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The Wretched (2019)

 

The Wretched is a great example of the power of marketing and the state of the art of trailer making. Because, if I had seen any of that stuff, I wouldn't have watched the movie.
 
This is not just a grim-dark, ninth-generation J-horror rip off of Blair witch. It's a fun, breezy teen horror flick that captures the vibe of great 80s movies, rather than just lazily churning out another anachronistic pastiche slathered in synthpop.
 
Sure, it could be argued that setting a mashup of Rear Window and the Faculty in a mashup of Derry and Amity island is not the height of originality. One could also argue, and persuasively, that some of the harder edges and darker developments can sit a little queasily against the Speilbergian milieu. And you could definitely say that  thing it does later (you'll know that thing) is unearned or unnecessary or just plain too much.
 
So if you are a joyless curmudgeon, say all those things, miss out on the fun and stay at home.
I believe the Ghost of Christmas past will be dropping by later.
 
Everyone else, get some popcorn, grab your significant other at the jump scares and have a proper fun time at the movies.

 

 

 

 

 

Aniara (2018)

A science fiction film based on a poem was never likely to be a high-octane laser romp, but aside from a from a few scattered super-scientifical trimmings, Aniara appears to take place in a shopping center.
 
Which is great.
 
The loosely connected chapters are navigated by a nameless protagonist known only as 'Mimarobe', her super-scientifical job title.
 
Mimarobe is the hostess of the Mima, a hallucinatory AI which hijacks peoples senses with pastoral visions, to enrich their lives on the months long voyage to Mars. The first act plays out very much like classic scifi, with the ship knocked off course and the Mima developing disturbingly Hal9000-ish tics as people throng to the illusion of an individual idyll.
 
But that is not what this movie is. At all.
 
As the chapters spool out into unexpected vistas of time and space, plot becomes less and less important in favour of a series of sketches on hope, loss, order and chaos.
 
If you have ever looked out at the night sky and felt that huge sense of insignificance, and if that sensation filled you with melancholic awe rather than Lovecraftian, existential dread, you will get a lot from Aniara.
 
Punchy, reductive summary: Passengers remade by every French philosopher ever.

Elizabeth Harvest (2018)

The Netflix algorithm really needed me to see Elizabeth Harvest. Like, A Lot.

It casually offered it up at first, like a bright eye vegan friend offers their flourless carob and courgette cookies. But then the offers became pleas, constant entreaties to chow down on the gritty discs of inevitable disappointment.

Eventually, things got awkward.

I gave in.

The movie itself seems to be the product of similar algorithmic process to those that served it up to me, some machine learning AI ignorant of all things in the world but Ex Machina and The Duke of Burgundy churned away in the cloud. Eventually, a server farm in Ukraine ejected this dead-eyed simulacrum into the internet and thence to my jaded eyes.

Ciaran Hinds and Carla Gugino deliver their performances with a level of professional adequacy the whole fails to earn. Much of the heavy lifting falls on Lieutenant Commander Data, as a blind plot twist, and a 90s CG supermodel as the titular Elizabeth.

Sadly, 90s CG supermodel is limited by the technology of her times and fails to make it across uncanny valley, inflecting everything with a creepy unreality that never feels deliberate.

The plot is workmanlike guff with delusions of grandeur and the anachronistic stylisation never quite convinces. There is something there, glimmering faintly like the proverbial ghost in the machine but ultimately it is neither clever enough to fascinate nor joyful enough to truly entertain.

Verdict: 3 occasionally entertained cates

Await Further Instructions (2018)

What would happen if Garth Marenghi's Darkplace got a nasty bump on the head and woke up thinking it was Black Mirror?

The high concept premise of Await further instructions is actually a bit of a lark; take the opening scene from an episode of Casualty, where a stilted ensemble sketch out one dimensional characters and relationships. Then,  just when grandma would have accidentally ignited the calor gas cylinder to roast an unsuspecting family member, substitute in an alien invasion.

People, we got a movie right here!

Poundland Jason Isaacs plays a sneeringly psychotic patriarch who's effete son brings back a minimally ethnic girlfriend, much to the chagrin of irredeemably racist grandfather. Minimally ethnic girlfriend isn't having any of his old-timey Price-Philipping though and stands up for herself by monotoning her way through a few turgid facebook updates about equality, before sitting down.

There's tension too between effete son and furrow-browed idiot sister, she has an inferiority complex due to being inferior, but she is at least loved and protected by her manly(?) baby daddy, played here by Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel.

Poor, long suffering, much simpering, martyr-mother  rounds out the group, attempting to keep the peace by whimpering like a kicked dog.

When the house is inexplicably encased in some form of packing material, paper thin characters meet unconvincing scissors and shoddy carnage ensues.

There is, undoubtedly, a version of this premise which could make a tight and gripping, if somewhat unoriginal thriller. This, however, fails to be that film by every conceivable measure.

 

 

The Silence (2019)

Netflix has done it again!

Sadly, the it in question is making an inferior knock off of A Quiet Place.

Tonally and narratively, The Silence is a lot more akin to the streaming giant's previous knock off, Birdbox, beginning as it does prior to the onset of the carnage and following the plight of a small group of survivors.

There's a deaf girl, people bully her for being deaf and everyone laughs, because the American movie high school is a dystopian hellscape and because it buys you instant sympathy for the victim.

In fairly short order we get a lacklustre apocalypse with off the shelf panic, there's a 'leave me here, I only slow you down', and a great showing of 'I am a man of peace but realise now violence is necessary (awesome/manly/American)'.

A tongueless death-cult appear to spring up around 15 minutes after the first sign of trouble, purely so they can show up halfway through to fill the role of 'the real monster is man'.

Remember here that Night of the living dead was made in 1968.

Nine Teen Sixty Eight!

Film makers: Please stop flogging that zombie horse to try and disguise a weak primary threat/save on CG!

Anyway, the performances are awful, Kiernan Shipka in particular feels as if her real threat would be termites, and there is a scene in the middle with a woodchipper that just underscores how utterly unthreatening the primary beasties are. That thing you did there? Yeah, just do that more. Done. Problem solved.

We end with a voice-over that goes something like "Reshoots are expensive, so we will just use a single scene with a voice-over of a half-baked theme we couldn't be bothered actually put in the movie to make it seem like this went somewhere. Also, my boyfriend is alive. Yay"

Utter dreck.

 

Under the Silver Lake (2018)

Under the silver lake is the answer to the, largely unasked, question: what happens if you take Rear Window, Mulholland Drive and They Live, splice them together like a Human Centipede and have the whole thing navigated by the character embodiment of listening to a Belle and Sebastian song on repeat after a two day cocaine binge?

It's exactly the kind of film I hate. Except the part where I don't hate it.

There's Hitchcockian stylings aplenty up top that get largely jettisoned in favour of the Lynchean freakshow of the second act before devolving into a bat-shit, Lizard people conspiracy nightmare. All this is delivered with a nudge, a wink, and a gluttonous embarrassment of references.

Garfield is by turns twitchy, stoned, creepy, vulnerable and dangerous as he takes us on a sexy-cool journey through a world of madness. Possibly a mad journey through a sexy-cool world.

Throughout the slightly baggy 2 hour plus runtime I kept expecting myself to be bored or annoyed  or really annoyed, but it just kept on entertaining me just enough.

Reviews have been extremely mixed, and understandably so, but (perhaps on the back of residual good will from It Follows) I thoroughly enjoyed spending some time as a paranoid nutjob.

Verdict: 4 Shiny cates for you sire

 

Lake Bodom (2016)

 

So, let's say you are looking to make a horror film in Finland. By a lake. Let's say that your Partner is from Finland, brought up in Espoo. So you find horror movie set in Espoo with a Jussi (Finland's Oscars) award winning actor on the bill, no brainer, right?

And it is all,sadly, a little brainless, but not quite brainless enough.

It's all rather handsome to begin with, rather nicely shot, despite a bewildering number of cinematographers who don't seem to have worked before or since. The leads are also rather handsome and play their roles gamely enough, but...

There's familiarity, the male leads taking a leaf out of the duplicitous duo of Scream, their female cohorts evoking Haute Tension. And these are great reference points. Sadly they do telegraph where this is going and it gets there rather perfunctorily.

The huge problem is that it gets there around halfway through the film and then, kinda dawdles around a plot point that really fell out of it's halfway reveal fully formed and clearly isn't enough to sustain the remaining run-time. So you know another 'twist' is coming and sit there, teeth clenched, hoping against hope it will not do the obvious thing, that it will give it's cast something they could get their teeth into. That it will surprise.

It doesn't.

Verdict: 3 frustrated Cates.

BURNING (2018)

 

Lee Chang-dong's Burning is an odd beast, starting out with quite broad strokes that somehow blend into something perversely opaque when the credits roll.

Our protagonist is the slack jawed Jong-su, an oddly blank cypher who is, incomprehensibly, pursued by manic-pixie-dreamgirl Hae-Mi at the film's opening. She provides him with a series of cod-philosophical statements and introduces us to the re-iterated thesis statement of the film: pretending something is real is not the same as forgetting it is not.

More plot machinations, a potentially real cat and we are introduced to Ben, a sneering cartoon of indifferent evil who instantly flaunts his psychopathy. We are set for our love triangle and the journey of the honorable, simple man learning to stand up for himself and others against the indifferent forces of capitalism and, finally, to be seen as worthy in the eyes of the woman he loves.

Only that singularly fails to happen.

Hae-mi becomes our manic-depressive-pixie-dreamgirl, the quirky, cosmetic flaws resolving as deep cracks in her psyche.

Ben is set up as the riddle at the center this mystery, but his sinister affect never quite tips the scales of an resolution and the whole thing ends up wrapped in the enigma of Jong-su. Cleaning a near empty barn, writing an empty book, searching for a possible well.

I kept expecting a twist, I was looking for some obvious re framing of reality: He's not real. She's not real. It's all a dream or a game or... he's a horcrux.

It never comes.

Instead we get a tantalizing glimpse of something almost Lovecraftian, cold and distant, perhaps quantum, observation as action and cats that flitter in and out of the concrete. I kept expecting to get the rug pulled, looking for the trick, only to find instead that the rug remained stable while the floor became a nine dimensional quicksand beneath it.

Verdict: 5 ambiguous cates

RAW (2016)

 

RAW has been on the watchlist for a while, but put off again and again as we tend to watch movies over dinner and I had heard this one was a little…
tough.
And oh boy, is it.
As a fairly seasoned horror fan it takes as certain calibre of imagery to rattle my terror cage, but the scenes in Raw? They work. Jesus they work.
The key is the relatability, whilst the denouement is (hopefully) fairly out of bounds for most of us, the lions share of the early shocks are itchy, knee-skinning, toe-stubbing affairs.
Stab happy clowns may work for some, but an incompetent bikini wax leading to a wound horrifically plausible in my own kitchen is what gets me squirming.
I would give the movie a couple of dings though.
There is a definite loss of coherence in the last third as the repulsive hazing rituals of the school left me wondering as to the status of some of our protagonists’ behaviours were in this world.
In addition, the odd choice of a gay/not-gay/gay-again/housemate/love-interest seemed to pull at a few too many extra threads in an already heady brew of clashing identities and hungers.

All reservations aside, this is a ferocious, voracious directorial debut.