Frankenstein (2025)

Score: 1.5 / 5

Literary purists were going to hate this anyway. Frankenstein, for being one of the most-adapted works of English literature, has never had a film version lauded as faithful to Mary Shelley's Gothic nightmare of a vision. The material itself, sublime and terrible, has always seemed eager to have a life of its own, thus spawning so many takes and versions and interpretations and deconstructions and homages that "Frankenstein" has come to mean, for any generation of readers or viewers, whatever its artists want it to mean. Like the infamous monster it dramatizes, the story's meaning has become an amalgamation of sordid parts, wet connective tissue, and a spark of creative enthusiasm. Take anything from Young Frankenstein to Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, with a lot in between (and since), and you'll see what I mean. Hell, pay the cost to watch Danny Boyle's theatrical production with the National Theatre Live company; in two parts, in which the two main actors switch roles as Victor and Creature, the production is gobsmackingly brilliant and deeply moving.

In fact, there's only one adaptation I've ever seen that feels truly faithful to the novel. And no, I don't mean Kenneth Branagh's pseudo-camp, very wet 1994 version, though that will probably now have to retain its deeply misleading and frustrating accolade of being the most faithful feature adaptation. Rather, I refer to the 2004 Hallmark made-for-tv film in two parts, which has its obvious budgetary restrictions but manages nevertheless to faithfully adapt the entire Shelley narrative (!!) with some notably impressive moments (their encounter in the ruined medieval castle is a brilliant scene, cinematographically) and a couple knockout performances, especially from a career-best Luke Goss as the monster. William Hurt's weird accent and flat performance notwithstanding, the production even features a score for days and a few scary images that will knock your socks off.

We all knew Guillermo del Toro would add his signature style to the material, and the trailers reinforced that idea. We all knew this would feature some obnoxious sci-fi imagery, with lots of beakers breaking and animated lighting zapping all over the place; it's annoying, from a purist's perspective, because almost none of the "science" in Shelley's work is like this, yet almost every adaptation uses these trappings to convey something about a very specific idea of (mad) science. And it never makes sense, especially the bizarre stitching patterns used on the creature. If Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs can make a prettier skin suit from girls in a dry well than can an actual surgeon (never mind the century), something is very wrong. Sadly, del Toro's monster follows the same path, offering more stylization than is good for it. The monster so rarely resembles a real dead body that it never feels as scary or gross as it should; its whole point is that it is incarnate abjection, a large living corpse. Do yourself a favor and reread Shelley's description of the monster, and think about what it would really look like. Just don't do it before bedtime!

I say all this because it's important to go into this film with basically no expectations regarding the material. Even a passing knowledge of the novel and its themes will lead you to disappointment. Del Toro has crafted, in his latest film, a travesty of aesthetics. What was so obviously a dream project reveals itself to us as an obsessive, forced mess that butchers its source material on the altar of autership, sacrificing any attempt at philosophical soundness, thematic imagination, and movingly dynamic characters to the false gods of beautiful but hollow imagery, and uninspired and derivative storytelling.

Do we have time for everything? This will be a long one, so gird your loins.

Broken into chapters as it is, I rather expected a more thematic approach. Either a new way of viewing the plot (a la The Last Duel, or Boyle's stage production), or perhaps something linking this more strongly with the Prometheus myth. But no, del Toro merely uses these arbitrary chapter divisions to clarify that the first half of the story is Victor's and the second half is the creature's, as if that wasn't already manifestly apparent in the narrative itself. Worse, despite some ham-fisted dialogue relating Victor to Prometheus -- almost all spoken by Christoph Waltz -- the film ambiguously provides the creature as much if not more imagery associated with the myth (his regeneration, his relationship with fire), so the blending of names and titles becomes functionally meaningless instead of meaningful.

Oscar Isaac plays Victor with his typically excellent craft, though more than once here his voice felt parodic of his own as the title character in X-Men: Apocalypse. Though Isaac has already played the Victor-character before, in the modernized Ex Machina, here del Toro has him set in 1857, several decades after Shelley's original setting, for no apparent reason except to lean farther into the sci-fi trappings of his laboratory. Changing the setting simply to have more reason to insert unnecessary effects sounds pretty artistically bankrupt to me, and it distracts from Isaac's otherwise committed performance. I'd have much preferred to see him going mad while lurking around churchyards and sweating in a lonely, Gothic attic lab. For no clear reason, del Toro has Victor prowling snowy battlefields of what I gather to be the Crimean War; in what world are these corpses of better use to a man looking for ideal, healthy body parts to cobble together a giant man? 

