Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021)

 Score: 3.5 / 5

Angelina Jolie is one of those amazing stars who -- say what you want about her acting technique -- manages to jump across genre boundaries with more dexterity than most others. Apart from her real-life persona, she has entered the niche of old-fashioned divas who were true individualists and demanded attention if not much else. And while she doesn't really perform prolifically, we might say, the ones she does grace are as varied and surprising as anything she's done on screen or behind the camera. In only the last five years, she's voiced two animated characters (one for Disney and one for DreamWorks), reprised her iconic antihero fairy, reimagined the origins of Neverland and Wonderland, directed and starred in a disaffected romantic melodrama with her then-husband, and is about to premiere in the newest installment of the MCU as a goddess/alien/superhero. And here, she returns to the kind of action-thriller that launched her international stardom twenty years ago.

The latest work from Taylor Sheridan is at once more of the same great stuff and disappointingly the same as so many others. His films (he directed Wind River and wrote Hell or High Water and Sicario) tend to depict rough, weary, and violent people clashing on the bleak frontiers of American wastes. And while the plots are always tight and deliberately paced, the themes and characters are endlessly complex. His hellish landscapes, drifting with sand or snow while baked by an unforgiving sun, provide a distinctly Romantic backdrop to the inner lives of his tormented protagonists. This time around, we're soaring above the hills and forests of rural Montana, not far from Yellowstone National Park. Beautiful, of course, and dangerous, it appears to be in the dry season, when lighting causes raging forest fires that can race like the wind and turn on a dime.

Have you ever heard of a smoke-jumper? Because I sure had not before seeing Angelina Jolie leap from a chopper directly above a blazing wildfire. She's part of a daring team of firefighters who, it seems, might be in this line of work more for the thrill than the fight; nevertheless, they are the first on the ground to try and hold the line of advancing flames. Jolie's character, Hannah, is quickly established as fairly reckless, perhaps trying to hard to be "one of the boys," or to escape some past trauma. Unfortunately, she's also slyly painted as a bit crazy, having just bombed a psych evaluation after witnessing kids die in a fire that she should have been able to save. Subject to bouts of PTSD, she's reassigned from a helicopter to a lonely watchtower, something she sees as boring and even demeaning. Will this movie feature her redemption or her destruction? Considering Sheridan's oeuvre, it's hard to predict.

Parallel to Hannah's predicament, we're introduced to Owen and his young son Connor fleeing Florida. Owen's shady work as a forensic accountant -- is that a real thing? -- has unearthed something dangerous in judicial offices, and now they've apparently hired assassins to take him out of the picture. Their cross-country trip takes them to Montana, where Owen plans to hide out with his brother; somehow the assassins know where he's headed and succeed in their mission. Partially. Connor escapes, meets Hannah, and their relationship blossoms.

Sort of. She's not exactly happy to have a kid around, and he's terrified of anyone and everyone around him. It doesn't help that the two assassins (played by a surprisingly scary duo of Aiden Gillen and Nicholas Hoult) are really good at their job. Target after target leads them closer to their prey until we find ourselves in a breakneck series of chases in a hellish wilderness: devilish assassins, walls of angry red flames, choking smoke and ash falling like snow, and of course injured heroes desperate to find sanctuary.

While I really enjoyed the film, more than once I found myself disappointed in what seemed to be unfocused storytelling. We jump around quickly and suddenly between a cast of characters that is a little too wide for such an otherwise streamlined primary arc. Owen's brother Ethan (Jon Bernthal) and his pregnant wife Allison (Medina Senghore, who deserved a movie unto herself for this role) get a little less than half the amount of screen time, and the film hops around even to the assassins with alarming frequency. The result is, to be fair, a more holistic view of the community, the work, the region, and the network of characters; it also sacrifices a lot of potentially significant character moments that would make these people as deep as Sheridan's usually are. In many ways, this felt more like adventure thrillers like The River Wild or even ensemble disaster movies like The Poseidon Adventure: a throwback that likes its actors more than its characters, and its conceit more than anything. I'm not mad about it, and if it proves the genre isn't dead yet, that's so much the better.

