PVC-1 (2007)

directed by Spiros Stathoulopoulos
Colombia
85 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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The actual events behind PVC-1 have inspired more than a couple ripped-from-the-headlines-style fictional works, and I remember watching an episode of CSI or something as a kid and thinking how brutal that kind of ransom was- the absence in the violence, the assaulters being able to have their hands all over somebody while being physically separate from them. The movie is about the real-life story of thieves fitting a woman with a collar made out of a PVC pipe bomb, which was armed and would explode if anyone attempted to get it off of her through cutting or any other sudden movements. It's striking and darkly captivating because I think it's one of those scenarios we read about and immediately begin, consciously or not, to imagine ourselves in.

The distinction separating PVC-1 from other crime movies is that it was shot entirely in real time, no cuts. The number of other movies that are composed of one long shot is relatively few, but the ones that come to mind usually take place within a fairly small environment. But this one throws all convenience out the window, makes a total mess of the notion of having filming be accommodating to actors or even physically possible. Maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit with that, but if you watch the movie, the sheer scale of the "playing field" that makes up the boundaries of the film seems absolutely ridiculous. Not only would the locations have to have been meticulously controlled behind the scenes while coming off onscreen like mostly empty farmland, the actors would also have to have enough stamina to travel all that distance.

The camerawork is also stunning, considering how little they had to work with. There's one scene at the beginning where the criminals break into the victim's house and right at the moment where one of them breaks down the door, the camera shifts to the left and begins following a power cord strung up by the side of the house until we end up at a lightbulb suspended above a cage full of baby chicks. This repeated motif of the violent contrasted with the innocent, chaos implied in the background while serenity is what's shown (though it's put in as a pretty obvious way to let the actors compose themselves off-camera), makes this a very intelligent movie with cinematography that's way more than just competent.

This is genuinely one of the rawest and most emotional movies I've seen, because it never embellishes anything with the option of fixing things up in post or shooting multiple reactions to see which looks best onscreen. What comes out of these actors is pure emotion, no cues to nudge the viewer in any specific direction. I guess I've kind of become one of those people who doesn't give out five-star ratings that often, but I think this one deserves it. PVC-1 is a capital-A Accomplishment and something where it's such a unique experience that talking about it doesn't really work.

Intimate Lighting (1965)

directed by Ivan Passer
Czechia
71 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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So I'm not yet familiar with the ins and outs of the Czech New Wave or how Intimate Lighting fits into it as a whole, but the impression I get is that unlike a lot of other waves from other parts of the world, the defining factors of it seem to only be that the directors were working in (at the time) Czechoslovakia, were fairly young, and had an eye towards the future or at least towards depicting the present in a modern, innovative way.

What marks Intimate Lighting as an entry into the Czech New Wave is the particular way it deals with the present. As somebody who belongs to what can loosely be defined as the "millennial" age group, a good chunk of the movies I watch take place in eras that are partly incomprehensible to me, because the way modern life is depicted on film shifts so rapidly that something can be outdated in five to ten years. My point is that I'm used to not being able to relate to or engage with older films, which is why, when Intimate Lighting struck me with how up-to-date it feels despite at the time of writing being 52 years old, I was surprised.

This movie isn't something that seeks to place restrictions on the behavior of its characters according to convention or according to how acting typically looks and feels. Instead it gives us a scenario that's almost wholly inconsequential and generally would not be good fodder for a movie- it's barely about anything at all, there's not much in the way of big, plot-defining events- and places characters in it who not only seem unrehearsed and organic but who genuinely feel like people I could meet today. So many movements and waves are defined by their inaccessibility to the average filmgoer; they appear to be engineered more for exhibition in an art gallery than anything else. But Intimate Lighting is both artful enough to have a place in more "sophisticated" cinematic history and to be so humbly relatable as to move a viewer like me who is very far removed from its time and place.

I didn't realize this for a while, but almost every interaction between two characters in this is between two people from different walks of life- young and old, men and women, somebody from the city talking to somebody who works on a farm. There's nothing sardonic, no looking down upon any of the characters for any trait, and there's a lot of genuine happiness in this, but there's also more than just happiness. There's emotion all across the spectrum, from the solemnity of a funeral to drunk guys playing music at the wake afterwards. The humor is clean and timeless. At the final scene, all the characters sit down at a table to toast with some eggnog, which the mother warns was made a little thick. They make their toast and tip their glasses back and the eggnog turns out to be so thick it stays in the cups. It's almost Coen brothers humor, it's humor that's funny but you don't always know why it's funny.

Personal Shopper (2016)

directed by Olivier Assayas
France
105 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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Personal Shopper has been getting a bit of festival buzz lately, but I knew very little about its actual content, so my impression of it was that it would somehow be like The Neon Demon and also that it would be very hoity-toity. One of those two things is true- it's nothing like The Neon Demon, but it is extremely hoity-toity.

