In Secret (2013)

Score: 4 / 5

Take an abbreviated Jane Eyre, turn it on its head, toss in some steamy sex, and you get In Secret, a quietly captivating erotic thriller that passed us all by two years ago. This dark adaptation of Emile Zola's Thérèse Raquin does little for those of us who want to be surprised by plot structure, but it works wonders for the rest of us. Not for a moment do we believe that the adulterous affair suggested by the title will end happily, but we also don't really care; anyone who disagrees has never seen Romeo and Juliet or any other romantic drama ever.

I suppose a brief outline will suffice, then: Therese (Elizabeth Olsen) is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly, spoiled cousin Camille (Tom Felton), watched over by her domineering aunt/mother-in-law Madame Raquin (Jessica Lange). When Camille's seductive friend Laurent (Oscar Isaac) comes calling, he and Therese embark on an intense affair that leads to murder, madness, and other exciting stuff. And if you don't expect all these things from the dark first scene, you can leave the fun stuff for us and go watch one of several mindless comedies in theaters right now.

Thus, our focus here is on style over substance. I said the first scene is dark, by which I do actually mean chromatically. Yeah, sure, the whole film is "dark" thematically, but director Charlie Stratton rightly decided to pair the heavy drama of a period piece with the striking visuals of Gothic thrillers, making every moment fraught with tension and rimmed with shadow. Stratton's screenplay -- which moves along at a surprisingly fast pace, though it is disguised by Florian Hoffmeister's (Mortdecai) meditative cinematography -- features very little dialogue, allowing for the actors, sets, and lighting to paint a nightmarish vision of hell itself, as Therese herself once describes her situation. Gabriel Yared (Cold Mountain, Shall We Dance?, 1408) crafted a symphonic score to accompany, and the great sweeping runs of stringed instruments would make the film feel overscored if the visuals weren't already so dramatic. In fact, the whole film teeters dangerously on the edge of operatic excess. The only thing that grounded it, for me, was the cast.

Jessica Lange is the undisputed soul of the film. And really, even for younger audiences or romantic viewers who might prefer the star-crossed lovers to be their protagonists, the film wouldn't work without a conniving, vulnerable, and passionate Madam Raquin to run things. Though some might say we've seen enough of Lange's crazy time in American Horror Story, here she does what she always does: She finds yet another nuanced, fully-realized character in the throes of madness unlike any we've seen yet. Miraculously, Olsen, Isaac, and Felton all match her, though perhaps less gracefully, scene for scene, with their own idiosyncratic psychoses. Olsen carries the weight of the film really well, allowing her teary, fearful gaze to sweep, wide-eyed, across almost every scene. Felton's pale simpering oozes a charm of its own, countered marvelously by Isaac's smoky stares and aggressive sensuality.

For as much as I'm throwing around descriptions of these people as "crazy", I don't want you to think this is a film populated with fearfully unstable individuals. No, this film isn't "about" (vile phrase) insanity. This film is about the ways in which normal people act and react under heavy cultural weights. These people are single parents who dote on their children, surrogate children searching for love, spouses stuck together without love or respect, a woman seeking freedom from cultural oppression, a man risking everything to be with his lover, and, ultimately, two people who learn that the sins of the past can never really leave us. Whether or not we agree with these characters' actions -- and Stratton has very cleverly allowed a lot of room for discussions on class, gender, family structure, morality/ethics, social norms, and marriage -- we can easily participate in their navigating the murky waters of forbidden romance, and hopefully emerge a bit better off than they do.

IMDb: In Secret

Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015)

Score: 3 / 5

Unfortunately, the third time isn't always the charm. The first Insidious was daring, fresh, and disturbing; the second was intelligent and more intense, if less focused. But Chapter 3 flirts with being entirely unnecessary, which is its primary sin. But maybe I'm being a tad premature.

Leigh Whannell's new chapter (which he also directed, for the first time) distances itself almost entirely from the Lambert haunting, which we saw extensively in the first two films. Though it's sad not to see Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne, and Barbara Hershey, those poor souls have been through hell a few times already. Now we see a totally unrelated family -- played by single dad (Dermot Mulroney) and his haunted daughter (Stephanie Scott) -- tormented by a totally unrelated evil spirit. I was a little excited that Whannell wanted to expand his universe, and I don't think he failed in doing so (we'll have to wait for another installment to be sure), but this movie only occasionally felt like an Insidious picture. His script tries, bless it, to tie itself in, using shorthand to build on characterizations (Specs, Tucker, the Woman in Black) made in other films. But maybe it wasn't the new plot or characters, though establishing them took quite a long time. Maybe it was Whannell's directing.

In fact, the only times I really felt like I was watching an Insidious picture were when our heroes journeyed into The Further, the dark limbo of demons and lost souls. But the long shots of a lone adventurer carrying a blue light through foggy shadows are too familiar now. Thank God we have Lin Shaye again, who also heroically helps tie this film in to the others. In fact, she is the only reason I would ever watch this film again. It's her movie all the way (sorry, Mulroney!), and she charges forward with her acting chops in full force, traveling the dramatic circuit from feverishly fearful to bombastically brave. Whannell seems to appreciate that Shaye's character, Elise, is the soul of these films, and finally gives her the chance to shine over the other characters. He also fleshes out her story in some unexpected ways, adding a romantic relationship, past tragedy, and previous experience to her character.

Besides Shaye, though, the film does little to remain memorable. Big buildups lead to weak payoffs (though scored loudly to make us jump), and the basic premise of a "haunting" is lost in a series of direct ghostly manifestations that cause bodily harm to our young female victim. Not unlike Chapter 2, where the "haunted house horror" became more of a "domestic invasion thriller", this film quickly forsakes bumps in the night in favor of zombies in the attic. I don't know if it's all good or all bad, but it just doesn't always feel Insidious.

That said, there are some effective scares (mostly in the frightful images, which seem to be the bloodiest in the franchise) and several effective laughs. If Whannell struggles to amp up the fear factor, he succeeds in awkward comedy, both in the disconnected domestics of the victim-family (Mulroney's "whoop-ass face" is a keeper) and in the eager antics of Specs and Tucker (Whannell and Angus Sampson with a bizarre hairstyle). He also succeeds -- perhaps unintentionally, but, again, we'll have to wait and see -- in planting seeds for further films. The three-month gap between Insidious and Chapter 3 leaves some room for more adventures with Elise, Specs, and Tucker's "Spectral Sightings" team. Or, we could venture further into Elise's past, as we did in Chapter 2, and see her earlier forays into the spirit world or her married life. Either way, we have more to see between her and the red-faced demon of the first film (which, mind, also appears in Chapter 2 and now in Chapter 3), whether before or after the Lambert haunting. I'm hoping for another "Come on, bitch," moment like she had in this movie! I may have cheered out loud at that one, and I'm not even sorry.

Who knows if James Wan and Leigh Whannell will keep up this franchise. I rather hope they do, though I think I prefer Wan's hand at this subject matter. Whannell unfortunately played it safe, and was too direct and too kinetic for my taste, but then I'm totally biased in favor of Wan's more relaxed, abstract, and detailed first film. Remember: Wan's wideshots win, every time.

And frankly, I want more Barbara Hershey.

IMDb: Insidious: Chapter 3

Jurassic World (2015)

Score: 5 / 5

Okay, the first thing you need to know about Jurassic World is that it is in every way superior to its predecessor. Whereas the third installment had exactly two decent sequences, this film is one long thrill ride. In fact, it's much scarier than even the first Jurassic Park, because it doesn't need to establish the "awe" factor of dinos, or the empty hope that the proceedings will turn into anything but a living nightmare. From the very first shot (of a wickedly clawed beast hatching and glaring into our souls), we know this is a thinly-veiled horror movie. More specifically, this is a thoroughbred monster movie.

The best thing about this film, though, isn't its frightening intensity. It's that it is so smart about being scary. Besides its intelligent dialogue (which is second only to the first film's), it has a reckless pace not unlike this summer's other high-speed blockbuster, Mad Max: Fury Road. Director Colin Trevorrow fits most of his exposition into our wide cultural knowledge of the franchise, and recalls it through minute details on set. Rather than wasting time, as I said, reinforcing our wonder and awe at his monsters, he skates over a lot of the familiar shots in favor of brand new ones (much like the management staff of the new park itself). Rather than a slow pan over a hillside with long-necked dinosaurs (I'm sorry, the scientific names are escaping me), which we've seen in at least two of the previous films, we skip right into the exciting new sights, like the Mosasaur lagoon and the Triceratops petting zoo.

We also skip over the well-trod ground of Velociraptors being deadly and leap into a whole new scenario, wherein they are being trained by none other than Indiana Jones himself. Oops, I mean Chris Pratt. In yet another swashbuckling turn, he dons this muscular, gruff persona well with just enough room to slide some fitting humor into the movie. He is a nice foil to Bryce Dallas Howard's managerial role, She of the White Skirt and Sensible Heels. Sadly, we have no Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, or Julianne Moore this time, but Pratt and Howard take the reins with no apologies or reservations (I think John Hammond would say they "spared no expense"). I was more than a little worried when they set up our two leads as such obnoxiously stereotypical gender tropes, but, again, it's a filmmaker's shorthand that speeds us right along into the action. Also, those tropes (as we immediately suspect) break down very quickly, and by the time the climax comes 'round, Howard is arguably more heroic than Pratt, as she herself drives the kids to safety while under violent attack by raptors and later unleashes the T-Rex while carrying a flare. And she does everything in the movie while wearing those heels. So there's that.

I keep hinting that this film is all about the thrills. And it is. But it's pretty clear that Trevorrow loves his dinosaurs, and that love is infectious. He may not do many long, slow shots of a dino silhouetted by the morning sunlight, but he certainly inserts glorious little moments of visionary beauty into his adventure. At one point, the hybrid monster yanks up a soldier into the foliage overhead, and as the camera looks up to watch, his blood plops down on the camera like a little rain. I guess that doesn't sound all that great but in the moment, it's almost poetic in its stunning color and brevity. Or when Howard's character opens the T-Rex pen to lure it out, and the light from her flare reflects in its approaching eyes. Brilliant. I would argue too that Trevorrow finds awe in his conceptualization of the dinosaurs as autonomous beings, rather than mindless carnivores that pop out at us. Whereas, in the third film, the Spinosaurus tends to just pop up all over the place and bite at our heroes (and so do all the other dinos in that movie, unfortunately), here the Indominus Rex (?) is driven by a superior intelligence, mutated genes, and the explicit ability to communicate with several species. The velociraptors, similarly, are personalized with names and a bizarre connection with Pratt's character that hints at a form of respect.

My last thoughts on this movie have to do with its violence. The first Jurassic Park worked memorably well due to Spielberg's use of suspense and tension through editing: We know the electric fence will turn on because we see Ellie slipping the switches, we just don't know when; we see the raptors see the children in the kitchen, we just don't know if they can actually open doors yet. In this film, however, Trevorrow seems less concerned with this type of storytelling. Rather, he seems to take his hint off the Indominus itself and, where the horror comes into play, allows the violence and jump-scares to be as brutal as they are. Almost every moment of violence is more visceral than in the other films, from the monster's clawed-out tracking device dripping with blood to the claws of the raptors lunging at the back of the truck. In fact, though I almost never verbally react to movies, yelled out loud twice in this picture. Once when the Indominus was smashing the gyrosphere over the children, and once when a raptor head burst in through Howard's driver window. But these weren't just sump scares. Violence had already been happening, and violence continued to happen after. Trevorrow cleverly (and sadistically) keeps amping up the action sequences in more and more intense ways before he resolves them.

I'm sure a 5 is a bit high for a score. But I love dinosaurs, I love this franchise, and frankly this film is exactly what we needed to keep it going. It's not overscored, overacted, or overplotted. Though it relies heavily on special effects, they're really good. Its themes are familiar but not dwelt upon, and its gender stereotypes are annoying but serve as an access point before allowing themselves to be bent. The climax was rather overwrought, but in which of the three preceding films has it not been? At least it didn't use a bullshit dues ex machina like in #3. I'm still bitter about that one.

Now let's just pray the next installment comes a little sooner!

IMDb: Jurassic World

Poltergeist (2015)

Score: 3 / 5

It was only a matter of time before someone remade Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg's 1982 Poltergeist. And I was ready for it. Frankly, I never much liked the original, because the effects are weird, the editing clunky, and the dialogue poor. The only things I enjoyed were the great lighting and the feminist (or at least female-centered) angle. But I think most of my difficulty with that film is its label as a horror film; it's hardly ever frightening or even disturbing, besides the moment when one man hallucinates peeling his own face off. Much like M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water (2006), the original Poltergeist is a dark fantasy, narrated much like a straightforward fairytale and filmed accordingly. It's less a haunted house movie (compare it to The Haunting, 1963) and more an edgier NeverEnding Story. Come on, I mean, a tree tries to eat a child and "The Beast" looks like Falkor mixed with Ridley Scott's Alien.

But now we have a scary Poltergeist. Or at least one that doesn't feel laughable. The foremost reason Gil Kenan's new vision is a real horror movie is that he doesn't film it as a fairytale with bright colors, still wideshots, or predictable effects. Rather, Kenan lingers on empty frames, daring the audience to follow him into the nightmare. That's not to say it's a novel technique (indeed, we'd be hard-pressed to find a non-found-footage horror film in the last decade that doesn't do the same). But it is no less effective here.

That said, this movie has plenty of its own faults. Though it's a distinctive horror film, as opposed to its inspiration, it labors under an intrusive score and little difference from the original film. If Kenan wanted to keep us totally on the edge of our seats, he would have played a bit more with the plot; that he didn't suggests to me that he had another agenda. Perhaps the credit also goes to the writer, David Lindsay-Abaire, who shifted the focus from the female "horror" of the first film to a less thematic and more iconic sense of contemporary paranormal activity. Let me explain. Hooper's original featured two female paranormal experts who came into the haunted home in an effort to bring back the (also female) victim, a child; ultimately, the child's mother is the sole means by which the child is returned home; the portal to the other world is arguably feminine, as a hole that opens periodically and (violently) sucks in its prey, and spits them out again in a sticky red fluid; an unveiled monstrous entity at the end (perhaps another portal to the spirit dimension? Who knows?) is distinctly vaginal, as a ribbed, red circle that similarly seeks to devour the child in a cruel inversion of a birthing process.

Still with me? Unlike many horror films that thematically or artistically position the audience with a (intrusive, gazing, violent) male horror-entity, Hooper's film was especially concerned with a female horror-entity (and hero). To hell with all that for this new film. For better or worse, Lindsay-Abaire and Kenan decided to have one female and one male paranormal expert, to have that male expert be a bizarre sacrificial lamb, to have the (still female) victim's brother (not mother) be the means of her salvation, and to do away with most of the feminine-horror imagery (no gaping vagina to devour the children here, and no Falkor either for that matter). In fact, we are actually allowed to see inside the portal this time, and the other dimension looks more like a scene from Dante's Inferno or "The Further" from Insidious (2010) than anything else: a murky, dark tunnel crowded with green-gray corpses that grab at the children like Harry Potter's Inferi.

So I don't know. Is it less likely to spark intelligent discussion of the gendered dynamics of horror films? Yes. Is it less likely to make you roll your eyes, chuckle, and then yawn? Yes. I fancied it because it was actually kind of creepy, unlike the original, and because Sam Rockwell is a sort of guilty pleasure of mine. I thought the dialogue was more engaging, the effects familiar but more grounded than in 1982, and the pacing a bit easier to manage than before. It's also just as overscored and just as melodramatic as before, and the lighting isn't nearly as inventive. Does it make me more anxious for Insidious: Chapter Three? You bet your ghost.

IMDb: Poltergeist