Arcadian (2024)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Post-apocalyptic horror might be tiring out, but that doesn't mean there aren't still new titles worth watching. Arcadian adds almost nothing new to the subgenre, yet it still manages to feel fresh, relevant, and inspired in most of its choices. Released this past spring with almost no fanfare, this ferocious and evocative little gem of a survival horror action movie metafictionally contemplates its own place in our ever-changing world of gods and monsters.

Clearly taking inspiration from A Quiet Place, the film begins with some kind of apocalyptic event as we follow Paul (Nicolas Cage) scavenging for supplies in an abandoned back alley as the sounds of explosions, sirens, and screams echo from a hidden catastrophe offscreen. We immediately jump forward fifteen years, when his two infant sons Joseph and Thomas are now in the throes of puberty, having been raised as brave and necessarily self-sufficient men. Their childhoods stolen, they have never been afforded the luxury of irrational or emotional thinking; survival is their only daily activity. Their ramshackle farmhouse is dilapidated, and they spend each day scavenging and hunting, bringing back wood, and generally eking out an obviously not sustainable life. One wonders how they've managed this long. Hints of a pandemic that wiped out civilization belie the more visceral threat of nightmarish monsters that attack only at night and have, thus far, been unable to break into the farmhouse.

The characters are as bare bones as they come, making this film less a dramatic thriller than something resembling a parable or even fable. Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) is a risk-taker, traveling farther away from home and returning closer to sunset than Paul dictates is safe. He's endeared himself to their closest neighbors, the Rose family, for whose daughter Charlotte (Sadie Soverall) he harbors a crush, and whose property is much nicer/newer/better maintained. Meanwhile, Joseph is more intellectual and prudent, working independently to solve existential puzzles and seeming eager to live a life beyond minimalist survival. He gets a utility vehicle working to help them, having labored in secret, and that day Paul takes him out to teach him to drive in one of the film's most charming scenes. These men love each other and respect each other, and they will be sorely tested.

That night, after breaking their mandate to fetch wood and return home, Thomas falls into a ravine as he runs home through the woods, knocked unconscious with a concussion as the monsters close in. Paul goes out to save him, prepared to fight off the creatures until dawn, in a Christological act of self-sacrifice that leaves Joseph home alone to batten down the hatches. While you might expect the action of father and injured son in a wooded crevasse at night fending off monsters with light that seems to harm or scare them to be the action highlight of the midpoint of this blissfully quick film, it is in fact not. And this is where director Benjamin Brewer and his team shine.

The filmmakers repeatedly zig when we expect them to zag, which is why this film is such a pleasure to experience. With an almost always handheld camera floating around wait-height, our approach to this world feels like a step or two shy of cinéma vérité or as if Terrence Malick made a Quiet Place installment. It's not always called for -- I felt as nauseated as I do in the Bourne films, for reference, which I can't stand -- and while it does force an atmospheric tension, a story like this needs so little of that packed on through delivery as its entire premise is tense enough. In the sequence above, the dramatic focus is not the fight for survival amidst nocturnal assailants but on Joseph, who falls asleep in his house after failing to secure a single aperture. When a mostly unseen monster enters, we're all but screaming for the boy to waken, though we dare not as sound is sapped from the film. Without spoiling what happens in this extended wide shot that nearly had my eyes melting in horror, suffice to say that directorial bona fides have been earned.

And what monsters! I'm hoping the designers have described how and why and what exactly their process and vision was, but I've not searched for that insight yet. Rather, I'll rely on the raw horror of what we see -- and don't see -- to tell you simply that these are devastatingly effective fear machines. To describe the monsters as perhaps some kind of elongated primate with skullish faces that might be tribal masks is to severely understate the sheer alien horror they instill. In fact, more than once I thought of xenomorphs, both due to things that protrude and project from their bodies and due to their M.O. of tunneling and digging en masse. These things are clearly well-developed, and so our inability to dwell on them visually or even see much of them at all isn't Brewer saying "less is more" due to ineptitude or low budget but rather due to the somewhat realistic problem of being able to see dark creatures that only come out at night and move deadly quickly. Our glimpses of them are also all our heroes have been able to see.

The lack of mediocrity in creating these things, which are also either all unique or develop in alarming and terrifying ways over time, more than makes up for occasional flat moments or extended sequences of mise en scene and ratcheting up of melodrama. Thankfully, we aren't bogged down by those moments, even if ten or fifteen minutes could have been shaved off this flick. We're given enough information that by the time our characters are in trouble, we care about their survival; when we see what they're up against, we doubt they're all going to make it out alive as things keep going wrong. But, and this is where I'll lose some folks, Nic Cage is really the hero of this movie for me. I've never much liked his acting or his real life persona, but in this he knows to really rein in his usual gonzo antics. In fact, he's so rivetingly grounded and withdrawn in this that I respect him a lot more than I ever have. He knows that to best serve this story and his co-stars, he has to be the sane, calculated, safe space in a film of wild frenzy, and he serves exactly that with nothing superfluous to surprise us. An early scene has him describing what he believes their future will be to Joseph and, brief as it is, it's so densely layered behind doubt and untruth and concern and comfort that I had to pause and rewatch it no fewer than three times.

There's not much to chew on in terms of worldbuilding or lore, so anyone who needs information, details, rationale, or backstory will be frustrated by this film. But, as its title suggests, anyone interested in simple idyllic pleasures bring torn asunder by horror and violence will find Arcadian a thoroughly satisfying diversion.

Mr. Harrigan's Phone (2022)

Score: 3 / 5

Adapted from the recent Stephen King novella of the same name, Mr. Harrigan's Phone debuted on Netflix last week. Unfairly (and somewhat inaccurately) labeled as "horror" and put in the same lineups as other spooky October-y fare, the film is almost certain to garner negative reactions from the casual viewer. Streaming categories like that are too broad; sure, the film is technically a horror film, but there's nothing really scary in it. Someone looking for a random scary movie to cuddle up watching will likely be very disappointed with this one, marketed as it is with King's name and reputation. And yet this is very much a King story, albeit a coming-of-age one like Stand By Me. His dramas, though arguably less famous, are pretty incredible themselves; his more recent ones (this story included) tend to take on specific hot topics or social issues head-on. This one, as you might guess, targets our relationship to smart phones even as it fleshes out a remarkably touching intergenerational friendship.

Schoolboy Craig (Jaeden Martell), after reading from the pulpit at church, gets hired by the wealthiest man in the state of Maine. Mr. Harrigan (Donald Sutherland), elderly and lonely, lives an anachronistic life in his local mansion, eschewing technology and preferring to read the newspaper or sit in his conservatory among the plants. As his eyes are failing -- or so he says -- Craig is meant to read to him. Not the tawdry and depressing mess of news blurbs, but rather the literature that Mr. Harrigan keeps in his library. After each reading session, they discuss themes and interpretations of classics like Heart of Darkness and The Brothers Karamazov, building an extraordinary friendship together. Mr. Harrigan's occasionally gruff demeanor belies a sensitive soul striving for sentimental connection. We wonder about his family, if he ever really had loved ones; his business acumen seems to have been his sole passion, one he now resents to some extent.

John Lee Hancock, director of The Rookie, The Founder, and The Blind Side (but, far more importantly, The Little Things, Saving Mr. Banks, and The Alamo), helms this adaptation with a brooding sense of calmness. We can see the ways Mr. Harrigan encourages Craig to stand up for himself with a level of confidence neither of them really feels; at least the elderly man surely did at one point, as he no doubt confidently stepped on others up the capitalist corporate ladders of his career. Craig, while clearly filling a void of companionship, seems to struggle with how to help his friend reciprocally, and so gets him a smart phone on which he can track the stock market and make real-time financial decisions. Mr. Harrigan gets hooked, much to both of their wonder and disappointment. He even mentions, while clasping and swiping his screen, how much he hates being tethered to the device. How many of us feel the same loving loathing toward these little torturous miracles?

I haven't read the story on which this film is based, admittedly, but I found myself wondering how much of the screenplay was King and how much was Hancock (who also adapted it himself). Most of the film is heavy-handed posturing about the dangers of being constantly connected, and it ultimately feels like a lecture on freeing ourselves from slavery to tech. That's not un-King-like, especially in some of his recent work that occasionally bends far from pure horror. But by the point in the film that supernatural elements enter -- and correspondingly darker themes -- it feels forced, rushed, and like woefully squandered opportunities. Because Mr. Harrigan, old as he is, indeed dies of natural causes. After Craig slips the man's cell phone into his casket at the funeral, he begins receiving calls from the dead man's phone. Despairing and missing his friendship, Craig shares stories like a verbal diary, describing his bullies and struggles with school and family. And soon enough, bad things happen to those who have slighted the young man.

Had the film leaned into these elements more intently and spectacularly, it would easily have made for a chilling horror flick. There could have been fascinating artistic representations of the balance (or imbalance) of power when it comes to our age, access to technology, and even virtual power (in instances of cyberbullying, for example). It could have shown how too much information -- rather, misinformation and fake news, as Mr. Harrigan notes his fear of the cell phone "gizmo" -- can in fact lead to radicalization and violence. It could have embraced Craig's coming of age through his learning of how to mete out justice with sudden and profound power. By the end, the film vaguely hints that had Mr. Harrigan had this power earlier in his life, great horrors would have happened, and that Craig has maneuvered through his moralistic mess to choose better. But I'm still not sure that Hancock ever really gets there in any concrete way, and so the film seems content to dwell in the possibilities: haunting in its own way, but not enough to provide any chills or even chilling insights.

The Lodge (2020)

Score: 4 / 5

This post is late in coming, but I watched this movie in mid-April, the height of our stay-at-home social order. It was still cold that weekend, and the garden was in danger of frost. As an introvert, I never got particularly depressed during this time, but this was about six or seven weeks in, and the cabin fever was beginning to addle my brain. We all started to lose track of time, health, priorities. And The Lodge was a particularly nasty way to spend a Friday evening after a trying day of working remotely. It may not have the same emotional effect on me now, but I'd guess it's still a harrowing experience. From the writing/directing team of Goodnight Mommy, I'd have expected no less. It takes ample ideas from other films and fashions something absorbing and indeed horrific if never quite original, but its cinematography and editing make the film, for me, endlessly fascinating.

The latest Hammer horror flick begins with a stylish, cerebral series of twists that some may find hard to grasp. I certainly did, upon the first viewing. We meet Laura, calling for her children and clearly distressed despite her immaculate, comfortable house that feels like something from a historic district in a middle-class New England suburb. She takes them to their father, Richard, whose modern house indicates he has moved on from Laura; indeed, its warm wooden exterior belies a cold interior with lots of open spaces, through which Laura sees a shadowy woman sneaking away. "Don't worry, she's not here," Richard tells his soon-to-be-ex-wife. But after he pushes for a divorce, Laura goes home and straightaway kills herself.

There's a chilling efficiency at work in these first twenty minutes, not because the plot or characters are particularly complex but because the aesthetic is. In only three separate locations, the architecture changes dramatically, as do the props and lighting. The opening shot, initially thought to be the titular lodge, is a warm wooden interior but the shot's focus is of a lone window through which icy white light streams. This sharp contrast is revealed as irony by the fourth shot, when this interior is populated by dolls; it's a dollhouse -- a la Hereditary -- that foreshadows more than anything. But its use in the first twenty minutes suggests something about the children who play with it, as we shall soon see.

The "other woman" is Grace, a mysterious figure who doesn't physically appear in any early scene. Richard (played by a brusque Richard Armitage) declares his love for her and hopes his grieving children will embrace her as he has when he declares his intention to marry her during their Thanksgiving preparations. But they have no intention of doing so: young Mia (Lia McHugh) clings to the doll of her mother while Aidan (Jaeden Martell) accuses her of being a psychopath and looks up her history. We learn along with the children that Grace is the daughter of an insane cult leader and the sole survivor of a mass murder-suicide. Richard met her while researching the cult and while his character remains rather opaque, we know he continues to push the children toward Grace, ultimately deciding that the three of them will spend time in the family's remote lodge in the mountains for Christmas.

It's obviously a terrible idea, and the children's cold welcome of Grace (Riley Keough) at the twenty-minute mark launches the film into its main plot. They drive up through the snow to the cabin in the woods, where Grace's trial by fire (or, rather, ice) is to commence, when Richard has to leave for his pre-Christmas work duties. We know immediately that Grace knows she doesn't belong and isn't welcome, not only due to the children avoiding her but due to the strong religious iconography in the lodge. At their first meal, an imposing Mother Mary looks down at Grace, clouding her visage and starting to remind her of her past, to the point that her nose starts bleeding. At this point, we are less than a third of the way through the movie, and at least three distinct genres have been firmly established: psychological thriller (children/outsider), tragedy (family), and horror (cult). This movie could go anywhere. And then they get snowed in.

And that's where I'll leave you. Creepy things start to happen, and we're constantly wondering if the lodge is haunted, if Grace is possessed, if the kids are out to get her, if she's just crazy. A notable screening of The Thing suggests there may be more horrors at stake for Grace and the kids than each other. The many twists and turns are less shocking and terrifying than deeply disturbing, and by the climax -- yes, there's a "reveal" but by that point the movie is more about what will happen as a result of the revelation -- I found myself eager for the film to be over. Not because I didn't like it, quite the contrary, but because its oppressively claustrophobic aesthetic, heady symbolism, and densely cerebral psychological horror was tough to endure. And, by the reveal, the film will continue on its (at this point) inevitable course to a grisly conclusion.