Tag Archives: thriller film

New In Theaters

The Slate Is Never Clean

Leave a comment

In Cold Light

by Hope Madden

Maxime Giroux’s gritty thriller In Cold Light keeps you off kilter, moving from dreamy confusion to full-on sprint and back again.

Maika Monroe is Ava, and our first sprint with Ava ends in a violent drug bust. But after her two-year sentence, she finds herself back in Ponoka, Alberta. No fresh start, she’s clean but she’s otherwise ready to return to leading the smalltime drug operation she left behind. But they’ve moved on.

Her twin brother (Jesse Irving) tries to reason with her, tries to convince her to take the 40k he’s been setting aside for her while she did her time, but Ava can see that her once small operation has bitten off more than it can chew and is now dealing with real big, real bad guys.

She’s right, and those bad guys are the reason for more sprinting.

The story itself is somewhat simple, but Giroux, working from Patrick Whistler’s script, keeps your attention by revealing information as necessary, and by situating Ava’s world inside something lived-in but not ordinary. The context gives the story roots, authenticity, and opportunity for some pretty wonderful, dreamlike sequences.

Monroe’s sharp. The character of Ava is interior, speaking only as necessary, always thinking, weighting options. The performance feels caged, desperate but simultaneously controlled. Monroe’s long been a master of using stillness to manipulate a scene and an audience. She did it with precision in Watcher, among other films. Once again, Monroe uses an electric silence to say more than dialog could properly manage.

Giroux surrounds her with a game supporting cast. Troy Kotsur delivers a particularly layered performance, and a cameo from Helen Hunt is chilling. There’s not a weak link in the ensemble, and barely a stray or needless phrase in the script.

If anything, the film could have used maybe a few more sentences of exposition, especially as it closes. To leave so much up to interpretation invites the suggestion of plot holes, which In Cold Light doesn’t have, but it does leave more to the imagination than it probably should. Regardless, it’s a more than solid thriller and another impressive turn from Monroe.

Outtakes

The Delights of Cruelty

Leave a comment

Maldoror

by Hope Madden

Deeply, darkly weird and surprising—that’s a good phrase to describe, to one degree or another, the films of Fabrice du Welz. His high-water mark for me is 2004’s Calvaire, a Christmas horror story that feels like something David Lynch might have done with Texas Chainsaw Massacre if he spoke French.

I am always eager to watch whatever springs next from a mind that conjures anything so harrowing and bizarre. His latest, Maldoror, is a true crime tale set in Belgium in the 1990s.

Paul Chartier (Anthony Bajon, Teddy) joins the Gendarmerie because he wants sincerely to make a difference. What he wants, as the film will slowly unveil, is to create for himself the life he was not born into—one with value, with family, with honor. For Paul, the unsolved missing persons case involving two small girls from the neighborhood provides the opportunity.

The crimes at the heart of the film are based on those of Marc Dutroux, a serial rapist, killer and pedophile who was able to continue to prey upon little girls in his community because of an inept and siloed legal system, as well as a corrupt justice department. Boy, there was a time when that would have sounded far-fetched, wasn’t there?

Du Welz surrounds Bajon with a large ensemble including the great Sergi López, always magnificent Béatrice Dalle, and du Welz regular Laurent Lucas. The filmmaker is at his loosest and most naturalistic with this film, a choice the cast embraces. Du Welz’s script, cowritten with Domenico La Porta, feels less well-suited to the approach.

The material is grim, covers more than a decade and casts a wide net. It’s sprawling and gritty, marked by a cynical unease about the possibility of finding truth or justice in a corrupt legal system. Yet somehow Maldoror becomes a tale of one man’s obsession, which neither fits the story being told nor the actor playing lead.

Bajon’s vulnerable, awkward cop and family man is played with an integrity that rings true. Even his early steps over the line in favor of eventual justice fit. But the character’s arc is a misfit for the film and the actor, and it reduces the story. Act 3 feels like it’s pulled from a different, lesser effort. The end result is that, though it boasts real tension and great performances, Maldoror feels like a misstep.

Outtakes

Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Leave a comment

A Desert

by Adam Barney

The desert is a scary place and for good reason – it’s easy to get lost, there are poisonous reptiles underfoot, the conditions will kill you, and you might even run into the most dangerous thing – strangers who choose to live out there.

Alex (Kai Lennox, Green Room) is a landscape photographer traveling around the American Southwest trying to recapture a spark from his early career. He likes to shoot abandoned buildings, but he has a burgeoning attraction to shooting portraits of the desert’s denizens.

He takes an interest in Renny (Zachary Sherman) and Susie Q (Ashley Smith), a drifter couple staying next door at his cheap motel. After too many drinks, they promise to be his tour guides and show him some hidden sights in the desert, places that no photographer has ever seen. Bad decisions are made.

After his daily check-ins stop, Alex’s wife Samantha (Sarah Lind, A Wounded Fawn) hires a P.I. (David Yow, Dinner in America, Under the Silver Lake) to go looking for her husband and retrace his steps. What follows is a sun-drenched, neo-noir mystery that may be a little thin on narrative but delivers on atmosphere and vibe.

The film sprinkles in some supernatural elements on the fringes like a creepy old movie theater and an abandoned scientific facility. Is there something more going on here or is that just the desert playing tricks on your mind? Don’t expect it to be Lost Highway or Southbound, but these otherworldly touches add a welcome surreal layer.

Director Joshua Erkman and co-writer Bossi Baker clearly have an affection for noir. They enhance the basic “man gone missing” mystery through their setting, which creates a pervasive and nightmarish sense of dread.

If you enjoy a good slow burn mystery, A Desert is a trip worth taking.