I just don't understand why, in adapting such a clearly and simply constructed story, you'd change so many details that cause you more problems in conveying ideas. Moving things from Regency England to Victorian England only seems justified if the point is to let Victor play with electricity, which isn't even the point of any of this. Worse, it's not even used medically appropriately. By the waking of the creature (and Jacob Elordi gives a fine performance, though his design is too weird and distracting), we quickly learn that he can heal from any wound almost instantly. Heck, in the opening sequence, he's given an animalistic roar and superhuman strength that allows him to singlehandedly move the entire icebound ship loaded with its crew. Imbuing the creature with such superhuman abilities makes him both more monstrous and potentially more heroic, pushing what could and should be a horrifying chamber piece into the realm of Disney-fied superhero flicks.

Del Toro retains the framing device of Victor's final chase through the Arctic and his encounter with sailors trapped there, but the minor theme of the captain's own obsessions is practically absent. In its place, he forces a few action scenes to showcase the supreme might of the creature and its The Terror-like ghostly presence in the frozen wastes. While beautiful, these scenes only confused me more, as they immediately reveal the creature to be immortal and immune to grievous injury. Yet the creature still loiters around, allowing Victor (who looks too healthy to be on death's door) to tell his full account to the captain (Lars Mikkelsen, with nothing to do) before intruding to share his own story. The timing just doesn't add up, even if the views of golden firelight flickering in the icy darkness are lovely on screen.

Victor's story -- told through rather obnoxious voiceover by Isaac -- launches into his childhood home life, quickly bypassed in favor of his days at university, Edinburgh rather than Ingolstadt for unexplained reasons, where he is the subject of an ethics tribunal. He's animating gory, half-corpses and getting them to politely catch and return objects. It's an insane change to the material, not least because it undercuts his entire tragic personality: the whole point is that Victor cannot and does not tell any other soul about his experiments or his eventual creation. His secrecy is wrapped up in his monomania and ego, but del Toro seems thrilled to showcase Victor's efforts to every single character in the film. Impressed by his grotesquerie, Christoph Waltz's original character of Henrich (an arms dealer, for no reason) generously offers to bankroll all of Victor's science, even relocating him to what appears to be an abandoned water treatment tower alongside a reservoir. It's beautiful, sure, but it's also an illogical and gratuitous move in order to force cheap Gothic imagery into the film. 

This reveals a central problem to del Toro's film: in attempting to force Gothicism, he ends up butchering it. How much scarier and more cinematic -- yes, even on a home screen via Netflix -- would Victor's lab have been had it remained true to Shelley's vision? A darkened, locked attic, shrouded in secrecy and night, with much of the body horror seen only by candlelight. Instead, the camera swoops around what might as well be a giant stone lighthouse with a gaping tiled hole running down through its center. Architecturally, it makes no sense at all, and adds a sort of Chekhovian bit of foreshadowing: someone will fall through this inviting hole without guardrails. And indeed, before long, the bizarre and totally extraneous character of Henrich does just that. I hoped we'd retain some of the academic and ethical debate so central to the novel through his character, even if he wasn't one of the iconic professors Victor studied under at university. Alas, he's just there to pay for an expensive and impractical setting.

After the creature is born, Victor is not repulsed or ashamed, but rather takes the creature by hand and walks him around, trying to communicate while teaching him to walk. He even has the creature, who seems shy or pained by sunlight, reach out as if to embrace the yellow rays. There's an impetus of kindness and fatherliness here that actually interested me, because it's so foreign to the material and character. Yet instead of building on this dynamic, del Toro has Victor promptly take the creature to a dungeon -- again, what exactly is this architecture?! -- and chains him up before walking away for the night. For some time after, Victor attempts to teach the creature various things by day before chaining him up again, though the creature only seems able to repeat the name "Victor." 

Until, that is, Victor's family arrives. I don't even know where to start with this. First, his younger brother William (the favorite of their father, played by Charles Dance, in a delicious casting choice for the bit part) is significantly older than he is in the book (so is Victor, to be fair), which changes their dynamic drastically. Worse, Elizabeth is in this version Henrich's niece and William's betrothed. Victor repeatedly makes advances on her, which she rejects; yet upon visiting the tower, Elizabeth immediately wanders into the dungeon and meets the creature, making physical contact without much ado, after which the creature is smitten with her. It's obvious, too, that she's smitten with the creature.

What the fuck, del Toro? I'm all for fresh interpretations of classic stories that aren't bound to purity. Look at Lisa Frankenstein. Look at James Whale's original film. Heck, look at Poor Things. These take a nugget or two and run with it into new and exciting directions. But to pass off your adaptation with integrity while bastardizing the material to suit your own oeuvre feels like the work of an amateur, not an auteur. I'm fine with a dark romance teased out of an ambiguous story: Robert Eggers just did that with his Nosferatu. Del Toro himself has done this! The Shape of Water takes our beloved Gillman from Creature from the Black Lagoon and moves him into a different setting with different themes attached, yet his story is still one of being a missing link and deciding to love a human woman who connects with him. If that's the story del Toro wanted to tell, why didn't he just write that? Why does he try to pass it off as a reasonable adaptation of Frankenstein? He could have taken the character and written a story around it finding romance, acceptance, and forgiveness, and he could have titled it The Shape of Flesh. 

