Monthly Archives: November 2018

2018, Recent Reviews, Reviews

Piercing (2018): Rigorous Aesthetics without Psychological Depth

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A married man with a loving wife and an adorable infant daughter has one tiny guilty pleasure: stabbing people. Coming from Nicolas Pesce (The Eyes of My Mother), the story centers on Reed (Christopher Abbott; It Comes at Night) as he plans and initiates the killing of a prostitute to satisfy his unnatural desire. The unsuspecting victim is Jackie (Mia Wasikowska; Stoker) who enters his hotel room expecting a night of S&M. The film is adapted from a novel by Ryu Murakami, author of the book that would become Takashi Miike’s Audition, so those familiar with his previous work have an idea of the kind of twisted events about to play out.

For fans of Pesce’s first film or of Murakami’s novel, the tone is going to be jarring. The source material was serious and psychological. It focused on the past of the main characters and provided deep insights into how childhood trauma and abuse can manifest in adulthood. The film is much more playful. It’s in the vein of movies like You’re Next that offer genre thrills but are self-aware of their own ridiculousness. Pesce takes Reed’s planning of the attack and turns into comedy by having him pantomime the act with a silly level of earnestness. But he doesn’t allow the humor to completely mask the actual violence. He includes unpleasant sound effects for each movement to remind us of the danger at hand. This is a movie that, while gruesome in several scenes, you are meant to have fun with and laugh at.

The clothing is another unplaceable aspect of the film’s style.

The film’s production design is stunning. Pesce has relocated Murakami’s story to the United States but sets it in an unknown location. He uses miniatures for the city landscape that communicate an fabricated world, one that, due to its stylization, is out of place and out of time. The technology shown indicates the story in set in the past, but the exact decade is deliberately obfuscated. Pesce uses a variety of stylistic choices to prevent the film from being grounded. The interiors have green shag carpeting and glistening wood-paneled walls that are from the 60s but the bright colors used call back to Italian giallo movies of the 70s and make the sets feel like dollhouses. The untraceable, artificial setting gives the film a strange, fable-like quality.

Pesce shows clear vision in his adaptation, but his choices often lessen the film’s impact. The film feels meticulous in its planning and execution and the subdued but unsettling acting fits perfectly with the intended tone, but the lack of psychological elements rob the story of its depth. Reed and Jackie’s histories are hinted at through well-executed but fleeting flashbacks yet this isn’t enough to add motive to their behavior. Instead, we are forced to react only to their actions onscreen, removed from the important context of their pasts that was previously present in the novel. The actions, particularly the violent ones, are well executed as Pesce knows how to make an audience squirm when he wants to, but without a grounding motivation. Piercing can be enjoyed for it rigorous details and Pesce’s laudable vison, but the lack of character development prevent the film from engaging on an emotional level.

3/5 stars.

2018, Recent Reviews, Reviews

Non-Fiction (2018): Comedy for Literary Intellectuals

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Olivier Assayas (Personal Shopper) has made a genre shift with his newest film. Instead of deep dramas, Non-Fiction is a comedy. The film involves four main characters: a book publisher (Guillaume Canet) and his actor wife (Juliette Binoche; Caché) and a writer (Vincent Macaigne) and his wife who works in political campaigns (Nora Hamzawi). Each has their own, often interrelated, mini-crises happening, both personal and professional, and they provide the background to the film’s main focus: conversations between educated and opinionated people.

Compared to Assayas’s recent work, Non-Fiction has surprisingly poor visuals. No one expects a comedy to be visually arresting, but the lackluster images are extremely noticeable since Assayas’s past two films were well shot. Part of the problem may be that his previous two works were shot on 35mm film while Non-Fiction appears to be shot digitally and likely has a lower production budget. Digital cinematography has to potential to be gorgeous but many scenes here suffer from blatant visual flaws. An early lunch scene has noticeable digital noise with blue dots speckled in darker regions of the image. Other scenes are outdoors and are completely blown out. It doesn’t help that the film’s sequences typically revolve around sitting at a table. The many conversations are filmed with very rudimentary shot reverse shots and only the occasional handheld camera circling the cast’s dining table to mix things up. They don’t ruin the film, but the poor lighting and cinematography is often distracting.

Hamzawi’s pragmatism is charming and hilarious.

The comedy can be uninvolving at first, but it grows on you. The jokes are subtle and come fast and furious to the point that they are easily missable, especially early on. Then, because the of the film’s literary focus, the comedy feels insular and pretentious, like a bunch of writers and publishers arguing theory with little practical purpose, but eventually this subsides. As the characters are developed, their histories are exposed and we see the fragility beneath their grand debates. All of the performances are strong, but Hamzawi emerges as the breakout. In contrast to her husband, she is practical, direct, and efficient. When her husband tells her that his book has been rejected by his longtime publisher she responds “What do you want me to do? Cry?” Her blunt responses are hilarious and the fortitude of her character is incredibly endearing. Even the other, more flawed characters have depth that drives their actions and the comedy.

Overall, this is a very French film. The majority of the movie is spent with characters eating, drinking, and, most of all, talking. People debate literature, technology, and several jokes rely on literary or film knowledge. Assayas prevents this from becoming haughty by subtly undercutting potential intellectual superiority. When esoteric references are made, it is implied that the character hasn’t actually read or seen the title they namedrop. Hypocrisy brings these bourgeois people back down to earth. The humor isn’t strikingly original or uproariously funny, but the film keeps maintains a healthy rhythm of laughs and even uses personal failings for brief moments of introspection. It’s a lighter work than his previous films, but Non-Fiction is still an enjoyable comedy for fans of talkative movies.

3/5 stars.

2018, Recent Reviews, Reviews

Border (2018): Pointlessly Strange

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A peculiar looking woman named Tina (Eva Melander) works as border security in Sweden. She possesses a preternatural sense of smell that allows her to literally sniff out smugglers. She doesn’t just smell food or drinks they might be hiding, she can smell guilt. She lives in a small house in the woods with a man that isn’t her significant other, but also not quite just a roommate either. One day she smells something wrong with a man, Vore (Eero Milonoff), who seems to share her physical features. Eventually she befriends him and offers to let him stay in her guest house. The film is based off a short story by John Ajvide Lindqvist who also wrote the novel Let the Right One In which was later adapted into two successful films. With these two films, Lindqvist has demonstrated his interest in loners and fairy tales. Let the Right One In had an isolated child bonding with a centuries old vampire and in Border we have a woman dismissed for her appearance who discovers that she is a troll – literally.

Initially, Tina’s sense of smell is intriguing. She seems like she might become some type of unconventional superhero a la Unbreakable. A subplot of this story does explore this idea as Tina assists law enforcement with a difficult case and it becomes the most interesting part of the movie. She is shown to be a kind person, despite how she is often treated, and would be an investigator worth rooting for in a crime story. But this is not that kind of film.

Tina and Vore’s romance isn’t the draw that Abbasi wants it to be.

Director Ali Abbasi (Shelley) uses Tina’s appearance to examine an outsider’s perspective. Tina has spent her life believing that she was an ugly person, disregarded by society and loved by only her father. In early scenes, Abbasi frames Tina by herself, gazing into the distance. He quickly establishes her isolation, but too much of the film is spent on these and other slow scenes of little value. It isn’t until Vore enters the picture that Tina realizes she is of another species. Vore explains that everything that made her different, her looks, her sense of smell, and the long scar on her lower back are related to her being a troll raised as a human. This revelation frees her from the negative labels she had absorbed. Her response to being nonhuman is contrasted to Vore’s. Tina hasn’t been treated well, but she harbors no ill will towards others while Vore has a militant pro-troll mindset. Through them we see how people can react to rejection and mistreatment and how these experiences can bind similarly outcast individuals.

Their shared trollhood eventually grows into a romance that, while believable, doesn’t have chemistry. It is touching to see Tina’s behavior change as she feels belonging for the first time, but the actual attraction between her and Vore has problems. Vore has a suspicious, almost predatory edge to him that makes even his kind praises seem dubious, but her attraction to him seems like a foregone conclusion. He is the only other troll so naturally they get together. Abbasi spends a significant amount of time on their relationship, but it, like the film in general, doesn’t have a payoff. The slow pacing and subdued acting make the film drag on until its unsatisfying conclusion. We’re left wondering why all the strangeness and deliberately unconventional plot details were even necessary when the final outcome is nothing special.

2/5 stars.

2018, Recent Reviews, Reviews

The Hate U Give (2018): A Message in an Average Film

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Whenever movies like this are released, the distinction has to be made between the film and the message the film is trying to communicate. The two exist together but are often, as is the case here, of differing quality. Starr (Amandla Stenberg; Everything, Everything) is a 16 year old black girl that lives a poor, crime-ridden, predominantly black neighborhood, but goes to a private, mostly white high school. When coming home from a party with her childhood friend Khalil (Algee Smith; Detroit), she is stopped by a white police officer. He asks her friend, who was driving, to step outside and stay still while he checks their license plates. Khalil doesn’t listen and is shot dead when reaching for his hairbrush. The shooting and subsequent trial create unrest in the community and divide Starr as she wrestles with her role and the different reactions she receives from her friends at school and her family.

With a clear point to get across, the script wastes no time on subtlety. The characters shown and the way they fit together fall into easy stereotypes. The good kid turned drug dealer to pay for his grandmother’s cancer treatment, the former gangster gone straight to raise his family, the conceited rich kids, and more clichés are stacked together to remove any chance of an audience member having a thought that strays from the film’s goals. With every element of the plot so conspicuous in its intentions, the machinations of the narrative are clear and the artifice of the story becomes apparent. The writing can be manipulative to the point that it prevents the characters and the plot from feeling realistic and lessens the film’s impact.

The supporting characters are too stereotypical to matter.

There are additional problems that stem from the transition from book to film. Angie Thomas’s novel relies heavily on voiceover to show Starr’s inner thoughts. When used to depict the split personality Starr is forced to adopt just to fit in, this device works well. We are able to understand and sympathize with her lack of identity due to the two worlds she inhabits and how it can be exhausting. Sadly, the film doesn’t just limit voiceover to this purpose. It’s often used for exposition dumps. This is especially egregious at the film’s conclusion where Starr’s narration ties up every loose end in an act of blatant telling, rather than showing.

At its heart, the film wants to spread a message against hate. The title come’s from rapper Tupac Shakur’s “THUG LIFE” adage and the story seeks to humanize the frequent news headlines of killings and police brutality. Its greatest weapon are its the actors. Stenberg has an incredibly expressive face and she uses it to believably convey a broad range of emotions. Her father, played by Russell Hornsby (Fences), is a tough but loving patriarch. His strictness comes from learning difficult lessons and wanting to ensure his children never have to do the same. When seen together, Starr and her family create the emotional center director George Tillman Jr. (Barbershop) was likely intending. They show how regular, good people cope when subjected to adversity caused inherent systemic flaws present in their neighborhoods and society as a whole. Had the film carried this humanist angle in the script, it would have been influential without feeling calculated. As it stands, The Hate U Give has strong performances, but a manipulative plot that weakens the effectiveness of its message.

3/5 stars.

2018, Recent Reviews, Reviews

Suspiria (2018): Promising but Flawed Remake

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Remaking a cult classic is never an easy task, but having Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name) behind the camera made it an interesting proposition. Like the original, the film follows Suzy Bannion (Dakota Johnson; Fifty Shades of Grey), an American, who comes to Germany to enroll in a famous dance school. On the day of her arrival, she hears whispers of another student who abruptly left the school for unknown reasons, leaving room for Suzy to join. She auditions in front of the demanding teacher Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton; We Need to Talk About Kevin) who, along with the rest of the staff, takes an immediate interest in her and assigns her the lead role in their next performance. As the film progresses, Suzy’s friend Sara (Mia Goth; A Cure for Wellness) learns that the missing student had suspected their teachers of being witches and using students for an unknown nefarious purpose.

While the original Suspiria was almost a giallo film, the Italian thriller subgenre popularized by director Dario Argento, Guadagnino has moved the title firmly into body horror territory. There are still elements of suspense surround the details of the missing student, but where the first film kept the nature of the school as its main source of intrigue, this iteration never lets the audience think the school is normal. Instead, the question becomes a matter of what Blanc and company are doing and why, not whether it is occult. In early scenes, Guadagnino establishes the teachers as witches through a display of horrific pain. He shows a body contorting against its will in a grisly fashion that would make David Cronenberg proud and continues these effects throughout the duration.

Guadagnino takes the film’s visuals in the opposite direction of the original. While it is beautifully shot with skillful use of shadow, it lacks the color of the original. Argento’s Suspiria was known for its vibrant, contrasting hues and patterned production design. Guadagnino instead creates the aesthetic of Cold War Germany. The buildings are oppressive with dull, muted colors that point to a city in disrepair. The effect of this aesthetic change is that it not only distinguishes the film, but also places greater emphasis on the actual dancing. The energetic dance moves come to the foreground when surrounded by drab settings. It’s a smart decision that gives the remake its own visual identity.

The main performance is a brilliantly lit and choreographed scene.

Until the end, Guadagnino’s Suspiria is a compelling watch. He makes decisions that separate his film in interesting ways and is able to communicate the hypnotic effect of dance that lures Suzy to the school. The film becomes a sensory experience led by Johnson’s striking dancing. Her movements resemble sudden convulsions more than graceful ballet and her twisting, in concert with the film’s lighting, show a temporary euphoria that extends to the audience. It’s unclear how much of the choreography was completed by Johnson rather than a dance double, but her performance and the editing make it impossible to tell as she throws herself into every motion.

It’s the film’s climax that becomes its undoing. Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich (A Bigger Splash) deserve credit for taking the story in a new direction, but the blood-soaked finale will leave most viewers confused rather than awestruck. The ending relies on a plot point that, while not convoluted, unexpectedly changes the film’s focus to something that was barely mentioned earlier. This isn’t a shift that recontextualizes prior events in new and interesting ways, it baffles by implying that the filmmakers were actually focused on what seemed like an inconsequential detail. There are also other background elements that end up superfluous. The repeated nods to WWII and actions that may have been committed under Nazi rule are never developed or addressed by the film’s conclusion. What started as a fresh and enveloping take on a classic film, stumbles and falls in its final stretch leaving Guadagnino’s remake a flawed work that never reaches its potential, despite having many great moments.

3/5 stars.

2018, Recent Reviews, Reviews

Burning (2018): A Thriller with Pain, Rage, and Guilt

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Lee Chang-dong (Poetry) has created an immersive, oppressive thriller like few others. The film, adapted from the short story Barn Burning by Haruki Murakami, follows Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), a young man who runs into a former classmate named Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo) who invites him to dinner. Hae-mi seems quirky and removed from normal behavior. She practices pantomime for no particular reason and is about to leave to Africa, seemingly on a whim. The two sleep together and she departs to Africa soon after. Weeks later, she leaves Jong-su a message asking him to meet her at the airport only for him to find her arriving with another man. Ben (Steven Yeun) is her new boyfriend and as the three spend time together Jong-su begins to question Ben’s motivations.

Steven Yeun deserves immense credit for building the central mystery. He is known for his work in The Walking Dead, but here he plays an entirely different role. Ben is an obnoxiously perfect individual. He is young but somehow wealthy despite not appearing to have a demanding job – or any job at that. He says he “plays” when asked about his occupation, an answer so terse it feels condescending. But he is never overtly mean. He is actually kind to Jong-su, invites him out with his friends, and never seems to view Jong-su as a threat to his relationship with Hae-mi, again to the point of offense as if Jong-su is too plain or lowly to be a rival. Yeun communicates Ben’s personality with eerily restrained movements. His entire physique moves with a slow, quiet confidence. His words feel measured and unemotional and his aloof smiles hint, ever so slightly, that his interests lie elsewhere. Yeun subtle acting commands attention during every second of his screen time and his uncanny mannerisms make him a shadowy figure that we feel compelled to unravel.

Yeun’s perfectly controlled movements make his character all the more mysterious.

It’s rare to see a film simultaneously this quiet and this angry. Beneath the film’s placid surface is a torrent of frustration, confusion, and latent aggression. Jong-su is a disaffected youth, working jobs as needed while trying to become a writer. His father is being sent to jail for an altercation with a city inspector that could have been forgiven with a simple apology note, but he was too prideful to do so. This same pride is implied to exist within Jong-su as he suffers the indignation of being replaced by Ben as Hae-mi’s love interest. He isn’t outwardly upset, but the jealousy is present in his envious stares. Ben has appeared out of nowhere and seems to, inexplicably, eclipse him in every way possible. He is extremely handsome, poised, and apparently has an active social life – all things Jong-su cannot say. As the film’s mystery grows, so does the exasperation. Lee uses the events of this thriller to force the audience to confront the crippling ambiguity of modern life. Jong-su, despite his efforts, continues to fail in even slightly understanding the events that may have taken place. If anything, his search only leaves him with more doubts about what he previously believed. Instead of answers, he is left with pain, rage, and guilt at his own desperate situation. Lee expands the film from beyond the thriller genre to a look into hopelessness, ambiguity, and the actions they can create.

4/5 stars.