Visitor to a Museum (1989)

directed by Konstantin Lopushansky

Germany, Russia, Switzerland

128 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I watched this as a kind of companion piece to Stalker, not because they share any thematic similarities but because I had the urge to watch multiple two-hour-plus Soviet science fiction films in short succession. (This urge probably only comes to me and maybe five other people.) I am a huge fan of Lopushansky's other work and I'm always happy when I can actually watch it, being as rare as it is to find any of it with subtitles.

It is somewhat amusing to me to describe the main character of Visitor to a Museum as a disaster tourist, because he is. He comes from the city to a place where the world is ravaged and transformed into a giant landfill, searching for a feature of some repute (the museum) and taking in the decimated surroundings. The exact reason for why the world has become so bogged down by trash is never stated, but it doesn't really have to be- like many Soviet films dealing with the apocalypse, this posits that the world is slowly getting worse, that its inhabitants are losing their moral grip on life, and that the ennui of existing is inescapable and will eventually lead us down two paths: total screaming despair 24/7, or frenzied indulgence; ritualistic capitalism, party party party. I can think of no vision of hell that feels more accurate than the leering, frantic faces of the people in their lavish outfits this film depicts dancing with wild abandon. The sobbing masses pleading with an absent god to bring them up from their misery feel perfectly relatable, while the dancing and cavorting of the elites, lit dimly in red and black, looks like a vision from the inferno itself.

About that lighting- sometimes this movie is so dark that the screen is almost entirely black. Most of the time, the color palette is dark red and deep, deep black with no other colors. This means you really have to strain your eyes to actually be able to see anything (and it's even worse if you're watching a stream that's already sub-par quality), but I also can't imagine a more perfect filter for the hellish world Visitor to a Museum creates. Like I said, those scenes with people pulling their faces into exaggerated expressions of happiness and living it up in the name of ignoring the destruction of the environment feel more like a Boschian vision of hell than anything else I can think of.

In contrast to what I have referred to as the "elite"- those people in the film who continue to live a semi-normal life, doing things like running taverns, inns, and scorning anybody who acknowledges and understands the escalating degradation of the planet- there are the "degenerates". Now this is an aspect of the film that is... not great, to say the least. Degenerates are people mutated by the effects of the ongoing environmental catastrophe, and are kept in reservations and treated like animals by those fortunate enough to be physically untouched by the ecological crisis. These people are portrayed (mostly) by actors who are actually handicapped. The degenerates are depicted in this film as the ones who understand what's going on and who bear the weight of the full knowledge that they're living in the apocalypse, and they form a sort of quasi-religion around this- a concept which is incredibly powerful. I'm fascinated by the idea of society dividing itself up into rigid sects along a line separating people who deny the problem and people who are so overwhelmed by it as to have it become an all-consuming, ego-destroying panic that controls their lives and belief systems. Not, like, in real life, of course. That wouldn't be great. But in fiction, this is an interesting way to look at the class divide: The people shunned and scorned for appearing imperfect, the ones directly influenced by the crisis produced by rich people consuming and consuming without worry for the resources they're using up, are, of course, going to be the ones shouldering the burden of the awareness of impending doom. But depicting disabled people as sacred bearers of a holy knowledge is, while not the same as depicting them as bumbling and incapable, still ableist.

There is still something about the underground movement of people turning apocalyptic doom into a religious movement that I feel really deeply. This kind of response to existential dread is, in my experience, somewhat rare in Russian/Soviet sci-fi. Typically, anxiety towards the future manifests in a kind of resigned apathy, like how Stalker depicts all of the land outside the Zone as this sepia industrial nightmare where there's no human comfort or joy. Visitor to a Museum shows ennui like a panic attack. The response to the weight of it all- to everything we're going through now, only worsened so much in the time since this film was made- is just so snap. To fully give yourself over to the sorrow and the horror and the irrationality of it all. To form huge masses and wail and scream and moan and beg your god with everything you have to get you out of there. That resonates with me very much. The closing shot of the film really captures everything in one scene. No sense, no reason, no logic in the face of such a monumental thing as the continued decline of our planet. Nothing to do but just scream at the sun.

