Goodnight Mommy (2014)

Score: 4.5 / 5

I suppose everyone has his or her limits when it comes to horror movies. Two of my most intimate friends draw the lines at burning bodies and vampires. I have been trying to pinpoint my own lately, and I think that last night I found it.

Goodnight Mommy is a fine film. It's brilliant technically, and it harnesses a special kind of dread I found intoxicating. Soon after their mother returns from cosmetic surgery with a bandaged face, twin brothers Elias and Lukas (played by real brothers with the same names) begin to suspect that her strange behavior belies a darker secret. As their suspicion evolves to outright fear, they take drastic measures to protect themselves and determine her true identity.

It's a cold, calculated film that takes nothing for granted and quickly gives in to its darker interests. The film is clean and bright, with distinct images and an almost sanitary feel. The house is bare and smooth, obviously owned by someone with wealth and style, and full of the niceties of urban life, though the house itself is isolated in the countryside. There is almost no score, which adds to the realism and the stark atmosphere of silence and dread. You might say it's a sophisticated thriller, one whose horror finds a niche in sharp modern decor (not unlike Ex Machina, remember?), and you wouldn't be wrong.

But it's also a particularly violent film, and for that reason I left it feeling deeply disturbed. Not unlike, I suppose, the horrors of Sinister or even Hard Candy, this movie does not shy away from its bloody violence and indeed toys with justifying itself. We have child endangerment, home invasion, mental illness, and body horror all wrapped up into one. I think that what specifically sends me over the edge is realistic torture, and -- Lo, and Behold -- that's in here too. I don't want to spoil anything, but the second half of the film was really hard for me to watch. Granted, I haven't seen the Saw sequels or the Hostel pictures, but this kind of violence is different for me than the splatter-tastic squeal-and-giggle gore of Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd or the Evil Dead franchise. I can handle those. This is real, unflinching and vicious, and pure torturous torture. It hurts to watch; and then to have the relationship involved be mother-and-young-sons is almost too much for me to stomach.

Goodnight Mommy is anything but unpredictable, but even knowing the final reveal will do little to relieve the horrors we see leading up to it.

IMDb: Goodnight Mommy

Serena (2014)

Score: 1 / 5

It's as if no one in the film read the book.

Before you call me a hypocrite for comparing a book to a film adaptation, let's get one thing straight. If you're making an adaptation and you have a perfect roadmap (from which you are adapting your work), why wouldn't you follow it? The only reason I can logically get behind is if your adaptation works on its own terms. If your adaptation effectively and artfully explores its own themes and style in a way that maintains some honor as well as integrity.

This doesn't.

Susanne Bier's film of Serena is a mellow melodrama with little historical relevance, almost no worthwhile thematic elements, and only mildly convincing performances. The cinematography is confused and confusing, shaky and unfocused, and what are supposed to be shots of sweeping majesty fall hopelessly flat as there is no drama under the visuals. It's overscored, overedited, and underwritten, and our stars' performances suffer as a result. What were apparently very effective rehearsals in emotional connection (chemistry, so to speak) are washed over onscreen simply because there is so little for our stars to dig their teeth into. Rhys Ifans gives the only compelling show, and he only pops up in a handful of scenes.

The worst sin here, though, is that the story just doesn't work. We are given an initial shot of two strong women, Rachel the dutiful worker and Serena the upright equestrian. From there, each dissolves into wispy figures awash in blood and fatigue, fearful and insecure, waiting helplessly to be delivered by the men around them. Even those men are strictly divided into the bearded strong men of the timber industry and the hairless wimps who deserve their sorrows. It's a sort of romance, I suppose, in that it raises questions of how far one will go for love, and yet all ends in bizarre, unconnected loss and failure. But by the end, we also don't really care, because the film has shown us remarkably little to gain our sympathies with any of them. Even J-Law's self-immolation (oops, spoiler alert, if it matters) was so ridiculous that I started giggling. I'm guessing that's not the point of the scene.

In case you haven't read it, let me give you a super brief concept of Ron Rash's novel. It's Macbeth in Depression-era Appalachia, where our title woman and her hubby establish their timber empire and ruthlessly remove all obstacles and annoyances (meaning traitorous business partners and incompetent lackeys) from their path to power, wealth, and glory. Serena is a perfect character, a goddess incarnate as well as a living, breathing nightmare of the heteropatriarchy. Ron Rash imbues her with superhuman qualities and extends this magical realism to the environment, allowing the wooded mountains of North Carolina to become their own character, sentient and divine at once. Much of the dialogue, narration, and plot/character devices mirror Shakespearean style, including the chorus of lumberjacks and the soothsaying old woman, which is also a reflection of archaic Appalachian culture.

Just so you know, almost none of this makes it into the film. Moments are stolen, but they are hodge-podge and so unclear that even someone familiar with the source material might miss them. There's a shot in the middle of the picture of Serena on horseback with the sun streaming through the morning mist about her; I think it's a reference to one such icon in the novel that suggests her divinity, but the images lasts less than five seconds and the background of the shot quickly trivializes the visual, and nothing significant happens before or after, so it doesn't really matter as a moment. Another example: Late in the film, our pseudo-hero comes calling to old widow Jenkins (the soothsaying archetype, who has until that moment not been seen or mentioned explicitly), only to find her dead on the floor, presumably a victim of our anti-heroes. The whole scene takes less than two minutes (probably less than one), and there is no exposition at all. No context at all. No drama at all.

The film, on the other hand, is anything but a reflection of the culture, the aesthetic, or the themes it pretends to invoke. In fact, I might argue that it is an artistically lazy film, a sappy and pathetic romance, a borderline misogynist (and not-so-borderline classist) story, and ultimately a waste of time.

IMDb: Serena

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Well, there it is. The franchise I never knew I wanted.

Cloverfield, in all its post-9/11 horrific glory, stole a bit of my heart way back eight years ago, but I never really thought it would become a franchise. It's a good solid flick on its own, deceptively simple and daringly, well, daring. I figured, if anything, a sequel would follow [REC]'s example and maybe just do a sister film, a comparison point with similar found-footage style camerawork and repeated themes. But after so many years -- and a fairly polarized audience, with horror fans either loving or hating it -- I don't think any of us saw this coming.

Going in, you need to know a couple things about 10 Cloverfield Lane. First: Don't even think about comparing it to its sister picture. Whereas Cloverfield took Blair Witch into breakneck big-scale horror territory, keeping close to the roots of its real-life horror in senseless, monstrous death and destruction in NYC, this new film instead plays on psychological horror in the vein of home invasion thrillers with a dash of post-apocalyptic spice. Most of the film takes place in a fallout bunker under a conspiracy theorist's rural house, where the owner has locked himself and two young people in out of fear that the outside world has come under biological attack.

The film unfolds fairly quickly, with wildly unpredictable beats and turns. I don't mean "unpredictable" in the sense that you don't know where it's going. It's a bleak enough film to know full well what will happen. But first-time director Dan Trachtenberg does some really amazing emotional work here, mirroring the intense and complex psyches of his characters in the pacing, cinematography, lighting, and editing; he focuses so intently on the people that it's easy to feel more claustrophobic that the film really is. It's a dazzling example of how a director can perform his job with integrity and bravery, undiluted by a previous film, and perfectly balance technique, spectacle, and honesty.

And the performances he captures are, if possible, even more astounding. John Goodman is electrifying as the bestial conspiracy theorist who locks in two helpless young people. In his nightmare-inducing (yes, I had nightmares last night) turn, Goodman is as surprising and vicious as Heath Ledger's Joker from The Dark Knight, completely insane yet making perfect sense, burning with his inner passions and concealing particularly insidious demons under his baleful visage. Matching him in energy and wit is Mary Elizabeth Winstead, a shining star of female power in a genre that often subjects such figures to pain, fear, and torment. Winstead carries the film, ceaselessly strong and smart, never sexualized or victimized, an action hero struggling - nay - demanding to be treated as such from the men both on screen and behind it. Her bright, wide eyes reveal far more of her character than her dialogue or even her action choreography, though she delivers in both those realms with admirable ferocity.

It's one of those rare films where every single element joins together in perfect harmony to create a transcendent experience, one that had me shrieking and laughing often at the same time. It's a taut thriller, to be sure, but one with unexpected humor and vast thematic implications. It's also one of those rare sequels that, to my mind, surpasses its predecessor in ways technical and emotional, and also as a result of its being so very different. I might also add that the pacing and overarching drama of the film feels distinctly mixed-genre: The first four-fifths of the film are a sort of home invasion/post-apocalyptic psychological thriller. The final fifth is something else entirely. It's even filmed very differently. Like how in the end of The Cabin in the Woods the thematic import of the film skyrockets into implausible chaos, the end of this film rapidly spirals into a frenzied fever dream of special effects and sci-fi violence. Before you say that's weird and doesn't make sense, I mean to assure you that it works. I don't know how, exactly, but it's not done over-sensationally; at least, not more so than the rest of the film. It fits, and it is profoundly effective in revealing the greater elements of chaos at work in the world of the film. It's operatic, it's enchanting, and by the end of the film, it feels strangely epic in intellectual scope.

But do we see the monster? You might be wondering if this film answers any of the questions posed by the first, and frustrated with the lack of overt monstrosity in the original film. I have an answer for you.

But first, a question: Why does it matter? Perhaps we never saw the huge monster in its entirety in Cloverfield, but doesn't that make it far more terrifying? We saw plenty of its offspring (or whatever they were). We saw all of the death and destruction it caused. I challenge you to go back and watch the news footage from 9/11. Isn't the whole point of horror in the last fifteen years that death is not predictable or just? That's the new face of horror. Terrorism. Biological warfare. Crumbling towers, alien invaders, undead armies, cataclysmic apocalypse. The age of seeing a specific monster (Dracula, the Blob, Michael Myers) is over; now it's religious extremists, political idealists, shadowy terrorist regimes. There's a reason the villains in last summer's continued spy sagas were called Rogue Nation and Spectre.

My answer: No. We don't see "the monster". We see several. We see a gun-toting, amoral conspiracy theorist and control freak who demands absolute power in his little microcosm of people he "saved", who is revealed to be exactly what we suspect from the beginning. We see an alien monster beast attacking our hero near the end. We see a giant flying alien/monster grab our hero and attempt to eat (?) her. We don't see "the monster"; there are many. Which is more horrifying? I couldn't say, though my nightmares were about a human, not a slimy monster with too many teeth. As the tagline says, monsters come in many forms.

I might also add that if you only want to see a movie because of its monster, that says far more about you than the movie. Selah.

IMDb: 10 Cloverfield Lane

Macbeth (2015)

Score: 2 / 5

Confession: If you start your movie with a child burning on a pyre (or, for that matter, getting mashed to a pulpy skin cream, a la The Witch), I'm definitely going to watch. I'll probably like.

And like Macbeth I most certainly do. It's a nightmarish descent into the psychological depths of what might be Shakespeare's darkest play. Not unlike the Fiennes film Coriolanus (my favorite Bard adaptation by far), this Scottish play/movie works best in its visuals and physicality. It gets us inside the world it presents. The production designers and art directors deserve most of the praise for their incredibly detailed work on this film, and cinematographer Adam Arkapaw (True Detective, Top of the Lake) presents us with a vibrant, dreamlike approach to the bleak atmosphere of war-torn Scotland highlands. I'd compare his technique to that of Nicolas Winding Refn (Valhalla Rising, Only God Forgives) in its stylized poetics as well as its bloody realism. Beautiful and haunting, this vision of hell won't let you look away until after the crimson-lit climactic battle. Light thickens, as Mac would say.

But as a piece of Shakespeare, this movie is no more than disappointing for me. It holds so little of the original dialogue that half of the scenes barely make sense, and that's saying a lot, considering that this is one of the Bard's shortest plays. It's almost as though director Justin Kurzel and his writing team used a search engine to find the most familiar lines in the show and then strung them together piece by piece, weaving together their own story in the gaps. And before you roll your eyes at my purist leanings, consider the almost absent issue in the play of Mac's childlessness. It's almost disturbingly absent in the play, which is what makes his "tomorrow" speech, or his wife's "I have given suck" moment so mysterious and suggestive. But in this film, we start with the death of their child, we see a young man die in battle who later reappears to haunt Mac, and Lady Mac's climactic "sleepwalk" scene is reworked into a strange sort of confession in a church where she's doused with pale white light as if emphasizing her barren nature.

And that is just one example of a rabbit-trail theme in this movie. There are some gems,though, perhaps the best being Macbeth's apparent PTSD as he groans that his mind is full of scorpions through gritted teeth and vein-bulging expression. And maybe I'm being too picky. I just don't really know why you would do a Shakespeare adaptation, and then not use your greatest tool: the language! If you wanted to do a surreal or metaphysical version, why not take out all the dialogue? That would be a trip, which would be totally appropriate for this movie. Who needs dialogue when you could see the visions Mac and his wife describe so beautifully? Maybe that film will happen some day. I'm down. But here, the visceral visuals serve only to pump up the experience of the play, rather than taking the reins entirely, and so the lacking dialogue and plot results in failure to remind us of why this story is so haunting and memorable at all. 

And -- this is totally personal preference -- the wickedly thick accents actually hinder the clarity of the words and the already murky motivations (a result of the butchered script). Kurzel seems to have coached his actors on delivering the lines in conversational and naturalistic tones, and that totally stops the drama from moving, much less lifting off. I've almost never been so bored with the Bard. After MacB slays Duncan's guards and declares as much to the others, one of them stares at him, completely deadpan, and slowly and flatly intones, "Wherefore did you so?" It's laughably dull, and doesn't make sense. I suppose it would if the movie had a faster pace or if the visuals were consistently over-the-top. But it doesn't, and they don't, and what we have instead is a bizarre combination of the two extremes. If the visuals are operatic, shouldn't the performances be, too? I think so.

This just felt half-assed and unsure of its focus, leacing us with a confused mishmash of sight and sound and fury that ultimately signifies little more than the thick fog rolling across the battlefield. Turn, hellhound.

IMDb: Macbeth