Soul Survivors (2001)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

I was a nü-metal shithead in the early aughts, which means I’ve seen almost every teen-targeted horror film produced in that era. From the blissful highs of Ginger Snaps & The Faculty to the tepid depths of Idle Hands & Urban Legend, I dutifully watched every Hollywood studio horror marketed to my teenage sensibilities like a soldier taking marching orders. And yet, I had somehow not heard of the ghostly 2001 psych thriller Soul Survivors until I recently stumbled across it on the shelves of my neighborhood Goodwill. Soul Survivors so clearly  belongs in that post-Scream horror canon that its DVD includes a Behind the Music parody promoting the alt-rock band Harvey Danger, whose hit single “Flagpole Sitta” was made famous by the trailers for fellow teen-horror relic Disturbing Behavior several years earlier. There was no question that I had to close this personal knowledge gap by purchasing the used disc, but the lingering question that still remains is why, exactly, was this title lost in the shuffle and forgotten to time? It certainly has more going on conceptually than most of its tie-in-CD-soundtrack contemporaries, so why had I never heard of it but I know everything about, say, 2000’s The Skulls?

The best answer I can come up with is that Soul Survivors is more of a supernatural teen melodrama than a proper horror film, which may have been a letdown for the nü-metal shithead audience it panders to. It shares some sappy tonal territory with I Know What You Did Last Summer & Valentine in that respect, but those movies at least boasted recognizable masked villains to chase the teens around their soap opera sets. In Soul Survivors, the only identifiable villain is confusion. Melissa Sagemiller stars as a college freshman who parties one final night away with her high school crew before the friend group splits up for good. After some sweaty dancing with her bi-curious bestie (Eliza Dushku) at a Satanic rave at the edge of town, she flips her car in a reckless driving accident, losing her high school sweetheart (Casey Affleck) in the wreck. Only, once she attempts to move on with her life in the months after the accident, it becomes unclear whether she actually was the one who survived. She & her boyfriend are communicating from opposite sides of this mortal plane, but she gradually comes to realize that her soul is the one in transition, and her new freshman campus life is really just an operating-table hallucination that she can’t snap out of.

In short, Soul Survivors is Jacob’s Ladder for concussed teenagers. Sagemiller is stalked by scary-looking metalheads (one wearing a see-through plastic mask under a beanie, the other costumed like Danzig); Dushku is tempted by a demonic lesbian upperclassman (Angela Featherstone); and Affleck frequently pops in to whisper ghostly words of hoarse encouragement; but none of its action is as literal or physical as the similar, better-remembered supernatural shenanigans of the Final Destination series. Sagemiller’s liminal, fraught campus life is a medically induced nightmare, which lowers the immediate stakes of its stalking scenes but also frees the movie up for more abstract thinking and lyrical editing than the by-the-numbers slashers it most closely resembles. I don’t know that its big-picture observation that, “Even a dream of life is better than facing death,” makes much philosophical sense out of context, but by the time it’s crosscutting the cosmic connections & divisions between Sagemiller’s dream persona and her real-life circumstances at the go-for-broke climax, there’s a strangely compelling poetry to it. It’s poetry for dummies, but it’s poetry nonetheless.

As soon as I pressed play, I immediately got the sense that the fine folks at Artisan Entertainment knew they had purchased a box-office bomb. Scenes of Sagemiller saying tearful goodbyes to her parents before driving off to college are hastily shoehorned into the opening credits to rush the prologue along so we can get to the sweaty Satanic dance party ASAP. That expediency cuts the film down to a brisk 85-minute runtime, as if the producers were eager to get the whole thing over with posthaste. Maybe it was just too difficult to market a supernatural weepie with ironic lines of dialogue like, “We have our whole lives ahead of us,” as opposed to a rote slasher with built-in Halloween mask merchandise. Whatever the case, the condensed runtime means that we rush through headier ideas in a shorter span of time than what’s afforded to its comparatively empty-headed contemporaries. Scares are scarce here, but its sincere exploration of the fuzzy border between the worlds of the living and the dead is convincingly eerie, more so than in fellow aughts-era spookshows like The Mothman Prophecies and The Butterfly Effect (which both have a half-hour’s bonus runtime to play with, unused).

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #254: Ghost Stories for Christmas (1971-2025)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Welcome to Episode #254 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Pete Moran of the We Love to Watch podcast to investigate the paranormal British tradition of broadcasting ghost stories on Christmas, courtesy of the BBC.

