Relic (2020)

Score: 4.5 / 5

The camera slowly zooms in on an urn, illuminated on a mantel by pulsing multicolored lights. Death has visited this house before we know anything about it, and not even the nostalgic, warm glow of Christmas can deny the macabre chill we feel right away. Suddenly cutting to half a year later, we learn through exposition that the urn contains the ashes of Edna's husband. The elderly widow recently disappeared from her remote country home in Australia, so we join her daughter Kay and granddaughter Sam as they travel from Melbourne to the home. The house is locked from the inside, but there's no sign of granny here; the camera lingers over dusty household artifacts, a stained-glass window, waxy residue from Edna's candle making, relics of her life that seem to be housed in a dusty, tenebrous museum.

The first act of Relic works incredibly hard and indelibly well at evoking foreboding, an aesthetic choice increasingly popular in horror movies these days. The thick atmosphere of this Gothic house serves as a grim backdrop to the family drama that is all too familiar. Edna appears to be suffering from dementia. Sticky notes litter the house with sometimes functional, sometimes cryptic notes: one demands, "DON'T FOLLOW IT" a la Amityville, and it proves the apparent bewilderment of a disintegrating mind. Kay tells the police about the prior Christmas when Edna flooded the house, about lapses in memory, about the hoarding in her bedroom; the police search the woods and find nothing. Meanwhile, Kay is disturbed by the bowl of rotting fruit on the table and the spots of black mold all over the house.

When Edna suddenly appears in the kitchen, the movie shifts from a chilly creeper to a slow burn. The dynamics of these leading women propel us through act two: the three generations living under the same roof reveal certain strains and affections that are not always what we expect. Edna (Robyn Nevin) was clearly a proud and strong woman -- still is, at least emotionally -- and it seems to have somewhat alienated her daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer) even as it has endeared the distanced and less scarred Sam (Bella Heathcote). Concerned for Edna's well-being, Kay and Sam elect to stay for a time, even as it already apparent to us that Edna needs to be placed in assisted living. Kay must know better though, and even looking at potential new homes for her mother is exhausting and apparently shameful. She's in for a long, tough trial of willpower. Anyone who has lived with or cared for someone with dementia or Alzheimer's knows, and will surely connect instantly with this movie's shorthand for the deeply troubling issues that ensue. For example, Edna seems occasionally frightened, saying the house seems larger and unfamiliar since her husband's death, exactly the sensation described by many a widow or widower.

Of course, being a horror movie, the real horror is buttressed and contrasted with a secondary horror, and it is around the halfway mark that we realize there may be a more sentient malevolence in this house than dementia. What's endlessly fascinating about Relic, though, is the lengths to which it refuses to give solid answers or explanations about the supernatural elements at work here, or even if anything paranormal is happening at all. First-time feature film director Natalie Erika James increasingly allows for the weird to happen, but there's no concrete evidence for any of it; paired as it is with a story of mental illness and aging, the film staunchly frustrates arguments to define the haunting. She suggests a demonic or ghostly presence, even showing it once quite clearly, even as our perspective begins to warp like Edna's has. By the third act, we are as lost as the three women in the labyrinthine hallways of this house that grows and shrinks, twists and turns beyond rationality, time, or space.

Is it real? Definitely, if by "real" we mean consequential for the characters and for our own experience. An inciting incident is teased at one point, suggesting that an unhinged great-grandfather's cottage on the property may have transferred madness (or more literal demons) to the house via the stained-glass window; I took this to symbolize the past returning to haunt the present rather than a portal for spirits, but I suppose that's up for interpretation. The problem is that if you want to lean into the ghostly side of things, you'll wind up horribly frustrated. Though James -- no doubt influenced by her Japanese heritage -- leans heavily into J-horror tropes of a rotting house and sickly, pallid bodies in a shadowy void, there are precious few scares until the surprisingly violent climax of this movie. The plot never really amounts to much here, but the character drama spins suddenly into psychological horror when the house comes alive, more or less claiming what is left of Edna and turning the finale into a home invasion thriller that had a baby with spiritual possession.