Things Heard and Seen (2021)

 Score: 3 / 5

The latest Gothic horror movie is a mixed and messy bag, but its complex delights often outweigh its tonal and thematic eccentricities. Things Heard and Seen, a title taken from Emanuel Swedenborg's eighteenth-century Latin book Heaven and its Wonders and Hell From Things Heard and Seen, manages to shallowly disturb during its early half before tilting into full dread as it reaches its climax. While the plot is never quite fresh, the way it's told is never less than interesting. The problem is that the film is so quiet, so moody and broody, and so filled with intangible ideas that it is utterly impossible to watch, understand, and appreciate with a phone in your hand. Or any other distractions, mind, which are sure to plague viewers watching this Netflix release in their living rooms.

When Catherine Clare, an art restorer in Manhattan, hears that her husband got a job teaching art history, you can start to see the cracks form in her otherwise ceramic face. Amanda Seyfried's wide eyes and stoic chin belie a psyche already on the verge of snapping, and our first experience of Catherine attempting to eat a single bite ends in her rushing to the toilet to purge. But her husband George, a handsome and sly James Norton, is eager to get started in what appears to be his dream job. Having toyed with creating art in his youth, he has now embraced his calling as a teacher, and so the couple and their daughter Franny move to a house further up the Hudson Valley.

The town is called Chosen and the school Saginaw, fictional in reality but filmed on location. The gray and tan color palette of the film make many scenes look like Hudson River school paintings and George Inness landscapes. Which is appropriate, as that is primarily what George teaches at the college. Or, rather, that's what he is purported to teach; we never see him successfully deliver a lecture. But we do see his conversations with his department chair Floyd DeBeers, and we hear from other faculty that George has developed a popular following amongst his students. George is different from the insular faculty, however, as revealed in his first dialogue with the chair: "I guess I'm a bit of a cliché, the New York cynic," says George to his department chair upon his arrival, "that how a painter as brilliant as Inness could fall for some 18th century mystic still baffles me." Floyd, played by an always delicious F. Murray Abraham, responds, "Well, Swedenborg wasn't just some mystic. He keenly understood that everything in the natural world has a counterpart in the spiritual realm. And Inness painted landscapes with this in mind." 

And suddenly, the horror creeps in. Not in any visceral sense, mind, but more like those meditative movies on the boundaries between life and death, memory and illusion (I thought more than once of The Little Stranger, A Ghost Story, and even The Others). "After all, we're in Headless Horseman country," says one of the locals, making me wish this film went a little more gonzo into the mysticism of the region. But Catherine experiences more than her fair share of bumps in the night. She follows ethereal lights around the house, smells fumes, hears creaks. She discovers strange relics like a family Bible that has damned deceased women, and a blood red ring. And, worst of all, she is sure a ghostly woman is trying to make contact.

A suddenly isolated Catherine is desperate to make her own community, rather than simply being grafted to George's new collegiate network, but runs into considerable hurdles. Ladies at the historical society whisper about her house, which is featured in a painting at the gallery. Two neighbors, the young Vayle brothers, swing by while Catherine is alone to offer their help, but it seems clear they have other intentions as well. And while Catherine's wide eyes and seeming determination to remain in the house might indicate a weak or masochistic woman, by the halfway point it is quite clear that she welcomes the haunting, hoping to bridge the divide and help the restless spirits if she can.

There is a bit of a hooking opening scene when George (we don't know he's George yet) drives up to a bleak farmhouse in 1980 and notices blood dripping from the garage ceiling; he hurries in to see his young daughter all alone. That's all we get, and there's no context before the film cuts back to the previous spring. Could the child be a murderer? Could the house be haunted? Could the mother be crazy? It's a cheap ploy at the beginning of any film, making us aware of impending doom without earning it, but here I'd say it doesn't hamstring us or infantilize us like in other movies. Because this picture takes quite a while to gain any semblance of momentum -- and because the flash-forward opening is a bit of a red herring -- I'd wager most viewers need some kind of hook so they know it's all going somewhere.

