Kin-dza-dza! (1986)

directed by Georgiy Daneliya

Russia (at the time USSR)

135 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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I rewatched this last night and have been holding off on writing a review because this movie is so good and I am so fond of it that I just don't know how to talk about it. In the time since I first saw it, the director has passed away, and while I've heard that his other movies aren't very much like this one, it's still a loss.

I don't often rewatch movies that are this long because of my awful American attention span, but I'm glad that I did, because it exposed something else about it that my Americanness blinded me from seeing, judging by what I wrote about it in my previous review: This entire thing is a satire of capitalism, and it's an absolute riot. Ironically, even though that kind of thing was pretty acceptable in the Soviet Union at the time, this movie did get blacklisted anyway for the possibly-unintentional sin of making the made-up catchall word used by the inhabitants of the planet Pluk (it... kind of makes sense in context) sound too much like the initials of a Communist Party official. But start to finish, everything that happens is a veiled jab at capitalism. In the first five minutes or so, the displaced odd couple of the USSR witnesses an elaborate alien introduction ritual, a spectacle involving crouching and slapping your cheeks a variable number of times depending on the color of the other person's pants, and deduces that they must be in a capitalist country. I took this as just a one-off funny joke the first time I saw it, but it is intended wholly literally. Pluk is a capitalist society, and its inhabitants are brainwashed and blind to it.

There's a mysterious leader that everybody is loyal to whether they're slave laborers in his factory or inhabitants of a far-off desert outpost. There are two distinct classes of people on the planet, and the difference between the two is entirely arbitrary, not based on any physical or material attributes. One gets privileges while the other has to wear a ridiculous little bell on their nose and occasionally kowtow to the other, except on some other planets it's reversed, and then on some planets they both get turned into cactuses. A running theme throughout the movie is that characters are constantly promising each other money but very little money actually ever changes hands. Sometimes it is actual currency, but sometimes it's also matches, which are apparently incredibly valuable on this planet, but with both things, although ridiculous sums are named as prices for simple objects, it all remains a transaction of words alone. At one point, stranded out in the desert, one of the Earthlings offers one of the Pluk folk water, which he initially rejects, but when offered it for free, he accepts- even though they were literally in the middle of nowhere, with no way to physically exchange currency. The whole of Pluk society operates on just inventing value where there is none and promising cash that doesn't exist. It's a spotlight directly on how absurd the concept of money really is.

The reason why this movie works so well as a satire is because it's not a 1:1 mapping of one concept onto another. I see attempts to do this that fail spectacularly because all they do is reverse the situation: Films where being gay is accepted and being straight is demonized, et cetera. Kin-dza-dza is way better than this because it's really just showing things as they literally are- not inverting them, not saying "oh yeah well how would you like it???" Obviously it's absurd and fantastical, but the message at the center is truth. I went on at length about how fully fleshed-out the culture felt the first time I reviewed this, and now looking back on that, I just think "that's because it's your culture, you twit".

And this is no boring grey Soviet propaganda message- it's one of the most visually impressive films of the era, and genuinely a hoot to watch no matter if it's your first time or your fifteenth. It's hysterically funny in any language, and borderline comprehensible even if you don't speak any of the languages spoken in it. It's possible to watch this a dozen times and get something different out of it each time.

Synchronic (2019)

directed by Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead

USA

98 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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It's been a long, long, long, long, long time coming for this one. I'm not sure exactly what the delays were, but it was held back quite a while, with only a couple of showings at festivals and the like. Benson & Moorhead are basically without fault as far as their directorial record goes, but don't base your assumptions about Synchronic off of the themes of the previous films, because this has some key differences that give it a whole different flavor.

The way I saw it, Synchronic has two distinct halves, or I guess I should say "two distinct sections", since I wasn't paying attention to notice if the changes occurred at the literal midpoint or not. The beginning of the film is more akin to a horror movie with its deep sense of building dread, starting with a semi-cold open right after the production credits that made me realize, oh yeah, this is gonna be A Movie for me. This part of the film feels the most like Resolution and The Endless. It's unnerving; the camera swings from side to side in a lazy, nauseating pendulum as we're shown things that shouldn't be happening, deaths that shouldn't be possible. And there's a deeply personal dread in this as well, which I have to mention because it's done so much better than most character backstories typically are in a film like this where the personal element is not necessarily the largest part, but is still important. I found myself feeling as anxious about the individual fate of the two main characters- their family issues, their medical problems- as I was about the premise the film was introducing.

After the actual plot kicks in, a lot of that dread dissipates. Once it's established what's happening, there is no longer such a feeling of danger, of being exposed, like there was in the first part of the film. After that, it just becomes interesting, with no particular tone or atmosphere. This is the only aspect of Synchronic that didn't immediately click with me: it is far more of a science fiction film than the duo's previous work, and this isn't a bad thing at all, but it took me a moment to get re-acclimated to the new direction of the film once that ominousness and mystery was shed in favor of something that rode on the merits of its own really, really neat idea.

That idea is that there is a pill that makes people time travel. That's it, that's the film. I emphasize the simplicity of this concept because Resolution and The Endless were extremely complex films, Resolution especially- those two requires some serious mental footwork to prise out meaning, they were confusing and had enormous conceptual scope that extended well beyond their simple, low-budget execution. Synchronic is what it is, which is not a downside, because since this is directed and written by who it's directed and written by, you can trust that that idea is going to be explored and executed beyond the surface level. And it happens to be an idea that I genuinely, whole-heartedly believe in, on a personal note- the concept that time is not linear, cannot be viewed as such, is something I think is just... factual, honestly. I don't believe you could pop a pill and go hang out with woolly mammoths, but our way of thinking about the past as behind us and the future ahead (or the reverse, if you conceive of it that way due to your native language) is just false. It all happens at once. And leave it to Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead to take that idea and turn it into something not only interesting but eminently watchable.

Dialogue is not neglected either. There are some deep philosophical discussions between the two leads that are delivered in a setting that feels like they're genuinely just two friends talking about big things. There's moments where any other film could easily have cheapened the vibe with a quick joke, or showed somebody not taking things seriously, but it never stoops down to doing stuff like that. I think a big part of why this is so good is because it's taken so seriously. And this is kind of chancey- you could easily lose a lot of viewers as soon as you show a woolly mammoth, or grubby racists in the vague 19th century, or a prehistoric human, because I think a lot of people are used to seeing those things as wild ideas that belong solely in fantasy. Synchronic takes them and brings them into a more relatable dimension, while never losing a sense of exploration, but also balancing that sense with some dread and uneasiness. These guys keep putting out excellent films, and I hope they continue once the film industry gets back onto its feet.

The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)

directed by Jim Cummings

USA

85 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I watched this movie with the hope that it might be a horror film, even though I had doubts. I was vaguely aware that Jim Cummings had made another film that people like (Thunder Road) and as far as I know it is not a horror movie. I also recently watched another killer wolf movie that turned out to be massively disappointing, so I was already wary and probably now slightly biased against wolf movies forever. What I'm trying to say is that from the beginning I was aware that I probably wasn't coming at The Wolf of Snow Hollow from the right angle. Despite this, and despite the fact that I really have no interest in watching Thunder Road, The Wolf of Snow Hollow really surprised me by just how good it is.

So Jim Cummings, in addition to writing and directing, plays the lead character, an alcoholic cop. That alone might deter a lot of people from watching this, because if there's one thing the world has more than enough of, it's alcoholic cop movies. And cop movies in general. But this is a rare case where despite all the characters being cops, the job isn't applauded as some godlike duty. They're all still cops, and I wasn't swayed by any attempt to make them more relatable, but... it's important for the believability, and really, the overall likability of this movie that everybody isn't presented as saintly just because they're cops.

But Cummings' main character being an awful, uncaring father actually almost turned me off from the film as a whole in the beginning. The first example we see of him treating his family poorly is skewed so that it makes it look like his wife is the bitchy one, and that was a big red flag. I didn't like seeing a mom strawmanned as a nag for daring to point out to her ex-husband that he's missing milestones in his daughter's life. But I think the point of introducing the main character that way and making it look like the film itself was siding with him at first was so it would become more apparent later that his relationship with his daughter was terrible. The way the film deals with him is also his own journey from believing that his hard job and his stress gives him an excuse to just treat everybody else like objects to realizing that he's the bad guy.

So where does the wolf stuff come in? Well... I don't want to make it seem like there's no wolf stuff here, or imply that this movie would be unappealing to horror fans, because that might turn people like me away from watching this very good movie. I hesitate even to say that the wolf stuff isn't the point, because again, to me, if the wolf stuff isn't the point, who cares? I guess maybe this is a movie you gotta be tricked into watching; you have to believe it'll be something other than what it is so that you can be pleasantly surprised by what it is. There's just something about this movie, something about the way the characters were written and how life is presented as this farcical, nonstop barrage of unfortunate circumstances, that feels refreshing. The main character keeps getting hit with bad stuff and he keeps responding to it in the worst possible way, and the message is, like, yeah, this is all your fault, you can just be bad at life, you can go about it the wrong way and alienate all your loved ones because you truly are just being a bad dude. And this is funny- you might not think it could be, but somehow watching somebody repeatedly struggle with everything carries that shameful "at least that isn't me" humor, but it's also a little uncomfortable, because maybe it is you. This is an uncomfortable movie at times. I admire how it doesn't stick to a genre but takes the best parts of a lot of them to create something interesting and new.

I'm not sure how I felt about the ending, but I may just be too bitter and personally involved with absent father stories to feel genuinely moved by a redemption arc such as that. Auld Lang Syne playing the lead character out in his final act felt like ending enough for me, anything beyond that seemed shallow and predictable. Even without my own personal feelings, the last scene did feel like a bit of a shark jump that was uncharacteristically unrealistic for something like this film. But it didn't take away from how good the rest of it was.

The Enemy (2011)

directed by Dejan Zečević

Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Hungary, Serbia

108 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I mostly watched this because I thought it would be a horror film, and I like the idea of Serbia being known for a different horror movie than "A Serbian Film", as well as Croatia and Bosnia being known for... well, any horror movie at all, really. As it turns out this is much less of a horror movie than I thought it was, and I don't really know what genre I'd personally consider it. I just considered it good.

So the film is set during the final days of the Balkan War, and the characters are all doing the grueling job of clearing mines while bunking in a burnt-out ruin that's too cramped for their number. Everyone is rife with cynicism and doubt about the new "peace" that's suddenly been declared; they all have seen too much to believe that everything the war has done can be undone simply by telling people not to fight anymore. This is not a war movie- it doesn't focus entirely on combat or the experience of being a soldier or death or anything like that, but at the same time it can't be divorced from its wartime setting. It doesn't take war lightly at all but it also doesn't bombard us with needless visuals of suffering. The film was made by people who actually do live and work in the region it's set in, and I've seen some other folks from the area praising it for realism and for being a rare depiction of the Balkans that wasn't made by someone who's never been there. It doesn't get too heavily into ideology, that's not its purview, but I think it does a good job of showing the toll of hate.

The title of the film is a reference to the character who is kind of the centerpiece of it: A man who the soldiers find bricked up behind a wall. He's unruffled, claims to not be cold, hungry, or thirsty, and never reveals anything real about himself, only ever asking for cigarettes, and not even those once he sees there's not enough to go around. His inscrutable presence causes a deep rift to form between the soldiers, and soon they start infighting viciously as their circumstances grow more mysterious and the theories about who the man in the wall is grow wilder. Coincidentally, I just watched another film that involves a very similar mysterious person who refuses to give up information about their identity ("Cure" by Kiyoshi Kurosawa) and so I feel like I have a little bit more of a framework with which to talk about The Enemy. I have seen a few films that follow this general premise: An interloper arrives, and without directly inciting violence, causes chaos among everyone near them. Whether intentional or not, the presence of an outsider who refuses to concede to ideas of kin or creed or class infuriates the people who meet him- who is he, if he won't define himself according to our ways? And who are we, if we cannot define him?

After a while, the soldiers start to toss around theories that this mystery man is either God or Satan. He never refutes either idea himself, but again, this causes deep tension and fear anyway. One of the more philosophically-inclined of the men introduces the concept of solipsism, the idea that maybe this is the only man who really exists. Kill him and everything else disappears. I really love the subtle way all of this is handled, and maybe it was even too subtle- there's so much focus on infighting and prejudice that the story of the man from the wall feels underdeveloped even for something that's intended to be underdeveloped- but the way he's played and the way he never acts to prove or disprove anything made him feel genuinely menacing. I don't know if I have a pet theory about who he was; I don't know if I was supposed to come away from this film with one interpretation or another, but if the maxim goes that Hell is other people, then the man in the wall would certainly qualify as the king of it. He brings everybody into hell by pitting them against people who were once, if not their friends, then at least people they consider to be on the same side of the war. This was a fascinating film and I would love to see it get more recognition internationally.