Stalker (1979)

directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

Russia (USSR)

162 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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My book club is discussing Roadside Picnic next month, so after reading the book I found myself wanting to revisit Stalker to see if it was any different with the added context of the source material. The two share few similarities other than the basic concept of the Zone, and I want this review to focus mainly on the film, so aside from a few points here and there, I will try to avoid talking too much about the book.

However, I do think the book and the film share the same main theme, out of which branch several avenues of thought that make up the framework of the story: The arrival of an outside force causing humanity as a whole to have to truly reckon with its own insignificance for the first time. The book and the film go about depicting this in different ways, with Roadside Picnic taking a brasher, grittier approach and Stalker immersing itself fully in suffocating existential dread. But in both instances, the matter of the Visit itself- an alien encounter not elaborated upon but presumed to have happened a decade or two prior to the events of the story- is far less important than the aftermath, in which we have to reconcile thousands of years of self-importance with the newfound knowledge that we're not alone in the universe. The title of Roadside Picnic provides some more important context that carries over into the film; it refers to the idea that the alien visitation and the subsequent scraps and artifacts left behind, as well as the creation of the Zone, is nothing more than the equivalent of a car full of careless teenagers stopping to have a picnic in a forest somewhere and leaving behind their trash. That kind of cosmic indifference has a profound effect on how humanity views itself, and I regard Stalker as a film taking place after a moral apocalypse, a shift which is so great that the essential worldview of every person on the planet changes irrevocably.

I think I wanted Stalker to be more of a science fiction film than it is. It would be lovely if this absolute monolith of a film were science fiction, if the genre had this esteemed and deeply culturally embedded object to call its own. But unlike Tarkovsky's more outwardly science-fictional film Solaris, Stalker does not deal directly with the impossible, and in fact dances around any mention of alien visitation or unnatural physics to the point where those things are almost absent entirely. Stalker is a movie about philosophical speculation, more or less, and not even in the face of a specifically extraterrestrial presence; the Zone is, here, an environment that triggers examination of the self and the id more than it is a landscape to be mined and picked over for alien artifacts. I do not believe, in Stalker, that the simple act of crossing over the boundary into the Zone brings some physical change into play. Rather, the act of crossing from the familiarity of the land outside the Zone into an area of such incomprehensible mystery causes one's mind to turn in on itself of its own accord.

I spent some time thinking about the significance of the change that occurs when the characters enter the Zone and the color palette of the film goes from pure sepia to natural color. Throughout the entire film it is emphasized that the Zone is unnatural, that it's a space that has been tainted by something foreign and is no longer subject to human laws and boundaries. But it's the "normal" space that the characters inhabit, their dreary, damp town and depressing industrial backdrop, that is colored unnaturally. I think it is the world outside of the Zone that has become "unnatural" since the arrival of the Zone. The new mindset forced upon humanity has warped their once-familiar environs into something new, and the untouched wilderness of the Zone has become an idealized space of natural beauty. The longing to return to this space that has been taken from humanity and reclaimed as something partially alien festers in the brain and causes venturers into the Zone to re-examine their role in the natural world.

I can't stop thinking about a conversation between the three characters towards the end of the film, when they approach the room deep in the interior of the Zone that apparently grants the deepest wish of anyone who enters it. The Stalker tells his two less experienced charges about a former stalker who took his own life after being granted riches by the room. This stalker's brother had died, also in the Zone, and he entered the room believing that the wish he would be granted would be the return of his brother. But instead, the room gave him piles of money. This is, I believe, the most profound statement in a film that is full of other profound statements. The utter decimation of one's character that one must feel after believing that what one truly wants is something altruistic, something that would lead to the return of a loved one, only to be presented with the reality: You are not that selfless. In the end, you are shallow. How do you come back from that rebuke? How do you come back from being shown that your true self is not who you thought you were?

There has been much debate about what Stalker is truly about, and I'm not aiming to end that debate here, or even really contribute anything original to it. I just want to talk about one of my favorite movies of all time. The only thing I can understand is that human insignificance is the driving force behind most of what the characters run up against. The Zone represents a threat to human superiority. I do not believe Stalker is fully without the supernatural- there must be some element of actual metaphysics or the Room would not have been able to grant the doomed stalker his fortune- and I believe the black dog who follows the protagonist is also a manifestation of the alien visitors. But much more than being science fiction, Stalker is a debate about "true" human nature and a breaking down of the boundary between natural and unnatural, human and inhuman. It doesn't feel so much like a film as it does an object. There are few films that clock in at nearly three hours that I could be content to watch at least once a week for the rest of my life, but this is definitely one.

Run (2020)

directed by Aneesh Chaganty

USA

90 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This was a last-minute watch for me. I didn't know anything about it beforehand and most of the decision to put it on was based off of how much I like Sarah Paulson. It's probably that way for a lot of people, because she is good, but I hope to change at least some minds towards watching this for Kiera Allen. This is her first credit, which is pretty unbelievable, and her performance deserves to be the reason you see this. It's also incredibly important that she's a disabled actor playing a disabled character, because the vast majority of wheelchair users in film are unfortunately not played by people with experience using a wheelchair. I will be talking major spoilers throughout this review so please avoid it if you're unaware of the particulars of this film.

The movie starts out on a hopeful note: Paulson's character describes her daughter, who uses a wheelchair and has multiple other chronic health conditions, in only good terms, conflicting strongly with the people around her in the support group she's attending who cry and fret about their children being incapable of existing in the world. To hear Paulson's character genuinely have confidence that her daughter is exactly as strong and capable as anybody with the use of their legs is, indeed, not something you hear often in a movie with a disabled character. This isn't a triumph story, it doesn't infantilize the lead or make it seem like her disability is a burden. It treats her as a whole person, not one with something taken away from her. And even though her mother is later revealed to be a reprehensible person, her confidence in her daughter is never something that's called into question because of what she does.

Now this is interesting because the big reveal (which some may have been able to see coming because really- what other twist could there have been?) is that the lead is actually not disabled. I think I probably shouldn't put it into such black and white terms, though- there's not such a strict binary here between Disabled and Not Disabled, and the lead character's health issues do persist despite finding out she's been lied to about their extent. The point of the reveal- and this is another instance where this movie stands out from other disability narratives- is not, gasp! She was really able-bodied all along! The point is that she was lied to for her entire life.

The story this tells is not necessarily a brand new thing, because we have heard about people being lead to believe by their own parents that they had a host of health conditions, which were in reality all made up because the parents enjoyed the attention having a sick child brought them. Again, though, it isn't quite like that with these two characters- the mother does not seek sympathy for her daughter, she does not milk her disability for her own emotional gain; her intent in shaping her daughter to be a certain way is related more to the loss she's suffered than a need to receive outside validation for being such a strong person for taking care of a disabled child. That's where a less thoughtful movie would have gone, and that's where Run doesn't go. So even though the basic framework of the plot isn't original, it's executed in a far more interesting and just altogether better way than anything else would have been.

I love the way this looked, too. It's so blandly Pacific Northwest that it looks really real. There are a couple things I can't figure out about it in relation to the setting, though. First off is the fact that the characters shop at Kroger. I live in the South, I've worked at Kroger. I have also lived in Washington, where this movie is set. I don't think there are Krogers there. From sitting through boring company history meetings, I believe that the Pacific Northwest arm of Kroger only operates stores under names such as Fred Meyer, and there are no Krogers themselves in that region. The other strange thing is that the film specifically mentions Derry, Maine; as in the fictional Derry that Stephen King invented. I have no idea if this is just a shoutout because the director is a fan or if King had some direct involvement with this, but I can't see any link to Derry. It is very strange to specifically mention Derry though, because you wouldn't do so without a good reason, since it doesn't exist.

The only reason I gave this four stars instead of five is because I didn't really like the ending. The last five minutes is the only time where I felt like this faltered. I don't see why the main character would do what she did- seven years later, after having established herself in a career helping others and making progress towards undoing the damage her mother did to her, I don't see why she would still tie herself to her abuser and choose to do something that would actively put herself in danger of being put in jail. I'm not making this argument based on real people, so please don't extrapolate my feelings about this movie onto the real world- I 100% would never outright wonder why someone doesn't leave their abuser, because abusive relationships are complex and just leaving is not always an option. But in the context of this movie, it didn't make sense to me that such a strong and intelligent character, who had already spent seven years living her own life, would return to the source of 17 years of confinement instead of leaving her past behind. That's my only nitpick, though, the rest of this movie is excellent. The kind of thing that makes me realize how rare it is to actually watch a good movie.