(Now entering spoiler territory!)
As is often the case in Gothic stories, the real horror of this film lies in its depiction of a nuclear family falling apart. George, for all his charm, is a narcissist and pathological liar, the archetypal man who makes his name through charisma and a keen ability to steal the accomplishments of others (The Wife, Big Eyes, and so many more). The reveal is painstakingly slow, but once you see his true nature -- first hinted when he flirts with a student -- it's hard to look away. His is the grand tradition of husbands who gaslight their wives in isolated, Romantic houses. His façade slowly breaks down, and by the climax of the film, he embarks on a terrifying (if contrived) spiral that leaves body after body strewn in his wake.

The joys of the film, apart from its somber pacing and deliberately evocative aesthetic, largely stem from Seyfried, who allows Catherine to slowly develop into a caring and sensitive woman who nevertheless cultivates her own furious righteousness. And while her conclusion is deeply frustrating to me (I felt similarly unsatisfied with the protagonist's end in Promising Young Woman), the aftermath of it here finally grants her the female security and community for which she has longed. It helps, too, that her burgeoning agency and volatility (Midsommar) makes her arc dynamic and her ending strong for people trying to poke holes in her flawed but admirable character. And then there's George's colleague Justine, an "adjunct weaving professor" played by Rhea Seehorn, who steals every scene and made me wish the movie featured her more. Then there's the end, which is about as consummate a work of art as you could ask for, though I would have preferred a film about the ties between art, life, and death to be a little more fleshed out before such a sudden and iconic finale.

Four Good Days (2021)

 Score: 4 / 5

In the tradition of parent-child trauma-dramas that has spiked in recent years, Four Good Days pits the unlikely duo of Glenn Close and Mila Kunis together in a battle of wits, heart, and drugs. It doesn't quite reach levels unseen in the sub-genre, and it hits pretty much all the predictable milestones until its climax. Even in that, it sacrifices plumbing the depths of dramatic insight in favor of a few didactic stingers and a frantic attempt at kinetic energy otherwise lacking from the film. But those are only really criticisms if you feel that these character dramas -- rather, vehicles for stars -- actually require a plot with momentum. The creators of Ben is Back certainly did.

And yet this movie is only typically like that picture, or the similar Beautiful Boy. The major difference is, obviously, that this movie centers on and almost exclusively considers two women in impossible circumstances. Molly (an almost unrecognizable Kunis) has been through rehab no fewer than fourteen times, and so when she shows up at her mother's doorstep, we can see the history of pain, mistrust, and evaporated love between the two. This is largely because Deb is played by Close, a master of single-look character studies, whose guarded stillness in contrast with the daughter's intoxicated mannerisms tell us chapters worth of backstory in moments. Deb gives Molly anything but a warm welcome, and the two clearly have an understood series of tough boundaries, no doubt due to prior problems with stealing and lying and endangerment.

Deb's heart, however, won't have it, and as Molly sleeps outside on the cold stones, her mother paces indoors and watches her. She wants to believe her daughter is serious about getting clean this time, just as Molly is desperate to get inside the house. In the morning, Deb gets her coffee and promptly takes her to a detox facility. They both know the routine a little too well, and it's all a bit cold. Deb certainly doesn't want to get her hopes up, but she senses something might be different this time. Is it only her weary, wishful thinking?

After three days in the facility, Deb picks up Molly and the doctor makes a shocking offer: an opioid antagonist. Essentially a monthly shot that will prevent Molly from getting high -- which begs the question from ignorant me, won't an addict still try and then overdose after not getting high? -- both Deb and Molly leap at the opportunity. Or at least, they dare to hope this might finally work. The doctor says that Molly must stay clean four more days; that will allow her body to prepare for the shot. Deb brings Molly home with her, and so begins the bulk of the film. It's a cat-and-mouse game of suspicious stares, tense conversations, and forced attempts at normalcy. Suitably hard to watch, the anxious energy the film taps into is firmly rooted in the maternal home, a strange domestic thriller without action but with a lot of heightened emotions and deadly consequences.