The Bloodhound (2020)

directed by Patrick Picard

USA

77 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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After watching a completely different film by mistake (who knew so many movies were called "The Bloodhound"?), I finally got to see what has been one of my most anticipated recent films, and it didn't disappoint. This movie is uncanny, uncomfortable, and nightmarish, with just the slightest trace of some weird wry humor that only made everything else about it feel more discomfiting. It's an incredibly stylish debut feature from writer-director Patrick Picard and I'd be very interested to see what he does next.

This is a movie where the house it's set in is as much of a character as the people inside the house, if not more so, and a myriad of stylistic choices are made to ensure this is the case. I think the most immediately obvious of these choices is the way it's shot in such an unusual aspect ratio. Not only is it shot with an extremely wide-angle, slightly fish-eyed lens, but also a very tall one- the effect this produces is that, more often than not, the entirety of a person's body will be in a shot, head to toe and then some, showing not only the floor but also the ceiling and ultimately making it feel like the characters are tiny figures wandering around in an oppressive dreamscape. Having the floor and ceiling visible serves to make the house feel claustrophobic- yet in other shots it feels cavernous. Add to this the dim lighting and the fact that most of it seems to take place at night, with only muted lamps and unexplained flashing red light to illuminate the stuffy rooms, and the whole thing has the exact feeling of a dream where you're wandering through some infinite coat closet or a house you've never been in.

Comparisons to Yorgos Lanthimos are warranted, but the characters here seem much more aware of and unnerved by their situation than characters in Lanthimos' films and how they wander through upsetting situations with no trace of emotion. There's also a little more nonsense than his movies typically have, which is a good thing. The Bloodhound is a loose retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher, but it operates exactly like a dream, according to a dream's own self-contained logic. At one point one of the characters says, flatly, "Now I have to turn around ten times to stop the world ending in flames" and then does so. This is where that bizarre humor comes in: things are said that seem like they should be followed with an awkward chuckle to diffuse the situation, but no chuckle ever comes, so we're just left wondering if it was really a joke or not.

The outsider is the main character, who comes to stay at the house of his reclusive friend after some undisclosed situation leaves him homeless, and of the two he seems the most aware that the things going on are not normal, but he becomes so drawn in to this bizarre landscape of the house that even his concerns often don't cover the most blatant of the unusual things that happen to him. He becomes concerned for his friend's sister, who is obviously ill, but no mention is ever made of the fact that he seems to teleport himself out of a locked room at one point. Other people enter the house at the end and perform the functions of their job unimpeded, which I think points towards the explanation that the house itself is such a profoundly strange place that it imparts some altered mental state on its inhabitants.

But it may not have been the house, or not entirely the house. The title of the movie comes directly from a dream: one that the main character's friend has about a menacing figure that he somehow knows has "the face of a dog and a pig" although its face is covered, and he also somehow knows that this figure is called "the Bloodhound". He describes it as coming from the sewers, picking out houses along the sewer line, crawling into them, and hiding in the closet, causing an inexplicable deep fear in the people who live in the house until they are so afraid that they're forced to reckon with each other and become closer as a result. This isn't a 1:1 explanation of all that happens in the film, but the actual presence of the Bloodhound- who is deeply, deeply disturbing- makes it hard to ignore that a lot of what we see tracks with the way the protagonist's friend describes his unsettling dream.

I absolutely loved this movie- it's something totally unique, something that's hard to quantify but still feels like it makes some absurd kind of sense. It's not scary in any sort of typical way that I can describe to you neatly, but it has a heavy feeling of ominousness over every minute of its very short running time. The set decoration creates a stifling atmosphere in a house that could be a perfectly habitable place in different lighting, and the stilted, uncomfortable exchanges between the two characters culminating in an ending as mysterious as everything that came before it makes this feel impenetrable, in the best way.

Ravenous (2017)

directed by Robin Aubert

Canada

103 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I choose my zombie movies carefully these days, as the genre has become so oversaturated with trash that it's hard to find good ones. Even the ones with a reputation for being artsy and slow can just feel overdone after a while. Ravenous enters the canon of zombie films as something different: still reliant on zombies and still definitely a Zombie Movie, not having a narrow enough focus to be entirely character-driven (like Cargo, or possibly It Stains The Sands Red), but also being slowly-paced and meticulous in its worldbuilding. It gets bleaker and bleaker, starting out looking like it could even possibly be a comedy, but ending on a note of loss and sacrifice, although with the possibility of solace still there.

I think that worldbuilding I just mentioned might be my favorite thing about this film, and I hesitate to even call it worldbuilding because that seems to imply a fantasy world, and while zombies aren't exactly realistic, their mere appearance in a film doesn't necessitate that the rest of the film be unbelievable. Whatever we're calling it, the way the environment is depicted in Ravenous is what makes it stand out from the crowd: This is a rural Quebec that should be calm and beautiful but has unfortunately been disrupted by the end of the world. The timeframe is soon enough after the end that everything still looks like the humans just took a quick break, but enough time has passed that the survivors seem somewhat jaded. It's also soon enough that there's still people hiding out here and there who've managed to survive, even vulnerable individuals- like small children, and kittens- but the start of the film has all the main characters separated, only to form their ragtag band as time progresses. Again, I hesitate even to classify this as a ragtag-band-of-survivors type of movie, because the people are disparate and don't feel like they have anything in common whatsoever. They don't really sit and chat, they don't insta-bond, some of them truly seem to not like each other. It's a way different feeling from the typical group of survivors you see in zombie movies, and I liked that difference.

(However I am not a tremendous fan of the fact that the sole black character is killed within ~30 minutes, and the trauma of witnessing his death is mostly used as a touchstone for a white character's backstory rather than a tragedy on its own.)

In addition to not getting the full backstories of each of the characters, we also don't get backstory on the zombies. There's a scene where one of them explains to another, still tied to a bed to make sure her "dog bite" isn't anything worse, the slow progression of the infection and how she'll feel if she's lying and is really zombie-bit instead of dog-bit, and honestly, it sounded like how I might berate someone for not wearing a mask during a pandemic. The description is not scientific but is based off of what is clearly secondhand knowledge- you feel weird, you vomit blood, you become disoriented and next thing you know you're devouring your loved ones. I can tell that the zombie apocalypse was taking place on a personal level for all of these people, and that's the way it was depicted on film.

The zombies themselves are extremely interesting. One of the things that isn't explained is that they seem to be building these huge piles of household items like chairs and small appliances, and if that was ever theorized about by the living characters, I missed it. It's a fascinating element, though; it recalls some of the consumerism critique of George Romero but is mysterious enough that you don't know what it means. Their humanity is preserved, in a rare case where survivors are clearly traumatized by having to kill people who used to be their peers. And they are genuinely terrifying- also a rarity for a zombie film given the prevalence of the genre. I finally got around to watching this based off of chatter from my book group, and I'm glad I did, because it is a well-rounded, well-made film.

Westworld (1973)

directed by Michael Crichton

USA

85 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I have a soft spot for Michael Crichton's fiction because he was one of the authors who taught me to love reading as a young adult, but now that I'm an adult-adult, I can admit the flaws in most of his work that I didn't see when I was younger. Westworld is, for the most part, like reading a Michael Crichton book, and although the fantastical imagery makes it more exciting, it's still got a lot of the issues his books tend to have.

But I'm making it sound like I didn't like it, which I did! It's such an interesting concept and it's executed really well, because in this case there was a roster of crew and actors to add depth to Crichton's ideas and enhance them in such a way that watching this is miles more fun than reading, say, The Andromeda Strain, where the concept is there but the writing is so flat that you feel like you're reading an academic paper. The special effects have been talked about and praised, rightfully, for being very much ahead of their time. It looks like a 70s movie but in a weird way it also doesn't, like it could have been made more recently as a parody of a 70s movie. The robots are believable as non-human entities, and the only bad quality about them is that the film doesn't seem to feel the need to focus on them, despite them being such a large part of the story. It's also very amusing to me that their insides, when they were shown, were depicted as basically just a bunch of circuitboards shoved into a human skin. Watching modern movies like Ex Machina has made me expect faux-humans to have much more sleek interiors, not a bag of chips and boards like you'd find if you opened the back of a computer- but then, computers were barely even a thing at the time this was released, so circuitboards were kind of all anybody had to work with.

I'm not surprised that this was remade as a hit TV series, because the concept really lends itself to more exploration especially in the modern era as focus on entertaining the masses and the morality of doing so has increased, but I am a little surprised that the original became such a classic because to be totally honest it's kind of boring. The story isn't boring, and Yul Brynner inexorably hunting a guy down across the desert landscape with bloodlust in his shiny robot eyes is extremely compelling. But everything just sort of... happens, and doesn't feel like it's happening to real people; there's no personal intrigue whatsoever, your enjoyment of the film hinges on whether or not you can get engaged with something where all the people are basically wooden cut-outs of humans that we're supposed to pretend are real. And again, this from the movie that has actual robots in it. Flat characters are probably Crichton's most egregious problem, and boy, does Westworld have that problem in spades. It is kind of interesting to watch a movie that feels like it has no main characters, though. Everybody in it, even the "leads", feels like just some guy.

I want to like this as a critique of consumer culture, and I understand that it was probably meant as one, but it's hard to really feel like it has any message in the end. And maybe that's my own fault for being part of consumer culture myself, for expecting to be drummed over the head with a moral from whatever I watch, but Westworld doesn't even feel like its message is subtle- it feels like it's not there. The amusement park is a lawless territory in which the guest is king, you can do no harm here and no harm can come to you; kill, maim, take, waste, whatever you want to do- but who is providing this? Who fuels this culture of lawlessness? In any other satire of capitalism, I would expect a sinister mega-corporation to eventually be revealed as the support structure behind a place of such gratuitous indulgence. I'd expect the curtain to fall and a scummy CEO, lining his pockets freely with money earned off of guests who leave the park with something like PTSD from never being sure if they really killed "just robots", to be behind it. But the people behind Westworld seem to just be scientists in a control room doing their jobs. We never see it go beyond that. The concept of letting people loose and telling them they can do no wrong is never given enough space for the implications of it to set in. Maybe these are things the television reboot addresses- I've never seen it, so I don't know. But it's fun as hell anyway as long as you don't think too hard about it.

The Unknown (2000)

directed by Michael Hjorth

Sweden

90 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I've been wanting to see this one for a while now and it did not disappoint. At first I wanted to say something about how it felt so dissimilar to other typical Swedish horror films I've seen, but I didn't want to dismiss the whole of Swedish horror cinema like that... until I saw some Swedish people talking about how this is atypical for Swedish horror. It's more the time period than the place, though, at least to me- the whole of Scandinavia in the early 2000s had a fairly specific aesthetic to their horror films which I believe can be best described as "cell phone commercial", and a lot of them tended to not really even be horror movies as much as they were action-thriller hybrids that usually had a human villain. This is the background I want to draw up for The Unknown just so I can contrast it against the things that were coming out alongside it at the time.

The first thing this movie does is make you believe it's found-footage. I guess "make you believe" is kind of strong language considering that at no point does it make any actual claim to being found-footage, nor do any of the characters wield a camcorder at any time. But the way it's filmed is virtually identical to Blair Witch Project, and it took me a few minutes to realize that none of the characters were acknowledging the camera nor were any of them designated to film everyone. I've written before about how certain found-footage films- the ones that are more adept- fully utilize the camera as a separate character, even if it's actively being carried by one of the protagonists, in order to create a representation of the antagonist's gaze. The Unknown is an excellent example of that. There's no reason for the camera to be used in this almost cinéma vérité style, but it makes us feel like the perspective is of an outside observer. Maybe it's just me, but in films that use this technique, I start to ascribe feelings to the camera's "person". I imagine it leering at the characters, enjoying their struggle. When it zooms on their anguished faces I imagine that it's getting some pleasure out of torturing them. Especially in a film like this where the horror is, by definition, unknown, having the point of view belong to the thing the protagonists are being threatened by while all the while they're unaware that something is watching them fits in with the narrative and makes a creepier film.

The reason why this is so unlike the films I've mentioned previously as being what I think of when I think of Swedish horror is because the horror of it is so loose and undefined. The film begins when a group of field biologists arrive at a patch of burned forest to investigate what caused the fire, and kicks off when they find the remains of a creature none of them can identify. Even after having watched the movie it's hard to say exactly what happened- it's like The Thing with less lore, a purposeless bodily invasion where, because the point of view is not that of one of the humans in the group, the exact intent of the invader and the way it works is left to the imagination. It's one of those movies where the land itself is just wrong. It slips into the bodies of the humans who visit it and creates imitations of them or forms them according to its own needs.

There's one line in this that's sticking with me- when most of the characters have been transformed by the unknown force, and one of the last remaining humans is speaking to the things that used to be her friends, one of them tells her "You have such beautiful hands". In a film where most of the dialogue is utilitarian, no flourishes, just sentences that real people would say to each other in real life, a small touch like that goes a very long way towards establishing an unsettling atmosphere. It implies that hands are a novelty to whatever entity or entities ripped through that burnt-out forest, that they're fascinated with human anatomy because it's not theirs. I know that it leans pretty hard on the legacy of Blair Witch, but The Unknown is such a creepy film all on its own that it's well worth checking out if you, like me, enjoy horror where the horror is unquantifiable and mysterious.

The Gulf of Silence (2020)

directed by M.K. Rhodes

USA

85 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I've always loved UFO documentaries. There's something deeply ingrained in my childhood about them, about buying hefty multi-DVD box sets put out by supposedly "reputable" sources like the History Channel and watching them over and over, and then later, gravitating towards the more crackpot-oriented ones, partly for fun, partly because the over-produced television specials where people mostly just trotted out the same things we already knew about Roswell and Area 51 no longer satisfied. A mainstay of these documentaries was the supposed inside source, of which there are, in comparison to the pool of people who claim to have been abducted or contacted by aliens, relatively few. Not a lot of people are out there pretending to have shirked their NDAs and abdicated from a secret research facility somewhere because there are Things the Public Must Know. Even though the veracity of these claims is always and will probably always be unprovable- the government has yet to step in and rally support behind the likes of Bob Lazar, and most likely will never do so- there's always the possibility that at least one of them knows at least some of the truth.

The Gulf of Silence is dedicated to this idea. It is, it should be stated, a pseudo-documentary: the actress playing Dr. Laura Gale is really named Mandy May Cheetham, and none of the things she claims about herself track with any real person. But there is a shred of truth, like any good fable: undisputed, publicly-acknowledged UFO videos are shown that are the closest thing we currently have to, if not footage of extraterrestrials, then footage of something that we can't identify. Cheetham, as Gale, speaks with a clarity that has a jadedness beneath it but also a great earnestness, as if she knows- and judging by how she speaks of her time on the convention circuit, she does know- how she's going to come off, claiming the things she's claiming. But her claims never become outlandish, and she speaks about them with the same factual tone she uses to introduce herself at the beginning. The film never feels like an accusation, it doesn't take the goading approach many contactees do, framing themselves as martyrs who just want the truth. And in fairness, the film also doesn't ever feel entirely like reality; the script is too obvious and the way Cheetham delivers it too practiced, but this doesn't have to be a detriment to its believability. Cheetham could easily be imagined to be Gale's stand-in, hired to read her words in order to keep the real woman as close to anonymity as possible.

There's something about this that feels bigger than a pseudo-documentary, though, which is why the obvious fakeness of it doesn't feel like it takes away from its overall quality. I'm not entirely sure what it is that makes The Gulf of Silence feel so... monumental. Maybe it's how easily I am drawn in by someone looking "me" (or the camera) in the eye and telling me an extremely compelling tale that they claim to have witnessed firsthand. Maybe the seed was already in me from how interested I am in UFO documentaries and secret government conspiracies surrounding aliens. But the point here doesn't feel like it's supposed to be "this is fake but I made it look real". It's not a found-footage movie, it's no Blair Witch. It's just... something. It's something new and fascinating and I love it.

Something about it is also deeply frightening at times- maybe it's the music (created, as was literally everything else, by M.K. Rhodes), which has a foreboding aura, like it's gearing you up for something bad to happen. Whatever it was, that story Gale tells about first contact in the Bering Strait is genuinely one of the scariest things I've heard in a long time and it made me feel uneasy being alone in my own house. Again, though, this isn't the point- although for me, who is as much a fan of getting scared by movies as I am of UFO movies, it's an excellent treat.

It was December 30th when I watched this film, it's December 31st when I'm writing this, and it'll probably be 2021 by the time anyone reads it, if anyone reads it, but I'm still considering this one of the best movies of 2020. All the time, I'm reminded of a tweet I saw in the middle of this year beseeching us all to remember, later, when we are vaccinated and back to some semblance of normalcy, that it was artists that got us through this. That we turned to art when we had to turn away from the rest of the world. There's always going to be things I stumble across like The Gulf of Silence that remind me that there's an infinite wellspring of new ideas and new possibilities, and people like M.K. Rhodes find that wellspring and bring from it things that inspire me to keep an open mind- towards art and towards the world at large.