00:00 Merry Spooky Christmas
23:49 Ghost Stories for Christmas (1971-1978)
1:04:54 Other BBC ghost stories (2005-2025)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Breakdown (1997)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Gaslight, heatstroke, truck hoss.

Kurt Russell stars in the 1997 dirt-road thriller Breakdown as a man who is LOOKING for his WIFE. If that’s not his most defining characteristic, it’s at least his most often recited mission statement. In a bigger picture sense, he’s an East Coast yuppie who’s relocating to California, violently derailed by working-class Southwest roughnecks along the way. He’s initially targeted because he’s driving a newfangled SUV he cannot actually afford, the kind of vanity-purchase truck that runs on computer chips instead of old-fashioned engine power. As the menacing, truck-driving men who abduct his WIFE put it, he might as well have bought a bumper sticker that says, “Rich assholes looking for trouble.” Those gruff brutes unplug some electric gadgetry on his shiny new toy while he’s not looking, leaving him stranded on the side of the road with his WIFE (Kathleen Quinlan) until the preppy-clothed couple are “rescued” by a passing trucker (J.T. Walsh) who offers to drive them to a nearby payphone so they can request a tow. Only, the wife never makes it to that payphone; she’s kidnapped and held for ransom, at a much higher price point than Russell’s credit-card-indebted poser can afford. So, he has to get his hands dirty and fight his way back to her like a real man, with trucks and guns and such.

Breakdown largely plays like a Hollywood studio echo of Australia’s Ozploitation boom in previous decades. The dizzying desert heat, small-town gaslighting, and lethal machismo that Russell’s hero suffers while LOOKING for his WIFE all recall Wake in Fright, especially by the time he’s stripped of his Big City respectability in the final action beats. Meanwhile, the truck-on-truck violence he has to engage in to complete his mission recall the diesel-fueled warfare of Mad Max & Roadgames — two Aussie action classics. Breakdown is entertaining enough as a thriller-of-the-week relic in its first half, when most of the villainy is psychological. The way Russell is bounced from diner to bank to cop station with no one willing to acknowledge that his wife was kidnapped in broad daylight is maddening. J.T. Walsh perfectly performs banal evil in that stretch as the low-level crime boss in charge of her abduction: an everyday, unassuming trucker who’s just trying to feed his shit-heel family by committing heinous crimes against total strangers. However, it isn’t until the dirt-road chases of the go-for-broke finale that the movie shift gears from Pretty Good to Great, Actually. Bullets are traded at top highway speeds, trailer homes are smashed in demolition derby spectacle, and big rigs crash over the concrete walls of overpasses, crushing bodies below in dark, cosmic punchlines.

If there’s any discernible visual style workman director Jonathan Mostow brings to Breakdown, it’s all in the first act. When we first meet the yuppie-couple-in-crisis, Mostow looks down on them from helicopter & crane shots like a vulture circling its next meal. Once Russell is isolated in his one-man mission to get his wife back, though, it’s all just by-the-books Hollywood studio routine. The thrills quickly become what critic Mark Kermode describes as “smashy-crashy” action filmmaking, with the iciness of J.T. Walsh’s villain and the psychological torment of the small-town indifference to his crimes taking a back seat to big trucks doing big damage at high speeds. It’s not quite as mean nor as grimy as the Ozploitation films it most closely resembles, but it does have the budget to escalate their scale to explosive proportions. It’s a fun studio thriller, but not much more. Catch it next time it plays on cable TV or, like me, pick up a used DVD copy on the shelves of your local Goodwill. Trust me; it’s there.

-Brandon Ledet

Paris, Texas (1984)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

There are some major film-world names attached to the 1984 road trip drama Paris, Texas. If nothing else, it is the Harry Dean Stanton movie, the most memorable example of the notoriously unfussy character actor stepping into the leading-man spotlight. Even so, German model-turned-actress Nastassja Kinski threatens to steal the whole movie from under him in a just a couple scenes buried late in the third act; Kinski radiates enough It Girl beauty & cool that the film’s most iconic stills are of her modeling a pink sweater dress, not of Stanton wandering the American sands. German director Wim Wenders obviously looms large over the production as well, gawking at the dust & concrete vastness of the American landscape with the amazement of an astronaut exploring an alien planet. Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller puts in career-defining work here too, dwelling in the ombre gradients between the natural light of dusk and the neon glow of roadside motels. This is the kind of movie that’s so stacked with big, important names that even its credited Assistant Director, French auteur Claire Denis, is an art cinema icon in her own right. And yet, the name that was most on my mind while watching the film for the first time this week was American painter Edward Hopper, whose work’s melancholic sparseness is echoed in each of Wenders & Müller’s carefully distanced compositions, to great effect.

