Fanny Lye Deliver'd (2019)

directed by Thomas Clay

UK

110 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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There was a large gap between when this movie was finished and when it finally came out, but the wait was worth it, because what an end product this was! Even if it hadn't been such a good movie overall, the sheer fact of how visually appealing it is would have been enough to keep me watching for the whole just-under-two-hour runtime. Everything about it is gorgeously kitted out, from the costuming to the mist covering the farm to the farm itself. Those buildings looked so perfect- if ever a film needed a "making of" documentary, it's this one. I want to know how everything was constructed and how long it took. The whole set feels like the stage for a historical re-enactment and I loved it.

So the film is set at the beginning of the reign of Oliver Cromwell, and the British populace is experiencing a great degree of oppression and hardship and a lack of religious freedom. This is epitomized in the life of Fanny Lye, a woman essentially serving as an unpaid housekeeper to her husband and small son on a farm, never much questioning her role in society or in her family. One day two people show up at the farm begging for shelter from a "highwayman", totally nude, and after they're begrudgingly given a place to stay, they slowly begin to reveal their true morals (or lack thereof). It's a story about Fanny discovering the world of possibilities outside of simply being a wife, but her journey to get there is not a simple path of instant or even gradual liberation- she goes through trauma on the way to realizing her full potential as a human being, a trauma which at times rivals the repression she had been going through up until the two strangers' arrival. It is actually the process of being pushed to her mental and physical breaking point that seems to teach Fanny the ultimate lesson about who she is and who she can be- a message I'm not sure I agree with, as the idea that some knowledge can only be gained by going through experiences that break you as a person is something I don't subscribe to.

I was thinking about how this has some interesting parallels to The Witch and Midsommar. Much like Dani in Midsommar, Fanny Lye had been living with a less-than-stellar partner, and this partner is the avenue through which a group with cultlike characteristics and unusual beliefs targets her. By eliminating him, they make her believe they've dispatched the cause of her suffering, and therefore gain her trust. They make it seem like they want to do something good for her but their intentions don't really ever feel like they're solely for her benefit as a person- they want something of her, even if it doesn't seem like it. And like The Witch, Fanny is a "pure" woman eventually goaded into losing her morality and living deliciously, even if it means an (unwilling) separation from her family.

But where this differs significantly from those two examples is that Fanny Lye has the wherewithal to gather her own lessons from the things the couple/cult is trying to teach her. She's initially receptive to the ideas of freedom that the two strangers preach, but after experiencing their attempts to press these ideas on her fervently and against her will, she decides to take from their teachings the things that would benefit her, liberating herself fully from her former life, but also liberating herself from what would have been simply another life of servitude to a different master. This is evident in her casting away of the relic that was so meaningful to the two, and also in the elaboration of her ultimate fate as she rides off into the sunset at the end of the film.

In between all of this we have other things, of course, not least of which the worst sheriff ever and his sidekick, who proves a long-held opinion of mine that every villain needs a henchman who just slouches around and sneers at things. There's a degree of wry humor to all of this, and the camerawork reflects this- it's filmed really strangely for what it is, feeling much more like a comedy TV series with its occasional fast zooms into characters' faces and the way the camera drifts around like it's being carried by someone trying to duck out of the way of the violence. Really the only bad thing about this movie is that Kate Dickie isn't in it. But Maxine Peake is a good substitute.

Saint Maud (2019)

directed by Rose Glass

UK

84 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I'm not sure what year to put as the release date for this, because it's been circulating festivals and highly limited theater releases since 2019, but then got caught up in the covid turmoil that scrambled many other films' releases until it finally dropped near Valentine's Day 2021 so that we may all enjoy it with our sweethearts since it is such a fitting date night movie. I'm joking about that. Probably don't watch this with your date unless you know them really well.

