Reviews

Irony, Sincerity, Hilarity, Clarity

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Does a comedy owe its audience even an ounce of heartfelt sincerity, or is it enough to just tell jokes? Is ironic detachment an open excuse for artistic laziness, or can it be a useful tool that cuts deeper than straightforward sentimentality when wielded with intent? I recently took in a double feature of new-release comedies that challenged my relationship with ironic, bad-on-purpose humor, which I used to enjoy without reservation half a lifetime ago. In my early 20s, I would’ve been over the moon for David Wain’s latest ironic joke-fest Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, which is so relentlessly, purposelessly stupid it’s almost indistinguishable from a hack studio comedy from a lesser mind. Instead, I swooned for the equally ironic but much more purposeful Maddie’s Secret, a new John Early vehicle that parodies hack TV movies & afterschool specials of a bygone era while also honoring their ability to make an audience cry.  Both were funny on their own terms, but only one made me genuinely feel something, which is an effect I didn’t know I needed in a comedy until I saw it was possible.

To paraphrase the great Robert Bresson, Gail Daughtry offers neither beautiful images nor necessary ones. The film starts in Everywhere, Suburbia, mimicking the imagistic sensibilities of a studio comedy from at least two decades ago. When our titular plucky hairstylist (Zoey Deutch) leaves the safety of the suburbs behind for a life-changing adventure in Los Angeles, the images shift to mimic the B-roll stock footage of an Entertainment Tonight segment showcasing the glitz & glam of Hollywood living . . . also from at least two decades ago. Everything you see in Gail Daughtry is intentionally, hideously stale, and much of its humor relies on its jokes being punishingly unfunny, all for the sake of above-it-all ironic detachment. If there’s any emotional investment in its low-effort mockery of pre-existing entertainment, it’s in the film’s broad parody of the Old Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz. Gail Daughtry’s name is a mirrored slant-rhyme of Dorothy Gale’s. The wizard she hopes to meet in the emerald city of Los Angeles is Jon Hamm (playing himself), whom she’s desperate to sleep with after her fiancée improbably acts on his own “celebrity sex pass,” to even the score. Along the way, she gathers a ragtag group of daffy bozos: a brainless management-agency desk clerk (Ben Wang), a heartless paparazzo (Ken Marino), and the cowardly John Slattery (again, himself). Along for the entire ride is her pet gay bestie Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), another anagrammatic reference to Toto. The Wizard of Oz homages are genuinely cute & heartwarming throughout, acting as the one shining beacon of effort & sincerity in a comedy that would otherwise rather not bother.

Maddie’s Secret is a different story. Ostensibly, the film is a winking, ironic parody of the made-for-TV “women’s issues” movie Kate’s Secret (1986), now set in the modern world of culinary “content creators.” Only, it’s not clear exactly how much of that parody is meant to be taken as a joke. John Early stars as the titular Maddie, reviving the same exaggerated drag mannerisms he brought to his 2021 “redux” parody of Showgirls. Early’s performance is a kind of post-ironic magic trick, one that can only be compared to Divine’s domestic melodrama performances in Hairspray & Polyester. You immediately forget that Maddie is a woman played by a male comedian; you just accept her as a person worthy of the world’s love, from the hairs on her stringy blonde wig to the everyday commonality of her sagging breasts (arguably, the MVP movie prop of the year) to the sensible shoes on her feet. Maddie’s in-movie audience loves her too, as she finds fast fame online making relatable cooking videos that outpace the view counts of her more pristinely put-together coworkers (most notably, Claudia O’Doherty as her test kitchen employer’s queen bitch). The fame gets to her, though, exacerbating her private struggles with bulimia so violently that she’s voluntarily institutionalized. From there, the movie takes a detour into Girl, Interrupted homage, introducing the audience to a clique of other women in crisis to fall in love with (including Vanessa Bayer as her ditzy roommate and Kate Berlant as her predatory lesbian sidekick). Everyone involved is technically putting in ironic, going-through-the-motions comedic performances, but the effect of the scene-to-scene drama is still deeply, painfully heartfelt. It’s a lot like watching an actual vintage made-for-TV melodrama on Lifetime, in that it can make you laugh and cry, often simultaneously.

Some of the disparity between Maddie’s Secret & Gail Daughtry‘s respective relationships with visual, effortful beauty is that the imagistic standards of all media have declined over time. Gail Daughtry may borrow its story structure from The Wizard of Oz, but its visual cues mock the pedestrian, smartphone-quality digital footage of modern filmmaking — intentionally deglamming & demystifying the Hollywood dream factory. Meanwhile, Maddie’s Secret is set in the world of digital content creation, but it pulls its visual cues from an era when even made-for-TV movies were expected to be relatively beautiful. The standards of basic craft were just higher in past decades, so that certain lighting & framing choices in a TV movie about bulimia could be mistaken for a Fassbinderian homage to Douglas Sirk. As such, I should probably cut Wain’s film some slack for being so aggressively ugly & mundane, since its lifeless visual aesthetic is itself a critical commentary on modern comedic media production. It’s just difficult to do so while there’s another comedy in theaters that proves ironic humor does not necessarily require a lack of effort, emotion, or purpose. Maddie’s Secret looks great, lands laughs, and earns tears while maintaining the same dedication to feature-length ironic parody. It can be done, and it is worth the effort.

-Brandon Ledet

War and Peace, Part III: The Year 1812 (1967)

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War and Peace: Part III: The Year 1812 opens with the same shot which ended Part II: Natasha Rostova, as Napoleon’s army of thousands enters the Russian theater of war. We then return to Russian high society, where the final lines of the previous film, regarding war as an event “beyond human nature, and human reason” are repeated over the image of another gala, but this one is quickly interrupted by the arrival of soldiers onto the ballroom floor, disrupting everything and turning the perfectly formed lines of group dances into chaos. The image contrasts Napoleon’s incoming army, so regimented and moving in perfect union, to the disruption of that same uniformity on the home front. There’s a strange air of casual indifference to the war among those far from the front lines, until it’s nearly knocking down their doors. The incompetence of Field Marshal Kutuzov, who eventually oversees (and utterly botches) the Battle of Bordino, is a matter of aristocratic gossip, to be pulled out, picked over, and joked about at fancy parties. 

Part III, thus, ends up being a story about the ignorance of an older generation. I’ve puzzled over what I perceive to be an ideological disconnection between the Soviet philosophy and these films’ romanticized depiction of the aristocracy of the era. Pierre Bezukhov (Sergei Bondarchuk) and Andre Bolkonsky (Vyacheslav Tikhonov)’s world is one of ornamented decadence; Natasha Rostova (Ludmila Savelyeva), who is once again reduced to little more than a background character for this outing, is both a product of that lifestyle and an object of desire within it. The Year 1812 is the shortest of the four films, at only eighty minutes, and it’s divided neatly in half at the midpoint by the beginning of the Bordino conflict, with that battle playing out over the last half of the runtime. The first half is itself divided in two, with the first quarter of the film focusing on what’s going on back in Moscow and St. Petersburg and the second quarter depicting the preparations for the war that will take up the back half. In the beginning, we meet a boy who can’t be more than ten years old, begging his family to allow him to join the army, despite, as his guardian says, his lips still being wet with his mother’s milk. We move from here to the Bolkonsky home, where the elder Prince Andrei is being tended to in his dying days by Princess Maria, the younger Prince Andrei’s sister, who is also overseeing the raising of Andrei’s son. 

Despite increasingly bad news about the Russian Army’s performance on the borders, including a letter from Andrei the younger saying that he fears the very camp he’s writing from will be taken by the French by the time it finds its way home, Andrei the elder doesn’t absorb any of this. It would appear at first to be dementia, but when he finally understands the peril in which Russia finds itself on his death bed, it’s an equally valid interpretation that he had simply rejected reality with a clear mind all along. This is mirrored in the more war-oriented parts of the film, where we see that the jokes that the upper class have been making about Field Marshal Kutuzov are apt; he’s unable to mount his horse, is winded at the slightest exercise, and, in a piece of on-the-nose characterization, blind in one eye. There is a boy in his camp that’s barely any older than the child we saw at the very beginning, and may even be the boy to whom that first child was referring when he said “Obolensky’s younger than I and he’s going.” There are other parallels, but the reading I take from the film is that this is a story that is made to address the inadequacies of the generation that preceded Pierre and Andre’s, one that is full of fools, truth-deniers, and incompetents who rose to power through nothing but birthright alone. The nineteenth century has come, and although the new generation sees things as they are, the trappings of the old ways and their attendant wealth are still with our characters (and still empower them). I must admit, however, that I haven’t quite parsed out what value the Soviets perceived in all the gilded filigree of the monied nobility, and how they were able to square what appears to be a celebration thereof with the anti-aristocratic political ideation of the government that funded and empowered the creation of this unbelievably massive undertaking.

In truth, I’m beginning to feel that I may not understand the actual overall thesis at all. Shortly before the Battle of Borodino, latrines are being dug and maimed soldiers are borne away from the lines of engagement in carts when Pierre, resplendent in expensive, clean white clothing (and a top hat to boot), appears to meet his friend Andrei and offer his services. Following the dual narratives in Part I, which saw Pierre and Andrei separately coming to the realization of just how precious and fragile life is, it feels redundant to have them seem to learn this lesson again. Maybe there’s something deeply Russian about revisiting this again, that the cyclic and reiterative structure is a literary device to which I’m unaccustomed or that it’s aiming for something that I’m failing to perceive. It’s also possible that it’s simply becoming more difficult to keep track of the intricacies of the narrative, or perhaps this is merely a reminder of their values when faced with another miserable war. Andrei’s only real notable moment of agency in this is that he rejects a staff position under Kutuzov and instead remains in a command position in actual combat, which underlines a soliloquy he has about how war is not a game and that the men above him in the chain of command are too far removed from the horror of it all. And it is grisly, and nightmarish, and through all of it, Kutuzov sits in a state of relaxation, enjoying tea and canapes while filtering out the reports of death and destruction that surround him. Like the elder Prince Andrei, he only hears what he wants to hear and turns his literal blind eye to the reality of the rapidly deteriorating battle around him. As a result of his ineptitude, Pierre even ends up getting splattered in the blood of the young attendant who might be Obolensky. 

It feels redundant, at this point, to go on praising the masterful filmmaking here, but it really is spectacular. War is once again hell, the screen filled with images from nightmares, smoke and blood and gunpowder and fear. Anatole, who almost eloped with Natasha last time, has his leg amputated, which is witnessed by Andrei (and the audience), and it’s nauseating. We go from a scene in which a grateful army descends on a small lake in the nude and en masse to bathe themselves, and they seem jovial, and it undercuts it even further when we see these same men gutted and killed in the fog of war. I’m still trying to fully grasp at every different thesis that War and Peace is laying before the audience; I can only hope that Part IV is capable of wrapping up all of those threads and braiding them into a tapestry that fills in the gaps in my interpretation. We’ll find out soon enough. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

War and Peace, Part II: Natasha Rostova (1965)

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The second part of Sergei Bondarchuk’s four-part adaptation of War and Peace contrasts and serves as companion to the previous film, which focused primarily on the “war” of the title, while Part II: Natasha Rostova, instead gives us a portrait of “peace,” as much as such a thing can exist in the heartland when war is at the borders. Natasha Rostova (Ludmila Savelyeva) played a fairly minor role in the first film, where she appeared as a young girl at a fête hosted in her family home in honor of her older brother Nikolai, before he went off to the war effort alongside Andrei Bolkonsky (Vyacheslav Tikhonov). There, her childhood innocence was a counterpoint to the war that we would soon see, and served as a reminder of what the war was meant to protect. Here, she is still naive, but is reaching adulthood. When she goes to her first ball, we hear her internal monologue as she panics that no one asks her to dance. Encouraged by Pierre (Bondarchuk), who is now officially Count Bezukhov, Andrei takes his “protege” for a spin around the parquet, and it only takes one waltz for sixteen year old Natasha to be utterly smitten with him. 

Andrei, who has been in a state of depression after recovering from his near death in the last film only to arrive home in time to watch his wife die in childbirth, ponders an apparent dead oak in early springtime, and compares himself to it, a hollowed shell that only seems alive. After meeting Natasha, he is reinvigorated, and passes the same tree, only to discover that it has put out new green leaves for the spring. He appears at the Rostova’s home and asks for Natasha’s hand, but states that they should not announce their engagement and instead delay marriage for a year, ostensibly so that Natasha can have some life experiences and decide if marriage to an older man is really what she wants for herself. (It’s worth noting here that I have no idea how old Andrei is supposed to be, but Tikhonov was almost forty.) He goes away to further convalesce abroad, and she goes nearly mad with missing him. Pierre has made some kind of peace with his wife Helene, and she attends the Moscow Opera with Natasha in tow, which leads to the girl meeting Helene’s brother Anatole (Vasily Lanovoy). Anatole was part of Pierre’s old drinking crowd with Dolokhov (Oleg Yefremov), the man Pierre wounded but did not kill in a duel in part one, and is an utter cad. At Dolokhov’s suggestion, he begins to pursue Natasha, despite already having married a foreign woman while serving abroad. When confronted about this by his sister, he declares that either the other marriage is irrelevant in Russia, in which case he gets what he wants, or he’ll be found to be a bigamist and driven out of polite society, in which case he will still get what he wants, which is Natasha’s innocence. Eventually, Natasha’s hostess learns of her plans to elope with Anatole and chastises her, and Natasha breaks down in tears; Anatole’s attempts to abscond with Natasha are repelled by Andrei’s watchmen. When Pierre sees Anatole’s eyes light up at the prospect of being bought off, he calls him a “vile, heartless brood.” 

Andrei is, ironically, no prince either. In the first film, he tries to convince Pierre to never marry, citing his unhappy union with the very pregnant Lise, whom he completely abandons in order to join the war effort despite there being no expectation of him to do so. Textually, it’s a good thing that he did, as he will prove invaluable to the war and a great leader later, but that’s immaterial to his motivations. He returned from the Battle of Austerlitz just in time to bear witness to Lise dying in childbirth and tell her that he loved her and regretted leaving her alone. This time around, he immediately falls in love with a child (the standards of the time notwithstanding), tells her he’ll marry her but not for a year, and then disappears again. (It appears that this delay was a demand by Andrei’s father in the source text, but no explicit reason is given in the film other than the one cited above, that she should be allowed to gather some life experiences before getting hitched to an older man.) When she does become excited at the prospect of marrying him, after spending weeks yearning for him to return to the Rostova family compound, we get to see him react in real time as his affection turns to disgust the moment that the marriage proposal is accepted. I’m not sure if this is an intentionally ugly portrait of Andrei, to show that he’s a man who immediately stops desiring something the moment that he actually has it, but whether this is a deviation from the source text or something that was not considered in the novel is irrelevant; it’s textual here. In the film’s closing minutes, Pierre reminds him of a conversation that the two had in St. Petersburg regarding morality and ethics. “I said that a fallen woman should be forgiven,” Andrei admits, “but I didn’t say that I could forgive her; I can’t” (emphasis added). As someone going into this adaptation with no real knowledge of Tolstoy’s novel, I had assumed that Pierre was one of its heroes, but I’m not so sure now. 

As Natasha breaks down, declaring her life to be over, Pierre cheers her up by telling her that if he were younger and single, he would beg for her hand, and this appears to break her out of her funk. Immediately after, Pierre is taking a sleigh ride when he sees Napoleon’s Comet overhead, and that narration informs us: “It seemed to Pierre that this falling star was a symbol of what was passing in his own softened and uplifted soul.” An image of the comet in the night sky is suddenly harshened by the crashing of a loud, dramatic scare chord, then some peasants crossing themselves, which was a delightful transition. The year “1812” rolls up onto the screen as ominous music plays, and the final image that we see is of Napoleon’s forces invading the western Russian frontier, promising more hideous war in the immediate future, “contrary to human reason, and human nature.” 

After the explosive, violent nature of Part I: Andrei Bolkonsky, Part II: Natasha Rostova is a bit of a breather, which makes the pacing of the whole thing feel slightly less thrilling in comparison. Despite being nearly an entire third shorter than Andrei, Natasha feels longer. The less dense narrative events are given some space to stretch out; it is, perhaps, too much breathing room. Internal monologue is a tricky thing to adapt to film as a medium, and one of the go-to failed examples that always comes to mind is David Lynch’s Dune, in which different characters’ thoughts are shared with the audience via whispery voice over. That’s not a novel idea in and of itself, but everything gets a bit muddied when the audience is bombarded with the thoughts of dozens of people. That tactic was also present in Andrei, but that film was cramming so many things into its long runtime that one didn’t have time to contemplate it. Here, we find the Rostova women preparing for a ball at around eight minutes into the film, and there’s an unfathomably complicated tracking shot as they all get ready, and then at about nine minutes in, they arrive to the gala, where we get another extremely impressive tracking shot that moves from the grand staircase in the entryway of a palace, goes up the stairs in order to watch Natasha and her cousin ascend, then enter the ballroom and wind through the various corridors, and it’s four minutes without a single cut. It’s beautiful and masterful, but we spend a lot of time at this party, to the point that one starts to have a little too much time without anything progressing. One becomes a bit tired of the pageantry and starts to wonder when we’re going to just get on with it, especially since there are still many hours left to go in this story. 

Where the film does see great success is in its style. One gets the feeling that Bondarchuk was delighted to get to play indoors after what must have been a miserable shoot on the first film. There are several sections in which the film becomes a split screen, divided between warm and cold colors, as characters have conversations that parallel one another. It makes for a beautiful tableau:


On the beauty of its images alone, this film safely rides into “excellent” territory, despite not living up to the standard set by Andrei. The ominous cliffhanger ending is a delight, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out in the following segments. You can find Part II on Mosfilm’s YouTube channel here.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

War and Peace, Part I: Andrei Bolkonsky (1965)

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How do you adapt a novel like Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a tome so notoriously lengthy (587,287 words) that, for over a century, merely having read it was considered a badge of honor, a sign of elite literary prowess? If you’re Paramount Pictures in the 1950s, you cast Audrey Hepburn as the teenaged ingenue Natasha Rostova opposite fifty-year-old Henry Fonda and forty-year-old Mel Ferrer, and you try to cram as much of the novel as you can into 208 minutes (admittedly a runtime not to be scoffed at). Not to be outdone, however, the Soviets decided that a Western War and Peace simply could not be allowed to be the film adaptation that everyone would remember, so they set out on a half-decade journey to create and release four different films, each roughly adapting one of the novel’s volumes. Four Soviet War and Peace films were released between 1965 and 1967, totaling over seven hours of runtiy. Having already seen what masters some of the Soviet filmmakers were, and what stunning pieces of filmmaking they created with The Cranes are Flying and Soy Cuba, when a friend suggested we pursue this massive undertaking, we leapt in with both feet. 

The three primary characters about which the narrative circles are Pierre Bezukhov (Sergei Bondarchuk, who also directed all four films), Andrei Bolkonsky (Vyacheslav Tikhonov), and Natasha Rostova (Ludmila Savelyeva), although Natasha’s involvement with the narrative of Part 1 is minimal. Pierre, the bastard son of an unfathomably wealthy Russian count, has just returned to St. Petersburg after having been educated in France; both his illegitimacy and his more French way of thinking make him socially awkward, especially as Napoleon is leading France against Russia’s allies at the time of Pierre’s homecoming. At a ball, he reunites with his friend, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who is at the crux of an existential crisis after growing disillusioned with the life of the aristocracy of St. Petersburg and bored with his socialite wife. To that end, he plans to join the war effort as an aide-de-camp to a Russian general, leaving his very pregnant wife in the care of his eccentric father, the elder Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, and his religious sister, the Princess Maria.

Despite Andrei’s warnings that Pierre should avoid the company of drunken roustabouts Anatole Kuragin and Fedor Dolokhov, Pierre ends up involved in an embarrassing bit of public drunkenness in which the three of them strap a policeman to a bear and throw him in a river (we do not get to witness this on screen, but we do see them drinking with the bear at a party immediately prior), resulting in Anatole and Pierre being expelled from St. Petersburg and Dolokhov being demoted in rank in the Russian army. When Count Bezukhov dies and recognizes Pierre as his legal heir, the new count becomes a desired party guest (and potential husband for any number of voluptuous aristocrats) overnight, and he finds himself courted by Helene Kuragin, Anatole’s sister, and the two wed despite Andrei’s admonitions against marriage in general. 

Dolokhov, Andrei, and Nikolai Rostov (the older brother of Natasha, who, like his sister, is less important here but becomes more so down the line) are all present at the Battle of Austerlitz, where Andrei is presumed to have died in battle. On the home front, Pierre becomes obsessed with the rumors that Helene and Dolokhov are having an affair, challenging Dolokhov to a duel. Despite Dolokhov’s military training, Pierre manages to shoot him, albeit not fatally, and Dolokhov misses his return shot. Pierre is horrified by the fact that he very nearly took another man’s life, becoming introspective and philosophical. Andrei, for his part, has had similar revelations in the field of war, and is revealed to his family to be alive when he returns home, just in time to witness his wife die in childbirth, realizing too late that he did truly love her, or so he says. 