Of course, it turns out my association of this 40-year-old movie with one of this nation’s most accomplished fine artists was not an original thought. After the screening concluded, I immediately found an article titled “How Edward Hopper Inspired Wim Wenders, David Lynch, and More” that detailed Hopper’s artistic influence on Wenders in clear, direct language. Most importantly, it includes direct quotes from Wenders himself, who explained in his 2015 book, The Pixels of Paul Cézanne: and Reflections on Other Artists, “‘All the paintings of Edward Hopper could be taken from one long movie about America, each one the beginning of a new scene […] Each picture digs deep into the American Dream and investigates that very American dilemma of appearance versus reality […] [He] continually reinvented the story of lonely people in empty rooms, or couples who live separate lives together without speaking […] In the background are the impenetrable façades of a hostile town or an equally unapproachable landscape. And always windows! Outside and inside are the same inhospitable and unreal living spaces, radiating a similar sense of strangeness.’” I could have written the exact same thing about Paris, Texas that Wenders says about Hopper in those quotes. I just would have worded it in clumsier, less articulate phrasing.

Paris, Texas is a solemn 1980s road trip through Edward Hopper’s America, conveniently relocated to the great state of Texas via interstate highway. Harry Dean Stanton stars as a weary, severely dehydrated traveler. He seems to be operating under a magic spell that compels him to walk through the Mojave Desert until he forgets everything about himself and where he came from. When his estranged brother (sci-fi convention regular Dean Stockwell) rescues him from that aimless mission to wander his identity into oblivion, it takes days for him to rebuild his persona from the ground up. He has to relearn how to talk, how to dress, how to act around relatives, and so on — recovering one personality trait at a time until he can recall who he was before he fucked off into the desert for a four-year eternity. As soon as he remembers, he immediately wishes he could forget again. It turns out he chose to obliterate his former self, because that man was an abusive, alcoholic prick. It’s an epiphany that inspires one last road trip, as he attempts to make right by reuniting his young, abandoned son with the young, abandoned wife he used to physically abuse (Kinksi). The effort is bittersweet. It disrupts all of the healing that’s accumulated in the years of his absence just so he can seek some personal absolution, but his heart is at least in the right place, seemingly for the first time in his life.

Like many great movies, Paris, Texas is very slow, very sad, and very beautiful, with many humorous little grace notes throughout. As cute as it is to watch Stanton mimic Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp while bonding with his sweetheart son, the full weight of his past sins sits heavy on that memory by the final scene, when he abandons the boy a second time. Those sins also create an impenetrable barrier between him and Kinki’s mother figure. The former lovers can only communicate via phone on opposite sides of the peep show booth where she now works, barely able to stomach the sight of each other. Müller’s Hopper-inspired landscape photography underlines that isolation in every exterior. While these European filmmakers seem wryly amused with the fast food, billboard ads, and novelty roadside attractions that define American kitsch, they also emphasize the sparseness of the country’s sprawling landscape to portray the characters within as isolated, lonely, broken people. The Edward Hopper of it all is a studied observation of physical distance, where people are only connected to each other through long-reaching shadows, interstate concrete, and telephone wire. Even the wandering Stanton’s Norman Rockwell daydream of his reunited family is framed within a vast, vacant lot in the titular Texan town, where nothing awaits him but dust.

Paris, Texas screened at The Broad in New Orleans this week, presented as a new 4k restoration by Janus Films. It was the final screening in this year’s Gap Tooth Cinema program, which is now on break until the first week of January. The screening sold out early, then was moved to the cinema’s largest theater, then sold out again. Like most of my experiences with Gap Tooth’s programming, it was wonderful to see such a gorgeous picture for the first time so big & loud with such an engaged, respectful crowd. I recently put together a Letterboxd list of my favorite new-to-me film discoveries from this year, and Paris, Texas was just one of many titles I got to see theatrically thanks to Gap Tooth: namely, Black Narcissus, Nashville, High Heels, Juliet of the Spirits, The Lovers on the Bridge, and the ephemeral America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of. They’re doing great work, and if you live in New Orleans you should be making time for their screenings in your weekly schedule. Just, you know, please wait until I can purchase my ticket first.

