Reviews

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

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A.I. tech bros’ latest attack on the basic dignity of everyday life targeted Studio Ghibli of all things, proving that absolutely nothing is sacred to these ghouls. There’s a recent software upgrade to the Plagiarism Generator technology that was advertised in the form of “Ghiblifying” pre-existing images with digital filters that adapt them to the visual style of the legendary animation studio. Nevermind the blatant copyright infringement that amalgamates already underpaid artists’ work into digital-age corporate slop. Nevermind that the studio’s broad cultural association with Hayao Miyazaki—and Hayao Miyazaki only—disregards the work of fellow directors & animators under that brand who have their own distinct style. The most insulting insinuation about the “Ghiblified” A.I. image trend is that it reduces decades of finely crafted animation to a few vague visual signifiers that could be summed up in a single word: “Cute.” Like the A.I.-generated Wes Anderson videos before it, this recent dispatch from Tech Bro Hell makes Studio Ghibli’s work look simpler, safer, and more twee than it is in practice, mining its surface aesthetics without engaging with the substance beneath. It’s just as empty & lazy as it is profane.

What would these “Ghiblified” A.I. images look like, for instance, if they pulled their visual cues from Isao Takahata’s work instead of Miyazaki’s? Would it capture the full span of life’s tenderness, cruelty, warmth, and pain, as gorgeously illustrated in The Tale of Princess Kaguya, or would it reduce the immensity of that film’s beauty to a few strokes of an algorithmic color-pencil? Would it convey the collectivist environmentalism of Pom Poko‘s radical politics, or just automatically equip all figures pictured with comically large scrotums? The real gotcha example, of course, is what an A.I. “Ghiblified” photo implicates about a film as devastating as Takahata’s WWII drama Grave of the Fireflies. I’m not sure how valuable the cutesy surface aesthetics of the studio’s character designs are in the context of a story about children starving to death during the societal disruption of war. In-film, the contrast between the characters’ classic anime cuteness (which Roger Ebert summarized as “enormous eyes, childlike bodies, and features of great plasticity”) and the real-life atrocities those characters suffer makes for horrific emotional impact, perfectly illustrating the inhuman evil of war. Using those visual signifiers out of context to cutesy-up your beach vacation photos is incredibly crass, then, if you take more than a half-second to think about it.

The biggest emotional gut punch of Grave of the Fireflies arrives in the first couple minutes, before you even get to know the children at the center. We’re introduced to our coming-of-age protagonist Seita in his dying minute, actively starving to death in a train station while passersby treat him as an inconvenient obstacle during their daily commute. When he passes, he leaves his body behind to reunite with the spirit of his even younger sister, Setsuko, who has apparently been waiting for him to join her in a firefly-lit afterlife. Both children’s fates are succinctly & poetically spelled out in this one quiet moment, so all the audience can do when the timeline dials back to 1945 is slowly watch it happen with no way to stop it. Seita & Setsuko are orphaned in the final days of WWII by firebombing raids and Naval attacks that leave both their parents dead. They live in a world sandwiched between mass graves below and falling ash from above, but they can at least depend on each other for community. Seita takes on housing & feeding his sister as his sole responsibility, dodging any pressure to join the war effort that would distract from her survival. As the opening warns, he fails, but he does manage to leave her with some joyous memories along the way despite the pain & indignity of starving to death, unhoused. It’s incredibly tough to watch.