A few moments do offer cool beats we don't always get in these adaptations. Most center around Elordi's creature, though I still think his design looks less like an animated corpse and more like an alien; in fact, he appears to have been visually inspired by Ridley Scott's Prometheus, which is an intriguing connection in genre intertextuality. Woodland creatures seem quite at ease with the monster, and we see him feeding elk and rats a few times. Elordi's physical performance and emotional conveyance is laudable, though I wish he was given more to do by the screenplay. His few scenes of real action are so drenched in CGI -- and yes, while I was at first excited for the wolf pack attack sequence, it quickly derailed into frantic, nonsensical animation -- that they made me lose respect for his performance. You just can't tell what's real or not, which hinders our ability to relate.

Speaking of which, del Toro takes such pains to equalize "monstrous" traits to both Victor and the creature that neither ends up being very dynamic. Victor has urges to be a kindly father or benevolent god, yet his lecherous attitude toward Elizabeth and cruel, almost blasé treatment of his child make him eminently unlikable. The creature is gentle and natural, yet does not hesitate to crush and eviscerate any potential physical threat. By changing the roster of characters in the story, and their ages, we lose several deaths enacted by the creature that increase our complex understanding of his monstrosity, and Victor's by extension. We don't get children being killed or maids being framed (justice for Justine!), and we lose the sorrow of Victor's best friend. There is almost no reason for us to care about Victor because he cares about no one; there is almost no reason for us to care about Elizabeth (and, frankly, Mia Goth's performance is flatter than a pancake in garish, unsightly costumes) because she has no trait of interest beyond liking bugs (so, she's a lay scientist?) and being unfaithful to her betrothed before being passed from brother to brother to child. 

After a messy final act, the film ends on a note that I took particular umbrage with. Having told their respective stories, Victor suddenly and inexplicably feels close to death, and begs the creature's forgiveness, apologizing for his cruelty and negligence. The creature immediately and tearfully accepts and forgives him, and Victor begs the creature not to perish but to "live." The creature disembarks the ship, pushes it out of the ice, and then tries to embrace the sunlight as Victor taught him. It's disgustingly sentimental and anti-Gothic, and profoundly stupid : what life does Victor think this creature could possibly have? He's greeted by horror in civilization. And without Victor, the creature will now forever be alone. Why would the creature want to live? It's a question Shelley asked and had an answer for: he doesn't! But in del Toro's vision, the creature seems fine with living a hermit's life in the Arctic circle, so he tries to affirm that bizarre choice with sunlight and flourish.

And what makes it all worse is that, however we want to define "monster," del Toro could have gone dark with this film. His Nightmare Alley is still on my list of almost-too-disturbing films due to its nihilism and garish theatricality. Can you imagine, here, an ending of the creature drifting away into the inky ether on an ice floe, perhaps holding a torch, slowly disappearing into the blizzard? A haunting chill of possibility, the kind of bleak frisson of the opening scene of Midsommar or that carriage scene in Nosferatu? For that matter, can you imagine an approach to Frankenstein in the style of The Lighthouse, vis-a-vis Robert Eggers?

I really wanted to love this movie, but it might be the first del Toro film I've actively disliked. Very few choices within it are elements I found engaging, thoughtful, or worthwhile. It's loud and bright and kinetic and pretty much everything I don't want from Frankenstein. Worse, his changes to the source material are unfounded, confusing, and detrimental to the story he himself is telling, causing what is a remarkably coherent literary work into a literary travesty without internal logic. Alexandre Desplat's score was lovely, and provided some nice atmosphere. The cinematography was beautiful, if often distracted; editing is more messy, with lots of redundancy, but it's not awful. David Bradley has a nice couple scenes as a rural blind man who becomes the creature's friend, and those might have been the best part of the film (until the giant wolves descend). But pairing my disappointment in the film with my disappointment in del Toro is a nasty shock that I wasn't prepared to handle as we hurtle into awards season.

MaXXXine (2024)

Score: 4 / 5

The third part in Ti West's radical slasher "X" series has finally arrived! No one was ready for A24 to so fully embrace slashers when they did with gusto in 2022. West had a unique, uncompromising vision. A sort of American Horror Story anthology approach to the horror subgenre -- X proudly paying its respects to '70s exploitative slashers and Pearl offering a bloodstained version of '40s-era Technicolor -- these films' aesthetics only enhance their otherwise complex themes of art imitating life (or vice versa) and the ways film impacts the lived experiences and desperate dreams of average Americans in times of social and artistic anxiety. MaXXXine furthers these themes while emphasizing the inversion of that: to what lengths will a young wannabe starlet go to truly live in the movies she so loves?

Enter Mia Goth once again as the titular Maxine Minx, the sole survivor of the events at Pearl's farm in 1979. Now, six years later, she's made it into Hollywood, though her career of pornography is no longer fulfilling her goals. She auditions for an exploitation horror film, The Puritan II, winning the part and thrilled at the opportunities it presents. Unfortunately, several other young folks (mostly women) are being hunted in the city of angels, and while we know Maxine isn't the killer, a couple detectives (Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan) are keeping a close watch on her. After all, the Night Stalker is active, and details of his gory crimes have all but petrified the city with fear; his murders have, however, mobilized the religious right, loudly criticizing movies and music for corrupting youth with Satanic ideas. 

West lovingly allows these elements to simmer in a hazy ambiance, stoking the atmosphere into a heady cocktail of garish neon lights, shadowy liaisons, and the sort of dusty grime that comes with dry desert heat. While he mostly avoids too much lurid display, he gets the sound and feel of the era exactly right, and a droning synth score feels transportive in the best way. Too many films and series lately have done "the most" regarding nostalgic, materialistic trappings of the '80s, and this smartly and beautifully sidesteps those pitfalls. And the endless film references make for so much cinephile discussion fodder that I actually ran out of space on my notepaper during the screening. These are films for horror fans who also love movie history, and West is offering boons for those willing to get on his level.

Additional new players make for a really lovely context, including Maxine's icy, commanding film director (Elizabeth Debicki) who knows the screenplay is trash but is determined to elevate it, and a threatening private eye (Kevin Bacon with a deliciously weird New Orleans drawl) who knows too much about her sordid past. These powerful new characters open up the "X" world in wonderfully inventive and entertaining ways. They also, arguably, limit Maxine's agency in the movie that bears her own name. Rather than taking charge of herself and her fate -- as Goth so muscularly did in the previous two films -- here, she tends to be more reactive to the big threats in her orbit. Perhaps that's an intentional way to remind us that with bigger fame come bigger restraints; where better to critique issues of celebrity and paparazzi than literally beneath the Hollywood hills?

But the exploitation that returns to her life with a vengeance is the real star of this film, not its final girl. "Hollywood is a killer" reads the film's tagline, and that's about the long and short of it. An artistically challenging and narratively satisfying way to potentially end the series, MaXXXine succeeded for me even as it made me hope for more installments. Goth has made quite an icon of herself, involved as so much more than actor in these movies, and West has finally broken into mainstream cinema in a big way. If criticisms of gimmickry or contrivances are to be leveled at this film, I'd hope they are couched in considerations of how to suitably conclude such a wide-ranging, intangibly themed franchise without some forced writing and heavy-handed direction. But sometimes the material also calls for that, and I'm eager to dive into this seedy glamor all over again.

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.

Pearl (2022)

Score: 4 / 5

Here it is, the unexpected (well, it was back in March) second installment in A24's surprise horror franchise from Ti West. The initial film, X, was a work of genius, though most audiences probably simply appreciated it as a gory '70s slasher homage; it deftly transgressed subgenre boundaries to make a work of consummate art firmly entrenched in the eccentricities of its thematic and generic roots. Its post-credits video proved to be a trailer for this film, centering on the murderous old woman Pearl and presumably performing as a sort of origin story for her. It was a weird trailer, and one that I was frankly not terribly excited to see. After all, the more we know about the villain or monster, the less scary it usually is, right?

Pearl takes place in 1918 Texas, on a small rural farm that looks a little too familiar. She's back on the farm with her German immigrant parents while her husband Howard is away at war. Her domineering mother, Ruth (Tandi Wright) runs a tight ship and demands a lot from her daughter, who is perhaps a little too young to be a new bride, but the film glances over that. Pearl has too many stars in her eyes and dreams in her head. She dances and sings too much, wishing to someday be a chorus girl or movie star. She runs through her routines, sometimes in her mother's clothes from which she has been repeatedly forbidden, sometimes retreating to the barn where the animals at least won't disapprove. She shows little care or concern about her absent husband, preferring to escape into the local cinema in secret. Her wide eyes absorb every frame on that screen, helping her push through the doldrums of farm life and caring for her invalid father.

But something is very wrong with Pearl. Is Ruth abusive to Pearl because the girl is flighty, or is that only Pearl's perception of her? Or, perhaps, is Ruth scared of her own progeny? Pearl's demeanor is not unlike a young Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, dreaming of heaven beyond the rainbow, but she barely bats an eye when, to take out her sporadic and unpredictable rage, she skewers a duck with a pitchfork and feeds it to her best friend, an enormous alligator in the nearby pond she has affectionately named after Theda Bara. It's nice that she bathes her father, but she always gets caught actually bathing herself while he sits a little too closely. Her constant quotes, "All I want is to be loved" and "the whole world is going to know my name," sound innocent enough, but we realize fairly quickly that she is deeply unhinged and that these desperate pronouncements are indicative of desperation at any cost. It's as though she's trying too hard to live up to her name, becoming a human gem, something calculatedly innocent and naive to endear the predatory Hollywood executives.

They don't bite, but the local cinema projectionist does. The handsome David Corenswet plays the nameless man, lusting after the wide-eyed Mia Goth with pitch-perfect chemistry. Every actor here is pretty great, to be fair, but the passion these two have is infectious. We're torn between wanting the best for her and stifling our shouts to him to run for his life. Goth is delirious in the role of a young performer's lifetime -- the third massive and award-worthy role she's played this year alone -- and the film primarily works as a result of her dedication to her own insanity. This movie makes you feel as icky as Joker did, where we're forced to sympathize with her even as we are not protected from the horrors she enacts.

There are fewer dead bodies this time around, though I'd argue each is more disturbing and impactful than the ones in X. West and his cinematographer and editor work seamlessly again to craft a waking nightmare with jolting scares and brutal violence, this time all in a color palette a little too rich in hue. Whereas the previous film took its visual inspiration from the independent horror exploitation films of the '70s, here we're treated to a vision meant to mimic the Technicolor vibrancy of the late '30s and '40s. Even the opening sequence feels like an evocation of The Wizard of Oz, and much of the story mirrors that staple film with impossibly dark twists, as when she meets a scarecrow and does unspeakable things to it. Thank goodness this one indeed doesn't have a brain. And then there's the film's constant references to pandemic, as the Spanish flu rages on and the family is meant to be isolating in their farmhouse; there are even visual gags with homemade face masks that feel intentionally funny and alarming at once. They hammer home the points that history repeats itself (a theme helped by Goth's casting, of course) and the needling sensation that the world has become an incurably sick place.

X (2022)

Score: 4.5 / 5

How do you take two forms widely considered the lowest of its type, and revive them with appeal to both arthouse circuits and mass audiences? I don't know, but Ti West just did it with his latest. His exploitation film, combining horror and pornography, may be aptly titled X, and while it's certainly not for the faint of heart, it's actually surprisingly tasteful in its delivery of genre thrills and weighty thematic concerns. The latest A24 film might cause some rumpled feathers due to content, as the studio's name has become synonymous with more high-brow or "elevated" horror. As the first proper slasher for the studio, this one comes with enough cerebral candy to woo some of the jaded Gen Z-ers who decry the genre, but only time will tell if it'll be embraced. For the rest of us, though, X represents a whole lot more.

Opening almost point-by-point like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, I wondered early if this film would be an homage to Tobe Hooper. And in many ways, it is. An odd group of misfits in a large van roll their way through Texas in the middle of a scorching summer. Arriving at their destination, an all-but abandoned farm run by two elderly people, the group sets about exploring and insulting the locals. It doesn't take long for things to get sexually heated and violent. The locals are about to fight back. Hooper's filmography was weird, and while this film clearly takes its inspiration from Massacre, it also draws from some of his other works. Most notably, the beast lurking in the nearby pond and its cheap effects are ripped directly from Hooper's Eaten Alive.

Without being too specific about the plot, the group of young folks includes burgeoning scream queen (and wonderful actress) Jenna Ortega (5cream, The Fallout, Studio 666), Brittany Snow (Prom Night, Hairspray, Pitch Perfect), Owen Campbell (Super Dark Times), Martin Henderson (The Ring, Little Fish, Everest, The Strangers: Prey at Night), Scott Mescudi / Kid Cudi (Crisis, Don't Look Up), and Mia Goth doing her best work yet (A Cure for Wellness, Marrowbone, Suspiria, High Life, Emma). A prime pleasure of this film in the first hour or so is learning these characters and their interactions; they bicker and discuss the movie they are going to make. At least two of them are horny and just want to have sex on camera for what will surely be the best porno ever; their director and his techie girlfriend want to make a legitimate arthouse film that nevertheless includes sex. By the time one character blatantly asks about Psycho -- Hitchcock's groundbreaking genre classic that combined explicit sexuality and psychology with slasher conventions (that he also sort of created in doing so) -- I realized that X may be earnest about some things, but it's also keenly aware of what it's doing.

Like Wes Craven's Scream franchise, these characters know they're in a movie. It's a film about filmmaking, specifically of an indecent and transgressive kind. Craven (like so many horror filmmakers) started his cinematic career in independent, low-budget exploitation with The Last House on the Left, and evolved to a place of metafiction that now defines the genre. When the director and producer agree that they are making a porno, not a horror picture, a dark chuckle rumbled through the auditorium, and the film almost pauses for the laughter because it knows what we know.

And that seems to be the film's purpose in general. Its first half is a foreboding dark comedy mixed with some nostalgic drama; the old couple who live on the farm are very strange, but clearly not aging well. Howard, the old man, can't walk or talk well, and he repeatedly mentions that his heart is weak even as he huffs and puffs his way around. Pearl, the old woman, is apparently senile, confused and wandering around. In a few intimate moments, such as when Pearl spies on the young stars having sex on camera, we see that Pearl longs for that kind of sexual fulfillment again; Howard denies her, suggesting he could die from that much exertion. It's tragic, and you feel bad thinking about the shame and ridicule our society places on older people having sex (Grace and Frankie for the win!). But they are still weird and creepy enough to carry us through the tense, deliberately paced first half of the film.

Then, as we might expect from psycho-biddy films or similar projects like The Taking of Deborah Logan and The Visit, things take a violent turn. This is where I'll stop with plot details because the second half is a straightforward slasher horror film, and it's endlessly pleasurable to experience raw, so to speak. Even the first big kill is as much a testament to the film's love of low-budget indie filmmaking, as the spraying blood cleverly changes the cinematography and lighting in fully theatrical fashion. Writer and director West knows exactly what he's doing, and what he's saying in generic context, and the audience he wants to entertain, and his playfulness with genre tropes and imagery are intoxicating. Costume and hair choices, cinematography and setting, sound mixing and editing, and direction of actors all feel pointedly informed by fairly specific referents, and West does not shy away from embracing those influences.

Thematic concerns beyond independent filmmaking include a consideration of elderly sexuality, sexual dynamics in a radically shifting industry, and commodifying youth in a burgeoning home video market. Howard and Pearl never really feel like believable characters as such, but their defining traits are clear and very real; and if we're being honest, how many killers do we ever really get to know in the first film? To quote one of Craven's killers, "Did Norman Bates have a motive? No. Did we ever find out why Hannibal Lecter liked to eat people? Don't think so!" I suppose we'll find out, because the post-credits scene is actually a trailer for a forthcoming prequel, starring -- well, I won't spoil it. But the casting is brilliant and should cause you to double check the cast list for this movie. It's a doozy.

Emma. (2020)

Score: 4.5 / 5

There are those adaptations that only work well if you are a fan of the source material, and then there are those that seem catered to wider audiences. We tend to think of film adaptations as needing to be widely accessible by definition, and in this process the "original fans" -- of books, usually -- tend to think of these as watered-down, less insightful, or even overwrought bastardizations of their beloved novel. Adaptations of Jane Austen's works, however, seem to be generally blessed with favorable reception, whether through the medium of PBS or BBC specials, direct cinematic translations, or even modernized, loose versions inspired by her characters and plots.

Though I am by no means a huge Austen fan, I've enjoyed her novels enough and most film adaptations a bit better. And with the exception of Joe Wright's magnificent Pride & Prejudice in 2005 -- and perhaps another or two, including Love & Friendship (2016) -- Autumn de Wilde's new Emma. might be one of my favorites. I make this distinction for several reasons, primarily that de Wilde's aesthetic is so pure and she carries it through with such integrity that I occasionally forgot this was Austen material. It feels more like an arthouse comedy, an offbeat indie flick made as a hyper-stylized period rom-com, and in that regard it is magnificent.

I'm grateful to have recently read Emma -- a local theatre is producing it this month -- because Austen's many plots and characters hopelessly interweave in my memory. The story is, essentially, about the proud and selfish title character who decides to meddle with the lives of people around her. Specifically, she thinks she has a knack for matchmaking and manipulates everyone around her, friends and otherwise, into enacting her perverse romantic whims. Her schemes fail more than succeed, and she is suitably punished by the climax before all is forgiven and all comes to a happy ending. Well, an arguably happy ending; Austen doesn't really have fairytale conclusions, and her portraits of love are not quite idealized.

Though I personally find Emma a troubling character, here she is portrayed by a magnificent Anya Taylor-Joy (brilliant leading actress of The Witch) as a wickedly intelligent, surprisingly well-intentioned young woman who has the impeccable timing and social strength of any Internet "influencer" worth her followers. Her every beat is calculated, every expression measured and controlled. She imbues the spoiled brat of a character -- unlikable even in the novel, Emma is pampered and wealthy to the point that she herself feels no need to marry but determines to match up everyone she knows -- with surprising earnestness and even a certain innocence I found fabulously intriguing, if not quite endearing. Taylor-Joy's ability to combine smug self-righteousness with absolute incompetence breathes new life into the character and, by extension, the film.

The same may be said for director de Wilde, who approaches the proceedings with a pretty straightforward period piece method. In fact, while she captures a fine blend of humor and manners as in any worthwhile Austen adaptation, she manages too to make a profoundly charming work of its own merit; gorgeous costumes, bright lights, brilliant performances, and sharp editing buttress a film that presents its warm heart on its sleeve. It builds pieces and routines that at first feel a bit odd, but by the end are comfortably pleasant. Alternately cold and warm when it needs to be, the camera nevertheless views these characters with humanity and honesty, daring us to treat these characters -- almost caricatures in their universal ridiculousness -- as our friends.

But de Wilde complicates this by presenting them to us behind a veneer of rigid and distractingly artificial Regency society. Bold colors and textures, enormous feathered hats, and sometimes true-to-life unflattering clothes awe our eyes even as we see the damaging (and damning) suppression of real emotions and fruitful communication. In this way, this film feels more authentic and true to Austen than other adaptations I've seen, yet also feels more urgent, immediate, and accessible than others. Without, that is, sacrificing anything to modern sensibilities or pop culture.

High Life (2019)

Score: 5 / 5

Sensual and hypnotic, haunting in the best way, High Life is a masterwork of science fiction horror from writer/director Claire Denis. We're trapped on a spacecraft filled with convicted criminals, helmed by a mad scientist, on a suicide mission to investigate what happens in a black hole. If that isn't the most provocative setup in recent sci-fi history, I don't know what is.

Especially with this kind of aesthetic. For a film with such potentially plot-driven foundations, this movie ends up being more of a free-floating chamber piece about human nature on the brink of the abyss. They are literally hurtling toward annihilation -- though they don't all know it -- and what do they do in the meantime? They are forbidden from sexual activity with each other, though the mad scientist leading them (none other than a magnificent Juliette Binoche), obsessed with successful artificial insemination, harvests them regularly for bodily fluids. Similarly, they frequently use the "Fuckbox" on the ship to release their frustrated energies; the most notable scene, in my mind, is of Binoche herself riding a dildo chair in what may well be the most breathtaking and violent autosexual (if that's what we might call masturbation?) scene in cinematic history.

It's not all sex (though that's pretty much the main thrust, so to speak), as Robert Pattinson's protagonist demonstrates. His celibate character is the only one left (...SPOILER ALERT?), as we see at the beginning of this nonlinear movie, to care for a child named Willow. We find out later Willow is his own, but since this information comes from the mad scientist and her experiments, we can't entirely trust it. Pattinson delivers an exceptional performance here, narrating and driving the film in both its heady patches, and its more grounded scenes such as when he advises against us eating our own shit.

Speaking of which, if you want to place this film amidst other spiritual spacefaring movies, I'd place it along with Solaris and Gravity more than with The Martian. Its concern with bodily fluids seems taken from Prometheus while its final act focus on the black hole itself is more in line with Interstellar. But while High Life references its own genre, it is never less than extravagantly original. At once grounded and abstract, the film suggestively encourages us to consider these diverse characters and their bizarre situation as symbolic of themes a little closer to home.

I won't spend too much time talking about this movie because I still don't have wholly coherent thoughts about it. It's just beautiful and creepy and fascinating, and it's meant to be an experience more than an intellectual discussion. You're supposed to feel the movie as you go -- and, yes, use your brain to fill in the gaps -- and sensually appreciate its visceral power before you dissect anything. Inasmuch as you can truly dissect something as obtuse as a "Fuckbox".

Suspiria (2018)

Score: 5 / 5

As if taking a cue from mother!, Darren Aronofsky's magnum opus of madness, Luca Guadagnino has not only remade Suspiria with and for a new age of gods and monsters, but has indeed fashioned a unique cinematic experience determined to make you squirm.

Dario Argento's 1977 original served as a sort of watershed moment, an icon of Italian giallo that perfectly bridged the gap between supernatural horror and slasher aesthetic. Guadagnino has kept the essence of the story: A young woman arrives at a prestigious dance academy in Germany, assuming a recently vacated position and quickly rising in the company. As strange horrors plague the academy, though, the girls suspect their mentors of diabolical designs and research what has come to be known as the Three Mothers, Argento's creation of embodiments of evil, a mythology he explored in a trilogy of films.

Whether Guadagnino plans a similar trilogy remains a mystery, but I certainly hope he does. Not because they need remaking, but because his reimagining is here so bloody effective.

The original film sets itself up as an impressionistic fairytale, drenched in vibrant, abstract colors and deceptively simple in themes and plot. Not so here, where Guadagnino has stretched the film to two-and-a-half hours of almost mind-numbing complexity. With cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, he's drained the film of almost all its color, leaving us in a cold grayscale that forces us to meditate on what we don't see. Until, of course, the blood gushes; then we remember that this is the wicked stepsister of Argento's film.

Resituated in time and place, this movie takes place in 1977 Berlin, and though the anxieties this raises aren't explained to those of us who don't know our history, it is immediately clear that Berlin is host of deep cultural wounds that are not healed. Whereas Argento's film found a home in dreamy Freiburg (again with the fairytale bent), here we're smack-dab in a modern city, with chaos and molotov cocktails ruining the streets. We're initially introduced to Dr. Klemperer, a psychologist on whom the film hinges, and through him we read a keen sense of injustice and trauma that coldly underpins the proceedings. His wife, you see, disappeared when the Nazis took over.

On a more immediately accessible plane, though, the themes of sisterhood and motherhood remain strong in this new adaptation. Bolstered by strong performances across the board, the characters exist in a brutal world as fully formed psychological beings; their wheels are always turning, and the camera will often rest on their faces as they do nothing but think. Dakota Johnson leads here -- who knew she could really act? -- with astounding physical skill, dancing her way through numbers of increasing intensity. But it's Tilda Swinton who truly stars, taking on multiple characters as a chameleon and disappearing under layers of impossibly convincing makeup. Her Madame Blanc, matron of the dance, takes an immediate liking to Johnson's young heroine, and despite the deadly power-play at work in the academy, she rules all with patience and striking kindness.

Patience and kindness, that is, much like the film itself. Guadagnino has carefully calculated every breath of this film -- appropriate, as Suspiria refers to the "sighs" of pain -- to be slow and deliberate, drawing you in and forcing you to exist in the world it creates rather than simply watching. Along with entrancing music by Radiohead's Thom Yorke, the film's sound mixing and editing is designed to pop, creeping into your ears and under your skin for maximum effect. Nowhere is this more powerful than in an early scene -- the movie reveals its mystery early, so you can drown in the style instead of the story -- when Dakota Johnson dances in her audition. Every step and flex she makes assaults your ears, and you hear every pop, crack, and thud; this is amplified when we see that the dance is a form of violent magic that bends and breaks the body of another girl in the academy. Whereas the original film found pleasure in sudden stabs and gushing blood, here we are subjected to body horror of the highest caliber. Bones grinding and snapping have never been more visceral.

Apart from its skilled body horror, audiences wanting striking terror are in for a disappointment. While this film takes sadistic pleasure in pushing the female body to its limits and viewing urine and blood and bones, it's by no means meant to scare you. Instead, it exists and invites you to share in its uncanny chill, its deliciously subversive approach to anticlimactic horror, and its ultimately tragic sense of how very wrong humans can go. That's what struck me the most, during what is arguably the climax -- a scene that will satisfy even the bloodthirstiest gorehounds -- when what should be as gruesome and disgusting as Evil Dead or Carrie becomes elegiac and profoundly sad.

While this movie has plenty of disturbing sensory moments -- the best of the year -- its purpose lies under the skin, seeking to not only quicken your heart but also to pain it. This movie is a consummate work of art: a work about art (dance) that uses never-before-seen techniques to remaster the form of film itself, to make insightful commentary about the power of art in our broken lives and about broken art in our lives, and to make itself a new way of viewing not only a genre but our world. Breathe with Suspiria and allow its meditation on guilt, generational pain, the limits of the body and of memory, and of female fellowship to invade your heart. Breathe with Suspiria and it will take over your senses. Breathe with Suspiria and witness the awesome power of modern horror cinema.

A Cure for Wellness (2017)

Score: 3.5 / 5

A young American executive is sent on a mission to retrieve his boss from an asylum. Once there, he comes to realize all is not as it seems, and suspects that the institution harbors sinister designs. It's not a unique story, and one that has been done better elsewhere. Consider it a bizarre revamp of Shutter Island and other, usually worse, films regarding entrapment in mental health facilities. While the story here rests with the simple and predictable, and while its characters seem inexplicably content to reside in a world where all is aggressively awry, the film boasts a few power punches that keep it interesting.

First and foremost -- something its marketing team got completely wrong -- it's not a scary movie. It's a horror film, and more specifically, it's a meditation on Gothic horror. Not unlike Crimson Peak, this is a fantastic foray into a world where waking visions abound and things go bump in the dark. We are drawn in by pale-skinned girls flirting with death, mountaintop castles with secret passages and unearthly dungeons, monsters lurking in the lake, violent townspeople and malicious doctors, secrets from the past, rape, torture, incest, and of course the specter of insanity. Sound like a good time?

Actually, it is, if you're willing to forego reality for its two-and-a-half-hour running time. Director Gore Verbinski helps us enter his vision through dreamlike pacing and excellent visual storytelling. You could watch the movie without any dialogue and have no problem following along; in fact, you might be better for it. His control of atmosphere and style is absolute, and with an impeccable production design in the mix, Verbinski has crafted a mesmerizing movie. And while the tale he chose to tell may be typical, his methods are anything but, pushing us through aggressively disturbing images to provoke visceral reactions. He forces so many wickedly clever motifs and thinly disguised tropes into the film it begins to take on a life of its own, an internal dialogue on borrowed themes and reimagined horrors. The more the better, I say, and it seems Verbinski said the same.

Without trying to sound trite, I'd say the film is more an experience than entertainment. A meditation on Gothicism and the boundaries between human bodies, human minds, and the horrors that await both, the film injects claustrophobia into its operatic style to entrancing effect.

And it's got Jason Isaacs, doing his thing, and a ton of eels. What's not to like?

IMDb: A Cure for Wellness