Review: "The World to Come"

 

I wasn't planning to write this review.

"The World to Come" was the last movie I saw this week, and usually that's the one I just talk about on "Indy Style" on WISH-TV, time constraints being what they are. If I feel like I can't give a film a thorough consideration in writing, I'd rather not do it at all.

Plus, my reaction falls into that very specific grouping of reviews that is the least favorite of the critic to pen: disappointed, but without any particularly strong points of contention or weakness. It's like trying to write about plain oatmeal -- it was consumed, and now it's done and soon will be forgotten.

But I found a few nagging points sticking with me. I think this could've been a very good movie and isn't, and am trying to figure out where it went wrong, or where I soured in receiving it.

Let's start with the obvious: thematically it's too similar to other, better movies I've seen in the last year: "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" being the most notable, and even the relatively lackluster "Ammonite" played better than this. Even "Lizzie" from a couple of years earlier had more to offer. 

I'm not sure when period films about two women falling into a passionate affair, usually for the first time in their lives, became a rut. 

But what felt amazing and incredibly emotional in "Lady" and at least passably engaging in "Ammonite" registers as forced and hackneyed with "World." At times it plays almost like a "Saturday Night Live" sketch parody. It's the sort of art film that people who don't like art films would find too easy to mock.

Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby play frontier farmers' wives circa 1856 who come to live near each other. Both feel trapped by their circumstance and the role women are expected to play as subservient laborers and bearers of children. They live in a time and place where females faced few choices, and had to either knuckle under to the patriarchal system or strive to break free of it, and be crushed.

We know instinctively from the first time Abigail (Waterston) looks at Tallie (Kirby) with an appreciation that goes beyond just banishing loneliness the couple is doomed. For the rest of the movie we're just counting the ticks until it comes.

Both wives are blamed for being childless. In Abigail's case, she did have a daughter who died a few years earlier, and she has resisted efforts to have another. Tallie is a different case, openly expressing her revulsion at the prospect of motherhood and reveling in her status as a quasi-rebel. 

She takes a sassy tone with her husband, Finney (Christopher Abbott) and is prideful about their wealth (relative to other local homesteaders) and long, wavy strawberry blonde hair. Finney, who likes to quote the Bible about a wife's duties, stews in the sort of way we know trouble is coming.

Casey Affleck plays Dyer, Abigail's husband, who treats his wife as just another asset to be accounted for in his ledger of the farm's business. He's less outwardly hostile than Finney, but is vexed by a wife who seems to have no space in her heart for him. A woman of literary tastes and ambition, Abigail has the soul of poet locked away in the pantry, peeling an endless pile of potatoes.

At first a joyous friendship, the relationship between Tallie and Abigail eventually takes a turn to the torrid, with all the usual corset-heaving fumblings we've come to expect. It's almost less a lustful desire than a needful clinging to something, anything other than the drudgery of work and submission.

Director Mona Fastvold's last feature was "Vox Lux," which I  could barely stand to watch. Screenwriters Ben Shepard and Ron Hansen craft a lot of beautiful language that feels like beautiful language written for a movie, rather than something that would actually flow from these women's lips or pens. 

"The sunshine streaming through the branches makes a tremendous farrago of light and shade," Abigail narrates. "We hold our friendship between us, and study it, as if it were the incomplete map of our escape."

The movie moves in exactly the direction we expect, towrad an ending that feels less inevitable than unavoidable. Its biggest problem is it does nothing to develop the two husband characters as anything other than one-dimensional antagonists -- primitive lumps who speak little and always seem to be occupied with some form of killing, as when Dyer calmly scrapes the guts out of a hawk he has shot with his fingers, no more bothered by the gruesome glob than if he was picking pebbles out of the tilled earth.

I actually ended up feeling a little sorry for him, this unloved fellow who is as held fast to his assigned place as Abigail is by hers. They actually discuss separating in an indirect way, and part of me wished they'd done so right there so she and Tallie could run away together, or be hunted as violators of natural law, or murder Finney and then run away, or anything other than doing exactly what I expected them to.

Review: "Possessor (Uncut)"

 

I'm a hi-lo man when it comes to horror. I grew up on the stuff, a true devotee devouring gory zombie flicks before I had down-there hairs. This continued into adulthood, but somewhere around 2000 either I changed or the fright flicks did, and horror films haven't held the same appeal for me since.

It's strange because a lot of horror diehards believe we're in the middle of the genre's golden age, with a lot of popular stuff going straight to video or niche streaming services along with a few high-profile theatrical flicks everyone insisted were so good and so scary where I was firmly ensconced in Meh-town.

"Heritage?" "Midsommar?" I didn't even so much as twitch an eyelid.

But "Possessor?" Yeah, this movie creeped me the hell out.

It's written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg, a family name that is like the Cartier of scare flicks. Daddy David specialized in mind-twisty frightful films ("Videodrone," "Scanners") where our conception of reality was as much threatened as the characters' lives. "Possessor" is thoroughly of that bloodline, something that feels like it was hatched out of the mind of sci-fi pessimist Philip K. Dick ("Blade Runner").

Note: the film is being distributed with an "Uncut" suffix as if to suggest there was a previous, tamer version of the film (of which I'm unaware). It's not being released with an MPAA rating but would surely be NC-17 if it were, with hard-to-look-at violence, nudity and porn-adjacent activity.

The high/low concept is that assassins are recruited to invade the minds of an innocent victim through a neural link inserted in their brain and then use them as avatars to kill high-price targets with no risk to themselves. The possessor then has the host kill themselves, at which time they return to their own body and consciousness. 

To the rest of the world, it seems like a random murder-suicide rather than an orchestrated hit.

We see one of these to start the story, as dolled-up female entertainers enter a high-roller club, and one of them (Gabrielle Graham) plunges a knife into a lawyer somebody must really hate. And then she does it again, and again, and again, and many more agains. But it turns out the possessor isn't able to pull the trigger on her (borrowed) self, nearly fouling up the job.

This is Tasya Vos, played by Andrea Riseborough, the proverbial best of the best. Outwardly, she seems like an icy blonde but, as we shall see, there are cracks in her facade as a remorseless killer.

Her handler, Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), treats Tasya almost like an adopted daughter, and is even grooming her to be her own replacement. Though Girder is a little worried Tasya's personal life is intruding on her work -- really best to snip out those pesky distractions like a husband (Raoul Bhaneja) and son (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot). 

Tasya has moved out of her home but clearly the pull to return is strong.

They've got a big job up next: taking out an egomaniac billionaire -- is there any other kind, apart from maybe Warren Buffett? -- named  Parse, played with delicious snarl by Sean Bean. The "in" is his wayward son-in-law-to-be, a former drug dealer named Colin (Christopher Abbott) who fell in love with one of his clients, Parse's daughter Ava (Tuppence Middleton).

Colin sort of reminds me of a young Richard Gere -- a low, impenetrable wall of wavy hair, slim almost boyish build, and a beautiful but bland face that needs some time and creases to give it  character. He could be on the cover of a magazine and yet you might walk right by him if you saw him on the street.

He also seems to be stronger-willed than anyone thought, and Tasya has to fight for control of the body, both before and after the deed. (Which is horrifyingly grisly, in how it happens and the ultimate outcome.) Girder scrambles to pull her top agent out, knowing that permanent brain damage has already occurred and will worsen the longer she's trapped inside Colin.

The special effect used to portray the possession is both novel and unnerving, as Tasya's face dissolves like melting wax and then is reconstituted into Colin's features. When things go wrong it becomes like a terrifying, half-formed mask they're both forced to wear.

This isn't really a deep character study, and yet we find ourselves closely identifying with both Tasya and her host. We desperately want her to get out of the body she's trapped in and we'd also like it so that somehow Colin doesn't wind up dead or in prison. 

That's a nifty trick to pull off for a filmmaker, to have the audience feel empathy for both the murderer and the victim. Thought he lines are a bit hard to draw, as both learn unpleasant things about themselves they'd rather not know.

"Possessor" is the rare modern horror movie that truly gets under your skin and is content to stay there, like happily burrowing worms.

Review: "First Man"

Neil Armstrong is the most famous person that nobody really knows.

He occupies a pivotal place in human history, an explorer who was the first person to step onto another celestial body other than the Earth. And yet while his name is known to virtually everyone, the man himself remains an utter enigma.

We quote his most famous words -- “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” -- yet I doubt anyone on the street could tell you where life took Armstrong after leading the Apollo 11 mission to the moon and that fateful step.

(For the record, he resigned from NASA shortly afterward, taught at a regional college, raised his family, did a little endorsement work and lived on a farm. He even stopped signing autographs when he learned there was a lucrative black market for them.)

“First Man” is the new film from actor Ryan Gosling and director Damien Chazelle fresh off their shared success on “La La Land.” It’s a decided left turn from a flight-of-fancy musical, a deep-dive space drama that tries to get inside the head of a man who many people were unable to get close to. The screenplay by Josh Singer is based on a book by historian James R. Hansen.

It’s a surprising movie in a lot of ways. The most obvious is how it portrays the long struggle to get to the point where Armstrong could take that first step onto the moon, starting with his days as a civilian test pilot in 1961. To put it bluntly, he’s portrayed as a bit of a screw-up, a better engineer than stick-man, constantly in danger of being grounded.

He surprises everyone by being accepted into the Gemini astronaut program -- they pronounce it “GEM-i-knee,” not “gem-ah-NIGH,” by the way -- and showing a steady, calm approach to the work. It took seven years from the time President John Kennedy called for going to the moon until it actually happened, and along the way there was a mountain of setbacks, resistance, failure and deaths.

Chazelle goes through some of the usual space program preamble we’re used to from “The Right Stuff” or “Apollo 13” -- spinning test machines, cocky scientist types in short-sleeve dress shirts and buzzcuts, macho competitiveness between the astronauts leavened with mutual respect, etc. But it’s really a movie about Armstrong, who he was and how others related to him.

His wife, Janet (Claire Foy), is often as much in the dark about her husband’s interior state as everyone else. Like a stubborn turtle, Armstrong just plods along with his work, relentlessly focused on his goals, occasionally pulling into his shell when others prod too much. She loves him enough to grant him his space, but also knows when to intervene.

A pivotal event little known about is the death of their daughter, Karen, at a very young age after a long illness. It happened right before he applied for the space program, and in a startling admission during his job interview, he answers that it could have a psychological impact on him.

Chazelle shoots the space scenes as if he’s going for the opposite of big, showy, rah-rah moments. He’ll focus his camera on the condensation running off the rocket booster or the bolts surrounding the space capsule window. “First Man” demonstrates how the first generation of space flight was not accomplished in sleek “Star Trek” ships, but clanky contraptions that often looked like they’d been hammered together in somebody’s garage.

“First Man” may not be for everyone. It’s a slow-moving and contemplative picture, one more concerned with the space between Neil Armstrong’s ears than the dark matter that lay between him and the moon.

But for those who favor films that portray real people realistically, this one shoots for the stars.

Review: "It Comes at Night"

Last year I saw a tiny independent film called “Krisha” written, directed, edited and co-starring Trey Edward Schults. It was shot on a Kickstarter shoestring, had a cast largely made up of Schults’ relatives and took place in the family home. I raved about the amazing debut of an intriguing new filmmaker, and ended my review with a simple, unprecedented request: “More, please.”

More has been granted: “It Comes at Night,” an eerie psychological horror/thriller that gets under your skin quickly, and burrows.

Schults’ first studio film is a triumph of unease. I’m not sure if I’ve ever felt so uncomfortable sitting in a movie theater. Its pervading sense of paranoia and doom leeches into your body like a dank fog creeping up out of the fetid swamp of primordial humanity.

“It Comes at Night” has a familiar premise, but achieves its ends through a gradual build-up of mood rather than the standard short spurts of shocking violence.

It’s set a few years after some kind of apocalypse that has claimed most of mankind. There are scattered pockets of survivors here and there, and even they’re not truly sure what happened. People started becoming ill, the disease spready rapidly, setting off a panic, followed by waves of death. The only way to prevent it seems to be not to interact with others.

Even then, death comes stalking. Kelvin Harrison Jr. plays Travis, a teenager living with his family in the basement of a lonesome house in the woods. As the story opens, his grandfather (David Pendleton) is rasping out his last breaths, horrid sores covering every inch of his body. Wearing hazmat suits, he and his father, Paul (Joel Edgerton), carry the dying man out to the forest in a wheelbarrow.

They carry a gun and a shovel; no more needs be said.

Travis shared a bedroom with his grandpa, so visions of contracting the sickness invade his consciousness. Much of the movie involves our perspective slipping in and out of the boy’s waking and dream states, so we’re not entirely clear what is real and what is imagined.

Carmen Ejogo is Sarah, the wife and mother. They gather as a family around the eating table in dim lamplight to discuss their problems and concerns. Dad is clearly in charge and orders strict protocols: No going out at night, never be alone outdoors, don’t talk to anybody, keep weapons close at hand.

We get the lay of the land when someone breaks into the house, foraging for food. Will (Christopher Abbott) is in many ways Paul’s counterpart: a patriarch trying to keep his family alive and safe. Later, we’ll meet Will’s wife, Kim (Riley Keough), and their toddler son (Griffin Robert Faulkner) -- though I’ll leave it to you to discover how.

The two families’ parallel desires quickly come into conflict, and hard choices must be made -- and unexpected opportunities weighed.

It’s clear Paul and Sarah are prepared to do what they must, including kill. Travis has a kind heart and is inclined to trust instinctively. He’s grown to the brink of manhood knowing only the tiny microcosm of his family, and is eager to explore the greater world. He spies on Will and Kim’s intimate moments, and is intrigued by the presence of woman only a few years older than himself.

Schults carefully maps out this suffocating little world, showing us the gripping dread that lurks at the edges. The house becomes another character, a grubby hidey-hole where the family bars itself against certain death -- I thought of Anne Frank -- separated by a bright red door heralding the dangers waiting outside.

Fear can help you to survive, but is it any way for people to live? “It Comes at Night” explores the distressing no man’s land where instinct and empathy cross paths.