-Brandon Ledet

Rabbit Trap (2025)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

“Listen,” speak-sings Daphne Davenport (Rosy McEwen) into her microphone over ambient nature sounds that she and her husband Darcy (Dev Patel) have been recording. “Noise … the oldest of gods. Before language, before flesh, before name, she was here.” It’s 1976, and the two of them have moved from London to the Welsh countryside with reel to reel recorders and state of the art microphones, which they traipse around the forest with, capturing the sounds of squelching marshes, nightbirds chirping as they move through the air in bloblike flocks, skittering feet of bugs across leaves, and the distant song of unseen fauna, or at least one hopes it’s something so natural. Later, the couple meets a mysterious androgynous child (actress Jade Croot, although The Child is only ever referred to as “he”), and when the boy asks if he can sing Daphne a lullaby that his mother used to sing him as a child, she records him as well. Listening back to it later, Darcy says it “sounds like a spell.” Rabbit Trap traffics in this idea, of sound as song, noise as god, voice as spellcraft, in a beautiful little folk horror from director Bryn Chainey, who has heretofore mostly worked in short film. 

There are points of comparison that it would be easy to go to when describing the film’s atmosphere. The sudden presence of a creepy child who brings with him portents of folkloric truth calls The Killing of a Sacred Deer to mind, and although this is set in Wales rather than on the Cornish coast, the atmosphere of isolation, hallucination, and lost time invokes Enys Men. There’s a sequence in which The Child leads Daphne to a series of tunnels and trenches that seem neither manmade nor natural and lures her through them by whistling a tune that she whistles back to him, and for a moment I felt I was watching Jessie Buckley harmonize with her own echo in Men. Despite these intentional homages or simple similarities, Rabbit Trap feels fresh despite being familiar. Even the way that this film goes to horror media’s most frequently visited well of late (grief and trauma are the real monsters) doesn’t feel like the cliché that it is. For one thing, the film never feels the need to dwell on what’s causing Darcy’s sleep paralysis. We see him experiencing strange dreams of the windows of the house being covered in goop and a spectral figure that may represent his father, with Daphne being quick to record his sleeptalking in the hopes that it might help him remember something when he wakes. Later, those dreams recur after he has broken a fairy circle, and in the end of the film, we find him standing in a beautiful vista recording his truth so that he can play it for Daphne later, since it’s too hard for him to say to her face. We can really only speculate what it is that’s caused Darcy to see himself as the source of an emotional “rot,” because it’s important only in its implications, not in its specifics. 

The plot kicks off when Darcy accidentally wanders into a ring of mushrooms, which folklore calls a “fairy ring,” and to break one invites the wrath of the Tylwyth Teg, fae from another world. Shortly thereafter, The Child appears outside of their cabin. Playing off Darcy’s concerns that he might be a burglar, he instead calls himself a hunter, taking Darcy to see the traps that he lays out for rabbits, taking special care to note that the bait has to be offered with honest and meaningful intention in order for the trap to work. The Child grows closer to both of them, taking an active interest in Daphne’s previous musical work (he asks if she’s famous, to which Darcy replies “You can’t really be famous with her kind of music. She’s more… influential”) and enjoying his and Darcy’s excursions into the marshes to record nature noise. As he becomes more and more of a surrogate child to the couple, his affection for Daphne grows to the point that he asks her to pretend to be his mother, as he claims his died long ago. Darcy, with his unspoken and only vaguely defined issues surrounding fatherhood, starts to get a little creeped out by this, and The Child’s behavior becomes more invasive and presumptuous. What little we do know about Darcy’s past is revealed to us not explicitly but in the way that he talks about sound—that god, that ghost, calling it a “Vibration of an event, an energy shadow, memory carved into the air, a scared lost creature desperate for somewhere to hide before it fades away. When you hear a sound,” he says, “you become its home, and your body is the house it haunts.” Darcy’s body is keeping an unknown score, and The Child has come to find a new family, one way or another. 

Much is left up to interpretation here. My personal reading is that the story The Child tells early in the story, about a baby brother that wandered into the Tylwyth Teg circle and disappeared, is actually about him, and that he grew up parentless in the fae realm, or that he was otherwise a kind of inverse changeling. Now that the ring has been disturbed again, he has the opportunity to go back out into our world and try to reestablish some kind of family, which would explain his quiet (and later loud) desperation on this front. This would also make his introduction of himself as a “hunter,” rather than the more accurate descriptor of “trapper,” a bit of foreshadowing despite the metaphorical, psychedelic rabbit trap that Daphne and Darcy must pass through at the end. Of course, this is a film that leaves a great deal up to your imagination, one that is more a visual and sonic experience than it is a narrative one. Its brisk runtime, coming in at under 90 minutes, means that this tone over text ethos never wears out its welcome. It’s unlikely that, at this late date, many people are still considering new entries onto their end of the year lists, and although this one was stellar, it’s one that will be waiting for you when you’re ready for it, but it’s an inexpensive rental if you’re still doing your 2025 end of the year cramming. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Powell & Pressburger’s Technicolor opera The Tales of Hoffmann (1951).

