Screening Room: Beast, Orphan: First Kill, Spin Me Round, Glorious, Squeal & More
Tag Archives: Hope Madden
Lion King
Beast
by Hope Madden
Idris Elba fights a lion. I don’t know what more you want from a movie.
Elba plays Dr. Nate Samuels, on a trip with his daughters to visit his late wife’s stomping grounds, the bush in South Africa. He and the girls (Leah Jeffries and Iyana Halley) had become somewhat estranged during their mother’s illness, and he hopes that staying with family friend Martin (Sharlto Copley) and touring the animal reserve he manages will help them all heal.
It’s more likely to kill them, as it turns out, because poachers have pissed off a really big lion and he’s gone all Jaws IV on the lot of them.
How is Mr. Elba? He’s very handsome. Dreamy, even. He’s also weirdly believable as a vulnerable widower, protective dad, capable doctor and badass who kicks lions in the face.
And he’s not the only one kicking lions, either. Halley gets some badassery in as well, as does Copley. Copley also takes a lot of abuse. Jeffries gets to be the smart one in a film unafraid to deliver teenage girls with agency.
This is not to say Beast is a great film. It borrows a great deal from a great many films: Jaws and Cujo most notably.
Director Baltasar Kormákur is an interesting filmmaker, able to produce smart, visceral thrillers like The Oath. Even his more flawed films —Contraband, 2 Guns, Everest, Adrift — make a valiant attempt at more than action for the sake of action. It helps when he writes. He doesn’t write this one.
Ryan Engle writes this one, and he’s not especially good, as a rule. He’s not terrible. His previous efforts — Non-Stop, The Commuter, Rampage, Breaking In — range from mediocre to poor. But Kormákur pulls a few tricks to elevate this material.
Firstly, he turns genre tropes on end by bringing a Black family to Africa and having their white guide be their wise mentor. Beyond that, there are not a lot of surprises, just a competent if uninspired adventure thriller in which Idris Elba fights a lion.
I’m in.
She’s No Annie
Orphan: First Kill
by Hope Madden
There’s something wrong with Esther.
That was the excellent tag line for Jaume Collet-Serra’s fun 2009 surprise Orphan. Then 12-year-old Isabelle Fuhrman delivered an inspired performance buoyed by the nuanced work of two veteran talents (Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard), but it was the climactic shocker that guaranteed the film’s place in horror history.
The bigger surprise might be to make a prequel 13 years later with the same lead. Furhman, now in her twenties, reprises her role as the orphan you do not want to adopt.
In director William Brent Bell’s episode, we go back in time to meet up with our wee villain in an Estonian facility. It’s a fun, bloody start to Esther’s adventure and an early reminder (it has been 13 years) that if you wonder whether Esther’s evil, F around and find out.
That, of course, is one of the obstacles writer David Coggeshall needs to overcome. We already know Esther’s big secret and we already know what she’s capable of. What surprises are left?
Plenty!
Orphan: First Kill goes in unexpected places, many of them an absolute hoot. Bell’s film walks an impressive line between tension, horror and laughs. It works because of a tight script, but mostly because of rock-solid performances from Fuhrman and Julia Stiles.
Stiles is Esther’s new mommy, a wealthy helicopter parent with an artist husband and a teenage son. She’s magnificent.
Able support work surrounds the pair, and Coggeshall’s screenplay meshes the expected with the unexpected.
I had no idea Bell—whose previous work includes the unintentionally funny The Boy and Brahms: The Boy II—had this in him. Yes, Orphan: First Kill may have benefitted from low expectations: a heretofore weak director, a 25-year-old trying to convince the audience she’s 12, a franchise none of us thought needed a sequel. Still, there’s no denying it entertains.
The film is no masterpiece and Fuhrman’s age does take you out of the fantasy now and again. But it is sly fun.
Turning Different Screws
The Innocents
by Hope Madden
Sixty years ago, Jack Clayton and Henry James mined supernatural terror with little more than the austere atmosphere built in one spooky location and the unnerving creepiness of children.
Sure, the youngsters in writer/director Eskil Vogt’s new Norwegian horror The Innocents look more like the icy blondes of Village of the Damned, but his film shares much more than just a title with Clayton’s masterpiece.