Grave of the Fireflies indulges in all the usual youth-nostalgia and hand-drawn natural wonder that typifies Studio Ghibli’s broader approach to 2D animation, but it’s mostly in service of making the emotional tolls of war weigh as heavily on the heart as possible. It turns out that even when gorgeously animated, war is Hell. Worse than Hell, maybe. The most insidious images I saw during last week’s A.I. Ghibli Fest were from the official Twitter account of the Israeli army, cutesifying their real-time, real-world bombing & starvation of Palestinian children en masse as if they regard Grave of the Fireflies as an aspirational roadmap rather than a dire warning of past evils that should not be repeated. Of course, most people using the Ghiblified A.I. generators have much cuter, gentler works from the studio in mind, like My Neighbor Totoro (presuming they have any direct familiarity with the studio at all, beyond walking past advertisements for routine repertory screenings at the local AMC). When Grave of the Fireflies was first released in Japan, it was paired with Totoro on a double bill that confused & traumatized unsuspecting children who weren’t prepared for such a heavy night out. That late-80s programming choice underestimated the full scope of what Studio Ghibli offers as a movie studio that produces daring, emotionally complex art decades before the A.I. C.H.U.D.s repeated the same mistake. They’re not in the game to sell twee digital filters and stuffed commemorative plushies; Grave of the Fireflies is alone proof of that.

-Brandon Ledet

Imitation of Life (1959)

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Imitation of Life is a weird document. All That Heaven Allows lives and dies based upon your investment in the happiness of its lead character, and Written on the Wind is a narrative about a wealthy American family in slow decline, rent asunder by internal forces of jealousy, desperation for approval, and poor parental love; both are also shot in glorious Technicolor. Imitation of Life, on the other hand, was marketed in much the same way as Heaven, namely that it was supposedly a romantic picture about a widow finding love again, but that narrative is by far the least interesting thing about the film. What it turns out to be instead is an unexpectedly heartbreaking story about a family that is torn apart by societal forces that even an abundance of motherly love can’t overcome, with the emergence of a new theatre star as the supposed primary plot of the film while actually serving as the background to a much more interesting story. 

Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) loses her daughter, Susie, at Coney Island one day, then finds her in the company of another girl, Sarah Jane. Lora, delighted, meets who she first assumes is Sarah Jane’s nanny, Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), but learns that Annie is actually Sarah Jane’s mother. Annie describes her late husband as having been “close to white” and that Sarah Jane takes after him, rather than Annie. Upon discovering that Annie and her daughter are essentially homeless, she takes them into her apartment, as there is an extra room off of the kitchen (a common feature of the time, as Lora is essentially putting them up in the maid’s quarters, and their placement there is not an accident). The supposed A-plot features Lora seeking to make it as a star onstage in the big city; she successfully bluffs her way into the office of talent agent Allen Loomis (Robert Alda) and gets an invitation to a party that same evening where all the movers and shakers will be. When it turns out that this is a prelude to a casting couch situation, she leaves in an understandable huff, although this is all forgiven when Loomis ends up becoming her agent regardless. He gets her an audition for the latest play by David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy), and when she stands up to him about a scene not working as written, he’s likewise impressed with her moxy and gives her an even bigger part. This is counterposed with her budding romance with Steve Archer, a photographer whom she met that fateful day at the beach; he took a photo of the girls balancing an empty can on a sleeping man’s stomach that day and eventually sold it for use in advertisements for beer. (Incidentally, Steve is played by John Gavin, who you may remember as Marion Crane’s afternoon delight stud-muffin in Psycho; try not to let his character being named Sam Loomis there while his character here is romantic rivals with a different Loomis confuse you.) Steve and Lora grow closer until he finally proposes, but his insistence that she give up her career is a non-starter. 

All throughout, the film focuses on Annie and her relationship with her daughter, who is clearly struggling under the weight of her Black identity. When she and her mother first arrive at the Merediths’, Susie tries to give Sarah Jane her newest and most prized doll, which happens to be Black, causing Sarah Jane to resent the younger girl’s innocent insensitivity. When Annie is telling the story of Mary and Joseph’s trip to Bethlehem at Christmas time, Sarah Jane asks what color Jesus was. Lora tells her that Jesus is whatever color one imagines him to be, and Sarah Jane protests that this can’t be the case since they are being taught he was a real person. Finally, she says “Jesus was white. Like me.” Things really come to a head, however, when Annie comes to Sarah Jane’s school to bring her lunch and learns that her daughter has been passing as white among her peers and the teachers, and the realization among her classmates when they learn the truth bears out much of Sarah Jane’s fears about exposure and the mistreatment she can expect because of the racism of the society in which she lives. When I started that last sentence, when I got to the end of it, I had to rethink my initial plan to conclude that Sarah Jane is mistreated “because of the color of her skin,” because that’s exactly the opposite of what’s happening. Sarah Jane is being treated fairly because of her apparent whiteness, and injustice and unfairness enters into the equation when a white supremacist society inexorably forces its way into these dynamics. Annie laments that her heart breaks because she can’t explain to the daughter that she adores why reality is so unfair, because Sarah Jane was “born to be hurt” by the world because of no fault of her own. 

Things are even worse for Sarah Jane when there’s a time jump from 1947 to 1958, the passage of time represented by continuously superimposed images of Lora’s name on various marquees and the accompanying year. Her newfound wealth has afforded them a manse in the countryside, where Annie and Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) continue to live with Lora and Susie (Sandra Dee). It’s unclear what exactly Annie’s role in this new house is, as there are other servants now. A charitable read of the situation is that Lora and Annie have essentially been coparenting both of the girls since Annie and her daughter first came into the Meredith household, with Lora in the breadwinner role and Annie as the housewife, but even if that’s what’s happening here, it ignores all of the power dynamics at play. It’s also clear that Lora has been paying Annie in addition to housing her, as Annie mentions having saved up enough to send Sarah Jane to college. I’m not sure, but how you read this situation can have a lot of bearing on how you feel about its participants. If we choose to read Annie as co-head of household, as she’s mostly treated, then her oversight of the house and meals feels a little funny but isn’t ultimately demeaning. If we choose to read that the relationship between Annie and Lora has changed from being two women trying to make it in the big city together to one that feels familial but is nonetheless employer-employee, then Lora becomes much less sympathetic. My ultimate reading boils down to how Lora reacts when the two are parted by death, and that although she truly loved Annie and considered her a partner in life and not a servant, she nonetheless found herself occasionally acting in the patronizing manner of the era despite her affection and devotion. 

Sarah Jane, for her part, is having a rough go of things, continuing to seek inroads to the life of privilege to which she feels entitled and which her perceived whiteness gives her just enough ingress to see how things are on the other side. This reaches a point of harrowing violence, when she goes to meet up with the boy who’s talked about running away together and getting married, only to find him sullen and unable to look her directly in the eye. He demands to know if what he’s learned—that Annie is her mother and that Sarah Jane is Black—is true. Sarah Jane denies it, but he nonetheless beats her savagely. Meanwhile, she’s having to deal with all of Susie’s stories about finishing school and watching her not-quite-sister get a pony as a graduation gift; to get out, she claims to be working at the NYC library, but Annie discovers she is actually working as a sort of sexy lounge singer where men leer at her, and when Annie’s appearance once again outs her as non-white, she loses the job. This prompts her to flee even further, finally ending up as a chorus girl out west, but when Annie comes to see her one last time, she tells Sarah Jane that she has come to say that she won’t chase her anymore, and that she loves her daughter enough to accept her choices. When one of the other chorus girls finds them together, Annie pretends to be no more than Sarah Jane’s old nanny in order to preserve her daughter’s concealment of her true identity. 

It’s this that serves as the film’s climax. Sure, there are other things going on. Lora and Susie are distant because Lora always put her career first. Steve re-enters the picture, and he and Lora make plans to travel together and get to know one another again that she immediately reneges upon when offered a part in a new film from an Italian art director. Steve keeps Susie busy that summer and she falls madly in love with him (who wouldn’t?). Susie tells her mother to just be with Steve, and they get together. All seems kind of rote and pale in comparison to what’s happening with Annie, doesn’t it? That’s clearly intentional, and even though there’s a kind of going-through-the-motions energy of everything happening with the Merediths, I was never bored by any of it. Everything happening with Annie just overpowers it, as she ultimately succumbs to (perhaps literally) a broken heart from losing her daughter, spiritually if not literally. Her funeral service features a performance of “Trouble of the World” from Mahalia Jackson, and it’s beautiful. 

In many ways, this is one of director Douglas Sirk’s finest hours. Annie’s story is beautiful, thoughtful, and tender, while Lora’s is perfectly serviceable. It may be that the DVD I saw of this didn’t have a very colorful transfer, but where this one is lacking is in its visual panache. You can almost feel the chill of the blue snow in All that Heaven Allows, but the colors here seem muted, although that may be due to the fact that this was a Eastmancolor production, not a Technicolor one. Susie’s room in the country manse stands out for this reason, as her bubblegum pink room should really pop, but it feels rather dull. Infamously, a publicity stunt surrounding this film was that half of its two-million-dollar budget was spent entirely on Lana Turner’s wardrobe, and while there are many fine pieces, it feels like they’re lacking in some razzle dazzle that one of Sirk’s other pictures would have more effectively conveyed. There are also some places where the narrative seams are less than flush. For instance, the extended sequence of Sarah Jane doing a musical number at the NYC club seems to be a leftover sequence from when the film was conceived as a musical. Both Steve (demanding that Lora forsake the stage in 1947) and Susie (realizing that her infatuation with Steve is childish and relinquishing her mother of any guilt in pursuing him in 1958) make decisions that feel more narratively convenient than true to the characters. Nonetheless, this one is definitely a contender for Sirk’s greatest work.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ash (2025)

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It is a truth non-universally acknowledged that all art is political, but Ash, from director Steven Ellison (better known under his musical moniker Flying Lotus), may be the first film I’ve ever seen that has no identifiable thesis and thus appears to be completely apolitical. This isn’t a criticism so much as an observation of the fact that this movie, despite how much I enjoyed it, seems to be all but completely theme-less. Riya (Eiza González) wakes up, amnesiac, inside of what appears to be crew quarters, surrounded by dead bodies, all of which demonstrate extreme violence done against them. She experiences horrifying flashes of such violence: a head bashed in by a rock, a face melting away as it decomposes, smiles turning from friendly and warm to malevolent and menacing. She walks outside and discovers that she was inside of some kind of station or base on an alien world, as something snowlike drifts down from a sky that is dominated by a radial design that resembles the iris of a great eye, pulsing and pulsating. She sees something vaguely humanoid at a distance, obscured by the harsh atmosphere, although it remains unclear if there is someone or something out there, or if it is perhaps a mirror image of herself (as it mimics her movements) or even a mirage or hallucination. She manages to make it back inside before the atmosphere suffocates her, only to hear a knock at the door. It’s Brion (Aaron Paul), the sixth member of their expedition team, who has left his post in orbit in response to a distress call from the surface, saying that Riya himself had told him that Clarke (Kate Elliott), the only person not accounted for between the two of them and the corpses, had undergone some kind of psychotic break and attacked the others. Riya attempts to recover her memories and advocates for finding and rescuing Clarke, but their time is limited; they have to return to the main spaceship the next time that it completes its orbit in just a few hours, as damage to the base means that they have insufficient atmosphere to wait for it to come around again. 

In writing about Lotus’s previous film, Kuso, Brandon noted that the gross out comedy (with heavy focus on the “gross out” part) was of a kind with Adult-Swim-to-feature pipeline films that “tend[ed] to push attention spans to the limit at full length.” I can confirm that this was an issue for one of my viewing companion, who admitted in the car ride on the way home that some of the gaps in his understanding of the film could be attributed to dozing off a couple of times, but this is also a film with an intentionally dense plot that lends itself to few easy answers. The amnesiac protagonist character is not necessarily a new one, but the film initially sets itself up as a bit of a science fiction mystery with an anachronic order: Who killed everyone? Can Brion be trusted? Can Riya, for that matter? As characterization and events are doled out in flashes of recovered memory as well as exploration footage that Riya manages to recover from a drone, we learn more about what happened, and it becomes apparent that this movie is little more than a remix of other films from this genre — an excellently photographed, perfectly soundtracked, and gorgeously colored, to be sure, but a remix nonetheless. That does not detract from the film, but that all of these elements come with a bit of a pacing issue does. 

In the opening minutes, as Riya makes her way outside of the base and sees a figure in the distance mimicking her movement, one thinks of the finale of Annihilation. The quick cross-cutting of horrific images in Riya’s mind—be they memories, hallucinations, nightmares, or some combination thereof—calls to mind Event Horizon, which famously tucked all of the visuals that pushed the film into the NC-17 rating into mere blips on screen in order to secure an R, so that the viewer isn’t sure what they’re seeing but are nonetheless disturbed. As Riya watches the video captured by one of the mission’s drones and we intercut between the footage itself and the memories that it awakens within her, one is reminded of the crew of the Nostromo as they approach the downed ship on LV-426 in Alien (that the planet “Ash,” from which the film takes its title, also has a very similar designation is but one of the smallest of many allusions to that franchise). Their discovery of an alien artifact of their own and the realization that this is the first domino that falls before the tragedy we entered in media res at the start of the film is likewise very Alien-like, and then the film pushes further and becomes a bit like Prometheus in the study of organic matter taken from it, which becomes an orifice-invading life form that is ultimately responsible for everything. There’s even a little The Thing in there, as this is an isolated place in a desolate environment where no one can be trusted, as well as a really great Rob Bottin/Stanley Winston style mutant human at the end. 

One Alien film it doesn’t borrow from is Alien3, but it does crib from another of director David Fincher’s films, but to say more on that would stray too far into spoiler territory, and I think this is a film that should be gone into with as little foreknowledge as possible. I certainly did; it just happened to be $5 Tuesday (well, $5.75 now) and a friend finally had some time off after having to work an extended stretch of days during and around SXSW. The arthouse was doing repertory screenings of things I had already seen, and Brandon had written about Black Bag and the new Looney Tunes picture, so with nothing more to go on than the tiny icon of the film’s poster in the MoviePass app, I went to the film with a couple of friends. As soon as the characteristic “heartbeat” sound and logo card that accompanies the opening of the Shudder app and precedes the films it distributes, I realized that I had accidentally duped myself into paying for a movie that I could watch at home. That having been said, when the film’s opening fifteen minutes or so felt very much like the beginning of a Syfy Channel original (albeit an extremely elevated and gory one), I was glad that I was watching this in a theater instead of at home, where the film’s pacing would have been a greater challenge on my attention span. This is a film that is introspective, but temporally, not tonally. There’s a lovely dream sequence in the middle that I rather liked, but the purposeful use of long scenes in which very little is happening and we are left to merely contemplate the tableau is something that I can see turning off certain audiences (my two viewing companions, for example, had polar opposite reactions).

Even if you, like me, are more tolerant of those contemplative moments, you may still find that what’s most critically missing here is a lack of theme. Alien is positively (and often literally) dripping with concepts of motherhood, gestation, and birth; The Thing captures a quiet paranoia and isolation that’s universally emotionally applicable; Event Horizon is a parable about madness through the consequences of what happens when science pierces the veil of reality. All of these are existential horrors in what are normally considered environments of speculative fiction, and all of them feature terrifying results of encounters with beings so unlike us that moral concepts of “good” and “evil” don’t really apply. So is Ash. But as to what Ash is about … I’m not really sure that I could tell you. The overall societal decline in attention span has resulted in a lot of discourse about whether a certain scene has a “purpose” or a “point,” meaning to what end does it serve the god of plot and the god of plot alone. Those people are not going to have a good time screening Ash. But the fact that I liked this one so much despite its real lack of theme or thesis tells me that this is a movie with no small amount of things to enjoy and even praise. Its “purpose” is to be an Alien movie unapologetically shot like Knife+Heart; its “point” is to synthesize all of those elements together and then create the best sci-fi synth soundtrack since Blade Runner. It won’t be for everyone, but if you have the inclination after this review to see it, I’d see it on the big screen if you can.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Possible Films: Short Works by Hal Hartley 1994-2004