Travelling Salesman (2012)

directed by Timothy Lanzone

USA

80 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Math is... not my strong suit, to say the least, and it's kind of a sore spot for me that I'm so bad at it, but I do understand the P=NP problem, vaguely, and thanks to Wikipedia, you can too. It's considered the most important unsolved problem in mathematics and can be defined, if one has to do it in a single sentence, as: Can every problem whose solution can be verified quickly also be solved quickly?

Onto the actual movie. There's very little of a traditional narrative in this and the bulk of it is spent in a single room, around a single table, with four mathematicians arguing with a government employee about the applications of their research after they've solved the P=NP problem. It doesn't show how they solved the problem; it all takes place after they've discovered the solution while apparently being contracted by the U.S. government to do so, the reasons for which are unexplained, but we all know that the government rarely researches anything if they don't believe it can be weaponized.

While I might not understand math, I can certainly understand what the mathematicians are arguing with the man from the government about. They're concerned about their work being used in the future the way research into atomic energy was used to develop bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Oppenheimer and other scientists working on the original projects that later became the nuclear bomb are cited multiple times, and although, again, I don't fully comprehend the direct path from solving the P=NP problem to weaponizing it, the specter of mass destruction is always present behind the mathematicians' (or at least some of their) arguments. One person is really the main character here, because he has the strongest opinions about the way his research should be used and he's the only one of the four who has any kind of background story. It should also be noted that this movie is almost comically masculine; there is a single woman in the entire film, who doesn't have a speaking role and is dressed down and dismissed inexplicably by the main character, then never shows up again. I guess there are no women mathematicians in the universe of this film.

I'm going to talk about spoilers from here on out, although by nature this is a difficult movie to "spoil" since it's largely just five men arguing in a room. I'm seriously impressed by the skill of all the actors in this to convince me that they really believed in what they were saying. It's one of those rare marriages of screenwriting and acting where I didn't feel the hand of a writer but was able, instead, to fully believe I was watching real people. I can't imagine any of these actors not playing a mathematician. They were so embedded in their roles that I have to believe they had at least some experience being the type of people they were portraying. 

Actually, you know what, I'm looking up the filmographies of the actors in this film and it is ruining my suspension of disbelief. The lead actor's other two credits are something called "Bad Girls Dormitory" and a film about a demon baby. One of them seems to have been in nothing but films about Blue Öyster Cult. I wish I hadn't done this.

Anyway, the interesting thing that this movie does towards the end is it becomes something that makes you rethink the lead character's motives and his role in determining the path of the film. While this whole thing is impersonal to the extremes most of the time, at the end it becomes almost a character study. Things are brought to light about how the lead character views the role of math in society that make you question whether anything he did was ever impartial at all, or if it was to advance his own philosophy. It's a shift in tone that's almost frightening- think about if you were watching a movie where someone had a nice day out for 90 minutes, and then in the last thirty seconds, they returned home and began putting on a suicide vest. Travelling Salesman is not as extreme as that example, but it saves the revelation until the end, when it dawns on you that the lead character had reasons for solving the problem that pertained more to his personal worldview than to the pure pursuit of knowledge.

I am not sure if the film itself was intended to share his worldview or if I am attributing extremism to his philosophy because it's one that I personally detest (the idea that any technology, even when it's beneficial to humans, like an artificial heart, is a crutch and must be eliminated), and if the latter is the case, I could be totally wrong in feeling like the film took a turn towards being a much more sinister study of a disturbed person than it originally appeared to be. In the end, like how I don't understand math, I don't understand everything about this movie. It has deeper layers than are apparent from the surface, and that's why it's so great. The cinematography is terrible and makes 2012 look like it was 20 years ago, but the content is what's important. The Primer comparisons are justified.

Friday the 13th (1980)

directed by Sean S. Cunningham

USA

95 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Somehow I've made it through many years and many, many horror movies without having seen this, so I decided that a real-life Friday the 13th was an appropriate time. It's no longer Friday as I'm writing this, and it was only still Friday for about an hour when I watched the movie, but... you know what I mean. And an excuse is really not needed to watch a movie this good, even if it is more fun to do it on a certain day.

