Longlegs (2024)

directed by Osgood Perkins

Canada/USA

101 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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This may be the only new film besides Ultraman: Rising that I review this year. I've severely fallen out of the loop with new horror, and that used to make me feel guilty, but now I'm mostly okay with it. I'll get around to stuff when I get around to it.

I'm inherently skeptical of any movie focusing on Satanic Panic themes. The phenomenon is a bit like the witchhunts of late medieval Europe and colonial America: the witches weren't real, but the hunt was, and it had devastating consequences. The two subjects are similar also in that there are a lot of people who view it on an aesthetic level (E.G. Salem's thriving tourist industry), which can feel really disrespectful to the victims and their families. I think Longlegs handles this fairly well because it's level-headed about what there actually was to fear about the possibility of a network of Satanic cults throughout America: serial killers, actual serial killers, not random rock musicians encoding backwards messages into their records or Harry Potter books encouraging children to do witchcraft. I'm going to assume Perkins has thought about these things and how to depict them with as much sensitivity towards real-world people as possible while still creating an effectively scary, authentically Satanic movie.

I think I mentioned in my review of Skinamarink how interesting it is when a horror movie uses the type of lighting and set decoration that my brain associates with coziness or a feeling of being comfy and safe at home: enclosed, lived-in spaces with low ceilings lit softly by lamps or a single light on somewhere in the house, usually at night, sometimes in the dark parts of the year. A lot of Longlegs takes place in lighting like that. When this is done right, the effect can be discomfiting in an almost subconscious way, and I think Longlegs does it very right - it front-loads with these types of scenes, giving us a lot of shots of Harker within her quiet house or her workplace after dark, but it also introduces horror into that environment, giving us the feeling, for the rest of the film, that the environments we think could be a refuge might actually harbor demons.

I've seen a few people saying that Satan is not a scary enough villain. I'm one of those people, but I also don't think that necessarily has to effect the way I feel about Longlegs, because even if I don't think Satan is scary (because I don't think he's real), I can still accept and become absorbed in a movie where the people in the movie think Satan is real, or where Satan actually IS real, within the context of the story. It's like watching haunted house movies when you don't believe in ghosts. And again, this is a thing that I think Perkins probably payed attention to: depicting a full-frontal Baphomet holds no surprises; there's no real scares to be had in black metal imagery. So instead he has these hints of something terrifying and otherworldly peppered throughout the film. There's one split-second shot of a silhouette against a glass door that stood out as one of the best moments in the film, to me.

I'm not sure how I feel about the way Longlegs really does seem to move further into the supernatural and weird as it goes on. I realize the irony of saying this about a movie that posits that Satan is real, but the whole plot element with the dolls failed to land in my eyes because it feels like it just goes too far out. It's too complicated. There's too much left unexplained. "Everything happened because Satan" is a simple explanation, but it's one that makes sense because it's been done before. Expecting me to accept some kind of weird metaphysical transfer of energy into a series of creepy dolls that somehow have mind control powers and can be used to allow Satan to infiltrate people's homes and drive them to murder each other is just... no, actually, no thanks, that's weird, I don't want that in my otherwise fairly grounded horror movie.

I disliked Gretel & Hansel on everything save for an aesthetic level for much the same reason as above. It could have been a really solid The Witch-style folk horror, but Perkins does all this weird stuff with it that leaves it feeling more fantastical than I feel suited its premise.

I've always like Maika Monroe, and though I was doubtful of casting somebody as recognizable as Nic Cage as the villain, I think what they do with him is really interesting - putting him in such heavy facial prosthetics that you can't really tell who he is lets him lend his inherent Nic Cage-ness to a character other than himself. I think that was a good choice. I guess your enjoyment or non-enjoyment of Longlegs boils down to how much of it you want to take seriously, because there is a lot in it that cannot be taken seriously at all. Overall, it's alright. Watch it in a vacuum without having seen any previews or read any reviews and you will probably get more out of it.

Colossal (2016)

directed by Nacho Vigalondo

Canada, South Korea, Spain, USA

109 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I was recommended this by somebody who knows I'm really into kaiju, and it made me realize that I had no excuse for not having already seen it. It's been out for seven years, I'm a fan of Nacho Vigalondo, and it does have a giant monster in it (a giant robot too!), despite not being what I would really call a "kaiju film", strictly speaking. This is a movie that uses monsters to represent many different concepts, most of them relating to the manifestation of the unconscious and our responsibility as individuals, and at best, it's a really interesting, original film with ideas that I truly haven't seen before, while at worst, some of it just... doesn't work. This review will contain major spoilers.

Anne Hathaway plays Gloria, an alcoholic rapidly losing control of her life, although the people around her also really suck and I'd argue they're responsible for half of her problems. After getting kicked out of her boyfriend's apartment, she returns to her dismal hometown, setting up in a ramshackle house that belonged or belongs to some little-elaborated-upon relative. While she's there, she meets Oscar, a "friend" from when she was a kid, who seemingly wants to lend her a hand, giving her a part-time job at his bar and occasionally dropping off random furniture. At the same time, news breaks of a giant monster attacking Seoul, South Korea. We should basically all know this by now, but the monster is connected to and controlled by Gloria, appearing in a specific district of Seoul at 8:05 in the morning when Gloria also happens to be in a specific spot (a park outside a school) at that same time. Although she doesn't realize it at first, she can control the monster's movements, and is absolutely horrified to find out that her actions have physical, material results, leading to the deaths of an unspecified number of people and immeasurable property damage.

Usually I don't put too much stock into names in fiction unless it seems really obvious the author is trying to tell us something, because personally, I know that when I write, I just name my characters whatever comes to mind first. But for some reason I think it's interesting that the lead is named "Gloria". Maybe it stuck out to me because it's a name that I think of as an "old person name", at least in the English-speaking world; Vigalondo is Spanish, and it may have different connotations elsewhere. It was only introduced to English audiences in the 1890s, as the name of a character in a novel who was herself Portuguese. So having a young, English-speaking woman with that name felt unusual to me. The name literally means "glory", obviously, and it is part of the Spanish and Portuguese titles of the Virgin Mary. One could argue that the Gloria in this film does give birth to the monster through a kind of immaculate conception, but I think naming her something that means "glory" is also relevant to her status as a hero, a rescuer, someone who evolved from believing she was the center of the world for selfish reasons to realizing that, in this context, she kind of is the center of the world, and she needs to use that power responsibly. There are problems with this, of course, and I'll talk about those towards the end of this review.

The monster is not just a monster. It's never just a monster. In this case it is a physical manifestation of the protagonist's inner feelings, which mostly constitute self-hatred. I think part of the metaphor here may have been the idea that if you're unkind to yourself, the world as a whole suffers, and that by improving yourself, you improve the world. That certainly does happen in Colossal, literally: When Gloria stops acting like a drunk idiot and realizes that her actions are having real-world consequences that are harming and even killing people, the monster also stops being a force of destruction, and the world suffers a little less. This is also emphasized by the fact that her old buddy Oscar turns out to be a cad and a scoundrel, and unfortunately he also happens to have a giant external id running around in Seoul, in the form of a robot. Whereas Gloria is devastated when she learns the results of what just felt like harmless drunk fun and immediately curtails her behavior, Oscar figures since he wasn't technically, physically there, who cares? Those people are far away, I didn't hurt them with my own two hands, so whatever. I can stomp on anything I want because it's not really me doing the harm. And one of the results of this is that the film shifts from being about Gloria trying to get her life together to being about Gloria getting into this really quite terrifying abusive relationship with Oscar - not a relationship in the romantic sense, but in the sense that he's forcing her to remain in physical proximity to him and do what he wants because he knows how to manipulate her. He knows that as long as he's there threatening to wipe out Seoul, she'll stay to try and stop him.