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I was unfortunately out of town or otherwise indisposed when my local arthouse theater recently hosted a showcase of Hal Hartley films. I’m not terribly familiar with the director’s work, but the promotional videos that were cut together for the screenings were very enticing. Unfortunately, the films that were shown have proven difficult to locate elsewhere, even despite the presence of my local, resurrected, independent video store. What they did have readily available was a collection of his shorts, a 2004 DVD release titled Possible Films: Short Works by Hal Hartley 1994-2004, which included eight titles that added up to be a bit of a mixed bag. 

First up is Opera No. 1, described by one online review as the most accessible of the shorts, which has born itself out to be relatively true. It’s a condensation of an operatic story about love and loss starring Parker Posey and James Urbaniak alongside the late Adrienne Shelly, who was a frequent collaborator with Hartley. Shelly and Posey play roller-skating angels among other characters within a narrative that Urbaniak is simultaneously both composing and living (I think). Twelfth Night is alluded to through an apparent gender swap for one of Shelly’s characters (again—I think), but the narrative isn’t really what’s important here so much as the image and, if you’ll forgive me, the vibe. Urbaniak’s placement on a precarious-looking scaffold as he writes out scenes then balls the paper in his fist evokes a sense of what it is to create: to endanger oneself through exposure of your innermost thoughts stage and the frustration that comes when one tries to contort the world into something more beautiful and manageable but failing to capture the same. Posey and Shelly are ethereal as angels, skating about in an empty theatre behind and between rows of empty seats, but the transcendent is also made human in that they also seem to love smoking. 

Opera No. 1 is followed immediately by The Other Also. Apparently, this second short began life as an art gallery installation, and I can neither improve upon nor dispute a contemporary A.V. Club review from Keith Phipps which stated this was “arguably the only place where a single out-of-focus shot of two actresses circling each other in slow motion to the accompaniment of an ambient score and a haltingly repeated Bible passage would be welcome.” It was at this point in my initial viewing that I stopped the DVD and decided to engage with the shorts individually, with some distance between them. 

The third short, the dialogue-free The New Math(s), is a return to something a little more “formful,” a film that is truly experimental in the sense that one feels Hartley trying out different techniques to see if they work. In an abandoned warehouse, two people sit at desks in a makeshift classroom. One, a man whose suspenders and short pants code him as youthful (David Neumann), contemplates an apple, while the other, a woman (Miho Nikaido, Hartley’s wife) works diligently on the math equation set before the two of them. A third character, their apparent teacher (D.J. Mendel) gets on and off of a freight elevator elsewhere in the building. When the woman appears to complete the equation, a non-violent kung-fu style battle seems to break out as each party pursues one another through the empty building, parts of which are likewise etched with other elaborate mathematical equations. The woman pulls a lever, machines elsewhere begin to move, and then their apparent activation seems to no longer be tied to the lever but to the woman herself, with the possible interpretation that the equation somehow delineates or even affects the passage of time. There’s something almost distinctly “public broadcasting” about it, from the grainy film quality to the overuse of the swoop and swoosh noises that come from parodying kung-fu sequences to the very Square One use of math(s) as a narrative device. I feel like I can see Hartley in the editing bay, working out how to convey the starting and stopping of time through the use of heavy machinery footage that may have been free to license, or him pushing the limits of his ability to capture fighting on screen and whether he had a knack for it. As with Opera No. 1, there’s little to say about the narrative or plot, but there is something interesting about the energy and the fun of getting to watch a filmmaker try out some new things. 