Vogt’s first triumph is his casting. Rakel Lenora Fløttum is Ida, a cherubic blonde 9-year-old idly wandering the tower block of her family’s new apartment. She doesn’t know anyone yet and doesn’t really want to play with her older sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), whose nonspeaking Autism keeps Ida from seeing her as truly human.
As Ida explores the area and the looming forest just beyond, Vogt’s observant camera builds atmosphere and dread. The tower block itself is a menacing presence forever in the background, the trees on all sides penning in these children on the loose.
Unnerving cinematography from Sturla Brandeth Grøvlen (Another Round) makes tiny children appear like playthings in the foreground of towering, watching buildings. Aerials of children on bicycles, their shadows seeming to be moving the bikes, unnerve and beguile.
Slowly, Vogt unveils the reality of the situation. We learn as the children learn, and we take on their curiosity and logic as we do so. Because there are several children in this complex who have some unexpected powers. Anna discovers hers through a little neighbor girl (Mina Yasmi Bremseth Asheim) who can read her thoughts.
Ida learns that her own new friend Ben (Sam Ashraf) may not have the right temperament for his gifts.
What unfolds is an observant and often terrifying origin story of sorts. The Innocents plays like a superhero story told with none of the drama, though an awful lot of horror. These children first thrill as their abilities blossom with camaraderie and commonality. Then comes the tricky test of good and evil.
On display with unblinking eye is the casual brutality of childhood. The Innocents is a film that sneaks up on you, rattles you, and sticks around for a while after the credits roll.
Fright Club: Killer Clothing in Horror Movies
We wanted to call this Dressed to Kill, but that would just be confusing. No, this is not about dressing the part [or about horror’s terrible history of confusing sexual orientation with psychosis]. Nope. This is about actual killer clothing.
5. The Red Shoes (2005)
In 2005, Kim Yong-gyun updated the old, horrifying Hans Christian Anderson story of vanity. Do you know that one? Spoiled girl with pretty red shoes is cursed so the shoes never stop dancing, her only relief is to have her feet cut off? Excellent children’s fare!
Like a lot of Asian horror of the time, the film follows a newly single woman and her daughter as they move into a shabby new apartment before finding a cursed object – in this case, shoes that are actually pink.
Though Sun-jai (Kim Hye-soo) brought home the discarded pair she found at the subway for herself, it’s her daughter (Park Yeon-ah) who becomes obsessed with them. Too bad they keep killing people!
There’s the obligatory sleuthing into the mysterious curse, but the filmmaker keeps you guessing, keeps the blood flowing, and comes up with a solidly creepy little gem.
4. Deerskin (2019)
What makes a good midlife crisis? What gives it swagger? Physicality? Style? Maybe a little fringe?
Deerskin.
Welcome to another bit of lunacy from filmmaker Quentin Dupieux. As he did with 2010’s Rubber (a sentient tire on a cross-country rampage), Dupieux sets up one feature-length joke.
It’s funny, though.
Deerskin is also slyly autobiographical in a way Dupieux’s other films are not. An odd duck wants to follow his vision (in this case, the obsessive love of a deerskin jacket) and make a movie. Creative partnerships and collaboration, while possibly necessary, also soil the vision and make the filmmaker feel dumb.
No one understands him!
Or maybe they do and his ruse is up.
No matter. He still has killer style.
3. Slaxx (2020)
Absurdism meets consumerism in co-writer/director Elza Kephart’s bloody comedy, Slaxx.
Sehar Bhojani steals every scene as the cynical Shruti, but the jeans are the real stars here. Kephart finds endlessly entertaining ways to sic them on unsuspecting wearers.
Where Romero mainly pointed fingers at the hordes mindlessly drawn to stores like CCC, Kephart sees the villains as those perpetuating clean corporate hypocrisy. Still, it’s their customers and workers she murders—by the pantload.
2. Clown (2014)
Sympathetic, surprising, and often very uncomfortable, Jon (Spider-Man franchise) Watts’s horror flick, though far from perfect, does an excellent job of morphing that lovable party favorite into the red-nosed freak from your nightmares.
Because clowns are terrifying.
Kent (a pitiful Andy Powers) stumbles across a vintage clown outfit in an estate property he’s fitting for resale. Perfect timing – his son’s birthday party is in an hour. What a surprise this will be, unless the suit is cursed in some way and will slowly turn Kent into a child-eating demon.
It does! Hooray!!!
1. In Fabric (2018)
My last note after watching In Fabric: “Well, that was weird.”
Weird in a good way. The film follows a red Ambassadorial Function Dress and the havoc it wreaks on its wearers.
Strickland, apparently, is about as fond of consumerism as Romero or Cronenberg. He’s also as fond of the color red as Argento. Unlike the giallo films that clearly inform Strickland’s aesthetic, here commerce, not violence itself, is the seductive, sexualized element.
Nobody blends giallo’s surrealistic seduction with dry British wit (two elements that, to be honest, should not fit together at all) like Peter Strickland. Subversive and playful while boasting a meticulous obsession with the exploitation films of the Seventies, Strickland creates vintage-futuristic fantasies that live outside of time and evoke both nostalgia and wonder.
Eaten Alive
When I Consume You
by Hope Madden
Perry Blackshear wants to break your heart.
His understated, excruciatingly tender 2015 horror They Look Like People certainly succeeds. And with his latest, When I Consume You, the filmmaker is at it again. Both films delicately explore mental illness—in this case, the lingering horror of childhood trauma.
Blackshear works with his regular troupe of actors: Evan Dumouchel, MacLeod Andrews and Margaret Ying Drake. Libby Ewing joins the gang as Daphne, big sister to Wilson (Dumouchel). The siblings are struggling to defeat a demon.
The film moves slowly and takes on an improvisational feel as Wilson ambles through life best he can, often landing on Daphne’s doorstep at 3 am so she can talk him through a panic attack. Blackshear never specifies the kind of childhood these two must have endured to leave them this scarred. Then again, the filmmaker doesn’t specify much.
This movie offers mostly atmosphere, situations that give the sense of the characters’ mental and emotional space. Blackshear also mimics the cycle of depression and anxiety with visual and audio callbacks: Daphne’s under the bed, later Wilson’s under the bed; Wilson’s on the sidewalk; later Daphne’s on the sidewalk. And there is the recurring audio cue: Get up.
This mostly works, creating a film that echoes with haunting attempts to break a cycle. Flashbacks are also employed, although they offer little to the narrative and only hinder a film already lacking forward momentum.
Dumouchel’s heartbreaking performance matches well with Ewing’s resigned turn. Blackshear’s cinematography emphasizes their intimacy, as well as their emotional incoherence, and the pair delivers a lived-in chemistry appropriate to two siblings who’ve been through the wringer.
Andrews is a volatile surprise I’m sorry we didn’t meet earlier in the film. He injects the movie with needed energy, but he also triggers a shift into more overt metaphor. While the film required some kind of structure, this tidy figurative direction feels false and forced.
They Look Like People possessed a deceptively loose narrative that, in fact, led inevitably to one of the tensest climaxes on record. When I Consume You feels like it’s trying to obscure its far more obvious framework.
Screening Room: Bodies Bodies Bodies, Fall, Emily the Criminal, Day Shift & More
Gig Economy
Emily the Criminal
by Hope Madden
The American Dream is a myth at best, a nightmare at worst in first-time filmmaker John Patton Ford’s lean indictment of capitalism, Emily the Criminal.
There’s a fearlessness born of anger in both Ford’s script and his lead’s performance. Aubrey Plaza flexes dramatic muscle as Emily, a savvy, hardworking young woman beset on all sides by forces crafted to keep the poor, poor—women in particular.
We meet Emily mid-interview, caught in a lie about her criminal record. Plaza’s roiling emotional reaction to the interview — a brilliant piece of acting — tells you all you need to know about the character’s character, backstory, and future.
Seventy grand in debt from art school, working catering gigs that barely put a dent in the loan interest, still holding out hope for a good, honorable, mainstream gig with an advertising agency, Emily’s on the ropes. Does she want to make a quick $200? The job’s illegal, but no one will get hurt.
Of course she does, and she’ll also take tomorrow’s $2000.
Ford’s tight script reveals only what’s necessary and rethinks nobility. Even as Emily begins to embrace and hone her criminality, she never loses sight of the true goal: comfy, secure, posh employment. But that’s as big a set up as college was.
It’s great to see Plaza not only playing a dramatic role but shouldering lead responsibilities. She’s in every scene —nearly every shot of every scene—and carrying that weight with grit. In her hands, Emily is defensive, cagey, and unafraid to be unlikeable. Plaza’s electric.
Theo Rossi provides a surprising, tender presence in a role where you wouldn’t expect it. He and Plaza sparkle together. You root for them, regardless of their occupation.
Emily the Criminal delivers the realistic inverse to a Tarantino or Scorsese. There’s no glamour to the criminal life. It’s a gig. And sometimes you gotta take the gig.
Don’t Look Down
Fall
by Hope Madden
YouTubers are stupid. I think that’s the basic theme of Fall, the story of influencers proving their erroneous sense of immortality and bone-deep need for attention.
Lessons are learned and lunches are lost as two friends scale a defunct radio tower 2000+ feet into the sky. Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) is trying to overcome grief and find a reason to live again. Her best friend Hunter (Virginia Gardner) is the one who convinced her to face her fears, but if Hunter can impress her online fanbase while they’re at it, all the better.
It’s all superfluous, telegraphed nonsense because what’s the real point here? How well can director Scott Mann and cinematographer MacGregor (Vivarium) capture fit young women in gut-churning danger?
Pretty well.
Strong supporting performance by Garner’s bra, by the way.
The story itself is cobbled together from other sources–a touch of The Descent here, a whole scoop of The Shallows there, plenty of Open Water, lots of Frozen (no, not the “Let It Go” Frozen). Essentially, dumbasses get themselves into serious danger and we sit with them until they probably die.
Believable? No. Thrillingly shot? Yes.
Fall delivers gorgeous, stomach-churning action. The footage is really quite stunning, so if you’re going to watch it, find a big screen.
A story this spare can be and has been effective when done well, which is to say, when done lean and mean. Fall’s biggest downfall is not the acting (entirely competent), not the cloying emotional underpinnings (forgivable), not the leaps in logic. It’s not the dream sequences (the laziest plot device in all of cinema). It’s not even that one surprise twist that we all saw coming. Or the other one.
It’s the running time.
Fall clocks in at an hour and 45 minutes, which is far too long for this film. Mann and company can’t sustain the tension through the middle section well enough to merit the length. The Shallows ran under 90 minutes. Open Water delivered its powerful blow in less than an hour and twenty minutes. Shave half an hour off this film and you have yourself a brisk, dizzying effort worth a trip to the cinema.
You Wanna See a Dead Body?
Summering
by Hope Madden
We’re invited to a turning point for four best friends. This is the last weekend of summer. On Monday, Daisy (Lia Barnett), Lola (Sanal Victoria), Dina (Madalen Mills) and Mari (Eden Grace Redfield) will be middle schoolers.
The first moments of Summering communicate the film’s strengths and weaknesses simultaneously. Heavy-handed, stilted voiceover narration sinks what is otherwise a jubilant, funny and very authentic opening.
Daisy, in voiceover, as we watch four adorable youngsters walk and talk through their suburban neighborhood: Summer has no walls. You can go anywhere.
Mari, on-camera dialog about that time her mom made her use the men’s room because the line for the women’s room was too long: Pee was everywhere. It was like a lake of man pee.
Summering walks that weird balance for its entire run time. One moment beams with the authentic lunacy of pre-adolescence. The next, adult male writers wax poetic and pretend that poetry sprung from the mind of a 12-year-old girl.
Director James Ponsoldt (The Circle, The Spectacular Now) and co-writer Benjamin Percy set the kids on an adventure before school and life changes the delicate balance of their circle. It amounts to a modern retelling of Stand By Me, with lower stakes, less ground to cover, and a wild lack of logic. Ponsolt and Percy seem desperate to capture the raw honesty of Reiner’s classic King adaptation, but their result’s a cloying mess.
The performances – especially Redfield and Megan Mullally as Mari’s mom – charm and endear with authenticity. Victoria and Mills succeed in crafting individuals, girls with backstories and personalities. Barnett, paired with an effective if woefully underused Lake Bell as the mom who drinks, struggles with the heavy emotion of an arc that’s clearly telegraphed.
It’s another way the storytelling rings false scene after scene.
Helicopter parents and cell phones, cartwheels and nostalgia, Ponsolt brings together all the elements for a modern ode to the last moments of childhood. And he tries really hard. But he’s unconvincing.