00:00 Welcome

01:15 The Suspect (1944)
06:18 The King of Comedy (1982)
15:38 Marty Supreme (2025)
22:31 For Your Consideration (2006)
29:00 Abigail (2024)
37:12 Rabbit Trap (2025)
44:00 The Headless Woman (2008)
48:36 The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
52:24 America – Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of (1973)
56:51 Black Narcissus (1947)

59:50 The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

SEFCA’s Top 10 Films of 2025

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Swampflix’s official selection of the best films of 2025 won’t post until January 2026, but list-making season is already in full-swing elsewhere. General consensus on the best films of the year is starting to take shape as regional film critic associations are publishing their collective Best of the Year Lists, and I’m proud to say I was once again able to take a small part in that annual ritual. I voted in the Southeastern Film Critics Association poll for the best films of 2025, representing a consensus opinion among 99 critics across nine states in the American South. Winners were announced this morning, and it’s a commendable list. At the very least, it’s cool to see the last three significant Warner Bros. releases (One Battle After Another, Sinners, Weapons) take a deserved victory lap before the historic movie studio is chopped up and sold for parts. While recent years’ SEFCA picks have typically been dominated by a single critical juggernaut (Anora in 2024, Oppenheimer in 2023, Everything Everywhere in 2022), this year we were able to spread the wealth among those three major Warner Bros. players: mostly split between Paul Thomas Anderson & Ryan Coogler’s respective accomplishments in One Battle & Sinners, while throwing some love Amy Madigan’s way for her Best Supporting Actress role as the instantly iconic villain of Weapons.

Speaking of that surprise Weapons win, the other major story of this year’s SEFCA list is the critical ascent of horror. To quote SEFCA Vice President Jim Farmer in today’s press release, “It was really satisfying to see a genre film like Sinners performing so well with critics across the country while also being a sensation at the box office […] I’ve always been a big supporter of horror films, and three of our Top 10 films fall into that genre.” Besides the aforementioned Sinners & Weapons, the third horror title that earned a spot in this year’s Top 10 is Guillermo del Toro’s gothic melodrama Frankenstein, a decades-long passion project for the notoriously cinephilic director. At this point, it’s unclear whether that critical boost for Weapons or Frankenstein will earn them Oscars attention as well, but Sinners ranks so highly among this year’s winners that it’s very likely going to be a major contender the way previous SEFCA winners have been in the recent past. Even if you don’t personally care about The Oscars as an institution, that does mean it’ll be easier for the next wave of high-concept passion project horrors to be made, as Awards Season attention often helps steer the flow of production funds. The collapse of Warner Bros. is a grim omen, but I’m still looking forward to our spooky future at the cineplex.

Check out SEFCA’s Top 10 Films of 2025 list below, and the full list of this year’s awarded film on the organization’s website.

  1. One Battle After Another
  2. Sinners
  3. Marty Supreme
  4. It Was Just an Accident
  5. Sentimental Value
  6. Hamnet
  7. Train Dreams
  8. Weapons
  9. Frankenstein
  10. The Secret Agent

-Brandon Ledet

Marty Supreme (2025)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Timothée Chalamet is an annoying twerp. That’s just a fact. Or, it’s at least been a fact for the past ten or so months of self-aggrandizing PR stunts, as he’s brought a style of hype & bravado to the film marketing business that’s usually only heard from rappers & athletes. During a SAG Awards speech earlier this year—where he won a statue for headlining a cookie-cutter Bob Dylan biopic—he declared that he is currently “in pursuit of greatness” as an actor, citing Michaels Jordan & Phelps among his professional inspirations alongside more relevant luminaries like Daniel Day-Lewis & Marlon Brando. His announced ambitions are the loud, brash ramblings of a twentysomething bro who hasn’t yet been slapped back down to Earth by the limitations of his talents & life, an inevitability eagerly anticipated by all of the pasty movie-nerd cynics watching from home. While annoying, however, there is an undeniable charm to the little twerp, who can worm his way into your heart with the slightest “Ain’t I a stinker?” smirk. Has his year-long campaign to dominate The Movie Business the same way Michael Jordan dominated the basketball court been a sarcastic bit, or is he totally sincere in his rejection of actors’ usual put-on airs of professional humility? I can’t say for sure, but if it’s all been a long-form viral marketing campaign for his new starring role in Marty Supreme, then he might be on the most genius self-promotion run in the history of the artform.