The more I watch early slashers like this, ones from before people started playing with the format and dressing it up, the less I understand why slasher movies have some conservatives so up in arms. The rule of thumb in early slashers was if you have sex, you die. Sometimes it's not even necessary to go all the way, or even to have sex- sometimes if you sneak off to do drugs, or look the wrong way at a girl who's in a relationship, it's enough to summon whatever lurking madman with a sharp weapon stalks through the film. This idea that only the people who "sin" get in trouble- that's everything the kind of people looking to ban movies with gore in them are advocating for, isn't it? I have to wonder if maybe their revulsion at slashers such as Friday the 13th is less due to perceived depravity and more because they don't want to accept that their behavior is more similar to the killer than the brave final girl fighting for survival. I realize that this term may fall out of fashion in the future and badly date this review, but Jason's mother is the ultimate "Karen": She blames other people for something that probably wasn't their fault, and she doesn't care if they weren't involved, she will get compensation for her pain.

I'm trying to figure out why Friday the 13th feels so authentic despite the acting not being any great shakes most of the time. Everybody in this acts like it's their first time acting any role at all (even though I'm sure that isn't true for most if not all of them). They pronounce their words deliberately and move in rehearsed ways around the sets. But somehow they embody the mood of naive campers and counselors; kids goofing off, totally oblivious to the creeping horror. Especially in the opening scene, where the ill-fated camp cook's dialogue is stilted and awkwardly written, but there's just something that feels real about her. In her you can see all the women who've ever been caught in the wrong car with the wrong man at the wrong time. It was watching Halloween for the first time that really made me realize that the most crucial part of slashers is the victims, and that you can't make a great slasher just by throwing some half-nude teens at the blade of an axe, you have to create characters who we genuinely don't want to see die, even if they're only onscreen for a handful of minutes.

The concept of Jason is really interesting to me, and I think in all the sequels he kind of gets boiled down to that standard "hulking figure with an axe and a mask" trope, but in this first one there's something different about him. I'm very surprised that nobody really addresses his mother- I mean, yeah, she gets her head chopped off, but this franchise is famous- possibly even spawned the trope- for finding increasingly unlikely ways to bring Jason back after he's supposedly been killed For Good This Time. Jason never dies, right? But what about his mother? What about this weird, semi-psychic relationship they have in which they seem to share one mind? There's something I find oddly compelling about a woman who looks like every white person's aunt you've ever met, dressed in a chunky sweater and commanding her dead-but-undead son while somehow also channeling him at the same time. Until the abrupt twist ending, Mrs. Voorhees IS the killer in this film, and I think that's incredibly unique, even if it didn't turn out to be fully true- this middle-aged lady just absolutely wild with righteous indignation over her son's death, so distraught that she embodies him, justifying her actions in his voice. It would be interesting to see a horror movie where the killer is an old woman, played totally straight, not for shock value, just because this old woman happens to harbor murderous hatred for whatever reason.

This is probably all stuff that's known already to the whole horror-watching world, but because this is my first time watching Friday the 13th, it's still new and fascinating to me. I did find myself extremely bored during the middle of the film and I could see it easily cut down to like 80 minutes from its original 95 (maybe this is sacrilege to say, I don't know, I'm sorry) but even the drag has purpose, has meaning. Getting bored of watching how easily and inevitably these teenagers all get murdered is part of the enforcement of Jason as a relentless, unstoppable entity. I love how you can tell what shots are from Jason's POV and which aren't by how shaky the camera is. That method of having him be on screen without actually showing him was brilliant. As with most movies, maybe at least a couple of the sequels are worth watching, but the first is a moment in time that should be appreciated as a singular object as well.

Death of Me (2020)

directed by Darren Lynn Bousman

Thailand, USA

95 minutes

1.5 star out of 5

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Every so often I watch a movie that is bad. Not bad in a fun way, not bad in a funny way. Just a terrible movie that had every chance to be good. A movie that had a large budget, decent actors, and was set in a beautiful location, yet somehow, all talent and skill was squandered. Death of Me is one of those movies. I got roped into watching it because of Alex Essoe and Maggie Q, but I have regrets now.

I had hoped that the horror genre had largely left behind the popular "American tourists go to another country and get into a pickle with the locals" plot except for when it's done in parody to show how inept and self-absorbed the tourists are. Apparently it has not, and those movies still exist. I'm not the biggest fan of Darren Lynn Bousman either but I expected him to at least make something that was watchable- not the case here. He handles the "lost American tourist" plotline with full seriousness; the tourists are rude and believe themselves to be privileged and it's never commented upon, it's just their default mode of being. They're established so that the whole of the film is about the horror of them not having everything handed to them. They don't even have chemistry as a couple, so one of the integral elements of the story- that the girl doesn't believe her boyfriend could ever hurt her, even though they find a tape showing him strangling her- doesn't work at all because it's just not believable that the girl trusts her boyfie enough to not run screaming in the other direction at the slightest hint of abuse.