Now... I'm making a good-faith assumption on Vigalondo's part and assuming he realizes that he's using an entire country as helpless bystanders for his metaphor, and realizes that that is kiiiind of not a great look. That two white Westerners' actions can be so influential as to have an entire non-Western country under their thrall is self-congratulatory at best. I have to say I almost got to really disliking this movie at the end, when the day is saved because a white woman Knows What To Do. The Korean military is useless, the citizens are at the mercy of these two people an ocean away, until Gloria steps in. I know that pretty much everything in this movie is meant to be taken as a metaphor, but when the metaphor involves actual, real-life people, you have to be a lot more delicate. Also, Toho sued the production company (this is what happens when you say the G-word in public as a filmmaker), which is rumored to have been why the location was changed to Seoul instead of somewhere in Japan, which would fit more with the popular conception of kaiju movies. So it doesn't really matter where Gloria's monster is materializing - it just had to be somewhere far off that isn't Us™.

I also forgot most of the time that this is apparently supposed to be somewhat of a comedy. I don't think there was anything in this film I found funny. There were moments where I could recognize that things could be taken as funny, like Oscar stomping around on the playground while people scream in the background, but I had a reaction much more like Gloria when she realizes what she's done. It's all just kind of too harrowing to be funny.

This is a really inventive movie that does what everybody should do with monsters, which is use them to explore human psychology (because it's us that creates the monsters, which means that in some way, the monsters are us, right?). It delivers an interesting message about growing out of self-hate and being dragged down by jealous people, and also about selfishness. When everybody starts getting tired of Oscar watching the viral "thug life" slap gif over and over, he says "I'm not the one watching it a thousand times, everyone else has". This is a perfect example of how nobody ever thinks anything is their fault - Oscar's never the bad guy, the bad things are being done by other people. He's not contributing to the problem, how can he? He's just his little old self, just one person. But the whole end message of this is that one person can make a massive difference. I just wish it hadn't fallen into the gravity well of the White Savior narrative to achieve that message.

Nope (2022)

directed by Jordan Peele

USA/Japan/Canada

130 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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It took me a long time to get around to watching this - its theatrical run was while covid was even more of a significant risk than it is now - and I had to contend with rampant spoilers in the meantime. I spent a lot of time scrolling really fast past gifsets. I thought I had seen some things about it that constituted major spoilers, but as it turned out I had done something that I don't know if everybody else does or just me: I'd seen very tiny details from a film and constructed a whole story around them in my head almost unconsciously, leading me to believe I knew the plot, when in reality the actual film was totally different. This is one of those movies where reading about it pales in comparison to seeing it, so I'm going to discuss spoilers freely and recommend that you skip all this and just watch the thing. I also must say: I used to live around this part of California and it kind of is just like that. I would not at all be surprised if there were aliens living out there.

We kind of "cold open" into Daniel Kaluuya's character, OJ, witnessing his father's death in front of him in circumstances that are almost impossible to explain. A nickel, apparently shot at high velocity, embeds itself in his brain, killing him. We also see a house key embedded in the side of one of his horses, the implication being that some extremely high-speed hail of small objects fell over the ranch the night OJ's father died. This is a bizarre occurrence and a perfect way to start off the film, because it doesn't actually reveal anything about the plot or the creature that will come into play later, but still primes us for something utterly strange and new.

I think Kaluuya does an incredible job playing his character for the simple fact that there's a palpable sense of him being a different person before his father's death and after it. And when I say "before", I mean in the literal two or three lines of dialogue he has at the beginning of the film. It's nothing short of impressive how he manages to convey such a change in personality that even though I only saw his "before" self for a very scant amount of time, I was still conscious throughout the rest of the film that the version of him I was watching seemed different. His performance is subtly physical and he conveys the sense of somebody who is uncomfortable in the public eye, somebody more suited to his horse ranch, to the solitude of being with his own family, with his horses. Keke Palmer as his sister, Emerald, is almost the exact opposite, but her performance is just as good, she's so cool and easygoing that it feels like there's no wall between the viewer and Emerald as a person.

This is a movie about cycles of consumption. It's about seeing and being seen. Nothing embodies this better than Steven Yeun's character, Jupiter. A former child actor, he sets up an apparently successful Old West-style theme park experience in the California desert with his wife and children. But in the past, in his role on a fictional late-'90s sitcom called "Gordy's Home", he was witness to an incredibly disturbing trauma that should sound at least somewhat familiar because it is taken from a real-life event that I think probably lives rent-free in the brain of everyone who's read about it. Gordy was a chimpanzee, and as Jupiter tells it, one day one of the chimp actors portraying him "reached his limit". Jupiter does not go into the gore in his own recollections, but we see in flashbacks - and we know from real life - that this was nothing less than total carnage, leaving a woman permanently disfigured, and possibly more people dead in the fictional account of the event. We see Jupiter hiding under a table, watching everything, probably eleven years old at most. And we see how this shaped his life to come.

I don't think I've ever felt like I could understand the psychology of a character more, not by having it explained to me but simply by their actions, than I did with Jupiter. A word repeated throughout this film is spectacle. Jupiter constructs his entire life around being the spectacle, taking what he witnessed and internalizing it. Early on in the film, he tells Emerald about how the Gordy's Home incident was made into a Saturday Night Live sketch, and he tells her with reverence - not a hint of bitterness, not a hint of trauma, it is genuinely the highest honor to him that his ordeal has been turned into comedy fodder. Because it keeps him in the spotlight. As long as what happened to him is consumable, he doesn't have to look directly at it. He can instead frame it as the spectacle. He becomes the spectacle as a defense mechanism, because if he makes himself into something to be consumed, he is immortal as long as there are people to consume him. But it can't last forever. You can beg and plead to be seen, to be looked at, but as we'll see repeatedly throughout Nope, you can never, ever be the one doing the looking. Jupiter tells the SNL story while sitting in front of a commemorative T-shirt from Cape Canaveral, which of course includes the Challenger on its list of shuttles.

Race is not absent from this movie's concept of who is being seen and who is seeing. In fact, I think it's at the center. I know there are probably elements here that I'm not even aware of because I'm viewing this as a white person. Nope builds itself around a sequence of images strung together by Eadweard Muybridge of a horse being ridden by a jockey, often hailed as the first motion picture (the images shown in the film are not his first horse film, but a later, presumably better-looking sequence). The jockey - a Black man - is lost to history, almost definitely intentionally. In Nope, an identity for him is created, a Bahamian named Haywood, and OJ and Emerald's family are his descendants. So this is not only a movie about movies, about seeing, about consuming and being consumed - it is inherently a movie about the Black experience of being consumed. The story is the same from before the beginning of Hollywood through to today: white audiences will eat up simulated Blackness, will go wild for stories about cannibals in the jungle and caricatures of everything they fear about Blackness, but should that Blackness look back, should they be confronted, everything becomes chaos.