The titular Marty is a twentysomething ping-pong player who honed his craft by hustling tables in 1950s New York City, based loosely on real-life table tennis showboat Marty Reisman. Marty is a scrawny twerp possessed with the self-driven mission to prove that he is the greatest ping-pong player in the entire world. All signs point to it being time to put that dream aside and settle down, get a real job, and build a home life with the woman he just got pregnant behind her husband’s back (Odessa A’zion, the only supporting player who manages to keep up with Chalamet’s manic energy). Unfortunately, none of those practicalities will penetrate his thick skull until he can prove his dominance in the sport, despite the fact that ping-pong is not especially popular, profitable, or respectable outside a few niche international circles that he cannot afford to reach by plane. So, he acts like a petulant child until he gets his way, getting both literally and figuratively spanked for his brattish misbehavior as the Bad Wittle Boy of Table Tennis until he achieves a self-determined marker of victory. Then, his ambitions lift like a curse and he can start to see other people in his small orbit as human beings, not just boardgame pieces to move around in his “pursuit of greatness.” It’s an incredibly disgusting, energizing performance from Chalamet, who nails every beat in building up Marty “Supreme” Mauser as one of cinema’s greatest attractive-repulsive antiheroes. For his sake, I hope he wins an Oscar for it, freeing him from his own curse of professional ambitions so he can calm the fuck down and we can all catch a breath.

Structurally, Marty Supreme is not especially surprising for anyone who’s seen Josh Safdie’s previous directorial efforts. Like Adam Sandler & Robert Pattinson’s pieces-of-shit protagonists in Uncut Gems & Good Time, Chalamet spends the entire film hustling every single person he runs into in desperate bids to fund his own selfish gambles. The only difference here is a matter of genre, leaving the audience more satisfied with the built-in payoffs of a sports drama than the grim, end-of-the-line letdowns of Safdie’s previous works. Bona-fide celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow, Fran Drescher, and Shark Tank‘s Kevin O’Leary mix with first-time no-namers who appear to have been cast at the corner bodega, overloading the screen with a surplus of vintage New Yawk accents & faces to scowl at our incorrigible antihero — another Safdie trademark. Third-time collaborator Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) returns to deliver another dizzying synth soundtrack, this time mixed in with a coke-fueled 1980s mixtape that disorients the audience within the 1950s setting. There’s an escalation of surrealism here in momentary tangents involving falling bathtubs, licked honey, vampires, The Harlem Globetrotters, and a seminal opening credits sequence borrowed wholesale from Amy Heckerling. Overall, though, Safdie mostly sticks to the formula that’s been earning him bigger acclaim every picture (as opposed to his brother Benny, who went out on a limb with his own sports drama this year, to lesser success). So, all of the novelty and spectacle on this outing belong to Chalamet and Chalamet alone, as he seeks to dominate this movie in every scene and, by extension, all movies for all of time. I wish him all the best, meaning I hope he eventually gives it a rest.

-Brandon Ledet

The Headless Woman (2008)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

2008’s The Headless Woman is the kind of thoroughly inscrutable arthouse film that poses even the meaning of its title as a riddle. Is Maria Onetto’s protagonist-in-crisis “headless” in the “Where’s your head at?” sense? The film is a week-in-the-life portrait of a wealthy Argentine woman who we never truly get to know, because by the time we meet her she’s not quite acting like herself; she goes through the motions of her usual daily schedule, but her mind is elsewhere. Is her titular headlessness a reference to director Lucrecia Martel’s tendency to push her characters to the furthest edges of the frame? We often see Onetto’s figure literally headless, as she is cropped & contorted so that her face is obscured from our eyes. My favorite, most baseless theory is that the title is a slight mistranslation from a Spanish-language idiom meaning The Concussed Woman, as that is our POV character’s least questionable condition. She has a head; she just smacks it really hard in a car accident, leaving her dazed for days on end as she stubbornly refuses medical diagnoses from both doctors in the film and the audience in the theater.

Besides the figurative opaqueness of its title, another common arthouse complaint that The Headless Woman invites is that “Nothing happens.” That would ring especially true for anyone who arrives late to the theater, since exactly one thing happens in the first few minutes, and if you miss it you’re fucked. The film opens with indigenous children playing in the canals off a service road, followed by a sequence of a white Argentine aristocrat (Onetto) driving recklessly down the same dusty path. She hits something with her car while reaching for her cellphone, but instead of stepping out to investigate what it was, she momentarily pauses then drives away — concussed and afraid. The next week of her life is a test of just how little effort she has to put into her daily routine to maintain her bourgie lifestyle. Annoyed family members, indigenous servants, and professional underlings guide her way as she sleepwalks through her schedule, distracted both by the guilt of possibly having killed a child with her car and by the physiological effects of a head injury. Eventually, she snaps out of it, repairs her car, dyes her hair, and moves on with her life. Nothing happens, and that’s entirely the point.

The Headless Woman is often billed as a psychological thriller, which I suppose is abstractly true. Although there’s not much action or momentum in the fallout of the opening car accident, Onetto’s concussed protagonist is often in danger of hurting more victims because of her temporarily headless state. Whenever she drives a car or shows up to work at her dentistry practice, there’s tension in what damage she might cause while her mind is adrift. Imagine if your next dental surgery was performed by Dougie Jones of Twin Peaks; it’s a nightmare scenario. Ultimately, though, it’s the stasis & rot of her inaction that causes the most damage, as she takes several days to admit to herself that she very probably killed a child. When she manages to voice that confession to loved ones, they immediately shut her down and reassure her that it was likely just a dog, encouraging her to continue to do nothing until the details are muddled and the transgression is forgotten. The constant attention paid to her interactions with the servant class indicate that it would be an entirely different story if she had struck a white child instead of an indigenous one, but that’s a story told through observation, not confrontation. The thrill is in puzzling through the intent behind every image & interaction Martel offers, leaning more psychological than thriller.

I’ve now puzzled my way through three of Martel’s works, and they all are determined to rot in a similar kind of immoral inaction. In her name-maker debut, La Ciénaga, the wealth class of Argentina drink their days away poolside while their estates are gradually reclaimed by nature and their indigenous servants continually refill their cocktails. In her most recent budget-escalator, Zama, an 18th Century Spanish officer is assigned to lord over the indigenous people of Argentina, with no specific orders except to await more specific orders. There’s a gradual madness built by the lack of action or momentum in all three works, and they all point to a cruel, culture-wide pointlessness in the nation’s colonization. Likewise, our figuratively headless protagonist is maddening in her lack of momentum or direction, a psychic wound that does not heal just because she eventually snaps out of it. That immoral stasis & mindless occupation doesn’t make for especially thrilling stories beat to beat, but it leaves a lot of room for the audience to think about the meaning behind each of Martel’s images, which are uncanny in their sinister ordinariness: a room temperature coffee pot, a staticky wedding video, a limp body seen only through the dusty veil of a rearview window.

-Brandon Ledet

My Christmas Wish: Treat Yourself to All That Heaven Allows (1955) This Year

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Last year, Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows made it to number 24 on Swampflix’s Top 100 films, so naturally I spent the evening of last Christmas Eve closing that blind spot. If you’re a weirdo like I/we am/are (and if you’re on this site, that’s probably the case), you’ll likely find yourself recognizing the plot from its contours, because what Star Wars is to Spaceballs, this movie is to John Waters’s Polyester. Since Brandon had already written a review years earlier, I repurposed the review I couldn’t stop myself from writing to save for this year as an earnest recommendation to spend some part of your Christmas season with Sirk too, on the 70th anniversary of Heaven’s release. 

Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) is a well-off widow in New England. Her life is quiet, with visits from her two college-aged children Kay (Gloria Talbott) and Ned (William Reynolds) growing fewer and further between. Her best friend, Sara Warren (Agnes Moorhead), takes her out socially; attempts to get her to pair off with older widowers in their social circle are unsuccessful, as she feels no spark with any of them. One day, she realizes that some new hunk is tending to her landscaping, and he introduces himself as Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), the son of the late Mr. Kirby who was previously engaged as the Scott family’s arborist. When she visits him at his home, she learns that he sleeps on a cot in a room attached to the greenhouse, and when he mentions planning to tear down the old mill on the property, she cajoles him into giving her a tour of the long-abandoned building, and she encourages him to convert it into a livable home instead. As their romance burgeons, their love is represented in ongoing changes to the mill house, which comes to resemble a livable home more and more. Ron takes Cary to meet some of his friends, a couple who have given up on the lifestyle of trying to keep up with the Joneses in New York and now instead tend a tree farm. As the night goes on, a party erupts, and the couple introduces Cary to their bohemian friends: birdwatchers, beekeepers/artists, cornbread masters, and lobster-catchers. 