It might be difficult to swallow on purely psychological terms, but emotionally, even the finale feeds into the allegory, spectacularly dramatizing the violence and cruelty these degenerative mental illnesses cause on those we love the most. And somewhere between the emotional gut-punches, uncompromisingly beautiful and cerebral aesthetic, and downright terrifying revelations, Relic is one of the most surprising and satisfying movies this year. Hopefully it manages to reach a wider market -- it helps, surely, that Jake Gyllenhaal and the Russo brothers produced it -- so that James can make more amazing movies!

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017)

Score: 4.5 / 5

For those of us who haven't always been DC fans but who found this summer's Wonder Woman to be phenomenal, this new film serves to increase our appreciation and love of the character. But before you take the kids to enjoy this real-life origin story, you may want to read up on your history. Or at least double-check the title.

William Moulton Marston, the American psychologist who created Wonder Woman, was inspired by not one but two women to create the Amazon goddess superhero. One was his wife, attorney and fellow psychologist Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and together they created a prototype for the first lie detector test. The other, Olive Byrne, defies strict description, as she graduated from student to assistant to lover of both Marston spouses. Their work together challenged not only scientific and academic tradition, but defied normative sexual and marital dynamics we still have today.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, as a no doubt fictionalized and dramatized account of their life stories, falls invariably into familiar biopic patterns. Their work leads to their love, their love is questioned and threatened by outsiders, and their lives ultimately transcend the bigotry and traditions of their community. The film succeeds exactly in this: its subject matter can't be so easily tied down by genre conventions. Its radical feminism (Marston himself would be a fascinating psychological study of a radical feminist straight man) and surprisingly sympathetic portrayal of polyamory and fetishes make this flick the most interesting and empowering biopic I've seen in years.

In an age of salacious scandals and voyeuristic sexual psychodrama, the human heart is often forsaken in favor of other organs located south of the equator. Not so in director Angela Robinson's movie, where the erotic exploits of its leading characters are so much a part of who they are that each sex scene is effectively riveting character growth. In many ways, that makes it even sexier than, for example, any scene where Mr. Grey and Anastasia Steele do the nasty in Fifty Shades, though at a glance motifs of bondage and polyamory would beg otherwise.

Bella Heathcote is mostly forgettable as third-wheel ingenue Olive Byrne, the wide-eyed student whose assistance to the Marstons extends beyond the "vanilla". Luke Evans delivers a fascinating performance as an especially difficult character. He is not the piggish frat boy who gets turned on by two women making love; he is a radical feminist who experiments on his psychoanalytic ideas -- immorally, arguably -- with his livelihood and marriage in the balance. He is never afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve, and his bare emotional state allows him to be frank and honest, even to a fault. But Rebecca Hall is the real MVP of this flick. She exudes a violent type of vulnerability I found at once hauntingly absorbing and a little too familiar. Encouraging her husband to adulterate and almost immediately harassing the object of his desire with threats, she defies simple description or clear motivation. She is a woman far ahead of her time but still in love with love, though perhaps in ways not socially acceptable at the time. Which is to say, of course, still not socially acceptable, despite some declarations that our culture is sexually free. This movie is far more timely than simply cohabiting 2017 with June's blockbuster.

IMDb: Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

The Neon Demon (2016)

Score: 4.5 / 5

If you haven't seen or appreciated Nicolas Winding Refn's other films (Drive, Only God Forgives, Valhalla Rising), don't even go near this one. It's typical of his work, and also a more visceral experience; I've said often before that Refn's films are examples of film as an experience. As we expect from him, The Neon Demon has little real plot, ill-defined characters, and a lack of anything you would want from a summer blockbuster.

What we have instead is a film with little dialogue (which is often pulpy and thin, if not a little forced) but so much style it almost hurts to watch. We are absorbed into the chaotic melodrama of Jesse, a young aspiring model who yearns for success and fame, and her world of superficial camaraderie and cutthroat competition. In many ways, this is an even more surrealist Black Swan, substituting the dancers of the latter with models and photographers. As Jesse (Elle Fanning) climbs the ladder, she sidesteps and flatters her superiors until, eventually, she overcomes them and turns into a goddess of her own world. Her success, of course, provokes attack from the natural world, her community, and even her colleagues.

