Cobweb (2023)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Eight-year-old Peter is shy and bullied and at risk. Thankfully, his substitute teacher notices and tries to take him under her wing, but his emotionally distant parents put a firm stop to that. With Halloween approaching, Peter -- who many kids but especially queer and neurodivergent kids would relate to -- wants to celebrate and go trick-or-treating, but his parents won't let him. They say a young girl disappeared on Halloween once, and they don't want Peter to be in similar danger. But staying at home hardly seems pleasant with those two demanding, disconnected parental figures. And Peter has been hearing knocking in the wall of his bedroom, taps accompanied by the voice of a young girl, who claims to have been trapped in the walls by Peter's "evil" parents.

Scared yet? You should be. There's not a lot of terribly original material in Samuel Bodin's directorial debut, Cobweb, but it's a fabulously fun time and a suitably spooky addition to anyone's Halloween horror roster. Think something along the lines of The People Under the Stairs and The Babadook and you'll appreciate the heavily stylized horror of this film along with its layers of psychological complexity. We may not talk about Bruno, but this voice in the walls is the stuff of nightmares. The more she sympathizes with Peter and builds rapport with him, the more he acts out and upsets his parents. Then Peter's bullies are brutally attacked by, well, whoever belongs to the voice. Is she his guardian angel, or a monstrous fiend looking to break in to the house?

It doesn't always matter, in this film, as our focus is tightly drawn on Peter (Woody Norman) and his psyche as he weighs the value of the various people in his life. The aptly named Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman) tries to help him, but she's repeatedly hindered by his parents Mark and Carol (Antony Starr and Lizzy Caplan) doing their brilliantly understated creepy thing at every turn. Their dynamic makes up the bulk of the film, interspersed with nasty sequences of people getting their comeuppance for interfering in this insular family's affairs. There aren't a ton of jump scares, but the few that exist are inspired and chilling, earned by their raw, low-budget creativity. It helps that Bodin's atmosphere, helped by grim production design and showstopping cinematography by Philip Lozano, is not unlike that within a haunted house. A real one, not a carnival attraction. For the most part.

Its plot is simple even if there always seems to be something happening. The film is an exercise in misdirection; one might think that Hitchcock would have made something like this had he survived this long and gotten a taste for the "maybe supernatural, maybe psychological" horror so popular in recent years. As its title suggests, it's as though the writer (who also wrote the unspeakable 2022 requel Texas Chainsaw Massacre) tossed several ideas onto a web before deciding all the dangly bits made for good ambiance. There's an intentionally off-putting stilt to most of the dialogue, especially from the parents, which makes the proceedings unnerving because it's all so unnatural, and this is a rare occasion when that effect enhances the film rather than detracts from it. By about the halfway point, it becomes clear what's really going on in Peter's house, but by then we're more than ready for the scary showdown we've been promised. And while it won't be to everyone's liking, if you let yourself get on Cobweb's odd wavelength, it'll creep its way under your skin, too.

Infinity Pool (2023)

Score: 2 / 5

Brandon Cronenberg only has three films under his directorial belt, and each is fascinating and haunting. Not in the same ways as his father David's films, though: perhaps Brandon's are so memorable because they are distinctive, unique, and arrestingly confident. His slow, deliberate pacing and far-outside-the-box ideas reveal a young filmmaker who knows exactly what he's doing in the realm of sci-fi horror and has the balls and clout to deliver on his every whim. As David's movies get more abstract and weird -- just look at Crimes of the Future -- Brandon seems to be pushing the boundaries on what can be realistically achieved on screen. If you've seen his Possessor, one of the great hidden gems of 2020, you know exactly what I mean.

Infinity Pool starts with an author, James Foster (Alexander Skarsgard) and his wife (Cleopatra Coleman) on vacation at a resort in a fictional country. James needs inspiration to get past his writer's block, which he's had for six years since his first book was published. The couple doesn't seem particularly happy -- one wonders if their relationship is strained due to his inability to work, and then what exactly they do for work anyway that allows them luxurious trips like this -- and it only gets worse when a pushy young thing starts interloping. Gabi (Mia Goth) approaches James and reveals that she's a big fan of his first novel; she and her partner persuade the Fosters to join them for a countryside cruise the next day, despite strict resort rules to stay on the premises.

There's a beachside indiscretion between the forceful Gabi and willfully submissive James, who seems enamored of the attention (both literary and sexual). There is a lot of drinking. And that night, on the way back to the resort, James accidentally hits and kills a local man. They get to the resort panicked but needing sleep to process what happened; they are awoken by the police and taken in for questioning. The police chief explains that their country metes justice for murder by allowing the victim's son to kill the criminal. However -- and this is where things get really interesting -- surely due to the high tourism in the area, they offer a way out of this fate: the extremely wealthy can pay to have a proxy killed in their place. And not just any proxy. The country can clone you, and your clone will be murdered in your place.

It's a fascinating angle on the disgusting privilege of the wealthy to sidestep consequences for their sins, yes, but it also creates a shockingly fresh idea in making us wonder what happens to a person who must watch their own murder. Is his guilt or shame displaced onto the clone? Does one's clone's death increase his guilt, in that yet another living thing has died from his actions? How can one be sure it's the clone getting murdered or the clone watching?

For James, it turns out, the death of his clone seems to remove any morality he still had. Gabi and a group of her friends at the resort -- we're never really clear about their relationship, except that they're all wealthy, cruel, and criminal -- act the same way, and seduce James into leaning into his violent desires. Since they can buy their way out of justice, they get grossly intoxicated and commit heinous crimes of vandalism, theft, kidnapping, torture, rape, and murder. James's wife, horrified, leaves. James, however, stays, seemingly becoming a Dorian Gray of sorts and seeking to do as much sin while he's able to do it in this exotic and forgiving place. Is it only our fear of consequences that stops us from giving in to these hedonistic and violent impulses? Cronenberg seems to think so, and most of this film chronicles James's free fall into evil.

And, without spoiling anything else, that's probably why I'll never watch this movie again. It's visually arresting and beautifully constructed. It's also one of a very few movies that disturbed me to a point I can't come back from. Inasmuch as Cronenberg seems intent to explore the nature of evil, or perhaps the evils of the privileged, I can't help but feel that this film is content to wallow in that evil. Its perverse delight in unapologetic, pornographic violence feels like an unholy crossover between The White Lotus and Hostel, which probably sounds more exciting than I mean it to. I'd compare this movie tonally to Funny Games but utterly devoid of the bleak comedy that movie tries to maximize. And, for me at least, it's just not something I want to experience again; I needed a shower minutes after getting home after the screening, and I still felt icky all night.