It may not seem that this outline, although fairly complex (and admittedly oversimplified), could fill nearly two and a half hours of screentime, but it does, and marvelously. I’m writing this review after having only watched the first two parts, and while Part Two is more about the “peace” part of the original text’s title, Andrei Bolkonsky is very much about the war. Weary generals arrive to tell their Russian counterparts about their complete defeat in other campaigns, the war and its justifications (and the narcissistic self-justifications of those who participate) are a constant topic among every rung of society that we witness, and we are treated to a very protracted depiction of the Battle of Austerlitz. It’s the last of these that’s most fascinating, as it’s long been a topic of film criticism that the depiction of warfare, especially in American and other Western films, often tries to articulate an argument against war but fails because it cannot help but depict war as glorious and honorable because of the very nature of filmic language. (If you’re too online, you may recognize a shadow of this in the now ever-present “depiction equals endorsement” fallacy that will be a product of discourse from now until we’re all dead.) Or, to paraphrase an old Lindsay Ellis video, a movie might make war look bad, but doesn’t it also make it look kind of badass? 

Counter-examples to this thesis are usually films of extreme misery, like Come and See or Threads, and although War and Peace is not interested in forcing the audience to suffer like those films, it makes for a very effective piece of anti-war art. It’s also a reminder that, for most of human history, warfare was a straightforward affair of armament, topography, and the sheer number of human bodies one army could throw at the enemy’s own masses. This was the most expensive film that the Soviets ever made, and every penny (or ruble, as the case may be) is on screen. Twelve thousand actors march toward each other on a series of hills, shrouded in fog and gun smoke, and when they meet, they fight to the death, brutally and without sentimentality. Soldiers break under the pressure and flee while others die in pursuit of their own glory, but all of them are men who have been led to believe that fighting and dying for Mother Russia is all adventure and excitement, only to realize too late that war is only ever death and despair. It’s technically impressive and gorgeously shot, capturing what feels like an endless field of battle, stretching as far as the eye can see, and what that eye beholds is hell on earth. Andrei’s revelation of the fact that he rejected a life of leisure at home with his loving wife because he believed in the fantasy of glorious war is paralleled in Pierre’s horror at himself and the fact that he nearly allowed something as petty as his own insecurities to drive him to kill. 

It’s all very good stuff, and the film is inarguably a masterpiece, an epic made with machine-like precision that unfolds like a series of blooms, one after another. There are elements of its visual style that I think become even more clear in the following film, and I’ll talk about them as they become more concrete. As of the time of this writing, Mosfilm has the entire series, remastered from 70mm just a few years ago, up on their YouTube for free; Part One is here. If you love movies, do yourself a favor, and watch it right now. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America (2003)

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One of the buzzier cultural events on the cinematic calendar in recent years has been the annual celebration of Bleak Week, a repertory block designed to celebrate the “cinema of despair.” What started as a cheeky attempt to create a Shark Week style marathon for arthouse cinema’s most notoriously dour, punishing missives in the cultural hubs of Los Angeles & New York City has since escalated to a global-scale film festival. In its fifth year, Bleak Week was celebrated by over a hundred theaters in over seventy international cities, each with their own unique lineups of hopeless, despairing classics. It’s proven to be a remarkably popular event, which means that it’s only going to expand even further in the coming years before cinematic masochists everywhere tap out and declare that we’ve already suffered enough. As a result, repertory programmers across the globe are soon going to run out of the more obvious Todd Solondz, Michael Haneke, and Lars von Trier titles that would conveniently pad out an annual Bleak Week schedule, and they’re going to have to venture further into the cinematic abyss for bleak deep cuts to avoid repeating themselves. To that end, I would humbly recommend that rep programmers consider screening Douglas Buck’s 2003 short film collection Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America in future Bleak Week celebrations. Not only does it match the general Bleak Week vibe in its early-aughts edgelord miserabilism, but its structure as a tryptic of shorts would fit right in with the typical rhythms of a festival program (especially as a reprieve from lengthier Bleak Week regulars like Bela Tarr’s 7-hour stunner Sátántangó).

The subtitle “A Trilogy of America” makes Family Portraits sound like it tackles a much broader topic than what it actually covers. Buck’s trademark short films specifically depict the failures of American fatherhood, not America as a whole. The fathers in all three of its vignettes are dead-eyed, emotionally unavailable brutes guilty of domestic violence and incest. The other descriptor Buck used to describe these shocking portraits of bad dads was “a Suburban Holocaust trilogy,” signaling the shorts’ penchant for inhuman cruelty and their anonymous setting in the suburbs of Everywhere, America. Just as depressing as the passionless acts of familial violence is the pervasive blandness of the mise-en-scène, as these fucked up domestic dramas are staged in loveless, artless homes with cheap appliances and no distinguishing character. In “Cutting Moments”, a lonely housewife mutilates herself in a desperate attempt to distract her abusive husband from a televised baseball game. In “Home”, a lonely housewife struggles to conform to the self-flagellating religious rituals of her Evangelist husband, who’d rather slaughter his family than pursue a healthier relationship with his sexuality. In the longest, concluding segment, “Prologue”, a lonely housewife discovers a cache of her husband’s crude artworks that confess his double life as a small-town serial killer. In all three shorts, the men profiled are serial rapists of children and terminate their loveless marriages in horrifically violent acts. They’re all variations on the same bleak idea: that the American family unit is rotten at its core, that most of the nation’s bleakest horrors play out quietly behind closed suburban doors.

“Cutting Moments” was Douglas Buck’s student film, and you can feel a youthful eagerness to resolve the tension of its suburban despair in the shocking violence of its conclusion (which features gore effects from horror legend Tom Savini). By the time Buck made “Prologue”, he was much more willing to sit in a rotten mood without offering his audience the violent catharsis of genre filmmaking (despite horror mainstay Larry Fessenden’s appearance in a small role). Not only is “Prologue” the longest & quietest segment, but it’s also the only one where all of the sensational violence has already occurred years before the story’s start, and all the audience can do is chill in the aftermath. Its ice-cold sparseness in mood & setting recalls the arthouse abstraction of James Benning’s Landscape Suicide more than any shock-value horror title, whereas “Home” & “Cutting Moments” wouldn’t feel out of place as standalone segments in the Masters of Horror miniseries. In a way, Buck’s Family Portraits are their own mini Bleak Week program, condensed down to 100 convenient, squirmy minutes. The genius of the anthology’s sequencing is in how it gets bleaker as it goes along, despite opening with its most attention-grabbing acts of onscreen brutality. Whether you live in a city that has yet to initiate its own Bleak Week celebrations (such as New Orleans, which has yet to participate in this relatively new tradition) or you already miss that cold, despairing feeling and can’t wait for next year’s program to come around, Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America is the perfect Bleak Week microdose to help you get through the sunnier days of summer blockbuster season, as ruled over by the tyranny of joyful entertainment.