More than anything else, this movie is tremendously good as a character study; specifically it's excellent at establishing backstory with a minimum of context. We don't revisit the opening shot of the main character having just either witnessed or committed something horrible in a medical setting, but this sets up basically her entire motivation for the rest of the film- obviously that traumatic experience triggered her into becoming intensely religious, and her religion is the centerpiece of the film. But the viewers' knowledge of it is contained basically in that ten-second cold open and maybe two or three other small references. Morfydd Clark does such an incredible job bringing this character to life that I thought surely she must be one of those actresses who is debuting for the first time and knocking it out of the park, because her entire persona felt so unfamiliar that I was sure I'd never seen her before until she was Maud. But I was surprised to look her up and see that not only does she have an acting career, she's been in big movies: stuff like Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, Crawl, and The Personal History of David Copperfield. She inhabits Maud so thoroughly that I found it hard to imagine her not being Maud.

I'm going to add my usual disclaimer and say that I was probably coming at this movie from a slightly different angle than may have been intended, because I'm a horror fan through and through, and my interpretation of films like this where there might be an ongoing supernatural event but there also might be something off about the main character's mental state will always be, first and foremost, that the supernatural event is real. When it is left ambiguous, I tend to fill in the blanks to make it true rather than an illusion. Saint Maud, to me, feels like it's leaning more towards being a straightforward horror film, as in something where there is genuine otherworldly activity going on, but you can never be certain because the sole witness to all of this is Maud, who has a deep personal investment in the veracity of God and divinity. I think this movie explores a little bit of what faith is and how people can be driven to it for the wrong reasons. When looking for an avenue that will allow them to avoid dealing with a trauma that they perceive as their fault, people can turn their attention towards the divine and become convinced that salvation from an outside entity is possible through trials, because this is easier than simply forgiving themselves.

It is interesting to see that a lot of reviews describe this as a scary movie- interesting because it lacks almost every single hallmark of a horror film aside from general ambiance. At no point was I afraid that something was going to jump out at me, which is usually what I feel when I watch a movie that I consider scary. I'm not mentioning the popular perception of this as creepy because I disagree with it; while I wasn't personally frightened by this movie, I think the fact that so many other people were is proof that this is a really distinct and masterful new direction in horror, because the horror of it comes from such a multitude of things that it transcends genre boundaries. It's unnerving because you're never sure what Maud is capable of, and it's unnerving because you're never sure if some external force is acting upon her and what that force might be. Is it a dark, demonic entity masquerading as a holy one? Or is this just what God is like, which is a far more horrifying possibility?

For a debut feature this is just stunning. There's so much depth in this for such a relatively short film that feels so small and self-contained. The William Blake motif is also very interesting because I am a fan of- though by no means an expert on- his art, and the way Maud applies it to herself and draws inspiration from it is fitting but unusual. When I look at a Blake painting I get the impression of a hallucinatory, mystic religion, a complete abandonment of narrative and a casting away of the personal in order to perceive the divine. This is not quite what Maud does: again, her need for faith comes more out of a need for outside validation that she didn't do the wrong thing. Her perception of God is a 1:1 conversation. She asks what to do and is told it, she doesn't really interpret signs or have visions that are opaque to her in their meaning.

I also just really like the idea that God speaks Welsh.

Impetigore (2019)

directed by Joko Anwar

Indonesia

106 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I let Joko Anwar's presence as writer-director of this film lead me to believe I knew what it would be like before I even watched it. That, and the fact that probably the most recognizable names in Indonesian horror (Joko Anwar, Kimo Stamboel, and Timoh Tjahjanto) make extremely gory, over-the-top films. Whatever the reason, I assumed Impetigore would be an eventual gorefest, hence the title. I did not expect it to be so restrained and to feel so full of depth and meaning. There is more than enough gore to satisfy anyone who might be looking for that kind of thing, but the film itself is not pre-occupied with how much blood it can spill.

This was Indonesia's submission for the 2021 Academy Awards, and already they were taking a risk submitting any kind of genre movie at all, given the Academy's historical record of snubbing horror films. Then you add in the impossible-to-have-foreseen current state of the Academy Awards now that films can no longer be released in 2020 the way they used to be when Impetigore was made, and you've got a scenario in which it seems very difficult for this movie to get any recognition at all. But it more than deserves it.

Impetigore starts off on such a strong note that it instantly gets you sucked in, even though what happens at the beginning seems to have little to do with the rest of the film until a good way in when it's all explained. It's like a mini horror movie in itself: the main character is bored at her job as a toll booth operator, chatting on the phone with her friend (also a toll booth operator) and complaining about a certain guy who keeps showing up and acting creepy. The guy shows up again while she's on the phone, of course, and this time he gets out of his car with an enormous machete while she's trapped inside the booth with nowhere to go. This is all executed so well and with such a lack of histrionics that it's borderline uncomfortable to watch. There's no dramatic camera angles or sudden musical stings when we see the man start coming towards her, silhouetted with the long knife held out to one side. The moment when he goes back to his car and then returns with a weapon makes your blood run cold. Tara Basro's acting and the confinement of her character in the booth while an unknown malicious presence advances towards her are enough to create tension and terror all on their own.

And the rest of the film continues to be surprisingly low-key until it's necessary to ramp up. Again, this is not what I was expecting. I've been conditioned to see Indonesian horror as extreme, sadistic, envelope-pushing. There is quite a lot that goes on in Impetigore that is disturbing in a way that stands out against even what I would consider extreme for American horror, and it's made more potent by the way it's presented in this film, but the story always felt like it came first. This is as much a scary story as it is a scary film visually. While moments (a certain scene with a clothesline felt like a solid punch to the chest) utilize violence and gore, the balance is always kept between horrifying implications and horrifying reality.

I'm always a little suspicious of any horror movie that sets itself up by having people from the city travel to a rural, secluded village and experience traditions that seem strange to their city-dwelling tastes, because I feel like depicting rituals and legends as creepy and backwards is inherently harmful and I see it a lot, not just in international film but also in the glut of backwoods/Appalachian horror that plagues the U.S. (or else Wrong Turn wouldn't have about eight billion sequels and a successful reboot currently in theaters). But Impetigore does this really, really well. The village itself feels like it's presented as very neutral, and the emphasis is always on the actions of individual people rather than the place as a whole or the rituals that they perform. The underlying message of the story, really, is that the evil deeds of one man who holds power can have a ripple effect until every single person who he rules over is helpless to do anything but become complicit in his schemes, or die. I was very excited to see a movie where gamelan and wayang play a big role, and now I'm even more excited that neither of those things were presented as weird, sinister backwoods black magic rituals performed by crazy natives. It's just the badness of one man that seeps into what was otherwise a normal village and corrupts everything that they do.

Everything that happens in this movie just feels like it has such weight to it. It feels like a curse. It's not like, say, Ouija movies, or movies where somebody finds a cursed doll, stuff like that where the implication is that any innocent person could stumble upon an evil object and become the target of bad spirits. The main character of Impetigore is marked from the beginning. The horror comes from the fear that you might not be able to escape your bloodline. A shadow is over her from before the start of the film. The man with the machete is the inexorable pull of her fate looming over her all throughout the story. The Oscars haven't meant squat for some time, if they ever did, but I do hope this gets some recognition.

Willy's Wonderland (2021)

directed by Kevin Lewis

USA

88 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Willy's Wonderland is a film I've been waiting for since it was announced because the entire idea of it is just so ridiculous it had to work. Also, you put Nic Cage in a movie and it automatically makes it A Nic Cage Movie™️, especially now, since he's garnered fame to the point that he's basically known for being himself and you cannot see him as anything else. So any movie with him in it kind of has to be tailored around the fact that he's now a persona as much as an actor, and Willy's Wonderland is very successful in utilizing his aura to its fullest extent. He plays a silent drifter with no background who gets roped into serving a shift at the titular restaurant, which is filled with a cast of demonic animatronics who try relentlessly to kill him and anyone else that enters the building in a cycle that has been in place for a long, long time. I'm not sure how much of it I should get into here to keep things interesting without spoiling it, but there is a decent amount of lore, which I really appreciated because, again, due to the inherent silliness of the idea of a grown man battling animatronic animals, the rest of the movie should be constructed carefully to be just believable enough to work with the concept, but not so extensive that its presence wouldn't be better than no backstory at all.