And as the film turns to its inevitable conclusion, Refn does something very sly: Whereas the beginning of the film featured more abstract images and dynamic visual spectacle, the climax (traditionally shown through more kinetic cinematography) is where Refn stills his eye, allowing the audience to ground ourselves in very real, graphic immediacy. Of course, the actual images he's filming are still surreal, which makes our experience of the end that much more bewildering and infuriating. In a good way.

It's a seductive story of hunger. We might ordinarily call it a "coming of age" plotline, but here we follow a young girl who is more vain than she pretends and who deludes herself into thinking she has more control of her destiny than she really does. She absorbs praise, and we see her blossom from a weak little flower to a champion and predator. Her little compromises build up into bridges she subsequently burns. By the end of her dark and distinctly unromantic narrative, rather than Jesse achieving her dreams, we see those dreams literally come to consume her. We see her colleagues, cougars and wolves, no less voracious in their own right, ever circling and longing to partake of her success and her flesh. As the dream sequences meld with the action sequences, we are held captive in a nightmarish netherworld of strobe lights and vibrant colors that sometimes look like a Kubrick or Lynch film and sometimes look like Tron. But there is nothing silly about the film, and its final scene packs a powerful punch.

IMDb: The Neon Demon

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016)

Score: 3.5 / 5

I'll say a few things right off the bat. I loved this movie. I loved Seth Grahame-Smith's book. I love mashing genres together. I love the cheeky, naughty, silly awesomeness of this kind of artwork. I'm not a fan of much comedy in general, but this is exactly the sort of sassy, irreverent humor I crave. It's why I play few video games other than the Lego actions games of popular franchises. It's why I loved Cowboys and Aliens. It's why I'm crazy about Grahame-Smith's other books.

For those of you who may not know, or are too lazy to guess, the film is essentially (very essentially) the plot of Jane Austen's classic romance with the added element of brain-eating zombies taking over 19th-century England. That's it. Very simple. From what I've read and heard, a lot of viewers felt let down by the movie because it's not as high-brow as they were expecting. To be fair, the book is a conceptual coup, with Grahame-Smith pirating large sections of Austen's work (never fear, she is credited with co-authorship), mimicking her style in others, and wholly inventing new horror in still more. The film, by nature as a film, can't do the same; what it does do is take the concept and adapt it to a more or less straightforward action/horror film while retaining the romance, drama, and vicious wordplay of Austen's classic.

Much like the recent adaptation of another Grahame-Smith book -- Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter -- this film takes great liberties with the source material. Though this one is directed by Burr Steers (17 Again, Igby Goes Down) and not Tim Burton, it's still a notably more Gothic vision than I expected, littered with bodies and smeared in gore. A leather-clad and moody Darcy, played by Sam Riley pretending to be Hugh Jackman a la Van Helsing (2004), leads the battle against the undead, while the silly, corseted Bennet sisters avoid their mother's schemes to marry them off. When newcomer Mr. Bingley (the handsome Douglas Booth) throws a ball and zombies invade the kitchens, the sisters seize the moment to show the villagers their fearsome prowess as masters of the sword.

Not long after, we begin to see that the sisters -- actually, pretty much just Elizabeth -- is no less a master of propriety and conversation than with a blade. In perhaps the most effective scenes of the film, the direct confrontations between Darcy and Liz and later Lady Catherine and Liz, our young hero thrusts and parries both her body and her words in fearsome combat that is at once outrageously funny and terrifyingly violent. Bravo to Lily James (Downton Abbey, Cinderella) for mastering the material. The other two perfectly cast actors, to my mind, would be Charles Dance as the Gothic version of Mr. Bennet, and Matt Smith, as the silly and stupid Mr. Collins (though, regrettably, his end in the film is nothing like in the novel, a scene I was particularly anticipating).

The film begins to falter, however, when it tries to make larger departures from the source material and, in doing, takes itself far too seriously. The siege of London, the escape over the bridge, the fairytale ending, and the weird mid-credits wannabe cliffhanger all point to a design that seeks to fashion a blockbuster franchise. The filmmakers should have left well enough alone and made the film the material deserves. For the most part they did, but it's in those final scenes that they were obviously trying too hard and grasping for handholds beyond their reach.

But, then, the film itself says, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains."

IMDb: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies