Offseason (2022)

directed by Mickey Keating

USA

83 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Mickey Keating is one of those rare directors whose new films I always look forward to because of his track record. Each film of his feels different and has a unique and fresh premise. Offseason wears its influences on its sleeve, largely the oft-forgotten gem Messiah of Evil (which I'm just delighted is getting some love), and having those more obscure influences in a modern film means this is something that feels altogether new.

I want to talk about locale for a second, because Offseason is a horror film that roots itself in its location. There are typical backdrops in horror that we're all used to seeing: The crumbling, haunted mansion; the spirit-ridden forest; the backpacking trip gone wrong; even the open ocean has many films dedicated to the terror of it. But one of my absolute favorite types of horror is the regional horror film, the film that's set in a specific place, usually where the filmmaker(s) hail from, and that is immediately recognizable to other locals of the area. In this particular case, the setting is something I see far less often than the other horror locations I just named: haunted Florida.

It is hard to describe in words how good this movie is at establishing atmosphere, because you can never really talk about the way something looks and feels to anyone who hasn't seen or felt it. And as hard as it is for me to try to do that for you, here, in this review, Offseason faces a bit of the same problem: There are people in the world who haven't been to Florida. I'm one of them, even though I live in its more conservative hat, Georgia. How do you impart the feeling of a place to someone who's never been? It's a difficult thing, but watching this movie, I felt like I was there, and I felt like the potential for horrific Florida-based media is sorely underused and perhaps overshadowed by fiction making fun of the state for its wacky criminals instead of embracing that, like all places, it has an ecosystem all its own with traits that make it rife with the possibility of unique horror.

Offseason takes place, as the title would imply, in a resort town during the off-season. Florida is known for its severe weather, and that's the backdrop of the main character's visit to the town on short notice. Called back by a mysterious letter informing her that her mother's grave has been vandalized, she arrives in her mother's small, clandestine hometown to find that the town is about to draw up its bridge and close to outsiders for the season. The weather is taking a turn for the worse and the whole town is in a seeming state of perpetual semi-twilight, heavy clouds shrouding the sky and a humidity that is practically visible on film. I'm so impressed by how this is captured; the whole thing takes place right on the edge of a thunderstorm, and though I've never experienced a Florida-specific storm, I think everyone is familiar with that liminal state where you can tell the weather's about to break and are just waiting for the first peals of thunder or the sky to open up. The downside of this is that there are a scant handful of exterior shots where the main character kind of looks like she's walking through a green screen, which I'm assuming is just due to adjusting the color palette in post-production. But 99.9% of this film is completely believable, and again, draws very strongly from Messiah of Evil for its atmosphere. I basically never see this kind of environment in a horror movie - it seems like the "edge of storm" feeling is neglected unless the movie is directly about a storm, a la Storm Warning or Alexandre Aja's surprisingly good Crawl, or relegated to a few scenes, not the entirety of the running time.

And it wouldn't be right for me not to outright say that this is also an extremely creepy movie. I don't focus my horror reviews on the scare factor because it's not the most important thing in a horror movie to me, but this one is so lastingly eerie and in such a specific way that in this case the horror is central to the plot. We all know the "town with a secret" trope, but Offseason really makes you feel the main character's sense of being somewhere she's not supposed to be, and it does this in two ways. The first is that it feels like she's not supposed to be there because she's not welcome, the whole town is in on some truth that she's not and they don't respect or give time to outsiders. The second is that it feels like she's physically not supposed to be there, that she's entered a real-life "out of bounds" area, a place that's closed off and unattended. The town is a place set up for people to entertain themselves, but when it's closed, where do all the people and things that cater to tourists go? Essentially, what happens to a place with a specific purpose when that purpose is (temporarily) removed? It feels like being in an art museum after hours, and there is in fact an extremely scary scene where the protagonist wanders into a museum of history that, like everything else in the town, is closed and empty of people. There's just something so unsettling about being alone in a place that isn't meant for you.

There is a concept behind this other than just the general unfriendly vibe it gives off - a creature to this feature, if you will. Marrying a specific and established backstory to something as vague and nebulous as the secretive, isolated island town this film takes place in is a dangerous game - horror movies very often fall victim to over-explaining, and if you show the monster or even talk too much about how the monster works, they risk their viewer becoming used to the horror. But thanks to restraint and good writing, the darkness at the core of Offseason stays creepy no matter if you think about it a little or a lot. It's just... I really think the greatest horror films keep their focus small. The possibility that in this one place something truly incomprehensible can be happening. A small-scale horror that infects person by person, that you can brush up against and escape from without knowing. "These people are my fingers, this island is the palm of my hand." I don't see stuff like this these days. I'm so glad people haven't forgotten how to make things this way.

Zëiram 2 (1994)

directed by Keita Amemiya

Japan

107 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Sequels get a bad rap generally, but this one, made by the same director with the same cast, easily stacks up to the first. While the story is more meandering, everything I fawned over in the first film is still there, and the care put into constructing this movie in all of its analog glory shines through once again.

We can wave our hands and excuse the parts of the story created solely to explain this movie's existence; presuming that Iria is indiscriminate in the jobs she takes, a second mission to Earth feels somewhat unlikely. But she just so happens to end up in Japan again, tracking down a small but very powerful statue made of a unique material that many thieves would kill to obtain. She meets up with the two hapless electronics-parts-store workers from the first film, one of them now about to be married with a baby on the way, and of course they get drawn into the chaos unwillingly once again. If I sound flippant about this, it's not on purpose - it just didn't matter that much to me how the film was set up. Once it got going, all I cared about was seeing Iria do her job and rescue everyone from a constantly moving display of practical effects work so beautiful it belongs in a museum (although to stick it on a shelf in drab lighting would be to rob it of the dynamic motion it had while being worn by a suit actor).

Now that we're familiar with the characters from the first film - and you really do have to be familiar with them for this movie to have its full effect - they seem to slip easier into a rhythm, or at least Iria does. One of two things that bothered me about this movie was that the fight choreography seemed lacking to me, almost like watching a "how to fight" training video where everyone is deliberately moving in slow motion to demonstrate techniques so that an uninitiated viewer doesn't miss anything. But now, thinking it through, the unflashy fight scenes are a point in this film's favor. It's not that they're not over-the-top: At one point Iria and Zëiram, locked together in a sort of death-hug, fall from a height that would kill them both (well, just her, really), but at the last minute, in mid-air, Iria stabs Zëiram through the forehead with a big sword, thus anchoring it to a (solid concrete) wall and allowing her to dangle from a more manageable height instead of plunging to the ground. That's pretty ridiculous, if you ask me. But there's no high kicks, no punching through walls, no absurdly unrealistic fight skills; just efficiency. And I think this fits Iria better because we do get the sense that, especially in her suit, she's much, much stronger than the normal human she looks like. So what appeared as a half-hearted punch to us could have in reality been packing tons of force behind it.

If anything, I just like her character even more now. She has a lowkey manner, not putting on airs either of a too-cool-for-it assumed capability or an aw-shucks fake-surprise that a pretty girl could be an intergalactic bounty hunter extraordinaire. She has an authentically unworried attitude because she knows that she's got it. She doesn't have to show off when she fights because she knows how to fight to achieve her goal, not to wow spectators.

There are some other bounty hunters who are visually implied to be part of her culture as well, and I'm still not totally clear on whether Iria is actually a biological human who somehow landed a really wild job or if she's something else assuming the shape of a human to fit in better, but even her counterparts who don't get cool suits or weapons like her are still kitted out in clothing and accessories that spell "alien". There's one scene where the bad guys summon what has to be 50 fighters from a whole host of unmentioned otherworlds to take on our lone Iria, and every single one of them looks distinct, like they have a backstory, even if they never get focused on and just stand in the foreground before getting messily killed. That attention to detail is what this movie packs into every frame and it's kind of amazing.

Bob is still looking good, too, especially for getting shot in the face-equivalent at one point. Even though he's the biggest digital component of a movie that is basically a celebration of practical effects, he doesn't feel out of place and is as much a character as any of the flesh-and-blood ones. I still think it's amazing how he (or his avatar) completely lacks any anthropomorphic qualities, but he still manages to have "expressions" and convey emotion.

Zëiram itself, which as far as I can tell is supposed to be some kind of second generation or possibly a rebuilt version of the one from the first movie, looks much the same as the first time around, with the addition of some jackal ears. I'm glad of this, because you can't improve upon perfection. It still boggles my mind how they managed to construct the face-worm that lives in its chest (which I think is actually Zëiram "itself", the rest is kind of a shell it pilots around) because, while some shots of it were clearly a puppet, at other times it was indistinguishable from a living person's face. I feel like you would have to not only be a pro at practical effects but also have studied the internal structure and anatomy of the human face for many hours in order to rig it so that the individual muscle twitches in the brow and cheeks looked real (and god, they did). I remain in awe of everything this movie achieves.

Having re-evaluated my big issue (the lackluster physical fighting), my only remaining problem with this is that dog-monster. Zëiram devours an innocent shiba inu and uses its parts to create a slavering, awful doglike minion for itself, and although I feel bad for saying this because the suit is as much a work of art as anything else in the film, it just doesn't fit. It probably has less than a minute of total screen time and it's incredibly intricate and detailed, and in any other movie it could be the star of the show, but it's almost wholly inconsequential here, and its slime-dripping maw (while as beautifully articulated as the face-worm) just felt too explicitly "horror" for this particular film.

I can't think of anything else I was dissatisfied with, though. The plot is stringy and weak at times and basically hinges on us accepting that Zëiram decided to go ballistic after allegedly having been put under control simply because It Did, but I really didn't care. This and the first film are absolute masterpieces of tokusatsu that could not be made today because of their reliance on clunky outdated technology to depict a futuristic, galaxy-trotting network of bounty hunters. They are both just so good.

Fever Dream (2021)

directed by Claudia Llosa

Chile, Peru

93 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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If I had to name one book that I considered to be "unfilmable", it would probably be Samanta Schweblin's aptly-titled Fever Dream. I don't recommend watching this movie without some context - whether that's reading the book or just familiarizing yourself with the plot, if you lack context, this movie will come off weird. The original book took me and many others by surprise because its style of narration is so thoroughly opaque that in the process of telling its story it reveals almost nothing, and how do you get that to work in a movie? Not through visual symbolism, in this case, and thankfully not by unraveling the book's plot so bluntly as to ruin all of its ominous vagueness. But in the end, while the book's plot is handled well, I'm still not so sure it works on film.

So the reason why I think this movie will make no sense to anyone who hasn't read the book is because it doesn't feel like it's attempting to do anything other than be exactly like the book, which is good for me because that's what I wanted to see, but not good for casual watching with no foreknowledge. The synopsis you can find online makes claims about the characters' motivations that simply are not there: "A powerful, haunting story of obsessive jealousy, an invisible danger, and the power of a mother’s love for her child" is just not what this movie is. The bizarre nature of the book overshadows anything about the individual characters, and without that incredibly strange narrative style, all you have is a movie where no one aspect is ever given enough weight to feel balanced. It struggles to mesh the human aspects mentioned in the synopsis with the tricky task of staying close to the book's style. But the good thing is that the film does still include a lot of that original weirdness: the narration, a conversation between the main character and her neighbor's son, is still there, and is taken almost word-for-word from the book, so you get the fullness of the original intended effect. It was when the film tried to insert anything that wasn't present in the book that it started to feel forced.

I'm going to lay out a very bare-bones summary of the plot just so I don't sound like a big weirdo, so if you've seen or read neither book nor movie, skip this paragraph and the next. Fever Dream is, I believe, an environmental horror story at its roots, or at least a horror story in which the environment plays a big role. The book is narrated, like I said, by the main character conversing with her neighbor's son, both of whom have been affected mentally and physically by a toxic chemical used on the plants around their houses. The main character is delirious, possibly dying, and in fear for her own child, and her neighbor's son, who became sick from the chemical some years earlier, is attempting to guide her through a haze of physical/mental pain to make her realize what happened to her. Or, quite possibly, the son is not really there, and is a production of the main character's mind to get her to come to terms with things. Fever Dream is an uncomfortable book because all of the horror comes from the very realistically rendered sensation of not being able to trust your own mind, or even really to operate your own mind. It's the terror of losing all function, and then to make things worse, your child is also at risk and you are no longer in control of your body enough to help them.

I have to say that the movie actually gets a leg up on the book in my opinion by making more explicit, or at least giving more attention to, the possibility of supernatural events playing into the story. The book teased me with this and in fact the only reason I read it was because I understood it to be more of a traditional horror story, when in actuality it can be best described as a horrific story masquerading as a horror story. But the movie heavily involves the possibility of a strange spiritual dislocation and that combines well with the biological sickness that is definitely there.

Thankfully, the movie understands the importance of how the book tells its story, and preserves that as best it can. You do not realize or understand about the connection between the main character's state and the chemicals in the water and in the grass until as late as possible. In the book you may not get it at all on the first reading. There are some things that made me uncomfortable regarding the way disability was portrayed, like a scene where a disabled girl is focused on that seemed to imply nothing but a fear of somebody who is physically different (or fear of becoming like that). This isn't a random, isolated scene of bashing disabled people, it is relevant to the plot in that it tells you something about the danger inherent in the environment where the characters are, but... in the end it still kind of feels like a poorly-handled message about disability being terrifying. The book does not present it that way, but focuses more, like I said, on the awfulness of being unable to help your child, with no real emphasis on disability being the result or cause of that.

It's actually weird that people seem to be very bothered by the film withholding its conclusion, because that's kind of the whole point of this. It's vague and unsettling because the feeling of not knowing what's happening to you or your body is vague and unsettling. If we knew right off the bat what was going on, we couldn't feel that way. Maybe it's a fault on the film's part that people aren't getting that and are just being frustrated by its refusal to serve up the story in simpler terms. But ultimately, aside from the exposition dump in the last twenty minutes when it veers off from the source material, I think this is probably the best adaptation of Schweblin's downright unfilmable book we're going to get. Would love to know the author's thoughts on this.

Lovely Devils (1982)

directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi

Japan

94 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I'm a really big fan of Nobuhiko Obayashi, and this more obscure film of his was on my watchlist for a long time. I can't say it's all bad that Hausu has become vastly more well-known than Obayashi himself, because it's one of my personal favorites too, but it can gear the uninitiated up for a different experience when checking out his non-Hausu work. That being said, though, Lovely Devils (and most of his other films, honestly) is still a deeply weird film. If I had watched this on "Tuesday Night Suspense Theater" in 1982 as it was originally aired, I would have come away from it wondering what in the world I had just seen.

This movie was not written by Obayashi, and I have no doubt that if anybody else had directed it, it would have been an absolutely bog-standard thriller with few remarkable qualities. The plot is largely straightforward on paper, but made weirder by the disorientating directorial style. The film opens at a wedding party where we're introduced to basically the main antagonist, a little girl named Alice who is extremely intent on getting her aunt's wedding veil, and when she promises that Alice can have the veil after the aunt dies... Alice does what's gotta be done to get that veil. This sets us up for a movie full of Alice's further misdeeds, but the actual main character is a distant, non-blood relation of Alice and her family whose situation parallels Alice's in certain ways. We see that she holds herself responsible for the accidental death of her boyfriend, who died in a car crash after she wished he was dead during a fight, and that this troubled her so much that she ended up in a mental hospital for several years before being released to come and stay with her brother-in-law, who lives with Alice and her mother.

I say that their situation is parallel because what Alice does without guilt, Ryoko thinks she may have done once, to fatal ends, and the guilt torments her for the rest of her life. Alice wishes people dead and acts on it, making her desires manifest no matter what's in her way so that she may get whatever object or end result she desires. Ryoko is haunted by wishing someone was dead and seemingly making it happen. It's like Alice represents the side of Ryoko that she's afraid to let take over - a remorseless, almost psychically powerful arbiter of life and death.

On its own, like I said, this is decent suspense-movie fodder, but not that weird. However, the way Obayashi lays it all out is borderline hallucinatory. The wedding scene at the beginning could have been one of the most normal points of the film, but instead it feels extremely uncomfortable and tense because everything is taking place in what looks like a severe windstorm. This is not plot-relevant whatsoever, but stuff feels worse when it's windy out. It's beautiful and sunny, and everyone is dressed in their nicest clothes, trying to enjoy one of the best days of their lives, but their hats are flying off and everything is blowing around and it just looks like a really bad time.

Recently, Midsommar brought up much discussion over whether a horror movie could be truly scary if the horror of it took place in the daylight. "Daylight horror" was not really coined as a phrase at the time when this movie was released, though I have no doubt that the concept was discussed in horror fan circles, but I would argue that much of Obayashi's oeuvre almost defines daylight horror, especially his influential Emotion. Lovely Devils is 100% daytime, appearing to take place on the brightest and calmest (save for the wedding) summer day you can imagine that never ends, and the women all wear these gorgeous white flowing dresses with pretty straw sunhats and look immaculate. The interior shots are lush and inviting, the scenery is green and beautiful, and the whole of the film looks like something you wish you could fall asleep and wake up in. But there's also something deeply wrong. I would say that one of the biggest contributing factors to this feeling is actually the one thing about the film that I initially disliked: the fact that the soundtrack is so overwhelming and ever-present. There's pretty much not a single second of this film that isn't flooded with loud classical string music, and at first I was waiting for this to stop because it was distracting, but as the film went on I realized that it fit perfectly with the overall tone and it became one of my favorite things about it. The heavy use of music really sums up the aesthetic of Lovely Devils as a whole: beautiful, elegant, relaxing images and sounds, but cranked up and shoved at you so much that it feels stifling.

The movie actually gets significantly less outwardly strange after maybe the first 20 minutes, but it never stops drowning you in classical music and the horribly, hideously lush countryside. There are singular images in this that I felt were as visually striking as anything out of Hausu, although less unorthodox - the sound effect used in a particular scene involving a glass vase (which you can just tell is coming throughout the entire film, thanks to some very effective use of the Chekhov's Gun technique) is going to haunt me forever. I really, really loved this, and I wish it was more well-known outside of a specific circle of film fans. There's a lot more to it that makes it a lot more strange than I could describe in a review, so the best I can say is: go watch it. It's on YouTube.

Horror in the High Desert (2021)

directed by Dutch Marich

USA

80 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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So this movie was made during the pandemic, but if you didn't otherwise know that, you wouldn't be able to tell. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything, because I don't want this to be tagged as a Pandemic Movie for the rest of time. But the format of it is such that nobody needed to be within six feet or even the same room as each other - it's set up like a focus piece, not a "pure" found-footage film; nobody claims to have recovered and pieced together the footage a la Blair Witch Project or anything like that, instead it's edited together, with background music and dialogue cards like a longform local interest news story. Everyone does a great job acting like non-actors, and even the newscaster who's on screen for about thirty seconds really nails the "newscaster" tone, which is surprisingly difficult. All in all, everything about this is believable because it hits the right emotional notes only when it needs to and avoids hyperbole entirely. It's not afraid to be totally flat and uninteresting in the spots where a real documentary would be, and as a result the payoff is all the more potent.

The story follows a man in his 30s who disappeared in the Nevada desert and the bizarre events that he recorded in his video journals leading up to his disappearance. The people interviewed are his sister, a news reporter, the missing person's roommate, and a fourth guy who, forgive me, I don't remember how he was involved. Again, everyone seems genuine and there is no extraneous material in this film whatsoever - we briefly find out about the relationship between the missing guy and his sister as well as the relationship between him and his roommate, but at no point does it ever feel talky or like we're being teased for stuff that will be important later on. In fact, the faux-documentary format allows Horror in the High Desert to not force us to eke out meaning from small hints at all. The film can tell us about how the sister held a little resentment for her brother when she was forced to raise him after their parents died while they were both young, in an incident that he indirectly caused, and it does nothing apart from provide us with background on him. In a film with a traditional narrative, this episode from his past would be his motivation, and we'd see how it influenced the way he reacted to events. Here, all it does is make him feel like an actual person who we might meet in real life.

I was also extremely fond of the missing hiker's video journals, because they don't make him out to be a self-absorbed vlogger or a savvy survivalist-type. He is entirely just a guy who's passionate about the wilderness and enjoys sharing his genuine love for hiking with an audience, who, from the sound of it, he admires and appreciates instead of just flaunting his life like a consumable product to followers that only exist as a number. It's established that he's not even really that good of an outdoorsman. He just does it because he loves it. In the end I was left liking him immensely and feeling a lot of empathy for everyone involved.

I've mentioned a few times that I generally am not moved by horror films that aren't supernatural in nature anymore; it's not that I don't like them or that I think they're all bad or I have any real moral or ethical problem with them, I just very rarely manage to get engaged with slashers or other horror films with a human antagonist. It is a me problem. Without getting too deep into spoiler territory, this movie is one of the rare ones that hit that perfect spot where it doesn't matter if the horror is paranormal or human, because the way it's shown to us is so deeply unsettling that there's an inherent aura of almost supernatural danger to it anyway. Halloween is the ur-example of this: Michael Myers is a person, but there is such a mythos built up around him and he's so enigmatic that he feels more like a creature than a human. This is relevant to Horror in the High Desert, I promise. There is ultimately nothing truly ghostly going on here, but it just feels like something is so, so not right.

Much like the way it lays out the background of its subject's life, but doesn't use those details for anything more than creating depth, this film also divests itself of context in its terrifying final 20 minutes, giving us no more knowledge than the unfortunate missing hiker would have had. With my usual disclaimer in place about how sheer scare factor isn't the best thing to judge a horror movie on, I have to admit that I really did not want to look at the screen during a lot of the final moments of this film. A good horror movie doesn't have to be scary, but for a movie as bare-bones as this where 90% of it is just boring and uneventful discussion of a missing person, followed by the most intense and nerve-wracking 20 minutes I've seen in a long time, to be able to create scariness within such a mundane atmosphere is an obvious sign of talent.

After Yang (2021)

directed by Kogonada

USA

96 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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Oh yeah, this one hurt me. I have to admit that I still get excited for a new A24 movie - as popular as it might be to poke fun at the studio's artsy output, and with all of its flaws that I will readily acknowledge, I still think they're consistently putting out some of the best genre movies today. I'm not familiar with the short story that was the basis for this, so my review will be solely for the film itself.

After Yang is set in either an optimistic future or a better version of the present, and the aesthetics of it are the very first thing you notice. It got close to losing me in the first five minutes, but the thing that brought me back around and got me hooked into it was the dance scene that plays during the opening credits. Credits are usually skippable by nature, but if that scene had not been there, it would have changed the feeling of the entire film for me. Something so energetic and fun being present in such an immaculately groomed world indicated to me that even though the core of the film might appear to be based off of looks, everything about it is a vehicle for telling us something about humanity. Even the angle the dance scene is shot from is perfect - the way the camera remains stable at around adult torso level, so that Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja, who plays six-ish-year-old Mimi, looks every bit as tiny as she is, but it still giving it all she's got.

Even so, the look of this film may still lose people. It rubbed me the wrong way for the same reason why horror films that start off with a family moving into a house that would cost more than most people I know make in a year rub me the wrong way: I can't connect to something when the presumption is of wealth and prosperity. But After Yang really doesn't feel like that. "Prosperity" might be on display here, but it didn't feel like it was connected to wealth. Like I said, this is either a better future or a better present, one where the environmental problems plaguing us today seem to be largely solved and humans are able to live in a comfortable and above all beautiful world where flora and fauna are seamlessly incorporated into our lives, and vice versa. Everyone's home is filled with hardwoods, natural fabrics, and healthy, lush plants. All cars appear to be self-driving and are also, from what I could see on my small screen, filled with plants. This looks like a world where nobody has to worry about dying from environmental injustice anymore - it is still not perfect, and is filled with human flaws and prejudices, but there's something deeply serene about it.

The film is, as the title implies, set after Mimi's companion android Yang dies, for all intents and purposes. We see a little of him in the present day at the beginning, but everything we know of him after that is seen through his memories of the past - a method of storytelling that fits the emotional tone of the film and absolutely wrecked me personally. The existence of synthetic humans referred to as "Technosapiens" is an established fact throughout the film, and the way they coexist with born humans is fascinating to me: Yang is what they call a "cultural" Technosapiens, intended for families with Chinese-adopted children to buy to assist their children with feeling more connected to their heritage. Despite the seemingly tranquil and balanced society, it is made extremely clear that most people view Technosapiens as objects. They're referred to with pronouns, but treated like objects. No one shies away from admitting that you buy them like any other product, and Mimi's father carrying Yang slung over his shoulder like an unwieldy carpet, before hauling him around to several variously indifferent repairpersons, highlights the fact that society at large does not seem to give these beings full human autonomy. Also present but not elaborated upon are clones - the father openly dislikes them, despite multiple people in his community being clones. All in all, prejudices definitely do exist in After Yang's created world; they might not run along the exact same lines that they do in our world, but the introduction of new technology and new ways to be human seems only to have spawned ugly new ways to exclude and scorn, as well.

At multiple points during the film, people express disbelief that a "cultural" android could have romantic feelings or be otherwise capable of being anything other than defined by their race. That Yang could be anything other than Chinese. This was one of the places where this film mirrors reality. People struggle to see Yang's faceted existence as a person because they only see his race.

But as the film goes on, the tides begin to change. We see a side of Yang that his non-synthetic family was blind to. His adoptive younger sister can see it; she views him as nothing less than a true brother, but it seems like most of the adult populace just sees him, again, as a product. Yang has a viewpoint of the world that is entirely different from ours, and therein lies the backbone of the film. This is a movie about an android - a science fiction story - but it is also about the possibility of looking at the world in a different way. It's about realizing that you have become jaded and used to experiencing your life in a specific way, that the years have beaten that into you and trained you to live according to what's expected of you. Again, even in a peaceful world like the one this film shows us, there is still a level of societal - if not simply personal - expectation. But Yang contradicts those expectations, and the tragedy of this is that his memories physically have to be dug out of him for anyone to understand this. We, and the other characters, get to see that Yang viewed his world as a place that was utterly precious and full of individual miracles, but no one understands this until after Yang dies. No one, that is, except his little sister.

So this movie cut me to the core in a rare and exceptional way. I think some of the best fiction makes us realize the true breadth of the world - our world, the one we really live in - by creating a world that's just slightly different from reality and using it to highlight the things we might not notice. After Yang is a well-crafted film full of talented actors, but it also feels simple. An unfamiliar world inhabited by speculative versions of future humans is used to show the inherent need to find and connect.

The Witch (1952)

directed by Roland af Hällström

Finland

74 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I watched this for Kalevala Day/Finnish Culture Day, which it is not anymore by the time you're reading this, and I'd been searching high and low for it for a long time, because anything that involves someone or something being buried in a bog is an instant watch for me. Some recognize this as Finland's first horror film, but as far as I know that honor belongs to Noidan kirot from 1927, although that one seems to be so scarce as to nearly be a lost film. This movie gets overshadowed by The White Reindeer, another horror film released in the same year, which is also quite good and I recommend it highly as well.

The film begins with a bit of a clash of views between the local farmers on whose land is the bog where the titular witch is "dug up" and the researchers who are searching the bog for archaeological finds. It's a typical situation that comes up in nearly every horror movie involving something being unearthed: The locals know there to be a legend surrounding the area that spawns whatever artifact or entity will later end up plaguing the film, and they wish the city folk would go back to where they came from instead of messing with forces beyond their control. The body of a young woman is uncovered from the bog, and the village's long collective memory immediately recognizes it as substantiating the legend of a witch who was murdered and thrown into the bog 300 years ago. As soon as the body is uncovered, things begin to go awry in the village, but it only gets worse when, in place of the corpse, the very alive body of a nude young woman is found.

There's some severely weird gender politics going on in this film. The arrival of the seemingly undead witch causes every man in town to go a little nuts - not in some primeval, mind-control way (the witch doesn't seem to have that much influence), but she signifies something that frustrates them on a deep level. "All women are witches", they say - in fact they say this over and over, many times. Every man teases his brothers and friends that every woman he's sweet on is a witch. All women are witches. It's posturing to cover up the fact that they're clearly afraid of what the witch represents. She's something they thought they killed, a force they tamped down and then built their identity upon the banishing of. If the witch is back, if the woman we forced into the earth when she tried to defy us is back, who are we as men? The women say that the witch was not really a witch, but a young girl who dared to resist when a local baron demanded a night with her as per tradition; in resisting she became a witch, not for having magic powers but for being the kind of woman who couldn't be suppressed. And the women are solidly afraid of her - they know what the presence of one defiant woman can mean for the rest of them, who will pay the price once the men suspect that they might not have total control over women like they imagined they did.

Mirja Mane plays the witch role with reckless abandon, and she plays it, again, not like a fairytale witch with magic powers, but as a woman who would have been scorned and branded an outcast for her unashamed behavior. She dances naked in the streets, doesn't chain herself to one man, and flaunts her sexuality openly. But when she's first unearthed, she's nothing like this - she's terrified, borderline incoherent; any time anybody suggests she might be the 300-year-old witch come back from the dead, she physically reacts as if someone slapped her. It's only with time that she becomes the impish, cackling, free-willed terror running roughshod over the town's rigid menfolk.

There is some ambiguity that the film seems to be pushing about whether or not she's actually the witch of legend, and this is the only thing I disliked about it. The ending felt weak and too soft for a film as bold as this one. Spoilers for a 70-year-old film: She basically comes to her senses and realizes that she was just a normal girl who - silly old me! - tripped and fell into the bog hole, never mind that we literally see her do things like disappear into thin air and that nobody acknowledges whether or not the unearthed skeleton was just laying there beneath her the whole time, as it would have been had she really just fell into the bog. I guess the point was that she became whatever the people of the town were afraid of her becoming, that at first she was a blank slate with no opinion of herself, but once people started to fear her, she became what they feared and worse. In the end, as is so often the case, the single person who is the object of an entire community's fear isn't the villain - the community is.

The Witch has a kind of dynamic energy that fits it as one of only a few horror movies coming from a country whose film industry was still relatively young. It doesn't feel stiff or restrained the way so many '50s horror films from the West do. The characters are not afraid to speak their minds and be loud and authentic - not rude, but with the shackles of performativity removed. I'm thinking of the woman, who's only in one scene, that they bring in because they get the idea that maybe the bog witch is this lady's daughter. She takes one look at her and basically goes "Nope, she's not mine, you think I don't know the people I've made?" and then demands compensation for being made to walk a long way on her elderly, aching legs. She's not treated as the butt of a joke, as some caricature of a tough old broad, she's just there for her one scene and exists as something outside the bounds of gender roles, much like the witch herself. Even though it tapers down to a somewhat disappointing ending, this movie is a joy to watch. As an aside, it seems to me like a lot of Finns have a very negative opinion of their country's film industry - I'd like to know what, if any, modern Finnish movies are generally well-regarded among the public.