-Brandon Ledet

The Invite (2026)

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After the much derided (but enjoyed by me) Don’t Worry Darling, Olivia Wilde was put in director jail for a while, only returning this year with the premier of The Invite, a comedy starring Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton. Wilde and Rogan portray Angela and Joe, a couple whose married life is circling the drain, with Norton and Cruz as their upstairs neighbors Hawk and Pína. Taking place over the course of a single, awkward, semi-disastrous, illuminating dinner party that Angela and Joe host, the film plays out as a less biting, more comedic version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The strains on Angela and Joe’s married life are self-evident from the get-go. Angela is a consummate (and bad) liar who, when caught in her dishonesty, simply freaks out until something else comes up conversationally that distracts from her lies. She prepares an elaborate meal and charcuterie in her excitement over the dinner, which was only planned earlier that morning after a chance encounter with Pína, despite lying to Joe that she told him about it the night before, and that he simply didn’t listen to her. When Hawk compliments her on a designer rug, she claims to have found it at a flea market, despite the audience seeing her unpack it and lay it out during the film’s opening title sequence. It appears that she has chosen to fill her life with these falsehoods (and too many podcasts) to distract herself from its banality, despite that life being one that she chose, as she admits that she got her degree and never did anything with it. For his part, Joe is also dissatisfied, seeing himself as a failure due to the one hit wonder nature of his band, his employment as a music instructor at a third-rate, non-prestigious conservatory, and the fact that the couple and their daughter live in the apartment that he grew up in. From within the horizon of her own unhappiness, Angela can only see that they live in a beautiful home, have a daughter who adores her father, and that Joe has an ideal job, regardless of the lack of respect that his institution commands. 

Into this dynamic comes the duo of Pína and Hawk, whom Angela is desperate to impress and for whom Joe has nothing but contempt, as he finds Hawk’s casual small talk in the elevator annoying, not to mention that the upstairs couple’s sex life is both very active and extremely loud. The dinner itself is a disaster, Angela’s souffle is completely burnt, Pína is revealed to be a vegan (debatable, given that her contribution to the meal is a flan) and unable to eat anything other than the charcuterie olives, and Angela’s lack of planning means that their only option for wine is a bottle given to them by Joe’s late uncle to save for a future anniversary. The two break off into pairs, with Pína joining Joe for a joint in his office while Angela gives Hawk a tour of the house that ends with tequila shots. With everyone properly socially lubricated, Hawk and Pína apologize for the frequent ruckuses upstairs before Joe can address the subject more hostilely, and admit that they are swingers who are interested in their hosts. Angela is fascinated by the possibilities that this opens up, and Joe, initially resistant to the idea based on the assumption that he would be excluded, also warms to the idea. The results are moderately disastrous, but not in the way that one would expect. 

The Invite is an adaptation of the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs, with a screenplay from Rashida Jones and a co-credited Will McCormack, whose only feature writing credit prior to this was as a co-story writer on Toy Story 4. The script is a delight, capturing a great deal of insight into relationships and their idiosyncratic disconnections (or, as Leo Tolstoy might put it, each failing marriage is “unhappy in its own way”) while never losing sight of the fact that this is first and foremost a comedy. That doesn’t mean that the film treats every part of its subject matter with levity, with a particularly noteworthy scene in which Norton’s Hawk delivers a sobering monologue about his failures as a husband to his now-deceased wife, but even that is undercut by the fact that this is Hawk’s self-rationalization for his current sexual curiosity. Penélope Cruz struts around this film with the knowledge and understanding that she is one of the sexiest people on earth, and her calm, casual demeanor is as magnetic to the audience as it is to an enraptured Angela. I also found myself charmed by Seth Rogen here; much of his film career consisted of variations on the single central idea of “pothead gets into A Situation,” which has never been a brand of humor that resonates with me. In The Invite, Rogen is still the snarky stoner providing commentary on everything that passes before him, but he’s also a sad, trapped man, and he conveys that complexity in a commanding way. 

The real revelation here, as is the case with all of her projects, is Olivia Wilde. Booksmart was universally praised while the critical reception to Don’t Worry Darling was… harsh. It’s impossible to fully sift out every part of that backlash to the latter that had more to do with the casting and behind-the-scenes controversy than the actual quality, but criticisms of Darling included that it was a bit of a mish-mash, never fully committing to any of its myriad ideas enough to coalesce into a solid thesis. While that wasn’t a problem for me, The Invite is a film that’s so confident and singular in its vision that it feels like a direct answer to that critique. This film is the twenty-first century reinvention of Woody Allen’s 70s adultery comedies (the film is even dedicated in memoriam to Diane Keaton), but Wilde has so thoroughly committed to separating the art from the artist that she has taken on Allen’s role as both director of the film and neurotic lead, with great success. Wilde reveals herself here as a very talented physical comedian as well; one of the biggest of my many laughs in this film came during Angela’s argument with Joe about cancelling the dinner, where the camera shifts to a downward angle that positions the front of the oven on the left side of the screen. Wilde crouches into the frame, almost feral, gesticulating to the souffle within. It’s very confident, but also strangely vulnerable, and I loved it. 

A story like this has the potential to feel extremely heteronormative, especially as it revolves around two typical man/woman pairs, one of them sexually repressed and the other more permissive and exploratory. While it stretches belief that a modern day couple would be completely unfamiliar with swinging, if this were an American film of even a decade ago, the main couple would open things up a little, have an awkward interaction that proves that they really love one another, and resolve to recommit to heteronormative routines. The Invite doesn’t do that; in fact, it never gets to the “sex” part of the sex comedy, and instead has the encounter collapse before it ever really gets started. Angela and Joe’s relationship isn’t rattled by temptation in order to come out stronger on the other side; instead, the revelations that emerge from both the need for trust and the rejection of anger that open relationships demand highlights that each is miserable. The ending is deliberately ambiguous, as Pína tells them directly that, in her opinion as a psychotherapist, their relationship is over, but also that a new relationship can form between two people if they try. It’s sweet without being overly sentimental, and it works.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Doll (Vaxdockan, 1962)

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Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: A lanky loner who works late nights and has uneasy relationships with women lives alone in an upstairs attic with an empty rocking chair, muttering increasingly disconcerting, violent things to an imagined woman who isn’t really there. Psycho was on my mind during the entire runtime of Arne Mattsson’s The Doll, which was produced in Sweden just two years after Alfred Hitchcock’s genre-defining masterwork. And yet, none of the film’s prominent critical commentary mentions Hitchcock by name, instead likening The Doll to the more sophisticated national cinema of Ingmar Bergman. Personally, I can’t read The Doll as anything other than an attempt to class up Psycho for an international arthouse crowd. It’s less of a direct photocopy than it is a cross-cultural echo, altered enough through translation that it gradually becomes its own distinct art piece. If nothing else, in the process of swapping out Norman Bates’s maternal corpse for a sexy department store mannequin it pushes past Hitchcock knockoff territory to explore new psychosexual genre textures, accidentally inventing Peter Strickland’s fetish-horror cinema in the process.

Our troubled antihero is a self-pitying sad sack who moans & groans about the loneliness of everyday city life. He spends countless hours staring at the water stains on his apartment ceiling, daydreaming about his ideal romantic partner instead of actually, you know, talking & relating to the women around him. The incel loser then strikes gold while working a shift at his nightwatchman job, discovering a department store mannequin that looks exactly like the ideal woman he’s been picturing in his head: a near-featureless object with a blunt brunette bob. He steals her away from his post, blames her absence on a robbery, and relocates her to the squeaky mattress in his bachelor pad. There, he keeps the plastic woman as a kind of domestic prisoner, pouring his heart out to her as the first woman to ever fully understand his peculiar persona . . . since she’s an inanimate object he can control through his own imagination. The longer he spends time alone with the mannequin, however, the more of her own self-determined personality & autonomy starts to emerge, and her captor once again struggles to reckon with the idea that women are people with their own wants & needs, not possessions to dress up & neatly store like dolls.

Once The Doll finds its unlikely man & mannequin couple locked away in a single-room attic apartment, it becomes a kind of volatile stage play about gendered domestic squabbles. Although the incel nightwatchman does commit violent acts as these one-sided arguments escalate, it’s less a horror of action than it is a horror of the uncanny. As he starts to fully believe in the personhood of the mannequin, she subtly comes to life; she laughs, she cries, she dances, she writhes. At first, she lays still while Mattsson’s camera handles all the movement, indicating her emotional state through a sweeping pan around her prison bed. Then, her mannequin body is periodically replaced by the real-life flesh of actress Gio Petré, who’s outfitted with the same bob wig and feature-flattening makeup. The mannequin figure alternates seamlessly between Petre’s body and its artificial surrogate, so that many shots leave the audience questioning which is which. This dynamic gives actor Per Oscarsson a fellow onscreen player to bounce the protagonist’s misogynist ideology off of, so that he’s not entirely acting opposite a doll, but it also provides the majority of the film’s horror-cinema chills.

Despite its potential framing as a rushed-to-market Psycho knockoff, The Doll is a beautiful art object in its own right. Mattsson lights his players with the harsh low-angle flashlight spotlight of a crime scene, establishing an Old Dark House vibe in what’s otherwise a fairly mundane apartment building. He also frequently finds aesthetically beautiful ways to accentuate the uncanny nature of the titular doll’s body, such as the Buñuelian image of her severed hand resting on the apartment’s basement stairs, or a rose gently resting on that same upturned palm once it’s reattached to the mannequin’s arm. Petre consistently contorts her hands to match the mannequin’s pose in her scenes, and she finds a way to appear distant & glassy eyed even in her fiercest arguments with Oscarsson’s disturbed lead. For a sexually sordid horror picture with a creepy children’s theme song about “a grown man who plays with dolls,” it’s a remarkably classy affair, one that earns its Bergman comparisons in its lengthy, vicious war-of-the-sexes dialogue exchanges. If you want the trashier, campier version of this movie, check out Peter Strickland’s In Fabric or the German whatsit The Berlin Bride. This one’s for the artsy-fartsy horror crowd, the elite pervert aesthetes.

-Brandon Ledet

Night Nurse (2026)

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Usually, when a movie is described as “Cronenbergian,” that genre descriptor is meant as a synonym for “body horror,” focusing solely on the mutational gore effects of Cronenberg’s early calling-card works like Videodrome or The Fly. Georgia Bernstein’s debut feature Night Nurse is Cronenbergian in a different way; it’s Cronenbergian in the way that it imagines a world where any interaction can qualify as a form of sex, like the vehicular mayhem of Crash, the surgical procedures of Crimes of the Future, or the graveside mourning of The Shrouds. Specifically, Bernstein imagines a world where scamming the elderly over the phone is an intimate sexual act, rehearsed and ritualized in such a playfully heightened atmosphere that it’s more immediately recognizable as a sexual kink than it is as elder abuse. Even the opening credits play over one such phone call, with the camera leering over the scammer’s rhythmically gasping body with the same uncanny, gliding closeups that Cronenberg’s on-screen avatar examines his wife’s corpse with in The Shrouds. That phone call is, in effect, a sex scene, but everyone involved is fully clothed and the bondage gear of more typical kink scenes has been replaced with the spiraling wire rope of a landline.

Cemre Paksoy stars as the titular night nurse, a new hire at a senior-care assisted living facility in the great beige American suburbs. She’s immediately warned by the head admin (Mimi Rogers) to be wary of the home’s most notoriously misbehaved patient (Bruce McKenzie), who has a tendency to confuse the nurses assigned to him for his deceased wife, touching them inappropriately in apparent fits of dementia. That supposedly demented Lothario appears to be much mentally sharper than she’s led to believe, however, and he’s quickly revealed to be a petty conman who’s using the cover of declining health to conceal his crimes. On her very first night shift alone with him, our seemingly naive nurse is very literally roped into his schemes, wrapped up in telephone wire and pressured to play pretend that she’s the troubled granddaughter of the mark on the other end of the line — in immediate need of cash lest she be kidnapped, jailed, or worse. It proves to be a huge turn on. This same semi-scripted scenario plays out repeatedly, mark after mark, as a lucrative substitute for sexual contact between an elderly man and his youngest ingenue. Only, both the conman’s mental sharpness and the nurse’s bewildered innocence prove to be a kind of practiced performance, so the con can’t go on forever.

Besides its ability to eroticize the unconscionable, Night Nurse is also remarkably Cronenbergian in its general affect. The entire picture is rendered in uncannily flat digital plastic, and yet it excels as one of the most effective erotic thrillers made outside of France in decades. Its hushed, beige-carpeted crime spree is both oddly gentle and intensely uncomfortable. The overall mood is just as quietly mesmeric as the seductive eye contact made by its demented conman, who gradually piles up a full staff of uniformed nurses on the floor of his living room harem. Despite that extended dream-sequence atmosphere, the movie can still be astutely observational when it comes to the rituals of industrialized elder care, focusing on the physical touch of physical therapy as old men are routinely paired off with young women in a transactional simulation of traditional domesticity. The gendered power imbalance of that generational divide also exacerbates the eroticism in unexpected ways, especially when it’s flipped by a young nurse who’s turned on by the helplessness of the old man in her care, lusting after his soft skin for feeling “like a woman, like a baby.” Everyone is horny, no one’s technically fucking, and yet it plays like a feature-length orgy replayed in slow motion.

As with Cronenberg’s less showy, more cerebral works, Night Nurse operates on an extremely peculiar wavelength that can be difficult to tune into. You can tell some social taboo is being transgressed in every scene, but these wanton freaks’ sexual dynamic is so absurdly idiosyncratic that it’s near impossible to pinpoint exactly which one it is. The only specific audience I can think to recommend it to are people who wished the straight-to-Netflix crime thriller I Care a Lot had more patience & sharper fangs, and that’s only because it’s the only other vaguely sexy movie about elder abuse that I can recall. Otherwise, it’s the kind of for-weirdos-only proposition that will find its own dedicated, odious audience in due time, the same way Crash premiered to angry booing at Cannes and has since been canonized as a modern erotic classic by the freaks on its frequency.

-Brandon Ledet

Touch Me (2026)

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Touch Me had its Shudder premiere this week, and I went into it completely blind, which I recommend for anyone who is interested. This is a color-soaked fever dream of a movie, an erotic thriller wrapped in a science fiction plot that doesn’t shy away from turning a titillating moment into one of pure body horror, then following that up with a joke that underlines the tone without undercutting it. It’s fresh, fun, and something decidedly new, although it’s obviously not going to be for everyone. 

The film opens on a therapy session with Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) detailing an experience she had with a charismatic man five years earlier. She ran into him at two separate events wearing an out-of-place track suit, and mockingly (and correctly) dismissed him as an alien. When he revealed that this was true and that he came from another world devastated by climate change to save the earth from falling victim to the same fate, she allowed him to share his psychic touch with her, which had a euphoric effect that effectively combatted her psychological issues. She hasn’t seen him since a sexual encounter between the two of them turned into an assault when he wouldn’t stop despite her asking him to, running straight to the home of her gay best friend Craig (Jordan Gavaris), where she has remained ever since. For reasons that are revealed later, the two are able to live comfortably in Craig’s home, despite neither having a job, but when an unexpected and costly plumbing emergency occurs, Joey starts looking for work. This brings her back into contact with Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci), her alien ex, and she ultimately accepts his invitation for her and Craig to spend some time in his modern mansion in the hills. There’s some friction between the two and Brian’s human assistant Laura (Marlene Forte), but after a few sessions of alien group therapy, things are going well, until they suddenly aren’t. 

One of the barriers that I think some viewers will have with this one will come down to its playful zaniness. Touch Me isn’t trying to be taken at face value and as such calls attention to its filmic and fictional nature constantly. After Joey witnesses video evidence that there’s something more sinister going on than she’s been led to believe, the film shows us the backstory of the person she’s just seen die in a black and white segment; the victim was lured in via hookup app, with the telltale sounds of Grindr notifications going off but those messages appearing on screen like silent picture intertitles. It’s quirky, but not overly so. When Joey considers applying to work at the coffee shop she frequents, the “help wanted” sign on the counter appears and reappears in multiple floating bubbles that frame her face. It’s cartoonish, and the tone of the film supports it, but I can see a lot of the film-going audience growing frustrated with Touch Me because of this visual playfulness in a film that spends much of its time dealing with sexual assault and its psychological impacts. Those scenes are never played for laughs and are treated with appropriate weight, and we’re never subjected to it and only witness the victims recount them in therapeutic sessions, both legitimate and manipulative. That tonal whiplash is part of what makes the film special, however, and I don’t think that I would have it any other way.

Brian turns out to want “cross-species intercourse” with both of his hot young houseguests (and as many others as possible), and the film is very good at capturing what makes him both desirable and uncannily, repulsively inhuman. Pucci is an attractive man who has clearly put a lot of work into maintaining his physique, but he also has very impressive control over his facial muscles in a way that, in combination with his unnatural dark hair, allows him to look eerie and not entirely trustworthy. When characters are aroused by him, either through psychic manipulation or basic human lust, the film communicates this through erotic, almost pornographic close ups of his bouncing pectoral muscles or undulating abs, but then intersplices this with off-putting close-ups that feature his creepy stare and libido-shriveling Gary-Oldman-in-Bram Stoker’s Dracula grooming. It’s very effective at being both arousing and off-putting, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a film that captures that line so well. Both Taylor Dudley and Gavaris are familiar to me as a viewer who soaked up a lot of 2010s Vancouver-based genre television; the former portrayed divisive character Alice in The Magicians and the latter was the universally beloved Felix on Orphan Black. I was delighted to see both of them in this film, and they not only have great chemistry with one another but are also putting in performances that are so distinct that, despite having spent dozens of hours with them as their familiar-to-me characters, I never found myself slipping into thinking about Alice or Felix at all. Joey’s grief is completely different from Alice’s, as is her expression thereof; Craig is easier to differentiate from Felix since he doesn’t share that character’s accent, but Craig also lacks Felix’s motivation, integrity, and unrelenting self-love. When it comes to Gavaris, his dedication to picking up the weights as he aged out of his Orphan Black era twinkiness was a cause of some concern for me; I started following him on social media some years ago when he led a short-lived comedy series called The Lake in which Julia Stiles played his conniving step-sister, and the way that he would post about his workouts and the way he felt about his body was troubling. One hopes that he’s come to terms with that since then, and that Craig’s body dysmorphia here is him taking some agency over Gavaris’s own, since Craig calls himself “fat” and “hideous” despite being neither. 

Of course, it’s also an equally valid interpretation that Craig doesn’t actually think that he’s either of those things, and that it is instead his way of fishing for compliments from Joey. It’s a sign of their co-dependency; we eventually learn that they were both victims of childhood sexual assault, but that Joey has kept this from Craig, which has allowed for him to weaponize his victimhood against her in a way that she feels she can’t counter without either being forced to relitigate her trauma or risk her living situation. It’s not ideal for either of them, and demonstrates how this betrayal during their vulnerable years has led them to dismiss those traumas flippantly, through dismissive humor, or through total suppression, and this makes them easy prey for Brian. It’s good stuff, and although the film draws attention to its artificiality through overt stylism, it doesn’t feel the need to broadcast that it’s tackling “elevated” horror themes. 

I’ve had mixed feelings about a lot of the horror that’s come out this year. I was personally underwhelmed by Obsession because of the familiarity of its narrative structure, but I was also quite taken with Leviticus despite the fact that it traffics in images and ideas that are not necessarily novel either, just viewed through a new lens. Touch Me is fresh, irreverent, exciting, and sexy, despite also owing major debts in its visual inspiration to Neon Demon, Ex Machina, and Mandy. It won’t be for everyone, but will be thoroughly enjoyed by those for whom it does work. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Supergirl (2026)

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It’s summer, which means that it’s the time when studios are putting out their big releases, hoping to get those big bucks from people seeking shelter in a cold dark theater on a hot afternoon or entire families coming out to see the latest computer animated intellectual property product together, getting snacks and commemorative blankets and popcorn buckets that will be leaching microplastics into landfills long after the human race is dead. It’s been an odd year, wherein the two most talked about films of the current season are both horror—Obsession and Backrooms—and both are still playing at my local megaplex, as are more recent wide releases like Leviticus. It feels strange to have the films that would normally be reserved for a late fall/early winter release appearing at the same time as more standard blockbuster-courting fare like Masters of the Universe (which the ten screen theater near me has already dropped, despite it being released less than a month ago). And into that market comes Supergirl, the follow-up to last year’s Superman, starring Milly Alcock as the younger cousin of the Big Blue Boy Scout, out on her solo adventure. Will it manage to find an audience, or will the one-two punch of Toy Story 5 and Minions & Monsters be too big of a kryptonite chunk for the Woman of Tomorrow to overcome? 

When the film opens, our heroine is a depressed party girl on an interstellar pub crawl, flying around in her caravan-esque spaceship with her unruly dog Krypto and drinking herself into a stupor. While spending time on a planet with a red sun so that its nullifying effect on her superpowers can allow her to get properly wasted, she encounters recently orphaned Ruthye (Eve Ridley), the young daughter of a master swordsmith who is seeking revenge on her family’s murderer, Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts). Krem is the leader of a group of space brigands who sex traffic “wives” from the planets they pillage to continue to propagate their “all male species.” When Supergirl’s defense of the naive Ruthye garners the attention of Krem, he shoots Krypto with a poison that starts the clock on the film; the last daughter of Krypton only has three days to track Krem down and get the antidote, while also trying to impart a lesson about the emptiness of vengeance to the determined Ruthye. Along the way, the two encounter immortal intergalactic bounty hunter Lobo (Jason Momoa), whose presence here is superfluous at best. 

There’s a lot to love and enjoy in Supergirl. Alcock is charming in the lead role, enough that some of the failures in character consistency are papered over by her performance. For the most part, the film also looks great. The title character’s barhopping showcases a myriad of excellent set designs and great alien creature effects, many if not all of which are practical in some way. When David Corenswet reappears as Superman in his video calls and in the flashbacks to his cousin’s arrival on Earth, he’s effectively corny in the way that made last summer’s outing so endearing. The film takes the opportunity that telling a story in a grungy, lived-in, space environment presents and offers the viewer a wide variety of environments to watch Supergirl kick ass in: an interstellar greyhound full of a dozen different alien species, a villainous bar full of unsavory space pirates, a gravity-defying aircraft carrier as it crashes into a mountain range. 

The drawbacks, however, are just as numerous. It’s not my habit to bully child actors, but to put it as politely as possible, fourteen-year-old Eve Ridley is not a very good actor. She has plenty of time to become one, but she fails to imbue the character with the kind of pathos that’s needed. Apparently, she was in the UK’s tour of Les Misérables when she was only ten years old, and you can see it in her performance; she’s a child of the stage, a student of a form of theatre that’s all about projecting enough to be heard in the back row. She has not yet learned the more nuanced acting that the close-up requires. When the effects are bad, they are quite bad, with the most frustrating example being the CGI effect used for Supergirl’s hair in space. Just get Milly Alcock in an actual pool of water and let her hair splay out naturally! It’s awful. Perhaps most glaring, however, is the overall presence of Lobo, who doesn’t really need to be here. He’s only present because Momoa was a “fan cast” for Lobo for a long time. Once upon a time, a fantasy casting was just something that you read in Wizard magazine and thought, “Huh, yeah, Josh Hartnett would make a good Nightwing,” and then move on. In the present, as the very existence of a released Snyder Cut shows, the outsized power of fandoms is enough to make or break a film. So sure, why not, let’s just let the extratextual reason of making the internet shut up justify sticking Lobo the bounty hunter in here, rather than the more traditional justifications like “narrative,” “character,” or “theme.” 

The director of this film, Craig Gillespie, is the man who helmed I, Tonya and Cruella, and those films’ use of tonally jarring humor and juxtaposition are present here. After all, this is a film in which a super dog delivers a groin attack and Supergirl pretends to be a Valley Girl to divert the anger of the aforementioned Lobo, but also one in which the villains are sex traffickers who treat the film’s young sidekick as merchandise to be haggled over. There’s also little point in denying that the fingerprints of Warner Bros.’s DC visionary James Gunn are all over it, especially when it comes to the more CGI-heavy fight scenes. It’s very reminiscent of Guardians of the Galaxy, which isn’t necessarily negative, but certainly bears mentioning. Where it also seems to draw inspiration from is in the glut of 80s Star Wars knockoffs like Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, but the eighties-ness of it all doesn’t end there, with villains taken straight from the Mad Max sequels. Nostalgia for that era has become radioactive over the past decade of Stranger Things and imitators thereof, but it feels somehow more sincere and real than most mainstream attempts at invoking the media of the decade. To put it succinctly, Supergirl is doing in earnest what Turbo Kid did ironically, and it mostly succeeds. 

You may have noticed that the character’s actual name, Kara, hasn’t come up yet in this review. The film also saves the first use of “Kara” on screen for quite some time, drawing attention to this fact by pointing out in act two that Ruthye doesn’t even know what Kara’s name is. This is done with intentionality, as the first time that anyone utters “Kara” is when her father, Zor-El (David Krumholtz) uses it in her expository flashback. As we learn, Zor-El (brother of Superman’s father Jor-El, whom we saw last summer telling his son to become a god on earth) and his wife Alura (Emily Beecham) escaped the destruction of Krypton via a force field that encircles an entire city, allowing it to live on after the planet exploded. Unfortunately, since said explosion resulted in kryptonite poisoning the soil of their little city in a bubble, Kara’s father sends their daughter, born 8 years after the Kryptonian apocalypse, out in an escape pod, along with the puppy she found rooting through the trash on the day of her mother’s funeral. “Kara” is a ghost of a world that no longer exists, and when someone finally verbalizes it out loud, it’s supposed to be emotionally effective in a way that the film struggles to fully convey. 

Most recent versions of Supergirl take their backstory from the 2005 relaunch of the character, in which she is technically Kal/Clark’s older cousin but whose pod was knocked off course, causing her to arrive as a teenager after he has already grown into an adult. This hews closer to the original concept, including the Argo City forcefield and her being born some years after Krypton’s destruction, but it also includes concepts from the aughts version, which makes the film a bit of a mish-mash in a way that plot hole pedants will likely latch onto and care too much about. Frankly, it does not make a lot of sense to try and have it both ways. For instance, at one point Kara saves Ruthye from an alien whom she has unintentionally insulted because of differing cultural norms. At this point in the narrative, we don’t know that Kara was born post-Krypton, so one assumes that she has knowledge about interstellar customs because she was from a world that was at least somewhat involved in interstellar communication. When we later learn that she lived her entire pre-Earth life in a literal bubble, it makes much less sense. Why would she know that setting your bag at the feet of this particular species is an insult if she’s never had contact with other aliens, especially in comparison to a child who lives on the planet that the space bus ferrying said alien arrives at? One must assume that Argo City never had contact with other non-Kryptonians. Otherwise, there would have been some option to save its citizens rather than letting them all die of Kryptonite cancer. It’s a plot element that’s not entirely thought-through, and although I’m not usually one to get hung up on something like this, it demonstrates that this was a narrative that was, perhaps, not given enough drafts to work out all the kinks (or, more likely, had so many drafts that the kinks became inevitable). 

This is a fun movie, and a cute one. It fails to recapture the effectiveness of last summer’s DC superhero outing, which was in some ways more narratively messy but nonetheless more thematically coherent. At the same time, it’s a cutesy little space adventure with lots of cool set designs, a braver approach to color and lighting than most post-Avengers comic book adaptations, and interesting aliens. A little more time spent rendering (or considering the necessity of) certain special effects would have been appreciated, but it’s decent overall. Perhaps not worth running out to the theater to see, but if you don’t do that, we may never see this version of Supergirl again. It’s up to you whether that’s something you want to vote for with your box office dollars. Between this and Minions & Monsters, it’s almost certainly the lesser of two evils.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond