Writer’s block—it is a common theme in all writing, especially horror. Think about The Shining, for example. Fred (writer/director/star Josh Ruben) certainly is. And at first, writer’s block is what the writer/director in Ruben leads you to believe Scare Me is all about.
Fred takes a cab to a wintry cabin. He tries to dodge
questions from his driver, who, like Fred, fancies herself a bit of a writer. A
short time later, Fred stares at a laptop screen. He’s not typing.
A power outage and a chance encounter with “real writer” Fanny
(Aya Cash) lead to an evening of telling scary stories. And just like that stormy
night so long ago when Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley out-storied her companions Percy
Shelley and Lord Byron, the male ego is more easily wounded than any fictional
character.
At its best, Scare Me offers an intriguing look inside the mind of privilege. What is it like to be a decent-looking white guy who has to resolve himself to the fact that he actually has no claim to that top spot on the totem pole that he’s always been told is his?
At its worst, it’s an overlong bit of self-indulgence.
As Fred’s nemesis/love interest(?)/frenemy Fanny, Cash is straightforward, merciless, funny and full of insight—as is Ruben’s script. Scare Me has no time for entitled, lazy writers.
For any of the real tensions of the film to work, we have to recognize and, to a degree, empathize with—even root for—Fred. Thanks to a smart script and an eerily recognizable performance, we do.
Ruben does an excellent job of wading those familiar waters, sort of likable and loathsome, sympathetic and toxic. Fred is kind of a good guy, or he sees himself as a good guy. Of course, he also sees himself as a writer.
The film hits its high (pun intended) when pizza guy Carlo (SNL’s Chris Redd) joins the storytelling. It’s not quite enough to save a second act that simply goes on for too long. But a bloated midriff doesn’t spoil Scare Me entirely, a savvy piece of storytelling in itself.
Can a film be absurd without really being cynical? That might be the miracle of Miranda July, who mixes heartbreak and humor like no one else.
Fifteen years since her groundbreaking Me and You and
Everyone We Know and nine years since The Future, the
writer/director returns to the screen with a film every bit as ambitious but perhaps
more contained and intimate.
In Kajillionaire, a miraculous Evan Rachel Wood is Old Dolio Dyne, 26-year-old woman-child who knows no existence other than that of the low-rent cons she runs day in, day out with her disheveled but wily parents (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger).
Like Hirokazu Koreeda’s delicate 2018 film Shoplifters
and Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 masterpiece Parasite, Kajillionaire
disregards the idea of the glamorous con and settles fully into the concept of scam
as a daily grind. And, like Koreeda and Ho, July uses this workaday world to
examine family. Although July’s vision is more decidedly comedic and highly
stylized, she hits the same notes.
The Dynes make their home in an abandoned office space that
shares a wall with a car wash. Every day—twice on Wednesdays—pink bubbles
descend that wall and it’s up to the Dynes to collect, discard, and dry, lest
the foundation of the building become besot with dampness and mold. The
precision clockwork (their digital watches are timed to go off) and the pink ooze
become ideal identifiers of Old Dolio’s rigid yet surreal existence.
Things get unpredictable when Mom and Dad take a shine to Melanie (an effervescent Gina Rodriguez). She loves their oddball qualities and wants to join the team, but Old Dolio is immediately put off by the disruption, and more than that, by her parents’ doting affection for Melanie.
July is a sharp, witty and incisive filmmaker, but Kajillionaire benefits more from the performances than any of her other films. Wood is like an alien visiting human life, then imitating and observing it, and the performance is oddly heartbreaking.
Jenkins and Winger are reliably magnificent, and Rodriguez’s
bright charm is the needed light in an otherwise gloomy tale.
The film hits July’s sweet spot: gawky introverts struggling to find, accept and maintain human connections. The humor works as well as it does because the whimsy and eccentricity in the film is grounded in compassion rather than mockery.
Life takes unexpected turns, no matter how tirelessly you
prepare.
Writer/director Dean Kapsalis explores a horrific side of this notion in his confident feature debut, The Swerve.
The film nestles into suburbia where Holly (a phenomenal
Azura Skye) lays awake, waiting for the alarm. Her face is a mask of
resignation and obligation. As the morning rituals rush themselves toward a day
at work and school for Holly, her two teenage boys and her husband, Rob (Bryce Pinkham),
it’s clear that Holly lives inside herself. In her home she observes and
facilitates but is almost never regarded, reached out to. She’s barely even
there.
The film takes us through one week in Holly’s life. Her
sister (Ashley Bell) returns home, stirring resentment and jealousy. Her
husband works late. There’s a prescription bottle. There’s a mouse. There’s a
boy at school, another boy on the highway. Some of this is likely imagined. All
of it is leading somewhere, and as inevitable as that destination is, it will
still hit you right in the gut.
The Swerve busies itself with too many catalysts. The film could have benefitted from slightly less. But there is no escaping Skye’s performance. As a woman on the verge, her delicate state, the way she fights against her own tendency to submit to misery, is devastating.
Skye is not alone. Pinkham is excellent in a role that too often is a throwaway, one dimensional bastard. The likeable authenticity he brings to the performance makes the character and the situations so much more frustrating. Likewise, Bell and Zach Rand (The Woman) bring life and complexity to their roles as well as Holly’s dilemma.
In its most authentic moments, the tension the film
generates is almost unbearable. As small mistreatments build, Skye’s posture
and dead-eyed stare say everything you need to know about Holly’s whole life. Skye
delivers half of her stunning performance without a single word.
Kapsalis’s understatement as a director capitalizes on Skye’s still, unnerving descent. Together they deliver a climax that will haunt you.
That Faulkner quote gets a lot of action in writers/directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s social nightmare Antebellum.
The titular term describes the period in American history just prior to the Civil War. That’s where this thriller finds its horror, and where a prominent, present day African American sociologist/activist/author wakes up to find herself trapped.
Janelle Monáe crafts an impressive lead as Veronica, a PhD beaten, branded and forced to accept a slave name in a film that plays out like a disturbingly relevant Twilight Zone episode.
Enslaved on a reformer plantation, “Eden” works to stay alive long enough to plan an escape and outsmart two Confederate officers (Eric Lange, Jack Huston) and the mysterious mansion mistress (Jena Malone).
The hideous rise of white nationalism is the true nightmare here – fertile and bloody ground for horror. From Godzilla to Get Out, horror has always brimmed with social commentary and anxiety, so it should come as no surprise that a genre film tackles America’s racist shame this directly.
And while this approach certainly grabs your attention with its boldness, Bush and Renz can get too caught up in obviousness and speech-making. The second act suffers most from these heavy hands. The modern day shenanigans with Veronica and two friends (Gabourey Sidibe, Lily Cowles) push too hard, last too long and say very little.
But as much as Spike Lee has recently connected the past and present of racism with layered nuance, Bush and Renz go right upside our heads. Pulpy exploitation? It goes there. It’s a horror movie.
Horror movies exist so we can look at the nightmare, examine it from a distance, and come out the other side, unscathed ourselves. Antebellum is acknowledgment and catharsis, and not only because all those Black people being terrorized on the screen are fictional, instead of real victims in another cell phone crime scene. The film’s true catharsis – a highly charged and emotional payoff – lies in Act 3: comeuppance.
And it is glorious.
There are stumbles getting to the fireworks, but for sheer heroic tit for tat, Antebellum delivers the goods.
Newcomer Charlie Guevara charms in Flavio Alves’s drama The Garden Left Behind with a bittersweet performance as Tina, an undocumented Mexican trans woman getting by in NYC. Her performance is simultaneously optimistic, wearied, frightened and strong.
Wisely, filmmaker Alves focuses his tale unblinkingly on
Tina—her day to day, her loving if prickly relationship with her grandmother
(Miriam Cruz), her warm and supportive community of friends, her struggle with
an insecure boyfriend, her tentative steps toward transition. In a real way,
every movement in the film is about transition, about claiming something that
belongs to Tina, whether it’s her voice or her financial independence, her
emotional health or her political power.
The rawness of Guevara’s turn sometimes makes way for
self-consciousness that brings certain scenes to an awkward halt. Still,
Guevara and Cruz share a lovely, lived-in chemistry. It’s their relationship
that both buoys the film and makes the it ache all the more.
The story around the periphery crystallizes the ways in
which the lives of trans people—especially trans women of color—differ from your
garden variety New Yorkers’. Alves’s hand is not heavy; the fact that so many
of Tina’s interactions could be taken as potentially menacing speaks volumes
without an overt narrative. It’s actually in this B-story that the filmmaker
may make the most salient and heartbreaking points.
If the film feels authentic, that’s unsurprising. Alves not
only cast trans actors for each trans role, but he also employed a staff of
transgender filmmakers in creative and crew roles. This after several years of
research within the NYC transgender community to develop the insightful and
poignant storyline.
It’s no surprise The Garden Left Behind became the 2019 SXSW audience award winner. The film breaks through as not only an admirable artistic vision produced with integrity, but a beautiful human tale of perseverance and love.
As colorful as a dream, Juan Diego Escobar Alzate’s feature
film debut Luz: The Flower of Evil looks like magic and brims with the
casual brutality of faith.
Set inside a religious community in the mountains of
Colombia, the film drops us into ongoing struggles with the group’s religious
leader, El Señor (Conrad Osorio). No one knows the devil as he does, he reminds
his daughter Laila (Andrea Esquivel).
She lives contentedly, devoutly, along with her two adopted
sisters. El Señor and the villagers consider the trio angels—just as they believe
the little boy chained up out back is the Messiah who will deliver the community
from its recent calamities.
Though never entirely detailed, the internal logic of the
film and the community is clear enough to feel simultaneously familiar and
horrifying. The way the filmmaker wrestles with what is and is not real, with
forgiveness and the morally ambiguous nature of man, and with our tendency to
blame God or the devil for our own shortcomings is frustrating and
intoxicating.
Alzate gets maximum impact for minimum budget thanks in
large part to Nicolas Caballero Arenas’s cinematography. His breathtaking visuals
add spooky richness, turning this Western of sorts into a beautiful, lyrical,
macabre Columbian folktale.
Lovely as it is, the film echoes of loss. The title itself conjures what is absent. As time wears on and the “angels” lose confidence in their father figure, remembered stories of the late mother figure Luz (Spanish for light) take the space for them that El Señor’s tales of God take for the rest of the community.
Luz: The Flower of Evil surprises as often as it relies on expectations to deliver its message. The film is more atmospheric than cautionary, its resolution a fitting end for characters’ whose own logic doesn’t likely reflect that of the audience. It is a vision, from its opening musical notes to its closing image, though, that marks a filmmaker worth discovering.
We haven’t been able to leave home in months, which means that home has kind of turned into its own horror show. For us, that’s Ohio, so we figured, why not celebrate?! In honor of our own home grown horror show, we dug into the best horror movies set right here in OH-IO!
5. Scream 2 (1997): Windsor College, OH
Updating his celebratory meta-analysis of genre clichés, Craven checked back in on Sydney Prescott (Neve Campell) and crew a couple years later, as the surviving members of the Woodsboro murders settled into a new semester in the little Ohio liberal arts school of Windsor College. The movie Stab, based on the horrors Sydney and posse survived (well, some didn’t survive) just two years ago is already out and screening on campus, but has it inspired copycat killers?
Craven, working again from a screenplay by Kevin Williamson, goes even more meta, using the film-within-a-film technique while simultaneously poking fun at horror sequel clichés in his own horror sequel.
And in the same way Scream subverted horror tropes while employing them to joyous results, the sequel – funny, tense, scary, smart, and fun – manages to find freshness by digging through what should be stale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG0oUO4mK4A&t=29s
4. Tragedy Girls (2017): Rosedale, OH
Heathers meets Scream in the savvy horror comedy that mines social media culture to truly entertaining effect.
Sadie (Brianna Hildebrand) and McKayla (Alexandra Shipp) are looking for more followers to improve their brand, and they have been doing a lot of research to make their content more compelling. The Tragedy Girls plumb their small Ohio town’s surprising death toll with more insight than the local police seem to have. Where do they get their knowledge?
Provocative.
Hildebrand and Shipp (both X-Men; Hildebrand was the moody Negasonic in Deadpool while Shipp plays young Storm in the franchise proper) nail their characters’ natural narcissism. Is it just the expectedly shallow, self-centeredness of the teenage years, or are they sociopaths? Who can tell these days?
3. The Faculty (1998): Herrington, OH
The film exaggerates (one hopes) the social order of a typical
Ohio high school to propose that it wouldn’t be so terrible if all the teachers
and most of the students died violently, or at least underwent such a horrific
trauma that a revision of the social order became appealing.
Indeed, in this film, conformity equals a communicable disease.
Adults aren’t to be trusted; high school is a sadistic machine grinding us into
sausage; outcasts are the only true individuals and, therefore, the only people
worth saving. Director Robert Rodriguez pulls the thing off with panache, all
the while exploring the terrifying truth that we subject our children to a very
real and reinforced helplessness every school day.
Interestingly, the infected teachers and students don’t turn into
superficial, Stepford-style versions of themselves. For the most part, they
indeed become better, stronger, more self-actualized (ironically enough)
versions, which is interestingly creepy. It’s as if humanity – at least the
version of it we find in a typical American high school – really isn’t worth
saving.
2. Trick ‘r Treat (2007): Warren Valley, OH
Columbus, Ohio native Michael Dougherty outdid himself as writer/director of this anthology of interconnected Halloween shorts. Every brief tale set in sleepy Warren Valley, Ohio compels attention with sinister storytelling, the occasional wicked bit of humor and great performances, but it’s the look of the film that sets it far above the others of its ilk.
Dougherty takes the “scary” comic approach to the film—the kind you find in Creepshow and other Tales from the Crypt types—but nothing looks as macabrely gorgeous as this movie. The lighting, the color, the costumes and the way live action bleeds into the perfectly placed and articulated moments of graphic artwork—all of it creates a giddy holiday mood that benefits the film immeasurably.
Dylan Baker (returning to the uptight and evil bastard he perfected for his fearless performance in Happiness) leads a whip-smart cast that includes impressive turns from Brian Cox, Anna Pacquin, Leslie Bibb and Brett Kelly (Thurman Merman, everybody!).
And it’s all connected with that adorable menace, Sam. Perfect.
1. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): Springwood, OH
Teens in suburban Ohio share nightmares, and one by one, these teens are not waking up. Not that their disbelieving parents care. When Tina woke one night, her nightgown shredded by Freddie’s razor fingers, her super-classy mother admonished, “Tina, hon, you gotta cut your fingernails or you gotta stop that kind of dreamin’. One or the other.”
Depositing a boogieman in your dreams to create nightmares that will truly kill you was a genius concept by writer/director/Clevelander Craven because you can only stay awake for so long. It took everyone’s fear of nightmares to a more concrete level.
The film was sequeled to death, it suffers slightly from a low budget and even more from weak FX that date it, but it’s still an effective shocker. That face that stretches through the wall is cool, the stretched out arms behind Tina are still scary. The nightmare images are apt, and the hopscotch chant and the vision of Freddie himself were not only refreshingly original but wildly creepy.
“Lord knows where a person who ain’t saved might end up.”
Indeed. The constant fight to overcome the worst in ourselves lies at the heart of The Devil All the Time, director Antonio Campos’s darkly riveting realization of Donald Ray Pollock’s best-selling novel.
Bookended by the close of World War II and the escalation in Vietnam, the film connects the fates of various characters living in the small rural towns of Southern Ohio and West Virginia.
Arvin (Tom Holland), the son of a disturbed WWII vet (Bill Skarsgård), fights to protect his sister (Eliza Scanlen) while he ponders his future. Husband and wife serial killers (Jason Clarke and Riley Keough) look for hitchhikers to degrade, photograph and murder. A new small town preacher (Robert Pattinson) displays a special interest in the young girls of his congregation.
It’s a star studded affair—Mia Wasikowska, Haley Bennett and Sebastian Stan joining as well—but every actor blends into the woodsy atmosphere with a sense of unease that permeates the air. No stars here, all character actors in service of the film’s unsettling calling.
Pollock’s prose created a dizzyingly bleak landscape where Flannery O’Connor and Cormac McCarthy might meet to quietly ponder man’s inhumanity to man. Campos unlocks that world courtesy of Pollock himself, who narrates the film’s depravity with a backwoods folksiness that makes it all the more chilling.
As rays of light are constantly snuffed out by darkness, Campos (who also co-wrote the screenplay) uses Pollock’s voice and contrasting soundtrack song choices to create a perverse air of comfort.
Redemption is a slippery aim in and around Knockemstiff, Ohio, and grace is even harder to come by. With a heavier hand, this film would have been a savage beating or a backwoods horror of the most grotesque kind. Campos and his formidable ensemble deliver Pollock’s tale with enough understatement and integrity to cut deeply, unnerving your soul and leaving a well-earned scar.
Documentaries can be frustrating, especially political
documentaries. They warn you about coming disasters you hadn’t predicted, show
you the brutality and ugliness in parts of the world you hadn’t seen, reinforce
that ulcerous dread in your gut about humanity on the whole. You can basically
only hope they also show you a way out.
Mercifully, All In: The Fight for Democracy does
that. But first it upbraids your apathy about voting by detailing the harrowing
history of Americans who had to take a beating, even die, just to exercise that
right. Then it details the meticulously detailed strategy in place and being
executed right now to keep you from exercising your right, now that you understand
its value.
Filmmakers Lisa Cortes and Liz Garbus wisely anchor their
facts to Georgia’s gubernatorial race of 2018. The core storyline, narrated by the
Democratic candidate in that race, Stacey Abrams, is of that election’s rampant
and open-to-pubic-view suppression of Georgia votes. Abrams’s opponent, Brian
Kemp, had been an architect of voter suppression as Georgia’s Secretary of State:
closing polling places, purging voting rolls and instituting legislation that
made voting more difficult.
It was incredibly successful for him. Expect to see more of
it.
If that sounds cynical, it is. It’s also a major point of the film. But Cortes and Garbus (and Abrams) have a more idealistic goal, which is to point out something important to every American citizen regardless of party: Democracies only work when citizens decide what politicians do, not vice versa. When citizens vote, we can make the decisions. We can determine who is in office and what they need to fight for and against. And if they don’t do it? We can vote them out.
But we can only do that if we can actually vote, which is
why politicians who don’t want to do their jobs enacting the will of the people
work tirelessly to make it harder and harder for Americans to cast their
ballots.
The history is well told between effective speakers and
illustrative animations, but it’s the insidious nature of voter suppression and
its modern execution that is equal parts enlightening, terrifying and
frustrating.
So make a plan. Verify your polling location. Double check
that you are still on the rolls. (Ohio is especially guilty of stifling the
vote.) Vote early.