Every stereotype of "backwards natives" is upheld here. The message is: Americans are special, all of the locals are talking about you in their native language behind your back, they are all obsessed with you and you are the center of their world on this little island where you are probably the only Americans there until the next tourists come. You are unique and deserve special treatment just by virtue of being American. You can insinuate yourself into any local tradition you want. It is the locals' problem that you don't speak their language, not the other way around. All of the strange customs practiced on the island are indeed mysterious, dark rites designed, again, to target you specifically. This movie is American exceptionalism personified.

There's a scene where one of the leads abruptly joins a random parade and starts filming it, and he remarks to his camera that it is "May 10th, not a significant day in the Thai or Buddhist calendars". Because I'm the worst, I fact-checked this. While no holiday specifically falls on the 10th of May each year, both Vesak- which I would consider extremely significant as it is the Buddha's actual birthday- and the Royal Ploughing Ceremony could easily fall on May 10th depending on lunar cycles, which are what determine the dates of those holidays. In fact, in Cambodia, the Royal Ploughing Ceremony fell on May 10th this year. In Thailand, it was the 11th. Is this knowledge crucial to your understanding of the film? No. Did it take me about five seconds to Google it and make the character who claimed there were no holidays look like more of an ignoramus? I think so. I am sure this had a budget in the millions of not tens of millions and they couldn't afford a five-second Google search. At least I have the satisfaction of knowing it grossed only $41k worldwide, but that could easily be pandemic-related.

Nothing about this is outstandingly bad in a technical sense, other than that incredibly annoying song they kept playing every two seconds. It looks nice and it... has actors I guess, everything like that. It's just conceptually awful, it's everything that sucks about the horror genre brought to light and played totally straight. I didn't think we were still doing movies like this. I thought everybody could see how bumbling American tourists are a thing to be made fun of rather than precious humans who must be protected from the scary natives and their creepy magical ceremonies at all costs. This is the last I'm going to see of Bousman's films. I don't know why I've seen any at all.

But hey, it's Friday the 13th! Go watch a better movie than this.

Save Yourselves! (2020)

directed by Eleanor Wilson, Alex Huston Fischer

USA

93 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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Let me lay bare my genre biases first: When I watch a movie I know is going to be a sci-fi/comedy, I usually get really bored if the comedy part outweighs the sci-fi. I don't watch a lot of comedies and if I am promised aliens I expect to see aliens, not just jokes about aliens. Save Yourselves! (I love movies with punctuation in the title) seemed to be leaning more towards the comedy angle, at least for a while; as it goes on it becomes more and more fantastical until it eventually does go full tilt towards the impossible. But all throughout, it's really charming and cute. Looking at it from a place of "oh I'm not going to like this if it does x" the way I did is a bad attitude to have.

So. The film is about a modern couple who are inseparable from their electronics and decide on impulse to take a week-long vacation at a friend's cabin in upstate New York, turning off all their devices and tuning out the outside world for the duration of their stay. This is another point of contention for me- having a message of "people are weak because of big scary technology" is a sure way to get me to resent your film. But Save Yourselves! is not like that, it really doesn't feel like it comes from a place of condescension in its attitude towards tech. It feels like it's coming from a sympathetic point of view, like someone saying "ugh we should probably turn off our phones and get back to nature" as opposed to a snide older person making fun of millennials. And really, in the end the point isn't even that turning off your phones is good- I don't even know why the synopsis chooses to focus so much on the technology-vacation part of it, because even though that is a big plot point, it's not relevant to the ultimate outcome of the film. I will talk about spoilers lightly from here on out so be forewarned.

The lead couple have a natural chemistry that's crucial to making this, like I said, a very charming movie. It's all a bit twee and if cute relationships rub you the wrong way you might want to look away. And yeah, even to me, who is very tolerant of twee, there's something a little bit privileged about this whole thing; it's lucky that the lead couple can afford to go away for a week, can afford to cut off from their family because they have no one urgently depending on them, can afford to be lackadaisical about how they live their lives. But- and I keep coming back to this point of it feeling like an insider's perspective- it never feels preachy or superior. It just feels like a good and positive movie.

The ending is... I don't know what to say about that ending. "Abrupt" and "unexplained" and "rushed" are all understatements. Somehow, though, it didn't entirely fall short for me when the movie basically just cut off, because I thought the very sudden ending worked well with the rest of it. This is a story entirely focused on two peoples' individual experience of an alien takeover of Earth. It's not about the aliens, or why they came, or what they're doing. It's not even about how the rest of the world is faring- and it seems to be faring pretty badly. It's just about these two people. For the ending to be wholly unexplained is a perfect conclusion for something like that, because if there were an actual alien invasion in real life, sure, a lot of people would devote themselves to methodically figuring out as much as possible about the aliens, but some people? Some people would be exactly like the couple in this film, not concerned at all with who these invaders are but just trying to keep their body parts intact and their ethanol un-harvested. They learn nothing about the aliens (other than that they harvest ethanol) and are totally at their mercy in the end. That's a more realistic picture of what will probably happen to the majority of us if aliens ever invaded than most media cares to envision.

This is running long, so I'll end it on a note of appreciation for the aliens themselves. Like I just said, they're not the most important element of this, but I loved them! The crew did such a good job making aliens that looked physical! I'm sure it was all due to their simplicity, but those aliens looked like real flesh-and-blood creatures and had such a strong physical presence that they fit right in with the scenery like any chair or desk or lamp. Even the more improbable scenes of them using their weird Yoshi tongues to suck stuff up looked convincing. Excellent alien design, I'm 100% here for the poufs from outer space. And points added for Weyes Blood, of course.

His House (2020)

directed by Remi Weekes

UK

93 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I'd been looking forward to this not only all October but ever since I first heard about it. I am very interested in the vein that seems to be opening up in the horror genre of utilizing familiar horror tropes to tell stories about the im/migrant experience. As a general disclaimer, I'm not a refugee nor an immigrant of any kind, so I can't speak to that experience personally. I think the horror genre is possibly the most powerful tool that can be used by marginalized populations when telling their stories because it's full of conventions that are typically used by white creators to speak to white audiences, but are so clearly better wielded as metaphor in the hands of people typically not given space in the genre. Most horror stems from unfamiliarity, after all, but we're used to seeing that over and over- what is more horrific is to be the one who is unfamiliar, to face the stares of people who don't want to see you, to have to acclimate to a hostile environment that you're uncomfortable calling home.

So that's the basic atmosphere of His House. The main characters are two South Sudanese refugees living in England and trying to adjust to the prejudice and setbacks they face. They're put up in a ramshackle old house in a run-down housing development and told in no uncertain terms how they can and cannot behave in this new country- terms which sound little better than jail. This alienation and their regrets and traumas boil over until they become part of their physical world, manifesting as spirits the couple carried over from South Sudan that take up residence in the walls of their house. A rift also opens up between them as they have different beliefs about the purpose of their haunting and what to do to get rid of it. All the while they still face discrimination and systemic oppression.

There's a scene that's interesting to me because it depicts something that a lot of films won't address: When Rial attempts to trek to the doctor's office on foot but gets lost in a labyrinthine configuration of concrete walls, she finds some Black teenagers and appears relieved that maybe they'll be kinder to her than the uncomprehending white people she's faced so far. But the teenagers are as rude and eager to make fun of her as everyone else- her accent, her origins, she's too marked as an Other to be accepted by them, because they've swallowed the doctrine of Britishness too thoroughly. This is unique because most films are satisfied to portray racism as a literal black/white issue. His House shows that it's a larger culture of racism that makes people racist.

This is a really unpleasant movie that's filmed gorgeously and acted incredibly well too. There's just nothing comforting in it, there's no space where the characters can relax. You hope to at least see them find refuge in each other as a married couple, but their differences in approaching their haunted house as well as processing their own grief makes them unable to reconcile. I appreciated that the flashbacks to their time on the boat were kept to a minimum, because that's something that I struggle to believe can ever be depicted well in fiction- things like genocide and refugee boats are parts of peoples' history that they have every right to tell if they're comfortable doing so, but when it's fictionalized, even when done tastefully like this, it's hard not to feel like there's an element of sensationalism. I just think that certain subjects are impossible to depict in fiction. That such things are real is bad enough. Making up instances where they happen to fake, made-up people feels questionable to me.