The screenplay by director Rodrigo Garcia and reporter Eli Saslow (who wrote the 2016 article that inspired this film), despite often engaging in brutal and honest discussions as well as situations, never quite manages to balance itself. Drifting from heavy-handed and sometimes groan-inducing symbols (an unfinished puzzle in the garage) to otherwise brilliant moments of unspoken tenderness (Deb is an esthetician and provides her services to her daughter in their most intimate scene), the movie only really works because of the dedication and remarkable skills of its cast. Close defies powerful urges to either hang her daughter out to dry or embrace her while knowing she'll pay for it. And Kunis really shows us her mettle as a serious actress, balancing desperation with manipulative ferocity and then shifting to psychological and bodily agony; her unexpected gentle moments hit with the same force as her feral scenes.

The powers of hope and love and perseverance are what make this movie so haunting, memorable, and important. And while that could be said of any of its ilk, at least this one gives us some Glenn Close to put in our eyes. For as long as your eyes aren't pooling with tears.

Profile (2021)

 Score: 2 / 5

Computer thrillers aren't for everyone, and yet the sub-sub-genre category keeps getting new entries. It makes sense that, in the age of digital connection, these movies would naturally grow out of the found footage tradition. And while we might have expected more of these during the recent pandemic (will we get more in the next half-year?), we were thankfully saved from the exacerbated horror of staring at Skype windows projected on large screens. And now we get Timur Bekmambetov's latest, a movie several years too late to be either timely or consequential, feeling like a half-baked idea turned into a half-baked movie. Its doughy makeup and comparative lack of thrills belie some really interesting and insightful ideas, and the final product left me feeling both unsatisfied and bloated.

An investigative journalist in London named Amy (Valerie Kane) creates a fake profile to attract ISIS recruiters. Her job is on the line -- one wonders exactly how she is supporting herself in her flat, with a dog, as her boss facetimes her at all hours -- and her relationship with Matt is equally rocky. Her boss and boyfriend seem to make demands on her she's not ready to fulfill, and for most of the movie the virtual temptations offered by her extremist liaison make sense to the viewer. He offers her money and stability, the promise of hot sex and a life of both passion and leisure, and of course the kind of fulfillment an awkward outsider like her craves. Well, at least, the version of her she's projecting through her profile. (Get it? Because that's the title of the movie!)

But her recruiter, Bilel (a seductive Shazad Latif), makes his own demands. In their earliest chats, he ensures she always wears a head scarf. He uses cats and kittens to lure Amy in, while decrying dogs as dirty and morally corrupt animals. He pressures her constantly to come to Syria with him and marry him, even to the extent of performing a marriage ceremony via Skype. His charm leaves little to the imagination, and over the course of their roughly month-long Skyping romance, we see Amy fall a little too quickly in love with him. She's not the hard-boiled, world-weary investigator we're used to seeing, which might be why she hasn't yet been hired as a full-time writer. Granted, he's also groomed and styled to be more alluring to Western eyes; perhaps the terrorist recruiters are in real life, but it's hard not to suspect the film of propagating stereotypes of brown people in the exotic Middle East.

She's uncannily incompetent, slipping up in just about every way we can see. It's a dangerous gambit for the filmmakers, placing the weight of the film on an unlikable and often stupid protagonist. She happily shares her screen with the invasive recruiter-slash-paramour. She repeats the truth about her actual real-life location. She shares names of people in her circle. When she gets flustered or shocked and doesn't know what to say, she simply ends the Skype call. "We got disconnected," she says, as if the past year hasn't taught us all not to believe that vague excuse. And yet, that Bilel still manages to hook her (and yes, she is emotionally insane enough to actually fall in love with a violent stranger online) says a lot about, well, everyone in this movie.

Despite the horrific representations of humans in the film, Bekmambetov's direction manages to do some interesting things, much as he has done in other films like Wanted and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. His ability to evoke panic and dread is on full display here; we can sense Amy's hesitation and even incompetence in her absence, when we're stuck on a screen with Bilel calling or in a video chat with him as her boss and/or boyfriend blow up her chat box. That said, I should also note something that may or may not have been intentional: while this is no horror film, anyone with anxiety or OCD should approach with caution. Amy has so many bloody windows up on her desktop at any given time that I constantly felt sick. Texts, Skype messages and calls, facetime windows, web browsers (with multiple tabs), and her own file explorer (with a ridiculous amount of downloads) all cover a desktop with absolutely no organization at all. It's an exercise in exactly how not to manage your own computer, especially for someone whose job is to investigate, report, and even go undercover. How she manages to pay her own rent is a feat worthy of accolades.

Moreover, there is little to no actual thrill element to the film, and it is here that it irredeemably falters. By the end, when (spoiler alert, in case you're incapable of seeing where this might be going) Amy backs out of flying to Bilel, she begins to rightfully fear for her life. But, as the plot finally gets to its most thrilling and potentially terrifying climax, it ends. There is no clear understanding that Amy's story was successful. There is no payoff with Amy and her boyfriend or boss. There isn't even a clear way to determine whether she survives.

Perhaps that's the point, and perhaps that's even the way the supposedly true-to-life story panned out, but it makes all the preceding action and ideas thematically irrelevant and all the plot inconsequential. This movie would have been terrifying if it had a better ending...and if it had been released three or more years ago.

Spiral (2021)

Score: 2.5 / 5

Right around the halfway point of this movie, I started feeling a little sick. Not because of the graphic violence, which of course makes anyone squeamish, nor because of the sadistic bent of movies in this franchise. But a gnawing, churning sensation gripped me somewhere below my heart but above my diaphragm. It bothered me to distraction, ringing in my ear like a cold, hard steel cage that wouldn't stop rattling. And right around the time the movie tipped inevitably to its second act, I recognized the feeling all too well: knobbly, gnarled disappointment.

Spiral looked like something new. Sure, it's a spin-off of one of the most recognizable franchises in the last two decades, but between its stars, late date, and effective marketing campaign, I was sure this would shed new lights on a long-dead franchise. Frankly, I hated all of the Saw series after the first three, and even the third teetered on the edge of my disdain; the first is a work of pure genius, while the second is a fun extension of its concepts. But Spiral, subtitled "From the Book of Saw" told me that, while it would concern a serial killer copycat, it would bear little direct resemblance to the earlier films. But this new installment features no novelty, no ingenuity, and most damningly, no relevance to 2021.

It begins with, yes, a deadly trap. After chasing a robber into the subway system, a cop is strung up by his tongue, forced to choose to rip it out or be splattered by the oncoming train. His demise brings detectives Zeke Banks (Chris Rock) and William Schenk (Max Minghella), newly assigned partners, to the scene, and they discover almost immediately that it's the work of a Jigsaw copycat. The killer is smart -- despite his robed and hooded pig costume that tempts me with the moniker "Pigsaw" -- and apparently seeks to torment Banks with his history of internal affairs problems at the precinct. The killer picks out corrupt cops one by one, pretending to teach them lessons by "playing a game" with them, as we know full well. Few survive, and all suffer.

As goes with this franchise, we are trained to suspect the unexpected (which is to say, expected) suspects. Could it be the captain (Marisol Nichols), whose badass role as the only female in command might have murderous underpinnings? Could it be the new partner, who clearly feels the tension with his new, unwilling partner? Could it be Banks's father Marcus (Samuel L. Jackson), who gets pulled into the fevered hunt? Or could it be Banks himself, who grows increasingly eccentric as the case spirals inward? Whoever it is, Banks needs to work quickly, especially after his partner is skinned alive and his father goes missing. The problem for me is that nothing about these characters is very compelling. They're all only so much meat, ultimately, and the film treats them as such before they get sucked into the inevitable meat grinder.

Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, even the film's signature traps -- torture devices intended to symbolically and literally reshape their victims -- aren't that interesting. Not that I really liked the gore-porn tendencies of this series (besides the first film), but at least some of the installments embraced the absurdity of horror its creators imagined. Here, we have fairly generic traps that, while effective in making viewers cringe, feel more nihilistic in their determination to kill rather than teach. Then again, in some ways, I felt more invested in this movie because the traps weren't, writ large, a Grand Guignol splatterfest; they were more grounded and realistic, so I wasn't consistently taken out of the moment.

Mostly, I am disappointed because of what the film could have been, based on the marketing and casting. The film flirts with raising really interesting questions about police corruption and brutality, about people of color in policing roles, about the brutality of social pressures on law enforcement and the cruel extremes to which cops can fall. But the movie never invests any time -- or even intelligent conversation -- to any of these ideas. Every time I wondered if the thematic stakes would drive home, we're jolted into another laughably strange flashback with Jackson and his team, cheated out of yet another hope for timeliness. Even Rock, who is talented at bridging the gap between humor and horror here, can't save his scenes, though he tries desperately to dig his heels in as a world-weary detective on the edge of propriety. It's worth a watch, but not much more than that.

Voyagers (2021)

 Score: 1.5 / 5

In the near future, as the sci-fi tropes go, Earth will become uninhabitable. Scientists discover, in the nick of time, another planet for humans to colonize, and sends a team to set up the initial community. Unfortunately, the trip to this new planet takes 86 years, and so the team of young adults will probably never see it. Rather, the mission is for them to maintain the ship, procreate, and die in space, with the goal that their grandchildren will be the first generation on the new Earth. Not necessarily a groundbreaking concept, it nevertheless opened a wide berth of storytelling opportunities, and in the first 20 minutes or so, I had no idea where this movie was going.

And it chooses one of the more interesting options available to it: Lord of the Flies in space, with attractive young people grappling with their sexual awakenings. The kiddos -- chief of whom are Tye Sheridan, Lily-Rose Depp, and Fionn Whitehead -- begin to fear that some ghostly alien creature is stalking the ship after some mysterious noises rock the ship and a suspicious, violent death rocks their fragile equilibria. Then they learn that "the blue," a drink they are ordered to imbibe daily, is not just a vitamin supplement but a suppressant of hormonal extremes and negative emotional outbursts. As teens will do, they rebel, embracing their adolescence in all its messy manifestations. Breaking free of their routine duties on board, they abuse their food supply, destroy valuable equipment, sacrifice their health, and decide to ignore their mission.

Well, most of them, that is. Colin Farrell -- the only redeeming part of this movie for me -- is the only adult on board, a tender, father-figure who has crucially connected with these young people and who embarked on this voyage knowing full well he'd only live for about half of it. And, bless him, he doesn't make it far at all. His loss affects all the kid-astronauts, who split into factions of idealism and hedonism and, you guessed it, the hedonists are more numerous. The middle of this movie devolves into montages of horny, rageful kiddos embracing their natural sensations as if life itself is a hallucinatory drug; swirling cameras and expressionistic lighting make the trip, well, trippy, and it's easy to get annoyed with all the bad decisions they're all making.

Because everyone is making terrible choices here, even behind the scenes. If this movie had gone full Lord of the Flies, I could have loved it, especially with a nice twist or two like focusing on the intelligent and least-cringey character played by Miss Depp. Instead, there is a sharp dichotomy between the two men, one angry and brutish, the other level-headed and quite boring. Attempts at violence and horror become washed out in sensory overload, and there is a sharper focus on teenage angst and appeal than on anything resembling character development, thematic complexity, or even anything but a rote plot. There's no real horror, other than what kids are capable of doing, and the strong thrust of vindication for their actions from the filmmaker's perspective makes the whole affair dangerously immature.

Colin Farrell should have blasted those kids into space and set up a new world all on his own.

In the Earth (2021)

 Score: 3.5 / 5

Ben Wheatley is back, baby! After his disastrous attempt at mainstream fare in Rebecca on Netflix, Wheatley returns to the form he has perfected. That's not to say it's perfect, and generally speaking his aesthetic isn't my cuppa, but its peculiarities mark it as canon among the filmmaker's signature works like Kill List and High-Rise. Wheatley movies are seemingly made for my people: artsy-farsty weirdos who, in the middle of the week, like watching challenging and often unsatisfying films in small, intimate groups while the wine is flowing; discussion may follow, but probably won't bypass the "and what the heck was that moment about?" commentary. It's the midnight arthouse kind of earned pretentiousness that I find dazzling only when it's about something horrific. Like In the Earth. 

Despite a relative lack of scares, Wheatley's latest might be one of his more accessible genre films. It's certainly his timeliest. Dr. Martin Lowery (played by an effectively miserable Joel Fry) is on a mission in a world gone awry. As a deadly pandemic rages, forcing people to learn how to live with it, he journeys to a remote government outpost in a dense forest. Meeting up with park ranger Alma (Ellora Torchia), the two embark on a two-day trek to find Dr. Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires), who has been missing for months after turning off her radio. Wendle has been working with fungi and plants to improve crop growth, and has theorized that the natural world is sentient and communicates through a psychic network of roots and spores.

Before you start counting, I'll start. The references here abound, and it's easy to get distracted. Apocalyptic plants? The Happening. A journey into rural crazyville? Heart of Darkness. A mysterious monolith that might be sentient? 2001: A Space Odyssey. Shocking brutality and anguish in a world devoid of rationality or morality? Take your pick, but The Texas Chain Saw Massacre isn't a far cry. Wheatley knows how to make an effective, low-budget movie that feels expensive, and gloomy forests that just might be the home of supernatural horrors is right up his alley. From these examples, you pretty much know what's going to happen, but that doesn't stop you from giving in to this movie's hypnotic seduction.

Apart from plenty of kaleidoscopic hallucinations -- which we are made to experience along with the characters -- there isn't too much chaos in this film. An otherwise linear story is layered thickly with references, themes, and ideas that individually would make interesting movies but altogether make a muddy sort of fever dream. Possibilities, in Wheatley flicks, tend to matter more than reality, and impressions matter more than expressions. Discussions range from the scientific use of death (fungus) to increase life (crops) to the effect of the Malleus Maleficarum on Western civilization, and if that doesn't prime your head for a wild trip, you're probably already on shrooms.

Of course the woodland trek goes badly, but then it gets worse. And worse again. And bad things keep happening. There's a hostage situation with a wackadoo hermit, there's a prolonged chase, and there's some particularly gory dismemberment. There's a hazmat suit and there's white ceremonial robes, there's a bow and arrow and an axe (and a very dangerous hook). There's pre-Christian folklore, lots of blood, and an obsession with rounded openings (eyes, wounds, holes). There's speakers and strobe lights in the middle of the woods, and there's a fog of spores that rings a clearing. What do we make of all this? I guess it doesn't much matter, because that's Wheatley's job. More than once I was reminded of the 1979 Soviet film Stalker, mostly because of the weird mixture of psychology and science fiction in the woods, but Wheatley seemed to want to do it with something like Leatherface as the titular stalker.

And when they do finally find Dr. Wendle, she's about as terrifying as anything you might expect, clearly unhinged but confined under respectable layers of purpose and education and civility. She delivers some intense exposition in terms of character -- regarding her past relationships with both Martin and the batshit crazy, violent hermit Zach (Reece Shearsmith) -- and in terms of theme and plot, as she reveals that her research has bent away from agriculture and toward an eldritch guardian of the woods. Science, after all, is just the modern verbiage for magic. And when you see the unholy but very interesting experiments Wendle is enacting, it's easy to feel, for even the briefest of moments, that she might be onto something real. After the last year of our lives, aren't we all a bit desperate to try anything if it helps us all reconnect? Remember the joy we felt last spring when we saw images and read data about nature healing itself as we all locked down? Shouldn't we still yearn for that?

There's a bit of a bloodbath climax, which is nice, but then the movie just sort of ends. Leave it to Wheatley to make us scramble for comprehension and meaning after throwing so much at us, but I confess to hoping for a bit more cohesion. If the various and varied elements of this movie fit together, it's largely without clear logic or connections; that's okay, but it does leave one feeling distinctly unsatisfied. Then again, why should we feel satisfied in a movie -- in a world -- so messed up that even looking for answers will leave you brutalized, bewildered, and ultimately lost in the woods?

Justice League (2021)

 Score: 5 / 5

It's the superhero movie event of our lives. Well, single event, as the final Avengers movies (as of this date) were split. It's the sort of gloriously indulgent, remarkably unsentimental, utterly transporting film that epics are made of. This is the new Ben-Hur or Ten Commandments, a continuous and almost unbearably lengthy drama that, while rooted in emotional and spiritual journeys, takes us to worlds we've never seen but now can clearly imagine. Four hours of graphic novel -- and characters of myth -- beautifully rendered in a sqaure (4:3-ish) aspect ratio that looks like panels of a comic book. Seen in IMAX, I can only imagine the transcendent sensation it provokes. And now all I want to do is see it in IMAX, preferably with an intermission.

There's a lot to be said about the road to this movie, and how it's been released, and why it exists at all, but there are far too many others talking about that. There's equally tons to be said about the implications of releasing auteurist visions like this, bucking studio trends, and even caving to mass fanbase pressure. Think of the collapse of the BBC's Sherlock, amongst others, and the revelation of Zack Snyder's newest film feels miraculous. But that's also a discussion for other people and places and times. But it bears noting that I certainly hope the supposed five-film arc Snyder had planned will come to pass with the success of this film. It leaves a lot to hope for, and I for one would be severely crushed if the majesty of this picture ended with itself.

But what of the movie itself? When compared to the 2017 theatrical version, clearly pumped out after Snyder's exit by a desperate studio and a particular director whose antics and style can be criticized elsewhere, this version is a wholly different film. I don't want to say "superior in every way," but it comes damn close to that dangerous descriptor. While I missed some of the awkward humor and forced action of the other Justice League, this one is consistently more organic even as it gives in to its superficial facade, perfecting the beautiful tableaus of battle and spectacle, and giving time and money to its computer-generated imagery. Its villains -- yes, now there are two! -- are gorgeous and tactile; its action sequences are the sort of balls-out insanity we expect from Snyder; its heroes are respected, even revered, rather than crudely used for cheap humor and cheers.

And while I liked the 2017 Justice League more than many others at the time of its release, this movie slapped me right in my opinions time and again upon my first viewing. Upon subsequent viewings (I've seen it now four times) I appreciate its marriage of subtlety and grandiosity more, its appreciation of delicate character development, its exquisite attention to detail and beauty, and its, well, Snyderisms. He's not a director I ever really valued much, and I probably still won't going forward, but I have to say his interpretation and vision for a DC movie universe will remain a favorite franchise of mine for a long time.

A consummate comic book movie, this Justice League is split into seven parts, each with titles and each feeling somewhat self-contained. Given the aspect ratio and digital artwork, and the rumors that this was meant to be a miniseries, I have to wonder if this was intentional, to evoke the serial editions of new comics. The action is easier to follow than in most similar genre movies, thankfully, and while some may still decry Snyder's comparative lack of humor, the deadpan quips and absurdism Snyder injects into this masterpiece makes the marathon sparkle with wit. Whereas many films of this ilk (MCU, I'm looking at you) exist to feed viewers exactly what they know they want, generating money without earning it and digging their studios deeper into fan loyalty hell, this movie is a unique vision by an unexpected auteur, who holds fast to his expression (feverishly radical as it is) despite clear and tempting opportunities not to.

All its characters are here, finally, given balanced screen time with strong individual arcs. Specifically, I needed more from Cyborg and this movie totally delivers. It also gives us Martian Manhunter, which heaven knows I pray we'll get to see in future films. And while the plot is essentially the same, now it feels earned and organic rather than forced and rushed. Moreover, plot is not what's driving this movie, something more superhero flicks would do well to emulate. It's worth noting, too, that both James Wan and Patty Jenkins have been quoted as basing their movies off Snyder's movie, not Whedon's. So what happens in this new movie is, really, the only thing that happens in this movie universe.

But I came, I stayed, and I will not stop preaching about the style here. Sure, the film is as fragmented as any superhero movie, and sure, it consistently skews left of expectations. It's so large and loud and busy that it makes even the wonderful and bloated Batman v Superman feel simple and sweet (and I loved the extended cut of that movie). It's a rush of pop art, with music and imagery and video games on its mind. It's fabulously excessive and gloriously escapist and troublingly incisive into the often unspoken psyche of superheroes. And it's the most -- well, it's the most. I love it. And now I think I'll go watch it again.