The movie itself looks just a little bit rough around the edges, which was, again, fitting for the kind of thing it is. I think this is a B-movie at heart- it's important that it didn't look too glossy and over-polished. A lot of care was obviously put into the suits and the graphics and the accompanying jingle created to rival the annoyingness of the "Pooka!" song from Into the Dark, but the color grading also looks kind of ugly sometimes and I couldn't get over how the whole thing was filmed in fish-eye. And that's fine. It all makes sense in context.

The centerpiece of this whole thing is really Cage's character. The band of random youths who try valiantly to get him out of the building before they can get their arson on, not realizing that the animatronics were stuck in there with him and not the other way around, could have easily been the main cast in a less-good film. Which would have been boring. Having the drifter be the central character, giving him such a distinct personality and then not explaining anything whatsoever about why he is the way he is was what cinched the deal to take this from a boring, derivative movie to something really entertaining and funny.

Personally, I read Nic Cage's character as undeniably autistic. I loved this because even though it was never stated outright, it would be a rare occasion where an autistic person is depicted as being better suited to a situation because of their autism, instead of not fitting into the world the way autistics are usually portrayed. Hear me out: He is told to do a job (clean up the restaurant) and he does said job 100% perfectly with extreme focus, despite the distraction of repeated assaults by evil animatronics. Every so often he has to go and do his ritual of drinking an energy drink and playing pinball for a bit. He obviously has some form of selective mutism. And the last remaining animatronic hits a button to activate flashing lights and loud noises, which overwhelms him- and which would disorient anybody, but it's the one single thing that actually seemed to lower his defenses for a second. Those are all behaviors that read, to me, as super indicative of autism, and this is my headcanon and I am holding onto it because I love it.

This is getting long and probably makes no sense, so I'll wrap it up by saying that I really did like this movie and how it never tries to be more than it needed to be. There's story and action in equal measure, and it's all pulled off with enough skill that I could believe the restaurant was a chain that exists in real life. The only thing that kept bothering me was that one animatronic who was meant to be a human- all the others were wearing enormous, elaborate animal suits, and the presence of an animatronic who was just a big head on an un-embellished human body felt jarring no matter how many times she was onscreen. But that is honestly not a deal at all in the bigger picture. The other animatronics more than make up for that weird one.

The Mortuary Collection (2019)

directed by Ryan Spindell

USA

108 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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From minute one, I was really impressed by how good this movie looks. It's amazing to me that this is just something you can watch anytime on Shudder, because aesthetically it looks like a movie that should have been preceded by a beloved cult TV show, a wildly successful effort to crowdfund a movie, a bunch of fan clubs, merch, and its own dedicated following. The sweeping overhead shots of the invented town of Raven's End and the detail put into establishing its backstory as a weird, monster-plagued place even before we hear the stories about it make this feel like it has far more history than a one-off film. I very much commend it for taking notes from classic horror anthologies of the 80s and 90s because it feels indistinguishable from them in all the best ways.

It looks like this is also a compilation of the director's previously shot short films, which explains why the wrap-around story, which I'm presuming was created solely for this film, is kind of the best part about it. The shorts are all great, don't get me wrong, but it does feel like there's a disparity between them that I understand now that I know the shorts had all been made a couple of years before the rest of the film. This is refreshing to see- a lot of older horror anthologies I watch fall into the trap of having the wrap-around be the most boring part, and a lot of times totally unrelated to the film as a whole, but really in this case everything works together to make a bigger story. And it does feel big. I can't believe this movie came out within the past five years.

The only issue I had with this was also, unfortunately, kind of the best part of it. Like I said, this feels very strongly like classic horror anthologies that we all know and love, and at times it feels too much like them. The filming style, the acting, the visuals, and everything else has all been upgraded to be 2019 quality, and it really is a pleasure to watch, but the scripts could have been taken from anything released between like 1980-1999. It just has that vibe of not being terribly deep, just focusing on what would make for good horror, not the most interesting or the most original, just... the most recognizable horror. And it's hard for me to get upset at that because it is good horror, it's enjoyable and it gives me that feeling of passion and playfulness that watching classic goofy horror movies does, but at the same time I wish it elevated itself a little bit beyond what I've already seen a hundred times.

I had moral issues with a couple of the shorts, I guess, and that's what tripped me up. The first and second ones were fine; the second one made me uncomfortable but not really in an ethical way, but the third and fourth used themes that aren't something I like to see in media being created in the present day. The third segment deals with disability in a way that makes it feel like it's more of a burden on the people around a disabled person than on the person themselves, mostly through depicting caregiver fatigue, and... making a movie about caregiver fatigue isn't the problem here, and it should be talked about more, but this is a movie about caregiver fatigue without any of the nuance that a discussion about it should have. I do feel like this was one of the better shorts visually- that final scene in the elevator was just gorgeous. But it shoots for a deep topic and instead of dealing with it respectfully it chooses to deal with it the way a movie that doesn't know anything about said topic would deal with it.

The final segment bleeds into the wrap-around in a cool way; again, I love how connected everything was. But it uses that ancient, tired "escaped mental patient" trope! And I hated it so much! This movie is so dedicated to looking and feeling classic, to using the same beats as the films it's emulating do, and you can feel that that is done with so much love and it's done so successfully that it makes this movie everything that it is, but it also doesn't weed out the parts of those classic films that are hurtful and offensive. I think this is a good example of why watching films shouldn't be a black-or-white activity- you can't watch something and absolutely refuse to acknowledge its problems because you like it, but you also can't discard something entirely because of its flaws (exceptions made, of course, for truly irredeemable media). It would be a shame to throw this whole movie away with all of its gorgeous outfitting and Clancy Brown's impeccably sinister-but-not-too-sinister performance, but we also have to see where it misfires.

Rorschach (2015)

directed by C.A. Smith

USA

75 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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This movie is available free and legally on youtube with the claim "Scariest movie online?" tacked onto the title, which to me was a red flag that got even redder with the fact that the channel that uploaded it belongs to the director. You shouldn't have to attempt to turn your movie into a viral video to make it known, and most of the time claims like that are overly presumptuous at best and untrue at worst. But that's most of the time. Not this time.

It's ironic that the director apparently places such emphasis on scariness when Rorschach feels like exactly the kind of film that is deliberately avoiding the trap of equating scariness with overall quality that so many horror movies get into, and is all the better for it. Some of the greatest horror movies are not scary, and some scary movies are cheap and boring. That Rorschach's whole brand kind of hinges on the fact that it is A YouTube Movie, with a semi-meta emphasis on its identity as a document of the digital age, makes it part and parcel of a found-footage movement that I saw emerge mostly in the earlier 2010s and fizzle out towards the end of the decade as bigger studios caught on and produced things like Unfriended. For a while, found-footage movies were coming out that were so dedicated to looking realistic that sometimes there was barely any actual paranormal activity in them, and it was great. To have these movies that bucked the trend so strongly and focused on creating something that could plausibly have not been fiction was a redefinition of the genre and a spotlight on the best of what YouTube and social media in general can do for horror. Rorschach's intensely pared-down, bare-bones yet still stylish approach to filmmaking impressed me and surprised me.

The film is very unoriginal in its concept, which is another thing found-footage can get away with as the important thing is usually how the paranormal stuff is executed and not the drama and intrigue of a unique plot. Two skeptical investigators respond to a desperate call from a single mother and her young daughter who are facing simple but constant inexplicable activity in their home. The occurrences are really small and subtle- quiet voices, objects moving, scratching and knocking noises- but it's very easy to tell that the woman is worn down by how it never lets up. Instead of large, showy events, Rorschach gives us a haunting that is a series of steady small nudges towards the end of one's rope, which, honestly, implies a much more disturbing entity, as it's shown to delight in torturing its victims slowly instead of making itself known less ambiguously.

The acting is good, essentially indistinguishable from real interactions, which to me is a much tougher thing to get right than to make a movie we're not supposed to be able to pretend is real. The set is realistic and is basically just someone's actual house as far as I'm concerned. And although it does use a very tired "creepy doll" trope at times, this movie is genuinely scary- I hesitate to put any emphasis on that because I just spent some time explaining my opinion on how scariness shouldn't be the determining factor here, but I would be remiss not to mention that this is definitely a creepy film. Put together, all of the scenes involving the haunting don't amount to that much, but Rorschach knows it has a good hand and knows exactly when to show it and when not to. I won't spoil the ending, but the final scene before the epilogue is one of those things that was so freaky it made me not want to look directly at the screen. This is a really solid hidden gem of the YouTube era of filmmaking- not tough to pull off when the competition is mostly trash, but difficult to find when buried within mountains of said trash.

Remnants (2013)

directed by Brian Coppola

USA

67 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I really, really love these tiny, low- to no-budget found-footage horror movies that one can usually find on youtube for free. There's always an authenticity and a lack of pretentiousness about them. Remnants is interesting because instead of the typical "this footage was recovered from blah blah blah, the people on the tapes have never been found" title card, it just says that the film was created in 2012 "for fun". This means it has no allusions to being fictional, and so instead it feels like a project being presented to us honestly, with transparency. I think that's a very under-explored way to make a film, and even though it basically shoots down any real sense of immersion for me, I would love to see more filmmakers present their work in that way.

So the movie takes place largely within a trailer home where a man and woman live with their corgi, and after stumbling into an abandoned cemetery in the woods while shooting B-roll for an unrelated film project, the man brings home some malevolent spirit that attaches itself to the trailer. Or maybe the spirit was already there, it is not terribly clear. The two deal with the haunting in what I feel was a very realistic way, brushing off everything that happens in the beginning as stuff they need to call their landlord about. At one point the man is walking around outside and just kind of nonchalantly goes "...somethin grab my foot?" and moves on. They disregard the strangeness that is very apparent to us outside viewers, and I feel like that's far more accurate to what most of us would be like if we dealt with a very minor haunting in real life than the kind of film where at the slightest suggestion of ghosts everybody goes running. We're all used to dealing with things that exist strictly in material reality, and if they didn't already believe, it would take a lot for a person to be 100% convinced what they're seeing is paranormal.

The haunting doesn't stay minor for very long, though. The first moment where it goes from "normal old trailer noises" to "something direly wrong" is when one of the couple turns his back for literally a second and the cushions on their sofa are suddenly stacked up on the floor. This feels, in its context, very different again from most found-footage movies. I think the reason why the slow reveal of the haunting feels so unique here is because of how incredibly normal everything else is. Even that first moment of confirmed ghost activity would be barely anything to write home about in any other movie, but here, for these people, because they're living their happy normal life in their happy normal trailer, it's a jaw-dropper.

I was curious about whether or not this movie would show any actual ghosts on tape, apart from knocking sounds and growling and whatnot, because with the obviously very small budget, a physical ghost could make or break a movie like this depending on how it looks. And I was surprised when they actually went in a really interesting direction with how they depicted the spirit-demon-whatever. It looks GOOD, they don't show it too much and when they do it matches perfectly with the low quality of the video so that it doesn't look out-of-place at all. And it's completely not what you're expecting but it embodies malevolence really well.

The nitpicks I had about this movie could probably be counted on one hand, total, but the biggest issue I had was the presence of background music. A lot of found-footage movies add subtle ambient music to their scariest scenes and it virtually never works well. It's a little different here, since we're presented the film from the start as a work of fiction, but it's still jarring and felt unnecessary. I also just didn't like the ending because I had gotten fond of the couple and I didn't want anything really bad to happen to them- although, again, having them not be impervious to bodily harm made things more realistic. It bothered me to not know what happened to the dog, but I guess her running away from the trailer kind of implied that she escaped with her life. That dog was a fantastic actor, by the way- I was scratching my head trying to figure out how they got her to do some of the stuff she did without obviously giving her commands.

Alistair1918 (2015)

directed by Annie McVey

USA

86 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Found-footage movies that are not horror are almost entirely foreign territory to me, even though I know the format has a lengthy history outside of the horror genre. There are some films like 84 Charlie MoPic and Punishment Park that have no genre elements at all, instead using found-footage to tell a firsthand account from a place and time where it would make more sense to have small, amateur cameras as opposed to a big film crew, but found-footage, to me, has always lent itself better to horror, and so sci-fi and other movies that utilize the format are rare enough to get my attention when I do find them.

Alistair1918 starts off as a student documentary about Hollywood's homeless population that very quickly turns into something far more interesting when the film crew encounters a roughed-up man in a WWI soldier's uniform who claims he was shot through a wormhole from 1918 after an explosion on the battlefield. He shows them how he's been living in Griffith Park, surviving on trash and squirrels he traps and eats, returning to his landing site every day in the hope that he'll randomly get teleported back to his wife. The woman doing the documentary takes him in, gives him a place to stay and gets him set up with new clothes, a job, a phone, et cetera while all of the people around her are skeptical-bordering on-hostile and assume Alistair is just some guy with delusions. That idea is never given any true weight by the film itself, though.

The best thing about this movie, to me, is the fact that Alistair is treated like a real person 100% of the time. I'm not just talking about how the documentarian takes him seriously and doesn't think he's delusional, I'm talking about how, after it's well established that he is from nearly 100 years ago, none of the patronizing and infantilizing that could easily come with talking to a person unfamiliar with nearly all everyday technology is there. I kept expecting the trappings of a typical "out of time" character, I kept thinking there'd be a scene where he's confused by cell phones or bewildered by TV or something, but there just isn't anything like that. The film gives Alistair total dignity, doesn't present him as a funny curiosity. He is written exactly the way any person in any new place would be written; the film doesn't belittle his intelligence so much as to assume he would be completely lost. He's a normal human being with the capacity to adapt to modern life. At one point the most obnoxious member of the film crew actually does tease him about being from the past and he gets very rightfully offended by it- I'm so glad that this moment was included, because even though "people who are from the past" is not really a marginalized category in real life, it showed that it's never okay to make fun of a person for what they don't know.

(The film is also respectful of Alistair enough to not make him a homophobe- another thing I really liked. There was no need to assume he'd be backwards and intolerant just because of when he was from.)

So Alistair himself is pretty much the best aspect of the film because of how well he's written with respect to his circumstances, but there is more to it than just following him around for 86 minutes. There is a lot of suspension of disbelief that has to be done on the viewer's part, not just on the part of the characters, and this is where the film almost falls apart. A good portion of the story involves trying to get Alistair back to his own time with the help of a scientist specializing in experimental physics that just straight up is not possible, but this is never presented as being outlandish in any way. They Google around and find a woman claiming with a straight face to be the world's leading expert on wormholes and time travel and she's just... accepted as such, as if every day, advances are made in the very real field of sending people back and forth through time in portals you can make with a bucket of water and some gazing balls. Why this troubled me while I was completely willing to accept the prospect of a guy from 1918 showing up in Griffith Park, I'm not sure. I think it was probably the ludicrously unnecessary fake accent the scientist had. But were this not such a charming and engaging film otherwise I would have been turned off quite a lot by the weird science.

I guess that's just the place this movie comes from, though- you can't really separate Alistair's story from the bizarro physics because the world of the film presents both as equally possible. If you can get past the need to believe everything and into a mindset where you want to believe it instead, this is a tremendously fun and rewarding movie.