It's hard to watch movies like this that have no notion of self-awareness sometimes... it isn't as explicitly pretentious as constantly talking about obscure subjects and treating those who don't know about them like lesser beings, or walking all over poor people like they're trash, or anything like that, but it's something that's clearly made by and for a class of people who are much, much "above" me and I'd deign to say above the majority of average people who watch movies outside of film festivals like Cannes. The characters walk through life clothed in incredibly expensive fashions, even the main character and her slightly more dressed-down look, and they talk and act like they have access to a private world where they can be chauffeured around and have success in every area of life they venture into. It's not the end goal of every movie to be relatable, but it feels like Personal Shopper thinks it exists in a vacuum and it doesn't, nothing does.

This movie, although set in an almost imposingly modern context, is about an iteration of spiritualism. The wave of Victorian fascination with ghosts and the afterlife is used as a motif, but the actual plot itself is also a rehashing of that into modern times. The main character has extensive text conversations with someone or something who is ostensibly not of this world, and that does come off as a little irritating, but it helps to consider that that actually is the same thing as was done in seances in the 19th century; that's the new form of table-turning. As technology continues to grow and expand, the influence of spirits will also adapt itself to these new technologies, and this movie showcases how that might look.

It's also interesting that the main character is who she is (somebody working for somebody else, who happens to occasionally try and contact ghosts for them) because there is a very long history of the upper-class being fascinated by the afterlife, but employing lowly servants to actually be the conduit between them and the spirit world. People who work close to death and the spirit world have always been reviled- it was common practice during much of ancient Egyptian times for people to physically chase away the priest who prepared dead bodies for burial rites, and that's not the only culture that practiced something like that. Personal Shopper echoes an age-old tradition of conversing with the dead being grunt work for people who are essentially turned into untouchables because of what they do.

I don't think this movie would have been half of what it was had it not been for Kristen Stewart. I hope the masses' desire to shoehorn her into forever existing only as Bella Swan has passed, because she really is an amazing actor and she just is this movie. It wouldn't be as good without her gestures and mannerisms, the physical gravitas she brings to her character, the way she navigates through life with an overpowering surety and suaveness. There are many things to get irritated with in Personal Shopper but her performance is far from one of them.

Evolution (2015)

directed by Lucile Hadzihalilovic
France
81 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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So this is my second time watching Evolution, because though the first time was relatively recently, I was basically asleep and I retained approximately 10% of the plot details. This is a new review, I deleted the old one.

A couple of film reviewers have made lists recently about movies that present genuinely unique cinematic experiences- concepts, atmospheres, and worldviews in film that feel like nothing else before them. I don't want to claim that Evolution has no influences, because it's entirely possible that it has blatant references to other movies that I have yet to see, but from where I'm standing it doesn't look or feel like anything I've ever seen before. It's unsettling and it makes your mind go to weird, uncomfortable places with the imagery it uses. There's very little in the way of outright gore- it's mostly restricted to medical procedures and a couple sea-creature deaths- but the level of skin-crawliness this movie manages to achieve through little bit good timing, uncanny acting, and a sense that something horrible and important is being kept from the review is amazing.

I can't remember if I mentioned this in the first review I did, but the key to a lot of why Evolution feels the way it does is silence. Absolute and utter silence for the vast majority of its runtime, the kind of silence that makes you not want to speak or move or even breathe. You probably do have to be a person with no small measure of patience to handle this, and also you have to be in an environment where there is as little outside noise as possible, but if you can get to a state where there's nothing you hear that the movie doesn't want you to hear... it's immersive. It feels like you're in the sea alongside the characters, in among the rushing of the waves and the gentle swaying of the undersea flora and fauna around you.

There's this ritualistic aspect to everything the characters (well, all the adult characters) do that lends a deeper sense of foreignness to everything. As is stated in the synopsis, the only residents of the town the film takes place in are nearly identical women and young boys. That the women are keeping something from the boys is obvious: their movements are deliberate, quiet, concealed, clandestine. And the boys have been impacted by this for what looks like a long time- long enough that none of them express childishness in any familiar way, the usual boys-will-be-boys method of investigating the world through poking dead things with sticks and getting into playfights coming off not as typical for their age but as the product of isolation and denial of contact with the larger world.

There's no clean answers at the end of all this that make you feel less discomfort. Any revelations come in the form of oblique mini-climaxes that show something no less confusing than all the scenes that came before it. It's a heavy, heady world to inhabit for 80 minutes, and it's a thing that'll stick with you no matter your final opinion of it.

O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization (1985)

directed by Piotr Szulkin
Poland
85 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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You can slap a "nuclear winter" plot on any movie and I'll feel compelled to watch it. And not only does O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization have the nuclear apocalypse angle going for it, it's Polish sci-fi from the 80s, a prime time in the history of science fiction where every movie coming out of eastern Europe was full of grit, grime, grease, and a heavy helping of doom and gloom.

O-Bi, O-Ba takes place in a large biodome one year after a nuclear war causes fallout to blanket the globe. About a thousand survivors huddle together underneath the relative safety of the dome, and civilization does not appear to have ended quite yet but it's in a sort of intermediate period where people are flexing their bureaucracy muscles to see if they still work in this new, hostile environment. The main focus of the movie is the class system that evolves in the biodome, with the majority of its inhabitants consisting of sick, dirty people bundled in blankets who don't do anything but shuffle around and fight over food. The people who can buy and bargain their way out of that are the ruling class, and they ultimately draw up the plans that influence the whole of the dome.

Our main character serves as mediator for all of this. He goes from upper to lower class, often physically- in and amongst the shambling masses to up above the crowd in some kind of weird disco club with strangely-dressed women and high-wire acts. He provides the viewer with a look at all aspects of the makeshift "society" while also having a distinct personality, so he doesn't fall victim to that thing where the protagonist is treated like an extension of the camera with no autonomy.

There's a number of things in this movie that are relevant to modern capitalistic society, mainly the way that it shows how worthless physical money is: It's stamped out of silverware by a guy in a basement. People fight and kill for this but as a physical object it carries no more significance than broken glass on the side of a road somewhere. There is also the perennial myth of salvation perpetuated by the ruling class, although they tightly control their own message of promised rescue; only some of the dome people get to hear it, the shambling masses get a broadcast over a PA system telling them not to get their hopes up.

A lot of the messages are also couched in metaphor, which is an interesting contrast to how at some points it's perfectly clear social satire. The end is pretty impenetrable, although going by the way that movies like this usually don't let anybody get a happy ending, I think it's safe to say the Ark did not actually arrive after that long hard wait. Whether the protagonist's double at the end was a hallucinated vision of prosperity (possibly supported by another character questioning if the protag has ever had "visions"?) or a metaphor for the every-man-for-himself world that post-apocalyptic society had become is something I really don't have any idea about.

The Void (2017)

directed by Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski
Canada
90 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski are... not known for making serious movies, to say the least. The Void is far from their first venture into genre territory, but the things they've made before have exclusively been over-the-top exploitation flicks that successfully use pretty lighting and weird humor to make up for their low budgets. They're good movies, but when I heard of The Void and how it's supposedly a departure from their traditionally less-than-traditional style, I got curious.

So The Void is, in fact, played straight. There's jokes, but they're not joke-jokes, they're not the kind of jokes written to get a laugh, they're the kind of familiar banter put in between two characters to show closeness. It's actually a bit strange to watch if you've seen Father's Day, Manborg, or any of the directors' other previous efforts, because the whole atmosphere of The Void is much the same as those- including, unfortunately, some less-than-stellar acting- but it's serious. It's got a genuinely creative plot and it's never anything short of believable.

The particular style of horror that this movie deals in is explained laconically in its title: Instead of ooey, gooey, but ultimately Earthly monstrosities, it applies its wonderful talents with practical effects to an entity from beyond reality. It has no name, it has no stated purpose, we don't get any big supervillainous proof-of-concept speech, just this bizarre humanoid being deciding it's time to come down to Earth and start up the apocalypse. When it comes to the particulars of the exact way horror is represented, though, The Void may take its seriousness a tiny bit too far. I'm not entirely sure how they could have combatted this, however, which is why I hesitate in even mentioning it, but at times it resembles something more along the lines of a Warhammer 50k universe in which the absolute grimmest and darkest is the norm and no thought is given to whether or not the prose gets too flowery (which it does).

But where it takes its bleak mood a bit far, it also succeeds in pairing it with visuals in a way that's better than anything I've seen recently. In fact this may be the best use of practical effects I see all year. An issue that I have sometimes with cosmic horror like this- and I'm just gonna throw Lovecraft's name out there in specific, because he's the most prolific writer of purple prose within the genre- is that when it gets into descriptions of disgusting abominations, it loses some element of the unknown that it had previously worked so well to establish. I'm more frightened of a description of a void than a description of exactly what kind of tentacle monster is emerging from that void. But the reason I'm mentioning this at all is because The Void avoids becoming anything like that, it manages to pair cosmic doom with gross fleshy beings in a way that's absolutely brilliant, supplementing the horror of the scenario with gigantic lumbering beasts from beyond the stars. It may be a little short on backstory, but the creatures pretty much speak for themselves in this one. I'd be sad if this is a one-off from these directors, but then again I would also be said if it spelled the end of their more comedic ventures forever.

Sauna (2008)

directed by Antti-Jussi Annila
Finland
79 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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For most people, hearing that a movie is about a haunted sauna would conjure up images of nude girls running in terror from some cliched axe murderer's ghost, because anything involving both a space where humans often get naked and a promise of the supernatural inevitably means the horror genre is going to do its thing and throw some naked women at it. This is why I'm so thankful that Sauna is what it is- a thoroughly chilling, serious, and very unique experience in what feels like the outer reaches of the world.

What's important in this movie is borders as liminal spaces. It takes place in the late 1500s where a surveying expedition is sent to define borders between Finland and Russia after a long, bloody war. They're really in the trenches, they go through bogs and forests and places that most likely dominated the landscape of that locale at the time. So these borders, villages, and marshes that nobody ever has any good reason to go to are used both literally and metaphorically to represent areas where nature (or possibly something altogether more unnatural) shows off its disregard for petty human-made laws that seek to separate the land between two factions. The movie does a fantastic job of making you feel like there's more to what you're seeing than simply what you're seeing.

This liminality of spaces is also alluded to in a religious sense, because although the war is over, religious strife still cuts its way through the environment. While avoiding traditional depictions of prayer or showing characters turning to their personal religion to cope with the eventual horror that befalls them, Sauna sets up an atmosphere where even the holy things are liminal. This is most explicitly stated in a scene where one of the main characters comes upon wooden portraits of saints and religious figures that are just wrong- they're painted with no faces, no bodies, or, à la Francis Bacon's "Screaming Pope" paintings, are too blurry to make out any details of.

What made this a five-star movie for me is that it has an atmosphere that's incredibly thick with foreboding and it genuinely looks like the ends of the Earth; like someplace people stumble into and never come back from, but it's actually a fairly simple movie. It deals with deeply unsettling concepts but it's never anything where you feel like you have to go back because you've missed something. It addresses horror plainly, as if it's something that can be understood by everybody from all walks of life, and that accessibility also gives a sense of there being nowhere to hide: the forces in the sauna don't discriminate, they don't care about Russian or Swedish or Finnish- sure, there's a feeling that the disputes between the countries somehow tie inherently into the evil from the sauna- but they belong to a deeper, older horror that's waiting for all humankind.

I could go into this further because it's really one of the best movies I've seen in terms of establishing tone, but I don't want to spoil too much. It's refreshing to see a movie set in what is loosely referred to as the Dark Ages that doesn't take place in England or- though it's in actuality much too late to be "Dark Ages"- early colonial America. And not for nothing, but this movie has a gay character and a character who is arguably transgender, so there's no reason to exclude LGBT people from your movies while using it being a "period piece" as an excuse.

Dig Two Graves (2014)

directed by Hunter Adams
USA
85 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I was iffy about Dig Two Graves due to the fact that it has "fantasy" included in its genre tags and I'm biased about fantasy movies because I don't like them. But if this movie can be considered any kind of fantasy, it goes about it in a subtle way. The entire thing has a dreamlike vibe even though everything that happens can ostensibly be explained; it's the sort of thing where there's multiple reasons why any given thing could have happened and one or more of those reasons may correspond to the supernatural. It was also interesting because it's centered around a protagonist who is a child, and it takes great care in presenting the worldview of a rather solitary child in a way that's very realistic. Not too many movies out there can parse the outlook of a kid in a way that both speaks to how the audience felt at that age and remains understandable to the portion of the audience who are past that age.

I also think it being set in the 70s- something that, a lot of the time, I was wondering what the reasoning for was- ended up being pretty important. Could this really not have been done in the present day? Two things I can think of make up a "no" answer to that question: The events that are replayed in the flashbacks of the older adult characters would have happened so long ago if set in the present that the characters would either be dead or so old as to make it not realistic that they had the involvement in the main character's life that they did. The second reason is because if you're around "millennial" age, you've probably heard people who grew up in the 70s talking about how children these days are "coddled" and listing with great fondness things their parents allowed them to do during the 70s that were horribly unsafe and dangerous. I think the relative lawlessness of a small town in the 1970s is something understated in real life and it makes a good backdrop for this movie.

That backdrop is also, I feel, a bit influenced by the age of the protagonist- the atmosphere is mostly dreamlike, as I mentioned, but it also manages to be gritty at the same time. I think the way the town and the surrounding forest felt so foreboding might have been influenced by the main character herself; maybe in reality it wasn't quite so menacing, but any young child alone after the loss of a brother would undoubtedly have an imagination that would begin to go wild while wandering out on the edges of town. It fades in and out of reality and something more intangible, but its hesitance to provide concrete proof of ghosts (versus the possibility that everything was in the imagination of the protag) did not effect the fact that this is a pretty great and original movie