But this movie is so well-made and so unique among a massive amount of horror movies where the closest thing to being a refugee the characters experience is moving into a house that has three bedrooms instead of four. Or the perennial "I know this cabin in the woods with no neighbors for miles is falling apart, honey, but it's ours!" Imagine what the "new house horror" genre could be if it was not just new house but new country horror, and throw in the horrors of war, alienation, hatred, racism, financial oppression, guilt, and basically everything else under the sun, and you have a starting point for how to think of His House. I recommend it just because there's so much garbage on Netflix and this is something really new and important. But like I said it is not an easy watch.

In Fabric (2018)

directed by Peter Strickland

UK

118 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I'd been wanting to see this for a long time- so long, in fact, that it somehow slipped under my radar when it actually came out. Better late than never, I suppose. Peter Strickland remains basically unblemished as a director, producing nothing but films that are more stylish than anything has the right to be, and marry soundtrack, image, and atmosphere seamlessly in a three-way union of perfection. It is easy, when describing this film, to slip into borderline nonsensical talk of luxury and retail allure the way Fatma Mohamad's mannequin-like saleswoman does to goad interested customers into submitting entirely to the will of her "trusted department store".

This is one of those movies that feels in some way magical, the level of aesthetic sublimity it achieves seemingly beyond the reaches of normal film and editing equipment. I mean, y'all, it looks so good. I was getting a vibe similar to Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani's work from this, but less random and with less of that very French feeling of, like, "shock value but make it art". Strickland is, in this film and in his others, strongly influenced by giallo, which shows in the bright coloring and the impossibly red blood, but this is also something completely new. It's full of anachronisms- parts of it seem modern, but people sit and watch television sets that look like they never saw the last quarter of the 20th century. A large part of the plot involves one of the characters meeting men through the classifieds section of her local paper, which feels inherently dated to me, regardless of whether or not people still do that. The department store is a mixture of different eras, the saleswomen all wear what look like mid-calf-length Victorian mourning dresses. I can't pinpoint an exact time period for this film, and that makes it all the more surreal and dreamy.

And then there's the plot, which is interesting on its own, but is supplemented by so much hypnotic imagery and small details that it feels like just the center jewel in a massively encrusted tiara. It's the story of a "cursed" dress that fits everyone who wears it, regardless of whether they are its size- a 36, consistently, no matter their measurements- and leads them to a strange but inevitable death, beginning with the model in the department store's catalogue. Now that I'm thinking about it, the whole scenario reminds me a ton of the killer masks from Halloween III. People watch, enraptured, as ads with bizarre subliminal imagery entice them to buy a product from a company which is nothing but a front for some occult organization, which then alters their body before bringing them to an untimely end. I don't know if that particular reference was intentional but it does follow a very similar format. The curse on the dress is not the beginning and end of its foreboding nature, though, and I hesitate even to reduce whatever is going on with it to simply calling it a "curse", because there seems to be so much more beneath the surface. The department store is clearly hiding something. Clearly everyone working there is in on some secret that we're not- they don't even seem human, most of the time. But we're never privy to whatever goes on behind the scenes, and as a result the film's sense of humor- and it does have one, as strange as it is- has the sense of someone laughing at a joke that is only understandable to members of a specific elite.

It's not as explicitly kinky as The Duke of Burgundy, but there is an extremely heavy sensuality to In Fabric that is part and parcel of the allure of it. It's suffocatingly, dizzyingly sensual. The takeaway I got from it is that there is power in submission: When one party satisfies every need of the other, caters to their every whim even before they know they have it, that party, although technically in submission to the other party, gains power over them. The whole of In Fabric is a dance between desire and fulfillment, consumer and consumption.

Don't expect to be able to follow an easily-recognizable thread of logic when watching this, because more often than not it doesn't make sense, but everything is communicated that needs to be communicated. Like I said, there is a strong "in-joke" feel, like if somebody with the correct insider knowledge watched it, they would understand everything, but that person does not exist outside of the coven running the department store in the film itself. There's layers and layers of nuance to this, and its style and Cavern of Anti-Matter soundtrack make it an immersive and memorable experience.