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Hellhound on My Tail

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Sinners

by Hope Madden

Ryan Coogler can direct the hell out of a movie, can’t he?

For Sinners, he reteams with longtime creative partner Michael B. Jordan to sing a song of a 1932 Mississippi juke joint. The Smokestack twins (Jordan) are back from Chicago, a truckload of ill-gotten liquor and a satchel full of cash along with them. They intend to open a club “for us, by us” and can hardly believe their eyes when three hillbillies come calling.

Jack O’Connell (an amazing actor in everything he’s done since Eden Lake) has a brogue and a banjo. He and his two friends would love to come on in, sing, dance, and spend some money, if only Smoke would invite them.

He does not.

The night becomes a standoff between those inside the club and those outside, but by the time Act 2 sets its fangs, Coogler and his terrific ensemble already have you invested in everyone inside.

The great Delroy Lindo effortlessly charms as bluesman Delta Slim. Wunmi Mosaku (His  House, Lovecraft Country) works with Coogler’s direction to turn the horror trope “supernatural expert” (the one person who can explain to the others what’s going on and how to stop it) into the film’s broken heart.

Newcomer Miles Caton shines as the young blues guitarist whose voice is so sweet it can conjure the devil.

The setting and period suit the film beautifully, giving Coogler room to play with ideas of religion and redemption, music and temptation, and everything else that offers hope to the powerless. Every character carries a rich history that you can feel.

Jordan impresses in dual roles, carving out unique but dependent characters. O’Connell delivers lines and lyrics with a lived-in magic, twisting together Coogler’s insightful ideas about how prayer and song are often tools of the oppressor.

It’s scary. It’s sexy. The action slaps. It’s funny when it needs to be, sad just as often. It looks and sounds incredible. And there’s a cameo from Buddy F. Guy, in case you needed a little authenticity.

When Ryan Coogler writes and directs a vampire movie, he gives you reason to believe there is yet new life for the old monster.

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Beauty and the Beatings

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The Ugly Stepsister

by George Wolf

Are we done clutching our pearls about the recent Snow White update? They’re about to get plenty gooey.

Really, writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt doesn’t care either way, she’s too busy infusing her feature debut with an impossible-to-ignore blast of sharp wit, subdued rage, and grotesque bodily horrors.

Yes, The Ugly Stepsister (Den stygge stesøsteren) the latest new angle to a classic tale, but don’t expect it follow the trend of humanizing misunderstood villains. Blichfeldt makes sure there are plenty of bad guys and girls throughout this Norwegian Cinderella story, punctuated by grisly violence surprisingly close to what’s in the 17th Century French version of the fairy tale penned by Charles Perrault.

As her mother Rebekka (Ane Del Torp) is set to marry the wealthy Otto (Ralph Carlsson), braces-wearing, teenage gawk Elvira (Lea Myren, amazing) dreams of one day marrying handsome Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth). But not long after Mom, Elvira and sister Alma (Flo Fagerli) move into Otto’s manor, he drops dead and new stepsister Agnes (the awesomely named Thea Sofie Loch Næss) drops a bomb.

Otto was the one trying to marry for money. They’re broke.

You know the plan that’s hatched: Elvira has to marry Prince Julian. If she can prove herself to be the most beautiful and charming of the “noble virgins” assembled at the upcoming ball, Elvira can secure the family’s future. Neither physical imperfection nor that slut Agnes is going to get in Elvira’s way.

As Elvira learns that “beauty is pain,” Blichfeldt’s aesthetic recalls both Cronenberg and Fargeat, with wince-inducing procedures, the oozing of bodily fluids, and a proud, unflinching satirical lens. This is Blichfeldt’s reminder that these impossible beauty standards have a long history, as do slut shaming, compromised nobility and the limited options of desperation.

Plenty of ugliness to go around.

Myren carries the film with a transformational performance that parallels the impressive physical changes. Elvira arrives as a shy, impressionable child, but when she begins to resemble the required standard, the toll to keep it – while not quite as garish as in The Substance – is equally destructive.

The Ugly Stepsister is fierce, funny, gross and subversively defiant. But is one feature film enough to immediately put Blichfeldt on the watch list of cinema’s feminist hell raisers?

Yes. The shoe fits.

Shudder Premiere

Wait a Minute, Mr. Postman

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Dead Mail

by Hope Madden

Welcome to Peoria, IL sometime in the mid-1980s. A little mystery has taken hold of the post office. Letter sorters found a necklace in an envelope with the wrong address on it. It looks valuable, so that means Jasper (Tomas Boykin) will put his skills to the test to try to sleuth out who the jewelry belongs to and return it to its rightful owner.

There’s also this torn, bloody piece of paper about a kidnapping.

Filmmakers Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy’s thriller Dead Mail builds on a wildly unrealistic concept: smalltown post offices with super-secure back rooms where pains are taken and spies may be accessed to solve mysteries behind lost mail. And yet, their analog approach to this period piece gives it a true crime feel you never fully shake.

The authenticity is not just in the lo-fi look—although the set design, costumes and hair are spot on. The wholly convincing performances, especially from two of the cast mates, pull you in.

Boykin’s low key, unflappable turn as the dead letter investigator quietly anchors the film—so quietly that the machinations around him are more likely to draw a “huh, I had no idea the Peoria post office went to such pains to track down lost mail” than they really should.

But the bulk of the film is carried on John Fleck’s shoulders. As Trent, the seemingly harmless organ enthusiast who has a man trapped in his basement, Fleck’s delivers magnificent work. There’s a beautiful loneliness in his performance that makes Trent irredeemably sympathetic.

DeBoer and McConaghy (Sheep’s Clothing), who co-write and co-direct, invest in character development enough to complicate your emotions. You’re genuinely sorry to see what happens to some of these characters, and yet, you just can’t hate Trent.

A couple of characters are there more for comic relief than anything, but even they are somewhat delicately drawn. And though the premise on its face is outlandish, every detail in the film convinces you you’re watching nonfiction.

Filmmaker and cast investment pays off. Dead Mail is clever, intriguing and wholly satisfying little thriller.

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I Dos and Don’ts

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The Wedding Banquet

by Hope Madden

Back in 1993, Ang Lee scored his first Academy attention when The Wedding Banquet was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. The marriage of convenience farce reimagined rom-com tropes and landed emotional hits thanks to nuanced direction and generous characterizations.

A generation later, director Andrew Ahn reimagines once again. His sweet film reexamines the same culture clash and romantic comedy tropes, this time with more of an insider’s viewpoint in an allegedly more progressive world.

Min (Han Gi-Chan) is a wealthy Korean man in the US, making art and living with his commitment phobic boyfriend, Chris (Bowen Yang). The couple stays in the guest house behind the home of their friends Lee (Lily Gladstone) and Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), long-committed partners living through the heartbreak, hope, and financial burden of IVF.

Min’s student visa is about to expire, and his grandmother (Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung) has decided Min needs to return to Korea and take his place in the family business.

So, Min decides to marry a sex worker…no, wait. That’s a different movie. No, when Chris refuses Min’s sincere marriage proposal, he proposes something different. He will pay for Lee and Angela’s IVF if Angela will marry him to keep him in the country.

What follows is a dear if too broad comedic fable about found family, acceptance, and forgiveness. There’s no way Ahn—working from a script co-written with Lee’s original writing collaborator, James Schamus—could have foreseen the sinister cloud that hangs over immigrants, IVF patients, gay marriage, indigenous women, the entire LGBTQ+ population, and essentially every human represented by a character in this film.

The Wedding Banquet already feels nostalgic for a time when disapproving grandparents and medical bills were the only things a gay couple had to worry about.

That aside, Gladstone, You-jung, and Ang Lee regular Joan Chen (as Angela’s mother) are true talents. They do what they can to bring depth to their roles.

Yang struggles with the dramatic needs of his character while Tran has trouble with the comedic, but there’s charm in the mess. Ahn conjures a bubbly, romantic confection and maybe that’s needed right now.

Outtakes

Fatherhood of the Future

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Daddy

by Rachel Willis

In a sterile conference room, a man speaks to a disembodied voice coming from a speaker. The voice is trying to determine if the man is the right kind of person to go on a government retreat that will decide if he would make a suitable father. If he’s not chosen, he will instead receive a vasectomy. So begins the dystopian comedy, Daddy.

Writers/directors Neal Kelley and Jono Sherman have crafted a new kind of hellscape with their look at toxic masculinity, the fear of vulnerability, and the competition that springs from the kind of scarcity that would lead a government to screen potential parents.

As four men arrive at the scenic mountain home, we’re given bits and pieces of the world that has given rise to such a scenario.  Mo (Pomme Koch) tells the others his girlfriend is at the female version of the retreat. The two decided to be screened at the same time. But while the men are housed in the lap of luxury, the women are apparently put through a more intense screening process. The subtle details that we pick up during the film’s run time make what we see on screen more interesting.

The men begin to descend into paranoia, leading to a certain amount of comedy as they try to decide what will make them seem like they’d be good fathers. The discovery of a realistic baby doll amps up the comedy.

Each actor brings a certain rigidity to their character that plays well with the idea that men have a hard time embracing their emotions. Scenes when the characters do display some vulnerability feel awkward – perfectly encapsulating how difficult some men find it to open up to other men.

When the film remembers that there is humor to be mined from such a situation, it shines. When it forgets, it becomes tedious.

However, it’s not hard to imagine this world, and Kelley and Sherman have fun wondering how men might react to the absurdity of it all.

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Spies Like Us

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The Amateur

by Hope Madden

A lot had changed in black ops, terrorism and surveillance since 1981, when Robert Littell wrote the novel and film The Amateur. The Cold War gave way to a surveillance state where it’s even easier to believe that a guy from CIA’s encryption team could undermine their entire operation.

Rami Malek plays that guy, Charlie Heller. Malek can be an acquired taste, but he brings a believable fragility and oddball quality to Heller that suits the film. When his wife—a photographer in London for a conference—is killed by terrorists, Heller uses compromising intel he has on his department head to get the training he needs to find the four responsible.

Of course, it’s all a double cross, but maybe Heller’s smart enough to have predicted that?

Director James Hawes (One Life, TV’s Slow Horses) keeps the story one step ahead of the audience, building in just enough layers to satisfy without overwhelming.

Malek’s the key ingredient. He projects a vulnerability that makes the ridiculousness believable. His is an unselfconsciously gawky, awkward performance that never leans toward caricature or mockery.

A solid supporting cast including Julianne Nicholson, Holt McCallany, Jon Bernthal, Rachel Brosnahan and Laurence Fishburn help to elevate scenes of exposition or, worse still, naked sentimentality. The script from Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli boasts a somewhat nuanced view of tech-aided murder. It also contains ham-fisted red herrings and silly moments of audience pandering.

Are there leaps in logic? More than a Bourne, fewer than a Bond. It’s the kind of laid-back spy thriller we used to get in the ‘80s and ‘90s—no gorgeous humans jet setting, no big explosions, no breathless vehicular gimmickry. Just normal looking people trying to outsmart one another and an audience that’s fitting the puzzle together as quickly as we can.

The Amateur is no masterpiece. (You should really see Black Bag.) But it is a nice change of pace.

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Can You Hear Me Now?

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Drop

by Hope Madden

The thing about Drop, Christopher Landon’s new first date thriller, is that we’ve seen it before. Maybe not this exact scenario, but the idea. Go all the way back to 2002’s Phone Booth, when Joel Schumacher and a self-righteous sniper trapped Colin Farrell on a pay phone. Or back to 2014 and Drop co-writer Chris Roach’s extortion-by-text-in-the-sky thriller, Non-Stop.

The point has always been that, via our technology, we’re helplessly surveilled and those watching can pull strings we don’t want pulled. It can be effective because it mines our collective reality. And Landon and a game cast keep the cat-and-mouse antics about as believable as they can be.

Meghann Fahy (The Unbreakable Boy, White Lotus) is Violet, a single mom out on her first date since the death of her abusive husband. She leaves her precocious 5-year-old Toby (bespectacled Irish internet sensation Jacob Robinson) at home with her sister (Violett Beane) and heads to a downtown Chicago high rise for a pricy dinner with too-good-to-be-true Henry (Brandon Sklenar).

But before she can even taste that calamari appetizer, Violet’s phone starts pinging with messages, including a command to check her home security footage. If Violet doesn’t kill Henry, the masked man in her living room will kill Toby.

Landon (Freaky, Happy Death Day, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse) has a strong track record with horror comedies, but Drop is not really either. It’s a tidy thriller, and though Landon’s instinct for humor gives the first date banter a charming quality, he can’t quite direct his way out of the script’s physical limitations and storytelling contrivance.

Almost, though. Landon gives the penthouse eatery a dizzying fishbowl quality. Between savvy editing and the cast’s commitment, tensions rise with gamesmanship that usually feels fairly authentic.

But then, a dramatic convenience reminds you that this is a movie, and that no human would react as the character is reacting if, indeed, a gun was pointed at their 5-year-old.

Still, Drop exceeds low expectations mainly on the charisma of the cast and two universal fears: technology and first dates.

Outtakes

I’ll Make Sandwiches

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Relative Control

by Rachel Willis

Sara (Teri Polo) has her hands full. Her adult son is living on the other side of the country and is still dependent on her. Her aging parents are beginning to show signs of mental and physical decline. And she was just hired to handle the biggest case of her career as a corporate attorney.

How can one woman balance all of this? This is the focus of director Dafna Yachin’s film, Relative Control. Working from a script by Charlene Davis, Yachin understands how much of a family’s responsibilities fall to women, even when they have lives of their own to consider.

More and more, this scenario has become the reality for middle-aged Americans. Sara, a single woman with no partner to rely on for financial or emotional support, is lucky enough to have a high-powered job that allows her son to live off – rather than with – her as she juggles work and familial obligations.

There’s an exasperated humor that lies at the heart of the movie. As Sara interacts with her stubborn parents, her father especially, you can’t help but chuckle at the situation. It’s very relatable.

Sara’s age is a significant factor. For those with careers, this tends to be the time in life when the demands of work rise as one climbs the corporate ladder. As the sole child responsible for her parents, Sara’s worlds start to collide with more and more frequency. There are a lot of things an audience can relate to as we watch Sara struggle to maintain balance.

But not everything in Sara’s life is so easy to identify with. Most working adults don’t have the kind of career that affords a son to fly home from the other side of the country at seemingly every crisis.

The characters do help to keep the story familiar. They likely resemble members of your own family, and as we watch the family interact, it’s not hard to care about them.

Relative Control is not a perfect representation of the “sandwich generation”—the one still supporting adult children when the need to support their own parents comes around—but it resonates nonetheless.

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The Talented Monsieur Jérémie

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Misericordia

by Matt Weiner

It’s a familiar story in the sleepy French town of Saint-Martial. Traditional ways of life are being upended, like getting your fresh bread from the village baker instead of a large supermarket chain. Or spending the afternoon on the farm knocking back shots of milky pastis. Or seeking absolution from the local priest and becoming entwined in a psychosexual conspiracy that effortlessly weaves together morality, sex, violence and a laugh-out-loud penis sight gag.

… Make that a familiar noir thriller until Misericordia director and writer Alain Guiraudie puts his own assured stamp on it.

Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns home from Toulouse to attend the funeral of his former boss, Jean-Pierre. The widow Martine (Catherine Frot) knows how close the two were, and Jérémie stays with her as he entertains the idea of taking over the local bakery with Jean-Pierre gone.

Martine’s hot-headed son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand) resents how quickly Jérémie insinuates himself back into the village, and especially his apparent closeness with Martine. Jérémie and Vincent have an uneasy familiarity. And as Jérémie overstays his welcome, the menacing play-fighting between the two spills into a vicious confrontation in the woods. Jérémie, overtaken by a burst of passionate violence, murders Vincent and hides the body—but not without being seen by the village priest (Jacques Develay).

All this setup feels like the start of a light noir in the countryside, but Guiraudie delights in blowing up all expectations. What unfolds after the murder is an unnerving philosophical cover-up, where the lonely priest plays both confessor and emotional blackmailer to the unraveling Jérémie. In this stylized version of Saint-Martial, sexual identities run together as fluidly as Jérémie’s collapsing alibis, something the gendarmes have begun investigating with a persistence that is equal parts dogged and inept.

Guiraudie’s existential detours as Jérémie and his perhaps too-forgiving priest are serious, but Misericordia is also unexpectedly funny. From Jérémie’s fickle and deadpan sexual escapades across town to Develay’s arch attitudes toward crime and punishment, there’s more than a little twisted homage not only to the thriller side of Hitchcock but also to the ink-black sense of humor.

Jérémie’s desires, seemingly like those of everyone else in Saint-Martial, are unknowable to all but his conscience and God. It’s just the sort of moral predicament that calls for a good priest… if only Jérémie knew one in town he could trust.

Outtakes

Fact or Fiction

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Asog

by Brandon Thomas

Since its inception, filmmaking has given artists an outlet to explore and amplify identity. Whether it’s cultural, religious, or something more profound and oftentimes less investigated – like sexuality and gender – film has opened the door for people around the world to share who they are. Through a mix of documentary and narrative film, filmmaker Sean Devlin’s Asog puts an important spotlight on the Philippines’s queer community as well as the forgotten people of the country’s rural areas. 

Set in the aftermath of a destructive typhoon, Asog simultaneously tells the story of Jaya (Rey Aclao), a non-binary teacher, and the residents of the devastated island of Sicogon. As Jaya travels to a drag pageant with one of their students in tow, they cross paths with the people of Sicogon as they struggle with the destruction of their home, and the outside forces of development that seek to change the island forever.

From the get-go, Asog is interesting in its stylistic choices: mainly in blending narrative and documentary type filmmaking. This kind of approach is certainly nothing new, but it does feel like a rarity in today’s IP and nostalgia-centric world of cinema. That mix of fact and fiction often happens through psychedelic realism – simultaneously putting the audience into the emotional vortex of the characters. The choice works as Devlin’s film keeps reminding the audience that a part of this story really did happen and the people are still dealing with the consequences. 

The heart of the film belongs to Jaya’s relationship with their student, Arnel (Arnel Pablo). The chemistry and connection between the two is raw and honest – mirroring the film’s overall form. This is all the more impressive given that both are non-traditional actors – with Arnel actually playing himself in the film. The rest of the cast is made of these kinds of actors too, with results not nearly as satisfying. There’s a clunkiness to the other performances that’s distracting and hobbles the film’s overall effectiveness.

The other half of the film – the part focusing on the people of Sicogon Island, isn’t nearly as cohesive or well executed as Jaya’s story. Devlin’s intent is there – cultural identity being virtually wiped away by encroaching greedy outsiders, but it feels too siloed when put together with the sometimes very comedic and intimately personal nature of Jaya’s journey. 

Even if the more telegraphed “message” portion of the film doesn’t completely come together, the story of Jaya and Arnel whacks enough of an emotional wallop that most audiences won’t notice Asog’s low points.