This is represented in the Viewer. A creature that consumes everything that beholds it, a giant eye (or what looks like an eye) scanning the landscape for what it perceives as encroachments upon its territory. By its very existence it is looking, but if you look back, it devours you.

The absolute genius of this is that not only is it an allegory for media consumption and race in Western filmmaking, it is also a deeply scary movie. It is horrific in a different way from Us or Get Out, in that its horror is actually, legitimately not of this world. It's also drastically less humorous: Peele's previous two films were similarly allegorical and serious, but there were moments of levity in them to be sure. Nope is practically a vacuum of humor (although that TMZ guy eating shit on the bike was pretty funny). The Viewer is really just ghastly: this unknowable, massive thing that watches you and refuses to be watched in turn, scooping people up whole and then flying around broadcasting their screams as they're being consumed alive. It's ghastly as an entity and it's also ghastly because nothing I just said about it couldn't technically be said about the machinations of the movie industry when you're an actor of color.

This is basically a perfect movie. If I had to find anything at all I disliked about it - and this really is the smallest thing - the interstitial title cards bothered me. They looked stock somehow, like a template that comes with a video editing software or something. Apart from that, it nails everything it tries to do. Seeing the Viewer unfold to its full, nearly incomprehensible form was breathtaking. OJ's final ride, with the best use (I guess one of the only uses) of Exuma ever put to film. Emerald's Akira slide (I cheered). And when he thinks he's not coming back, OJ's "I'm watching you" gesture to Emerald is deeply, deeply meaningful: In a world where everyone begs to be seen, where everyone is concerned with seeing the latest spectacle and becoming the spectacle themselves, in a "look at me" world, with that gesture he's saying "I'm looking only at you". Not "see me", not "I want to be seen". "I see you".

Orphan (2009)

directed by Jaume Collet-Serra

123 minutes

Canada, France, Germany, USA

3 stars out of 5

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This movie came out right around the time I started to be allowed to see movies other than Disney or Pixar stuff as a kid, and so I was peripherally aware of it as something that was also playing in many theaters that my family went to. It was one of those movies that seemed to be known mostly for its twist, and not necessarily in a good way; the reception was a mixture of making jokes about it and... well, making other jokes about it. Nobody really seemed to be taking it seriously and I had no idea up until recently whether or not it was actually a good movie. The sequel that came out not too long ago had me intrigued, so I decided to finally watch the first one and find out what its deal was.

Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard play a married couple whose lives hit a stumbling block after the stillbirth of their third child and the wife, Kate, going through recovery from alcoholism. An accident is also implied to have happened in the past involving their younger child that is blamed on Kate's alcohol abuse, but this is not really relevant to the plot at large. We see the two of them go through the process of trying to adopt a child until eventually they find Esther, a girl (supposedly) from a Russian orphanage whose parents died in a house fire, and are immediately smitten - she seems perfect; this reserved, quiet little girl who likes to paint and wear old-fashioned, pretty dresses. We the viewers, of course, know what's going on, and even if we somehow have managed to avoid being spoiled and don't know exactly what's going on, the tagline "There's something wrong with Esther" gives us a big hint that all is not as it seems.

Watching this with knowledge of the twist allowed me, for a minute, to elide over the fact that the whole backbone of this movie is kind of based in ableism. I won't go on about it too long, but when you watch this knowing that there is actually something wrong with Esther beyond the generic disturbed-child horror tropes, you're a little blind to the fact that in many ways this is a movie where our fear of the kid in question relies on behaviors that autistic kids tend to exhibit (dressing oddly, having unusual speech patterns, behaving differently from other children their age, not fitting in at school, etc). A lot of us are thankfully not phobic or bigoted enough to see it, but when, say, a horror movie contains a character who has autistic-coded behavior, but is made out to be a murderer or otherwise a criminal for reasons separate from their apparent autism, the end message is not "they wrote this person to be so obviously evil for other reasons that their evilness has nothing to do with their autism". The end message is that non-autistic people are afraid that autistic people secretly ARE that devious and dangerous. There's a subset of people who are frightened that kids who act differently like Esther will also end up being like Esther in the way that they abuse and harm other people.

I dismount my soapbox. The first thing I noticed about this movie is that it's ugly in that way that horror was throughout the first decade of the 2000s; that Saw-Hostel-Midnight Meat Train-House of Wax style where nobody wears any colored clothing at all and everything seems to be coated in ash and dirty snow. It's very industrial, stripped-down; there seems to be a rejection of the idea of cinematography in favor of presenting an atmosphere that communicates through blunt force that life is harsh. This aesthetic is not as severe as it is in other movies I can think of, and it's not distracting, but it's just kind of something where I thought "oh look, it's that mid-to-late-2000s drabness" and moved on.

Without a doubt the thing that makes this a watchable movie at all is Isabelle Fuhrman's performance as Esther. When you're a kid, you always feel older and more mature than you really are, and then when you do get older, you realize you had no idea what it was actually like to be an adult. Children on film, when they're in roles that require them, for whatever reason, to act more maturely than kids their age usually do, end up like the peripheral child characters in Orphan: annoying, not even through any fault of their own but because mean, vindictive lines such as those given to Esther's bullying classmate sound contrived and cringe-worthy when written by an adult to be spoken through the mouth of a child. It's too easy to become aware of the artifice when we're watching movies with children acting out scenarios written by adults trying to imitate what children are actually like. Absolutely none of that applies to Esther. At no moment whatsoever does she feel like a little girl, even - and especially - when she's pretending to be one. Furhman was 10 at the time, and everything about her line delivery and body language just says "tiny adult", not "child pretending to be an adult". It's really, really impressive for a child to be able to deliver a performance that breaks through that feeling of separation between adults and children and have adult viewers (or at least this adult viewer) feeling like they're looking at somebody their own age, even when they're not. Isabelle Fuhrman rules and it's so awesome that they got her back for the sequel. I don't think anybody else could have handled "child pretending to be an adult pretending to be a child" as well as she does here.

I should mention that Vera Farmiga also does a great job in her role and further saves this film by not matching her husband in typical horror movie parent obliviousness. Her character seems to have a depth and interiority that Sarsgaard's character does not. It's interesting to me that we never see her stillbirth presented in a realistic manner but instead our only view of it is as a horrific, trauma-warped memory that opens the film and is never shown again. Having that be our only window into what happened to her centers the film around her point of view rather than looking at her entirely as an outsider.

The pacing is fairly decent - I don't believe movies need a "reason" for their length, but I admit that the fact that this movie is over two hours long had me wondering about it a bit. I generally trust Jaume Collet-Serra as a director and aside from the color palette (which was really just how a ton of media looked at the time) I think this is a perfectly competent film. Despite everything going for it, though, this feels like a three-star movie at best. It's mid. It's maybe the most mid a movie has ever been. And it's so weird for a horror movie - in my brain I don't even necessarily categorize it as one, but I don't categorize it as not one either. It's just kind of, there's horror, and then there's Orphan. The scenario is horrific, yes, and the film uses horror tropes, but it mostly does its own thing in its own inscrutable, grungey, late-2000s way. It kind of falls apart if you start thinking about it even a little bit in that way that tabloid headlines do; it's meant to be entertaining and make you go "wouldn't it be horrible if..." but not explore that concept too deeply.

Slaxx (2020)

directed by Elza Kephart

Canada

77 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I kept meaning to watch this, but wasn't in the right mood for it, which... I don't know what kind of mood you need to be in to watch a movie about a possessed pair of jeans that kills people, but I know I wasn't in it. But really, this isn't a mood movie at all; it's short, you don't have to prepare for it, and it's just good fun. Mostly.

Like most slashers, this isn't a very character-driven movie. It does have a decently-sized cast of distinct personalities, but their main purpose is to eventually get pantsed at some time or another, so you won't get too attached to them. Insofar as there is a main character, it's Libby, a new and very young employee at what we're told is a hugely popular clothing chain store. She has the misfortune of her first day falling on the night before "Monday Madness" - a big sale where the chain is about to unveil their revolutionary new product, and also have a popular influencer in to spread the word about it. Said product is a line of jeans that are supposed to use cutting-edge "thermal technology" to mold perfectly to your unique body shape, therefore being all-size and -gender inclusive. Because we know we're watching a movie about evil killer jeans, we of course know to be suspicious of this new product, but none of the characters do, leading to denim-fueled mayhem after hours.

I worked at Old Navy as my very first job when I was around the same age as the protagonist in this movie, so a lot of this was... nostalgic? Let's say nostalgic. The store is obviously not real, but the set decorators did such a great job of capturing that aesthetic via basically inventing it wholecloth that it might as well have been. It's a very immersive set, with color-coordinated marketing, posters, and even an invented terminology: I've never heard any retailer refer to each employee's specific work zone as their "ecosystem", but it sounds like the kind of positivity jargon a store manager would use. The attitudes of the employees range from Libby, bright-eyed and genuinely buying into the head of the chain's reputation for humanitarianism, to the awful wannabe regional manager, to Shruti, who has absolutely no time for any corporate spiel at all. Everybody else plays an important part in fleshing out the film, certainly, but they've pretty much got timers counting down to when they get killed.

The thing that makes this movie good is that is plays itself so incredibly straight. There is no sense that the people who made this were thinking "haha we're making a funny bad movie". This could so easily have gone the route of other "killer object" films in which there's either a deliberate attempt at goofiness or just a lack of caring about whether or not things came off as goofy, but it doesn't do any of that. In fact, it almost feels like it's trying its best not to be goofy. Slaxx wants you to take murderous denim seriously. I think this works so well in large part because of the kills, which are as gory and bloody as you'd expect them to be, but stop at the perfect point where the gore isn't gratuitous or out-of-place.

I also really appreciate the way the killer jeans are achieved onscreen. Everything else aside, if that had failed, this movie would have been nothing. From what I could tell, the jeans were operated with practical effects whenever possible. This is crucial because I feel like we all know by now that fabric is one of the most difficult things to get right with CGI, and in fact if you're looking at a particularly good CGI character, the thing that can immediately give it away as being fake is the clothing. So for the most part I think this was genuinely just jeans and wires, and it looks incredible. There's some shots, like a pair of the jeans scooting down an empty hallway lapping up a trail of blood, that are so unique I found myself lauding the sheer creativity of that, and the fact that cinema has never seen the likes of a pair of jeans scooting down a hallway lapping up blood and may never see it again. There's also a level of anthropomorphism here, though again, like most other things, Slaxx never takes this too far. The pockets look a little like eyes, and the waistband of course makes a gaping mouth, and it's perfect, but it's not used so often that your eyes immediately zero in on the jeans' "face" in every shot. If the face were too obvious, I think it would remove a little bit of the sense of danger and just become cute.

This movie's biggest shortfall, I think, is that it does actually try to play certain things a little too straight. I don't really have a place talking about this, because I'm a white American who has undoubtedly worn clothing produced in sweatshops and with child labor (though I do shop secondhand almost exclusively), but there's something about the way Slaxx tries to tackle those topics that doesn't feel quite right. Spoilers here, if a movie about killer jeans is something you're desperate to keep your mind untainted for. I'm just going to say it the way it is and you can decide how it sounds to you: The jeans are possessed by the spirit of a 13-year-old Indian girl, killed in a thresher accident while picking cotton on one of the clothing company's subcontracted farms. Close to the climax of the film, the jeans obtain a mannequin torso and attach it to itself (herself?) for increased mobility, and the first thing it does is daub a bindi on the mannequin's forehead with blood. Also, the first tipoff that the spirit in the jeans is in fact a former human is when the characters discover it has a soft spot for Bollywood songs. Now... like most other things in this movie, none of that is framed in a way that's obviously intended to be a joke. It is not making fun of Indian people, child labor, Bollywood music, or any of the other topics it covers. But at the same time, having that kind of thing in a comedy movie and covering it the way it's covered just feels... I don't know. If anything, I feel like it fails to deliver the impact of what it's trying to say. I don't need to be shown cruelty happening to know that it's happening, but the image that the film provides - a girl working in what look to be fairly nice conditions, who, through pretty much a total accident, ends up killed - feels like, if such a thing is possible, a deeply rose-tinted vision of child labor. 

And I really don't know what to make of the ending other than that a 13-year-old girl whose death was covered up by the people who were ultimately responsible for her safety is set up as a bad and hateful person who does the wrong thing. The army of jeans unleashes denim fury on a crowd of hapless customers, and the main character fails in convincing the girl's spirit to relent. I mean, in fairness, if the spirit had been appeased by sweet words and empty corporate promises, the film would have felt entirely toothless. But I feel like there could have been some middle ground, another way to conclude this story than casting an innocent girl as an obvious wrongdoer. So this is a pretty good movie and, as I said, lots of fun, it just feels like it stumbles a little in (what was almost definitely a well-intentioned) attempt to draw attention to real-world issues.

Skinamarink (2022)

directed by Kyle Edward Ball

Canada

100 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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When I started hearing about Skinamarink from places outside of where I usually check for information on upcoming horror, I didn't hesitate to see it as soon as I could. I've been severely out of the loop with recent horror, so I hadn't heard anything about it until I started suddenly seeing people call it the scariest thing they'd ever seen. You can tell that someone is a seasoned horror fan when they're talking about a movie that scared them and their tone is incredulous rather than matter-of-fact; that's what I was getting from the mentions of this movie that I'd read.

This movie is made in a way that is probably unlike anything you've seen before. The first thing you notice as soon as it begins is that the entire thing is shot with a grainy, fuzzy overlay, like watching something on an old CRT TV before the switchover to digital. (Old televisions do in fact play a part in this which I will try to address later.) The other two distinctive things about it are that it is (mostly - later in the film, the perspective gets looser and less concrete) shot from the perspective of a young child, which is in keeping with the fact that the "main characters" are both very young children, and that a lot of it is composed of just static shots. The camera doesn't "follow" the children around much; usually it's either filming from their point of view or sitting still while we see their lower legs walk across the frame. The visual fuzz combined with the growing darkness means that it's almost impossible to stop seeing things where there might not actually be anything there, creating patterns out of swirls in the static that can look like anything. This is definitely a movie that is situated at a specific point of time, because for viewers any younger than myself, their childhood memories might not necessarily be so tied to this kind of dated, grainy picture quality. If you're fairly young, your childhood pictures and videos might be in as good a quality as you could take on your cell phone today. It's a vanishing feeling, the way the warm, indistinct-around-the-edges aspect of home videos shot on camcorder somehow embeds itself in our memories of ourselves as children. Skinamarink captures that feeling and uses it to both comfort and disorient.

For a movie with such a simple idea behind it, where it starts and where it ends up are vastly different in tone. So what is it about? From what I've gathered, it was inspired by an actual dream that the director had as a child. At the beginning of the film the two child protagonists wake up to find that their parents are gone and their house has changed. The doors and windows are gone (also the toilet). As they explore the new topography of their house, other things begin to happen, increasingly unsettling and increasingly unmoored from familiarity. I think "familiarity" and its destruction is the most central tenet of this film, and is the reason why it's so deeply discomfiting. When the film begins, I had trouble feeling like I was going to be as scared by it at all, because personally I have a lot of nostalgia for my childhood, and the way things looked - the perspective of a small person, the grain of the picture, the warm light in the middle of the night when it's dark out and the only illumination in the house are lamps - made me think about what it was like to be a kid awake in the night. But the pleasure of that nostalgic feeling comes from knowing you are safe. Gradually, in Skinamarink, any hope of safety wears off until the once-comfortable home becomes something twisted and claustrophobic. A space that should be cozy becomes alien. Over the course of the film the lights grow dimmer until the kids are navigating places that they should be familiar with by flashlight. The scope contracts; eventually all that exists is what can be seen in front of you. The presence within the house tightens its grip until it feels like the walls start closing in.

I feel like without a doubt Skinamarink is much more deeply frightening when it is doing virtually nothing. The dimming of the light, the perspective of a child, the ultimate fear of your protectors being gone and then later reappearing but not acting like themselves - all of that is horrible enough. The second half of this movie is when it seems to think that isn't enough and begins trying to create a clearer picture of the thing inside the house. And it is a "thing", it is a boogeyman; it isn't just the sense of disorientation that's the only scary part of this film. Something is in the house with the children and it's doing things for no apparent reason. Whether or not a creature is more frightening to you than an unending general sense of unease is a matter of personal taste, and in the moment this mattered to me, but afterwards, now, thinking about the film, I really don't have a problem with anything in it. It's the same way when we first see blood and the implication that something physically traumatic is happening, instead of just creeping dread. Watching the film, I thought "oh, this isn't a film where there should be any violence, this has to all be implied and subtle" but now I see that all fears are sort of linked back to the fear of bodily harm, so the presence of blood is still in keeping with the overall atmosphere.

The use of public-domain cartoons and sounds also bothered me initially because it's something that always bothers me when I'm watching a movie and it's not otherwise brought up - I just feel like somebody sitting down and watching a Flesicher-esque cartoon and laughing at it like any children's show is an unrealistic scenario. It always feels really obvious to me when someone is using copyright-free sounds or images to get around paying royalties (even though I understand why they'd do that). Here, though, it fits. The stretchy, often disturbing quality of old cartoons works perfectly with how malleable reality feels in this film. Late in the film, one moment in a cartoon is played over and over, a Bugs Bunny ripoff shrinking itself into nothing with an up-slide sound effect. Something about that is so striking. Sometimes as a kid you're watching TV and you see something, just a line or a few seconds of animation, and it feels wrong somehow and stays with you for years. It could be a normal moment or scrap of dialogue, but you misinterpret it and it hits you in a particular way that doesn't let your brain let go of it. That's what that felt like.

As the film goes on it loses all semblance of narrative and becomes a collection of images of a house where something is very wrong. Dimensions don't make sense like they used to and all light gets swallowed up by what seems like a miasmic malignance. There are strong shades of House of Leaves. At one point the camera becomes seemingly trapped in a warping, endless, inverted closet along with a heap of toys, and the subtitle on the screen reads "576 days" - this I could not figure out, and it's still bothering me. Was that meant to imply how long the remaining child had been trapped in the house? It could not have been his age, because we can guesstimate (and we hear him say) that he's about four years old. That little detail was a curiosity that I would love to know the real meaning behind. I'm also not sure what the point was of including a conversation the kids' father has where we hear him talking about one of the kids falling down the stairs and hitting his head - was that meant to cast doubt on anything that happens afterward, implying that it could have been a hallucination? I certainly hope not, because that would be disappointingly cliched.

This is getting long, so to sum it up I'll just say that Skinamarink truly is incredibly eerie in a way that I don't know that I've ever seen a movie be before. Examining it is rewarding in that we can see references to earlier films and figure out why exactly it frightens us, but it's really something that, if you're seeing it for the first time, you have to sit and absorb and not let yourself think too hard about to get the full experience. It feels like watching a home movie that was shot inside of a nightmare. The intimate, personal nature of it, the universality of the childhood experience of having a bad dream that you wake up from and believe was true for a little while, brings this out of the realm of fiction to an unsettling degree. I don't think another movie in this style could be made again, but I would love to see where else this director goes. At the moment it's not available anywhere but the small screen, but I have heard that it is getting a limited theater release in January and I would highly, highly recommend everybody who can goes to see it that way. I watched this directly before going to bed (inadvisable!) and walking around my dark house afterwards felt so strange.

Stanleyville (2021)

directed by Maxwell McCabe-Lokos

Canada

88 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I'm absolutely psyched to be reviewing this, as it's been one of my most anticipated films for probably a year or more, and finally getting to see it was very exciting. However - and I mean this in the best way - I can't see any way to talk about this movie other than by describing all the ways in which it was nothing like what I expected it to be.

I was under the impression that this was going to be a pretty straightforward, semi-dystopian workplace dramedy of the type that has been popular as of late due to everybody generally feeling like we're being forced to work desk jobs during the apocalypse. The book Severance, the TV show Severance (no relation), the film Mayhem, and even back a few years the more popular (yet less watchable) Horrible Bosses all encompass this sentiment of getting out your pent-up frustration with your job in weird ways - either that or they present a version of capitalism that is as bizarre as the reality of it is, but in different ways. This is where I thought Stanleyville was heading. Instead, I do not know what this movie is doing or trying to say, and I love that for it. Some synopses call it a "satire", but that word is too small to contain the whole of this film. I also feel like the word "satire" implies a kind of malicious disparagement, and while this movie definitely is saying something about our tired old work routine and how it needs to be abolished, to me, at least, it didn't feel like it was overtly angry about that. I think maybe this is more about lampooning the concept of work than the workplace.

The main character is by far the most fascinating aspect of this film and is in large part the reason why the whole thing feels so unique and unpredictable. She begins the film the way I expected her to: Leaving a dismal-looking office job and an unsatisfying home life to go on a spur-of-the-moment adventure. She's lured into what sounds like an unusual game show that would offer her the opportunity to test her mettle against other people from all walks of life. That was all fairly normal. But there are things about her that make her wildly different from the way protagonists usually are in the kind of capitalism-escape-fantasy film that I thought this would be. Usually there's a degree of relatability; you can place yourself in the shoes of the main character who is running from their boring job or beating up their boss or whatever the situation is. But Maria, Stanleyville's protagonist, only gets more opaque as the film goes on. She doesn't speak much, certainly not about her situation or her feelings towards her job. She's not the most relatable of the cast of characters she finds herself mixed in with - that title would probably go to Felicie (if it goes to any of them), who just really wants a car and hates everybody else. And Felicie doesn't even get that much screentime. Maria is something entirely new. Having a protagonist like her who seems to have come from a totally different film and is equipped with powers that never get fully explained makes Stanleyville impossible to pin down and tough to relate to - which is good, in this case.

This is one of those projects that you can kind of intimate are only scratching the surface of a much vaster idea that the filmmaker had in mind. Sometimes you watch a movie and you just get the idea that whoever made it knows much, much more about it than you do - not in the technical sense, where you're aware of the cast of people physically making the film (by operating the camera, the mics, the props, et cetera), but in the sense that everything that happens feels like it's part of a bigger mythos that you are not privy to the details of. I say this partially because the director's previous short films seem to be tied into this one somehow but also because the aesthetic of Stanleyville is so specific and so well-fleshed-out that it feels like there's so much more to it than what's on the surface.

It's hard to describe how something looks to someone who hasn't seen it, especially something as arty as this. And especially something as specific as this. Nothing else looks like this movie does - it uses a conglomeration of individual objects to make up a single-location film that feels like a huge game of I Spy that you're playing with one eye closed. You pick out recurring themes and things scattered throughout the room but you never know what they mean, yet they do seem to have enormous significance that you can't grasp. The bust with the pith helmet, the big sea shell, the cans of corn, why is there writing in Amharic on the wall? We never find out what the Amharic means (unless you are literate in Amharic). My favorite blink-and-you-miss-it detail is that all the items in the storage room seem to be labeled in different languages - it adds to the feeling of deep weirdness and disorientation in time and space that the whole film cultivates. It's almost like this takes place in an alternate universe.

I really can't contain anything about this movie in words, and I certainly can't pigeonhole it by simply saying that it's strange and new. I'm not gawking at its weirdness or taking exception to it, I'm appreciating and enjoying it for what it is. I think I'm rating it on the higher side of most reviews I've seen, but I don't know, something about this just did it for me. I very seldom have a film escape both my expectations and my ability to judge what's going to happen next in so thorough a manner and so enjoyable of one. Try not to go into this pre-judging it, and if you can, it's probably best to not judge it even while you're watching it - this is a weird maze of a movie (especially for something that takes place largely in a single room) that works better if you just vibe with it instead of applying labels to it.

The Third Eye (2007)

directed by Leah Walker

Canada

91 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I'm not even sure why I'm reviewing this because it's probably only of interest to me and like five other people, but I was so surprised to actually like it after it almost lost me in the first few minutes that I just want to talk about it. This might be the first review of it online, but admittedly I've barely done any digging to find other reviews.

So there's really no good way to describe this movie because anything I say about it is going to make it sound way more bonkers than it actually is. And I guess it is kind of bonkers, but the concept of it and the way it's executed are very different from each other. Basically, this is about a woman struggling to come to terms with her brother's death, which many around her are blaming on either an overdose or a suicide, which for all intents and purposes it appears to have been. But that explanation leaves her with questions, and here is where this movie gets bizarre - she finds out that her brother was interested in self-trepanation, and that he may have been involved with people who could have helped him with it. This movie is about trepanation. Like, as in cutting a hole in your skull. And somehow, I don't know how, it manages to deal with the topic as if trepanation - referred to by some of the characters as if it's a hot new street drug called "Sight" - is the newest fad among those hip and in-the-know. On paper everything about this sounds ridiculous, but it's laid out in a reasonable and believable manner, and again, I really don't know exactly how Third Eye manages to pull this off.

The reason it almost lost me as soon as I started watching was because this entire movie is so solidly caked in an aesthetic very specific to the early-to-mid-2000s that I initially assumed it was going to be a try-hard, shallow affair. I am also not sure how to describe this aesthetic other than to say that if you're familiar with it, you know it. Leather wristlets, spiked hair, dark clothing, combat boots, fingerless gloves (at one point the main character wears fingerless gloves over regular gloves), and anybody of any gender wearing heavy eyeliner. It's not quite punk but it's also not not punk. The music they listen to isn't harsh or crusty enough to be punk; it's more like industrial, but for the most part I think these people can best be described as emo. This pervades everything about this movie, and if you're not willing to humor something so stuck in 2007, it'll chip away at your ability to enjoy the film.

But there is something that feels so genuine and unapologetic about this that as soon as I recovered from the shock of seeing so many low-rise cuffed jeans and unnecessary vests being worn over long-sleeved shirts I realized that this didn't have the vibe of something that was just for looks, it felt like an extension of the people who had made the film. Being as this is clearly a low-budget project that was written by a brother and sister, I feel like it's more likely that this is just what the filmmakers were personally into, and they had the freedom to make this movie look exactly how they wanted it to look without the influence of major studios who they had to acquiesce to because they were getting funding from them. It doesn't feel like it's appropriating an aesthetic. It just is that aesthetic. Something about it made me feel deeply nostalgia, which is weird because I'm 23 and too young to have been emo.

Getting over the look of it also let me realize that the writing and the plot is not half bad. It takes itself seriously enough that it made me take it seriously too. I liked the main character a lot: She felt like a genuine, complex, flawed person, with her own agenda that motivated her and a refusal to cave to either the viewer's expectations or the expectations of other characters. She was a rare well-written woman character in and amongst a bunch of really badly-written women characters I've been watching lately. The situation she's in is also dealt with well, and nothing feels soppily sentimental - it all feels real enough. And fortunately, there's not too much stigma put onto drug users and addicts, as there can often be in any movie that concerns an overdose. It doesn't really talk a lot about drugs in general, even though they're always there. This is a movie about trepanation, first and foremost.

The last thing I'll say is that this seems to be getting lumped into a lot of lists of horror movies, mostly, I'm guessing, by people who haven't actually seen it. It sounds like it should be a horror movie, and I was kind of expecting it to be one too, but it's really not. I would just call this a drama - no genre elements here. The fact that it involves drilling holes in your skull (and your buddies' skulls, if they want it bad enough) is pulled off as naturally as the subculture it's set in.

V/H/S 94 (2021)

directed by Simon Barrett, Timo Tjahjanto, Steven Kostanski, Jennifer Reeder, Chloe Okuno, Ryan Prows

USA, Canada, Indonesia

102 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I don't know if I can honestly call myself a "fan" of the V/H/S films, because their quality varies so wildly, but the concept behind them is something that I'm very enthusiastic about. Even if it's bad, I'll watch anything involving a cursed tape. And I genuinely appreciate that the series is bold enough to make explicit the supernatural status of the tapes; even if a solid mythos is never established, in every film - if I recall correctly - it's more than just a clandestine network of trading snuff videos, which would itself probably be interesting enough - it's something weirder and harder to define going on.

But I think where the problem lies is that every single V/H/S film seems to have all these really cool ideas and somehow every single one of them falls just barely short of capturing them to their full potential. I mean, they definitely do something right, because even though they're not perfect films, I've seen all of them multiple times and can talk about each segment from memory. But the thing is that I haven't seen them all multiple times because they're flawless, but because I feel like that's as good as I can get. If I want to watch a movie about a guy who gets a camera installed in his eye and starts seeing ghosts, I don't have anywhere else to go. If I want to watch something where a slumber party is interrupted by aliens, nobody else has done that yet. Timo Tjahjanto's goat satan baby could have been in a better film, but it's not, so that's what I have to deal with. It's not that the V/H/S films are so great, it's that I have to settle for their not-quite-fully-fleshed-out ideas because these films are the only place to find them.

V/H/S 94 continues this tradition of getting really close to a cool concept, or even having a cool concept, but botching the execution just a tiny bit. In this case, the most egregious part is the wrap-around story, which has to do with possibly supernatural tapes and the wild cult that distributes/worships them. Great story, but who wrote the dialogue, a machine intelligence fed nothing but episodes of COPS and scripts from Call of Duty? I don't make a habit of watching movies featuring the police/military, but the acting and dialogue in the wrap-around story was every awful military hardass cliche combined. It's no better when the cultists get to speak - "We are the final girls, and this is our final kill!" Spare me. If you asked me if I wanted a short film about girls in a VHS death cult who turn the tables on a police raid, I'd be all over it, but if you told me it'd be like this, I'd say no thanks.

I think my favorite segment might have been the first one, which takes place mostly in a sewer, with two reporters stumbling on a different kind of cult built around a strange creature who lives down there. I enjoyed this almost entirely because of the well-placed practical effects (something this series has always done great with, and I'll talk more about that in a minute) that were neither overused nor skimped on. There's a classic facemelting scene with exposed skull that made me smile and looked like something that genuinely would have come from the time period this film sets itself in, but the sewer god itself also looks pretty decent.

I was most excited for Timo Tjahjanto's segment, and within the first minute it had hooked me due to the tone and subject matter being so different from everything else in V/H/S 94. All the other segments are pretty fleshy, but Tjahjanto shows us a man's head attached to a mechanical spider body within thirty seconds of his segment starting up, and it only gets weirder from there. This could have been my favorite if it hadn't gone on for what felt like far longer than it needed to - with the first-person POV, it felt like watching somebody play a first-person shooter, dying, and then just... continuing to play even after their character should have been dead. There's something interesting about the idea of merging human with camera, and I think a found-footage film series is the perfect place to explore that, but as usual, something fell a little short for me with this. I love the vibe of it and the effects are done well but it could have been much shorter and benefited from it.

It actually seems like each segment in this is ordered in descending quality from best to worst. The final one is where this lost me, and then the wrap-around segment is completed and it all goes further down the drain. From the start I was uninterested in the last segment, with the militia who try to weaponize something they don't understand, but I totally checked out as soon as the rabbit exploded. You cannot put exploding rabbits in something and then play the rest of the thing straight. I love seeing white supremacists get decimated, and if they explode - hey, that's great too! But I think something about that concept didn't quite stick the landing, and I'm not sure if it's just that physically depicting a person or animal exploding has some weird inherent humor to it, or if I felt like this segment never quite got as extreme as it could have.

I really feel like the gore effects are what made this any kind of an enjoyable film. Even though every segment was made by a different person or persons, they all have that same theme of chunky, frequent blood and guts - though never so frequent as to feel overused, as it has in the series in the past. The skull exposure in the rat god segment, the animate body parts in the funeral home one, the scrap-and-junk half-people in Tjahjanto's piece, that absolutely wonderful vampire creature in the otherwise middling last segment - things like that feel innovative and original and are what I love seeing when I watch a V/H/S film. The culture of collaboration that this series presents is a great thing for modern horror filmmaking, and that is another reason why, even though I don't love them, I keep coming back to these things: It's just pure fun to see people who love the genre doing original work together.

The Green Knight (2021)

directed by David Lowery

Canada, Ireland, UK, USA

130 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I wasn't sure if I was going to review this because there's already so much that's been said about it and I doubt I have anything intelligent to contribute, but after putting it at the top of my "best of the year" list, I wanted to at least get some thoughts down about it. So consider this less of a critical review and more of me talking about how I personally responded to the film.

The translation I read of the original Sir Gawain and the Green Knight poem was not fantastic - an extremely stodgy rendition that felt like it had been given a bag with a very limited number of words in it to choose from, and specific instructions never to become overly emotional or upsetting - but it highlighted something that, I think, made me approach this film in a different way. Prehistoric Britain is a personal fascination of mine and something that I'm so much of a stickler for in media that it ruins my enjoyment of anything set in the era, and I was almost edging on getting my enjoyment ruined several times during The Green Knight because of all of its anachronisms, but then I thought about that garbage translation I read and I realized that the Sir Gawain poem itself was not being faithful to the truth of ancient Britain, but creating a motif that would have been recognizable to the people of its day. The Green Knight does not attempt to re-create a specific time and place so much as it uses those themes as a palette with which to create something recognizably "old", but in the process it creates something out-of-time. It's not important that we believe 100% what we're seeing is pinned to a specific era. The feeling just has to be there enough for us to respond to it.

There is a scene that I particularly liked in which Sir Gawain essentially has his photograph taken by the lady of the castle he comes across in the wood. This is a great example of trading perfect historical accuracy for tone, and I felt that using anachronistic technology also said something about the mystery and inaccessibility of the past. To imagine that the technology to take a photograph might have existed in the time of Arthurian legend risks bringing us into bunko Ancient Aliens territory, but as long as it remains just an idea and we recognize that we have no actual evidence to prove that it could have happened, it's such an interesting concept that I'm kind of still struck by it. There's something about the thought of people in such a far-flung time having the ability to permanently capture images without the use of painting, and how that would have impacted the entire world, that resonated with me.

In its context, the photograph plays an important role to the story as well. Gawain is captured in it not yet having reached the end of his journey. The first time we see it, he's a troubled man reckoning with his place in the world around him having been shifted and smudged to incomprehensibility. The second and last time we see the portrait, it's hanging behind him while he is on the throne during the vision where he sees himself becoming king. While he's been thrust into a role of power and fulfilled an expectation that others had of him and that he, possibly, had for himself at the start of his journey, the difference between the morally conflicted man on the throne and the confused, searching knight in the photograph is only the addition of a crown.

One of the most interesting things that was present in the film and not in the poem is that there seemed to be this confederacy of women throughout the entire thing, who were driving the entire thing, and that was never explained or even really shown in full but only hinted at. Gawain's mother is rumored to be a witch and is shown performing some kind of ritualistic magic multiple times, magic that parallels and perhaps even invites the Green Knight's challenge to Arthur's court. The magic she performs also mirrors King Arthur's own demise, possibly as part of a plan to get her son on the throne. Even in the far reaches of his journey, when Gawain comes across the castle, there's an old woman present who is blindfolded in the same manner as his mother during her rituals, suggesting that his mother's method of divination or spell-casting is not specific to her and her peers but scattered, known by many women across the land. The little girl in the post-credits scene who finds Gawain's crown also hints at an inheritance of power by girls and women. The lady of the castle, the one who takes the photograph, is learned and certainly seems to have some knowledge that neither Gawain (nor her fairly inconsequential husband) are privy to. And despite Guinevere's otherwise small role, when the Green Knight enters the king's court, it is her who delivers his message, not the Knight himself, which seemed to me to further prove that there was some connection between the Green Knight and Gawain's mother's circle of women. I would argue that girls and women are at the heart of this whole movie, influencing everything that happens, though it may not be apparent at first glance.

The central message of the story has also been changed to reflect more of the storytelling norms of our modern era as opposed to the structure of the original poem. At the time, the tale would have been told to audiences not as a story about a single man but as more of a moral fable intended to teach them something about how to be. These kinds of tales with morals still exist today, of course, and are now often blended with stories about an individual person's journey, but The Green Knight as a film is far more focused on Gawain as a single, specific man than stories of its time typically were. I am going to link to a Reddit comment that explains very eloquently how Gawain goes through five separate encounters that force him to face the five values of chivalry, because this person's analysis of the film in contrast to the original poem is very good and opened my eyes to a couple of things I had missed out on. As chivalry is really not something people follow to the letter anymore, at least not in the sense that it was followed during the Gawain poet's time, these five trials are used as moral building-blocks for Gawain as an individual instead of a lesson to to the audience about how to act. To transpose something originally written with a completely different aim into a format that modern audiences are familiar with and still not lose any of the feeling and symbolism shows that David Lowery has significant talent.

Spiral: From the Book of Saw (2021)

directed by Darren Lynn Bousman

Canada, USA

93 minutes

2 stars out of 5

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I knew going in that this wouldn't be good because of how universally ridiculed it is, but on a personal level, every time I watch anything directed by Darren Lynn Bousman I dislike it more than the last one. I decided to see Spiral (from the safety of my own home- I'm not risking getting covid for this) mostly just for laughs, but instead what I got was a movie that meanders around unsatisfyingly until it ends, also unsatisfyingly, and never even made me feel enough emotion to be amused by it.

So I think that the reason why the Saw movies have started to be less and less tolerated by the general public lately is for much the same reason as Todd Phillips' "Joker" was so strongly derided: These movies are so in love with their own philosophy, and so intent on shoving it in the audience's face like it's the most intelligent thing in the world, and that philosophy is at or below the level of a teenage boy's angsty journal rants. I'm not going to harp too much on what the "true meaning" of Saw is, because Spiral is an entirely new chapter in the series with a new killer and is really a Saw movie in name only, but it seemed like in the first couple of films John Kramer was trapping people for one of two reasons: Because they personally wronged him, or because he saw them as blindly mooching their way through life with no regard for those around them, and he took such offense to this that he wanted them to die, I guess. The whole "sheeple" theme has always been really strong throughout this whole series as a motive for why the folks who end up stuck in traps do end up there.

But the horror of a Saw scenario, to me, should come from the feeling that anybody might end up targeted by the killer because he's just so warped that the smallest mistake is cause for him to see you as worthless. The horror is in the idea that if, for example, you cut somebody off in traffic and then they go on to crash their car and their whole family dies, you're automatically on the hook for that. Spiral totally divorces itself from this idea by making everybody who ends up in a trap 100% a bad person. This is a Big Cop Movie™ and all the people who get killed for their transgressions are exaggeratedly crooked cops who do stuff like shoot people for flipping them off and cover up corruption (again, by shooting people). The audience's hand is held and bad cops are pointed out with as much subtlety as showing a child an elephant at a zoo. Again, I'm not gonna act like it's a heinous sin to make everything so cut-and-dry good vs. bad, because this movie clearly thinks it's separate from every other previous one and doesn't hold to the same standards, but the huge difference in motive behind the Saw killings is something that, if you had any ounce of respect for or interest in the series before, will make you hate this one.

Is the whole problem of this movie the fact that the Jigsaw franchise has, by now, been viciously milked dry and anything new coming out will inevitably be as horrible or worse than Spiral? I think it just might be. It feels like there was an attempt to make this feel "current" by having it focus on crooked cops and police violence, but if you're going to go about that plot by making the main character one of the "good" cops who tries to clean up the department from within, you're missing the entire point. But examining systemic racism and inherent bias doesn't fill theater seats. Samuel L. Jackson saying "motherfucker" does.

There's really just nothing about this movie that feels watchable. I can't imagine paying money to go and see this because it feels so thoroughly like something that's been on Redbox for six months already. I guess it's somewhat praiseworthy that despite the differences in character backstories and characters in general, this fits in with the rest of the series in terms of aesthetics and mood, but there's not much to like about that. Towards the end, Chris Rock's main character finds himself in a simple trap that's much the same as in the very first film. He wakes up handcuffed to a pipe by the wrist with a flimsy saw next to him- not strong enough to cut through the cuffs, but strong enough to cut through flesh, if need be. He seems to intuitively know what he needs to do, but instead of making that choice, or really even considering it, he finds a bobby pin on the ground and springs the cuffs. I don't know what Bousman's reason behind putting that in the film was, but the translation of something that was, when it first came out, genuinely upsetting into something so weak and defanged with an obvious solution feels like a metaphor for the direction this series has gone in.

The Oxbow Cure (2013)

directed by Calvin Thomas & Yonah Lewis

Canada

79 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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A movie about a woman moving to a remote cabin in the middle of nowhere to isolate away from other people is possibly the most apropos thing to watch in the current situation, but what I didn't expect from The Oxbow Cure prior to watching it was that it is specifically about disability. I don't frequently see films that talk about chronic pain, or if they do they're not as personal as this one. So having something like this where the disability is sort of danced around (ankylosing spondylitis) but definitely legible to those who actually have it is somewhat rare.

This is a body horror film in probably the most literal interpretation of the phrase. I did have a misconception that it would be a more traditional horror movie before I watched it, but it's far more of a look at one woman's contemplation of her own body, her imminent future in it, and what it means to be apart from other people. The horror comes from facing down the knowledge that your future will involve disfiguring pain and stigmatization, and trying to figure out how to mitigate your symptoms while also acknowledging that this thing will come for you eventually. Like an unstoppable It Follows demon of pain and suffering, the lead character's spondylitis manifests in different ways over the course of the film, an unwelcome intruder she can't get rid of.

I'm going to keep this review at least somewhat short, because there really isn't much substance here. I don't think the lead character even says ten words throughout this whole thing. It's really just about one woman isolated in a cabin by a frozen lake, and that doesn't leave much space for monologuing. We never learn much about her apart from her diagnosis and that she's recently had a parent die. One symptom of her disease is a lack of energy, so that's reflected in how she doesn't move around much from the cabin save for one sequence of wandering that is all the more unnerving because it's so out-of-character. The film is shot in an uncomfortably intimate way; at times I could pretty much visualize the cameraperson getting up from a crouch and shifting position because of the way the camera was moving. It feels voyeuristic sometimes, looking in on a woman grieving. She briefly has a dog, but it slips away. She watches videos of exercises that are supposed to help with her pain, and the calming voice and attractive body presenting this information on the tape is cast as alienating, unfamiliar. The whole atmosphere is disorienting and strange. Like I said, this is about a specific disability and sort of also about chronic pain as a whole, but it could easily be mapped onto our current experiences of covid isolation and paranoia.

There is a moment in this movie towards the end that changes the whole tone, and it's difficult to talk about without spoiling because it only works if you don't expect it. Many reviews have already talked about this, but I'm going to avoid addressing it directly. Suffice to say, though, I didn't see that coming. A fairly obvious interpretation would be that it represents the woman coming to terms with her disease, or possibly mourning her dead loved one, trying to hold close either something that repulses her or something that she feels slipping away, and I would tend to agree with that meaning, as I don't really see any others. All in all, I can't say I was thrilled by this movie, but it's something very unique that I did appreciate a lot. It's barely even a movie, it feels more like one long video essay or art piece. 

I'm still troubled by thoughts of where that dog ran off to.

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.