Cary has a wonderful, uninhibited time, but there’s trouble around the corner; her high society friends are rather snooty about her relationship, as are her children. When she mentions selling the house and moving in with Ron (post nuptials, of course), Ned becomes quite upset about his mother selling his childhood home and tells her that the “scandal” she’s bringing upon the family by dating someone who’s merely (upper) middle class could jeopardize his career options. The local gossip hound starts a rumor that Cary and Ron had been an item since before her husband died, which deeply upsets Kay, as she begs her mother to break things off with Ron. Everyone also seems to be utterly scandalized by their dramatically different ages. (Hudson was 30 and Wyman 38 at the time, and those are the ages that they appear to be to me, but the film may be trying to imply a greater disparity.) She acquiesces to the demands of her fairweather socialite friends and her ungrateful children, only to learn some months later that her sacrifice was in vain. Both of her children delay their Christmastime return to their hometown, and when they arrive, they reveal their own new life plans; Kay will be getting married to her beau in February when he graduates, and Ned will be leaving straight from his own graduation to take a position in Europe that will last, at minimum, a year. They present her with a Christmas gift that she doesn’t want (more on that in a minute), and Ned even suggests that they sell the house, since the kids won’t be needing it as their “home” any longer. Via a simple misunderstanding, Cary comes to believe that Ron is getting married to another woman, and the melodrama only unfolds further from there. 

Sirk is a Technicolor artist, and this is a gorgeous movie, and a very funny one at that. One of the things that I really loved about this cast was the opportunity to see Agnes Moorhead play a kinder, more sympathetic role. Just a couple days after watching this one I caught her name in the opening credits of Dark Passage and thought to myself, aloud, “That woman was working.” And, wouldn’t you know it, I tuned into the New Year’s Twilight Zone marathon on H&I just in time to catch her episode of that: 

Moorhead’s Sara Warren is the only real friend that Cary has, as she’s the one who encourages her to get back together with Ron when she sees just how heartbroken her friend is. We learn this in a scene that’s perfectly framed and is one of many pointed social critiques that the film makes. We cut to a shot of a housekeeper vacuuming a carpet, as the camera dollies backward through the doorway to the room in which Sara and Cary are talking, and Sara closes the door to shut out the noise so that the two women can converse. It’s a neat gag, but it plays into the overall social critique of the movie, in which even the most sympathetic member of the bourgeoisie is still an aristocrat shutting out her social inferiors, despite her softening her heart towards her friend’s desire to date a blue collar business owner. There’s also a great contrast between the country club cocktail party that Cary attends near the film’s opening scene and the lobsterfest that happens at Ron’s friends’ house, where the upper class is presented undesirably. A married man makes a pass at Cary, kissing her; a potential romantic interest tells her that there’s little need for passion at their age, to which she (rightfully) takes some offense; the town gossip queen is there to do her thing. Ron’s group’s party is a lively place, where he plays the piano and sings boisterously, and people dance with great fervor. It’s never commented upon, but it is present throughout. 

Another fun little tidbit about this one is its distaste for television. Early on in the film, Sara suggests that Cary get a television to keep her company now that the house is empty, which Cary finds to be a contemptible suggestion. When a television salesman sent by Sara calls upon the Scott household, Cary shoos him away in a huff. In the final insult, however, Cary receives a television set as a gift from her children for Christmas. Ned even reiterates that Cary will be lonely and unfulfilled without her children and should have something in the house to distract her from her pitiful solitude, as if he and his sister hadn’t done everything in their power to sabotage her relationship with Ron. After the children have gone off to do their own things, their mother is left alone in the house, lit only by the lights of the Christmas tree and a duplicate fire: one in the hearth and its mirror in the flat TV screen — the giver of warmth and its cold reflected image. It’s striking and memorable, and the relatively tiny window that the TV might give of the world is visually contrasted with the vivid Technicolor world just on the other side of the panoramic windows that Ron has installed into the home he built to share with Cary. It’s good stuff. 

The film doesn’t demand a winter or Christmas time frame to be viewed, but I think it works best in that context. I’m getting the word out now so you can put it on the calendar before we all get Christmas brained. And, while you’re at it, when was the last time you watched Polyester?

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond