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Fire Down Below

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I.S.S.

by Hope Madden

When you watch a Gabriela Cowperthwaite movie, you never fully forget her background in documentary. And while none of her narrative films possess the same vitality of her 2013 doc Blackfish, each film’s lived-in detail gives it authenticity that serves a purpose.

Her latest seals you up inside the International Space Station with three Russian cosmonauts and three American astronauts as the world below devolves into a nuclear battle between the two nations.

I.S.S. introduces new science officer Dr. Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) to a close-knit group who’s shared cramped quarters for years. First Officer of the American unit Gordon (Chris Messina) is levelheaded and caring. Weronika (Masha Mashkova) and Gordon move quickly to help Kira feel at home.

Until word comes from below. Each side has been ordered to “take I.S.S. under any circumstances.” In cramped confines and awkward conditions, a handful of people hide and seek and figure out who can and can’t be trusted.

Tight space, small group, big stakes – it seems like an excellent premise, but Cowperthwaite, from a script by Nick Shafir, doesn’t have a lot of spare parts to work with.

She makes up for much of what’s missing with camera work. She and cinematographer Nick Remy Matthews (Hotel Mumbai) employ simple but effective tricks to ramp up tension.

Matthews’s camera floats in and around the zero-gravity quarters while security footage – stable and in b/w – makes you feel as if you’re sneaking a peek at something that you’re not supposed to see. The two styles collaborate to generate dread and a sense of helplessness.

Footage of the brief adventure outside the craft is generally quite impressive – it’s no Cuarón, but it does look good.

Messina and Pilou Asbæk (as conflicted cosmonaut Alexey) deliver the most complete performances, full of regret and humanity.

DeBose is hamstrung between heroism and naivete. Her dialog is often less logical than it is convenient. Jim Gallagher Jr. telegraphs his position in the shifting drama from his first moment onscreen.

Worse still, somehow the whole film feels anticlimactic. The danger never feels real, and the pointlessness of success is never even addressed. It’s a misfire from a reliable filmmaker and a middling effort in the “terror in space” subgenre.

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Meeting of Minds

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Freud’s Last Session

by Christie Robb

Freud’s Last Session imagines the lengthy conversation that might have taken place had a young C.S. Lewis (author of the Chronicles of Narnia) taken a train down from Oxford to meet up with a dying Sigmund Freud to debate the existence of God.

It could have happened. An anonymous Oxford don did apparently chat with Freud toward the end of his life in 1939, right as England was declaring war on Hitler’s Germany. But history didn’t record the identity of the scholar.

Freud, the man behind the field of psychoanalysis, is a committed atheist and he’s keen to talk to Lewis (already a published author and famous Christian about town) about the origins and inner workings of a faith he’d come to as an adult.

Freud is played by Anthony Hopkins (who once played C.S. Lewis beautifully in 1993’s Shadowlands). He delivers the layered and nuanced performance you’d expect from someone as talented as Hopkins. Still, it manages to feel that he’s giving you Freud’s greatest hits instead of plumbing the depth of this controversial and legendary figure. (He’s shown chomping a cigar talking about regressing to his oral stage of development and absentmindedly fiddling with a pair of scissors after discussing the fear of castration.) But that’s not Hopkins’ fault. Hopkins finds both the fear and the playfulness sprinkled amidst the theory.

Matthew Goode plays Lewis and he is good. He manages to hold his own with Hopkins. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have nearly as much material to work with. He doesn’t expand much about Lewis’s philosophy. Hopkins gets all the best lines.

Freud’s Last Session is adapted from a stage play and you can feel the director/co-writer Matt Brown (The Man Who Knew Infinity) struggling with that legacy.

The film is beautifully set, almost a Pinterest board of all things Dark Academia. It’s shot in chiaroscuro—a high contrast technique that sets off a highlighted subject against a dark background. Perfect lighting for weighty discussions about the legacy of war, why bad things happen to good people, and why one’s daughter feels compelled to tell one about her genderbending S&M fantasies.

To adapt the material to film, Brown makes use of cutaways to what is happening elsewhere while the men chat—whether that is what is happening on the same day but elsewhere or flashbacks.

We see an overburdened Anna Freud (the doctor’s daughter, not his wife, although you’d certainly be forgiven for mistaking her for a spouse given the way the old man treats her) and flashbacks to the two central men’s formative years. However, the cutaways interrupt the flow of the debate. Although sometimes beautiful, they seem like a deflection and distraction from what might have been weightier revelations—like the subject was changed right as we were getting to the good stuff. 

In the end, the film seems like a beautifully composed thought experiment, but it doesn’t exactly make for a satisfying story.

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When You’re Alone

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All of Us Strangers

by Hope Madden

Loneliness can be self-imposed, but that doesn’t make it any easier to overcome.

Adam (Andrew Scott) is alone. A writer living in a London high rise that’s still under construction, his solitary days bleed into his solitary nights, 80s hits on video and vinyl his main companions.

Adam is trying to write about his parents, so he decides to leave his flat, take a train, and revisit his old neighborhood. And soon his solitary days turn into afternoons spent with his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) and nights spent with his only neighbor, Harry (Paul Mescal).

What follows is a beautiful, melancholy meditation on reconciling your love for someone who has failed you, recognizing their love for you and their failure.

Scott doesn’t anchor the film as much as he haunts it with a turn that’s achingly tender and forgiving. Meanwhile, Mescal delivers another beautifully wounded performance, raw with emotion and sensuality.

Foy is a delightful change of pace, conflicted and unsure, and Bell stands out as the dad you really want him to be: honest, culpable, sorry, deeply loving.

Writer/director Andrew Haigh (45 Years) expertly weaves the lonesomeness of childhood traumas, as misunderstood and overwhelming as they can be, with personal identity. What of your traumas created who you are? What of who you are created your traumas?

Though never illogical, logic itself is far from the driving principle in Haigh’s storytelling. Emotional honesty, perhaps. Desire, certainly.

All of Us Strangers is a tough film to summarize and even tougher to categorize. It exists in a dream state bound by loss and isolation. Naturally, the only way to puncture that atmosphere is with love.

In many ways, this film should not work. Genre elements litter the script that, told by any other filmmaker, would run either maudlin or cheesy. But Haigh’s hypnotic touch creates a tone equally honest and obscure yet full of wonder. It’s also utterly devastating.

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Hiding in Plain Sight

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Origin

by George Wolf

Origin is so loaded with theories, facts and history, you may wonder why writer/director Ava DuVernay didn’t just make the film a documentary. After all, 2016’s 13th showed DuVernay can certainly command the genre.

I’m guessing she gives us the answer with a telling line of dialog: “Real people, real things.”

The main character, Isabel Wilkerson, is a real, extraordinary person, and author of the source book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent.” And the film works as well as it does because of how well DuVernay unveils both the results of Wilkerson’s work and the personal journey that made it possible.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s tremendous turn as Wilkerson doesn’t hurt, either.

We first meet Wilkerson shortly after the news of Trayvon Martin’s murder first breaks. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist is looking to take some time off to care for her elderly mother, but her colleagues (Blair Underwood, Vera Farmiga) are hoping she can address the issue in print.

Even Wilkerson’s husband Brett (a wonderful Jon Bernthal) thinks she’s happier working, but Isabel is hesitant.

“I don’t write questions, I write answers,” she explains. And Isabel finds many lingering questions in the Martin murder, the Charlottesville tragedy, and the increasing drumbeat of fascism in America. Her mind is restless, because while racism is a symptom, using it as “a primary language to understand everything isn’t sufficient.”

But as Isabel suffers heartache and loss in her personal life, she researches history in Germany, India, and America’s Deep South to find the connective tissue she sought – caste systems perpetuated through unending violence until they’re accepted as the natural order.

DuVernay utilizes Wilkerson’s classroom presentations, conversations with her cousin Marion (Niecy Nash, terrific) and fact-finding interviews as sufficiently organic vehicles for flashback. The history lessons are rife with discovery and heartbreak, and compelling enough to keep a firm grip on your attention.

There are flashbacks to Isabel’s personal history as well, including a look at her relationship with Brett that is tender, funny and poignant, buoyed by the sweet chemistry between Ellis-Taylor and Bernthal.

And though the third act can get especially lecture heavy, the material works as a narrative whole because DuVernay finds her own layer of tissue that connects us to both the real people and the real things.

The cycle of trauma -be it personal or systemic – can only be broken by confronting it. Origin confronts it with questions and answers, humanity and inhumanity, in ways compelling enough to change the very way we look at the world around us.

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OK Google, Start Apocalypse

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Project Dorothy

by Christie Robb

When small-time crooks James (Tim DeZarn, the Cabin in the Woods) and Blake (Adam Budron, Special Ops: Lioness) need a place to hunker down and evade the police, they pick the absolute worst location. They’ve stolen a laptop with a Wi-Fi dongle that enables internet access. And they are hiding out in an abandoned research facility where a rogue AI named Dorothy has been lying dormant since killing off its human overlords.

All Dorothy needs to enact its plan for world domination is, you guessed it, access to the internet.

In Project Dorothy, director George Henry Horton (co-writing with with Ryan Scaringe) tries to make the most out of an abandoned factory and a handful of actors. The use of security camera footage and the saccharinely menacing voice of Danielle Harris (genre staple and the voice behind Nickelodeon classic The Wild Thornberrys Debbie Thornberry) as Dorothy is surprisingly effective in conveying the oppressive sense of constant surveillance.  And the use of forklifts as Dorothy’s robotic enforcers is amusing.

But many of the shots seem repetitive and there is not enough in the script to make the viewer care much about the fate of the world or the two men. It’s like the set up for a Doctor Who episode without the lived-in charming characters and would have, perhaps, made a better short film than a feature.

But, hey, forklift henchmen are fun.

The Screening Room

Screening Room: Mean Girls, American Fiction, Beekeeper, Book of Clarence and More

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Mean Girls, American Fiction, The Beekeeper, The Book of Clarence, He Went That Way, Destroy All Neighbors, Reflect, Clearmind

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Stranger Than

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American Fiction

by Hope Madden

Boyz in the Hood is a great movie. In 1991, the same year 23-year-old John Singleton’s feature debut made box office and Oscar history, Julie Dash released the beautiful, generational drama, Daughters of the Dust. No guns, no cops, no real violence to speak of, Dash’s film nabbed a Sundance grand jury prize nomination and cinematography award.

Daughters of the Dust was essentially forgotten upon its release. (It has, thank God, in recent years been rediscovered, restored, and added to the National Film Preservation Registry.) But Boyz in the Hood immediately reshaped movies.

Writer/director Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction takes aim at fiction – print or cinematic – and its problematic relationship with Black trauma. But to say that Cord’s film would like to see movies move beyond Boyz in the Hood and other films that revel in suffering would be to simplify, even miss its point. The filmmaker complicates the discussion with debate over a Black creator’s right to simply pursue success, as any other creator might. Even if that means catering to a white audience’s thirst for Black trauma.

“White people think that they want the truth, but they don’t. They just want to feel absolved.”

You might not expect a film that floats this truth so effortlessly to be a laugh riot, but American Fiction delivers an awful lot of laugh-out-loud moments.

Jeffrey Wright plays cantankerous college professor and literary writer Thelonious “Monk” Ellison. His latest manuscript is not being picked up for publication, his students hate him, and suddenly he needs to look after his mother, who will need round-the-clock care. Which costs money. The kind of money you can make if you pander to exactly the readership he loathes.

Monk does, incognito, and soon he’s pretending to be something he’s not at work and pretending not to be something he is at home. Buried within this are a couple of really lovely, sweetly complex middle-aged romances. Those are rare in films, so they deserve a mention here.

Issa Rae and Sterling K. Brown offer remarkable supporting turns as characters you want to dislike but simply cannot – part and parcel of a film that forever asks you to rethink what you believe you know. And maybe laugh bitterly as you do.

Adam Brody is also a hoot as that same smarmy douche he always plays, but he does it so very well. Jon Ortiz and Erika Alexander both bring warmth and humanity to a story essentially about a man who is not quite sure how to be warm and human.

Wright – an underappreciated genius of an actor if ever there was one – does what he always does. He conjures a fully formed human being, flawed but forgivable and endlessly earnest. Buoyed by a delightful ensemble and cuttingly hilarious script, he delivers one of the finest performances of his career.

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Don’t Look Back

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Memory

by Hope Madden

“I remember…”

These are the first words uttered in Michel Franco’s deceptively spare drama, Memory. Sylvia (Jessica Chastain) is celebrating 13 years of sobriety at an AA meeting. She’s brought her daughter, and those around her are remembering her impact on them.

For the next 140 minutes, Franco examines what’s true and what’s faulty in the human memory, and what he finds is sometimes harsh and unpleasant, but just often, profoundly tender.

Chastain’s performance is brittle but with complexity and depth. Sylvia’s life, and her hard-edged wall, are built from the years of being denied her truth. She knows who she is and she’s doing what she can with that.

Saul (Peter Sarsgaard, astonishing) does not always know who he is, but when he does the film shimmers with life and humanity. Saul follows Sylvia home from a high school reunion of sorts. The catalyst is provocative in that it makes Sylvie reconsider her own memory, which allows those around her to reignite their assault on its veracity.

A razor-sharp ensemble lends remarkable support to Chastain and Sarsgaard. Jessica Harper, in particular, is picture perfect, her sly and cheery manipulation leading to an emotional climax blistered by authenticity.

Memory is a bit of a departure for Franco, who’s films often keep audiences at arm’s length from the emotional turmoil beneath a character’s enigmatic surface. Not so here. Chastain’s slowly melting wall of ice creates real intimacy, and what she reveals beneath is raw.

She and Sarsgaard are veteran talents reveling in an opportunity to discard artifice and create something untidy. Their work, particularly in scenes together, testifies again to each actor’s remarkable skill.

Franco’s films rarely answer all the questions they ask, and can feel almost shapeless and often hopeless. Memory is a departure here as well. Though it’s far less rigidly structured than many Hollywood films, there’s a comforting structure to it and, more comforting, an undeniable spark of hope.

Shudder Premiere

Would You Be Mine? Could You Be Mine?

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Destroy All Neighbors

by Hope Madden

A film for anyone who squeezes creative passions into the hours outside other responsibilities, refuses the label “hobby” and still never manages to complete anything, Destroy All Neighbors lives that nightmare.

William (Jonah Ray) has been working and reworking the final song on his prog-rock album for ages. Years. He’s so close, but then the loudest, most aggressively weird neighbor moves in next door. Vlad (Alex Winter, who also produces) may have charmed William’s longsuffering girlfriend (Kiran Deol), but he’s pushing William to the brink of insanity. Who can get anything done with all that noise?!

William is that nonconfrontational nice guy who’s always being taken advantage of. But Vlad has pushed him too far. Which is why it will be so difficult to convince anyone that Vlad accidentally killed and dismembered his own self. But he did! Really!

Destroy All Neighbors delivers silly, sloppy horror comedy with the highly relevant message: maybe this is all your own fault. Ray (MST3K) drives the lunacy with an earnest performance. You kind of already know this guy. Hell, he could be you.

And that’s the real charm of Destroy All Neighbors. Director Josh Forbes, working from a script by Mike Benner, Jared Logan and Charles A. Pieper, isn’t wagging a finger of judgment. The finger is gently pointed inward.

The writing team comes from animation and comedy rather than horror, which may be why the film is so gleefully gory, no meanness in it. Whenever William does find his inner badass, the film makes sure he immediately regrets it.

A cameo from Kumail Nanjiani and the supporting goofiness from Lennon and Ryan Kattner as rock and roll has been Caleb Bang Jansen (say the whole name!) keep the tone silly.

Destroy All Neighbors is not a great movie. It’s definitely not a great horror movie. But it’s a light, weird, gentle reminder that you may be all that’s holding you back. (And also, loud neighbors kind of suck.)

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Violent Fantasies

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ClearMind

by Brandon Thomas

With Clear Mind, director Rebecca Eskreis and writer Seanea Kofoed craft a darkly comedic tale of revenge while also poking fun at new age therapy.

After losing her daughter in a freak drowning accident, Nora (Rebecca Creskoff) finds herself adrift in grief. Her marriage over and dropped from her friend group, Nora seeks solace in a new form of virtual reality therapy. In the virtual world, Nora gets to exact revenge against the family and friends who have wronged her. Unfortunately the violence doesn’t stay virtual. 

Despite presenting itself as a horror thriller, Clear Mind is surprising light on frights. As the carnage begins to splash across the screen later in the film, it’s only after Eskreis has subjected the audience to round after round of uncomfortable confrontations between Nora and her former friends. While the kills and gore gags might not wow horror fiends, the tension and seat-squirming anxiety created in the lead up more than makes up for it. 

Despite being high-concept, Clear Mind is not a plot heavy film. The bulk of the movie features characters simply talking to one another around a table. It’s a testament to Kofoed’s writing that while the movie is overly chatty, it’s never boring. Only when the movie stops to propel the plot forward does Clear Mind stumble.

Eskreis and Kofoed’s commentary on therapy and the people found in Nora’s friend group is so well established through character relationships that any push to highlight it through plot seems disingenuous and clunky. The genre hook of the movie feels like the part the filmmakers were the least interested in.

Despite somewhat pulling punches with its genre elements, Clear Mind is still a well written jab at pseudo-science and the people in its orbit.