreads like a contagion through the city.

Oussaifi delivers a quietly fierce performance, one that Grayaâ counters with unexpected tenderness. Both actors are given plenty of room to breathe, Chebbi lingering with each in their private moments to allow for introspective, patient character development.

Those quiet moments look amazing, too. Ashkal is gorgeously filmed, Chebbi finding symmetry in the bones of the buildings and unexpected beauty in the fire. An evocative use of color, shadow and light create a hypnotic fusion of supernatural fantasy and police procedural.

The context is specific to Tunisia, but the themes are universal. As greed and corruption overwhelm a city, victimizing the poor and the powerless, political protest blends with cultural grief. Simultaneously pessimistic and hopeful, grim and beautiful, Ashkal is a meditation on modern times.