The fourth short, entitled NYC 3/94, follows four characters. The first is a man portrayed by Dwight Ewell (most recognizable to me from his long-ago Kevin Smith collaborations, most notably as Hooper the Black, gay comic book writer in Chasing Amy) who finds himself standing at the edge of a roof. The shot cuts away and we find him on the ground, apparently unharmed, where he meets a woman (Lianna Pai) who helps him to his feet. All around them, the sounds of war rage. Elsewhere, another man (Urbaniak again) reads out a jeremiad for the present day, narrating the inevitable collapse that we see taking place on the street. The final character, a man in a suit (Paul Schulze, whom I couldn’t place until I looked him up; he’s Father Intintola from The Sopranos), asks to be let into a place where Ewell and Pai’s characters have taken shelter and apparently dies in the street, but who is later seen escaping with the other two characters. Apparently, the audio was taken from “the war from the former Yugoslavia” (according to the aforementioned Phipps review), and the supposed mundanity of a civilization in collapse is effectively captured via the fact that the short is shot guerrilla style. As our three characters duck and cover from violence that only exists in the audio track and thus is only inferred through the magic of filmmaking in the images, people in the background mill about and go about their daily lives, “oblivious” to the “war” around them. It’s a neat little piece. 

The Sisters of Mercy is the fifth short and consists of seventeen minutes of outtakes between Posey and Sabrina Lloyd (from Sliders!) as they rehearse for Hartley’s short film Iris (not included on the disc), which is set to the song of the same name by The Breeders. It’s interesting from a technical point of view and mostly in conversation with the avante garde music video that for which it is, for all intents and purposes, supplementary material. Iris clocks in at under four minutes long, and Sisters of Mercy works to show how much work actually goes into a much shorter completed piece of art. As an individual piece, there’s little more to say about it, as it feels like an orphaned DVD extra. I did seek out and find Iris on the Criterion streaming collection, though, and it’s pretty good! 

I have to admit that I messed up a little here. Seeing Sisters of Mercy, Iris, and Regarding Soon on the Criterion Channel, I decided not to rush through the remainder of the shorts and instead return the DVD to my local video store, only to discover that the next short, Kimono, was not only not on Criterion, but all but impossible to find online. I would have to rent it all over again, I assumed, until I accidentally misspelled the director’s last name as “Hartly” in one of my Googlings, and discovered the 27-minute short in its entirety … on a porn site. I don’t know that I would call it pornographic, but there should be no mistaking the fact that this is an erotic film. A woman (Nikaido again) is a woman in a wedding dress who is ejected from a New Beetle (this was released in 1999, after all) in a deserted area. She wanders through woods and fields, slowly shedding parts of her wedding dress until she’s down to her lacy undergarments, all the time pursued by two woman that the IMDb page identifies as wood nymphs (Valerie Celis and Yun Shen). Once she’s shed every part of the bridal attire, she redresses herself in a kimono that she finds in a rundown house in the woods. She appears to fall asleep, whereupon a ghost whispers something to her while the observing nymphs cover their ears. Intermittently, poetic phrases float up on screen (ex.: “In this world / love has no color / and who knows how / my body is marked by yours”). They appear in broken lines, and it’s unfortunate that the effect is something like you would see in a contemporary film trailer for a suspense thriller (you know the effect I’m talking about, even if you can’t pinpoint the last time you saw it). It lends the whole experience the effect that it’s an advertisement for something else, and with a runtime of nearly thirty minutes, that’s a negative. On the other hand, this is a beautifully photographed piece, and one which shows that, even before the term “wife guy” was coined, Hartley was pioneering what that meant when it came to making a piece of art about how much he loves his hot wife.

Regarding Regarding Soon, this ten-minute film features Hartley talking about the creation of his stage play Soon, which was inspired by the Branch Davidian massacre and revolves around millennialist end-times Christianity in America. In his review of the DVD, Robert Spuhler noted that Sisters of Mercy was “probably [his] favorite as an actor” because of its insight into the creative process. Regarding Soon turned out to be one of my favorites probably because of my (well documented) interest in American eschatology. The play largely consists of arguments between seven characters about scriptural interpretation and interpolation, and the concept of “creative religiosity,” most notably the way that both religion and art are attempts we mere mortals make at attempting to understand the nature of existence. There doesn’t seem to be a performance of the play online in any format that I can find, but there must have been a publication of the script at some point since it has a presence on GoodReads, and we do get some images of the performance on this DVD, which is nice. I recently saw part of Hartley’s 1989 film The Unbelievable Truth and was struck by the pointedness and efficiency of its dream-like dialogue, how it presaged the kind of quick-witted linguistic playfulness and melodramatic delivery that would go on (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse) to be a characteristic of works like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gregg Araki’s Nowhere, and Gilmore Girls. It seems like this was the mode for Soon as well, and I hope I get to see a production of it or get the chance to read the script at some point in the future. For something that’s essentially a supplementary text for a larger work, this one held my attention quite well, and it was fascinating to hear Hartley talk about his creative process and confirm some of the things that I had already assumed about him from the previous entries in this anthology. He describes himself as minimalist by nature and how he enjoys working within a “restricted palette,” and I think that came through in all of these in one way or another. 

Ultimately, this collection wasn’t what I expected. Probably a must-view only for Hartley completionists, a few films feel like they are included here just because they had to be stored somewhere in order to be cited in his feature works, or feel like diary entries from production, which has a limited audience. I think that most others would get just as much out of watching the ones that sound interesting to them on the Criterion Channel (or whatever porn site you can find Kimono on).

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond 

Eephus (2025)

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I am not sure how, but my grandfather watched a baseball game for the entire span of my childhood. No matter when we stopped by his house, that one Atlanta Braves game was playing on the television, with no beginning or end. No one ever won or lost. Nothing especially interesting ever happened on the field. It was just plain, old baseball for all of eternity. I never understood the appeal until I attended a game in-person as an adult. With a couple beers and an Italian sausage in the stands, the endless stasis of plain, old baseball became pleasant instead of confounding. It was a calm background texture, an occasional distraction from the casual conversation & junk food consumption I would be indulging in anyway. Baseball is, essentially, the hangout movie of sports.

The new gloomy hangout comedy Eephus understands the spirit of that sport more deeply than any other baseball movie I can name. It’s a slow-paced, aimless picture that feels like watching a sub-professional baseball game played in real time. None of the players are especially athletic, much less talented. They’re playing a game so pointless that they can opt to get drunk & nap in the outfield with no direct effect on the final score. And yet, the dead-space background texture of the sport leaves a lot of room for what really matters in movies: detailed observations of human behavior, character quirks, and the poetic graces of life. Every single dialogue exchange & character detail of Eephus is deeply charming, riotously funny, or both, making for an exceptionally pleasant day at the park.

The occasion of this specific baseball game is the closing of Soldiers Field in Nowhere, Massachusetts. Before the site is demolished to make room for a school, two recreational-league teams of middle-aged men gather for one final game. They complain about the cruel absurdity of building a school on such hallowed ground, as if their field were being replaced with a strip mall or prison. The next-nearest field is only a 30-minute drive away, which they consider an insurmountable distance, deciding instead to retire from the sport forever. As the sun sets on their final game, the field lights never kick on, so they play in the dark, unable to see the ball or accurately call a play. They can barely haul their sagging dad-bods around the bases, joking “They should put me down” as if they’ve fully outlived their usefulness. There’s no real momentum or purpose to the game beyond going through the motions to give the field a proper send-off. When they celebrate with fireworks after the final play, we don’t even watch the display. There’s no sense of ceremony here, just lives being lived.

Eephus lingers somewhere in the vast liminal space between Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets & Field of Dreams, but its moment-to-moment charms are more kinetic than that description indicates. There are seemingly no repeated camera set-ups as cinematographer-turned-director Carson Lund (Ham on Rye, Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point) finds infinite angles from which to shoot a generally unimpressive recreational field. Standalone shots of an empty dugout, a good cloud, or the moon peeking out in daylight register with a quiet, warm beauty, but Lund never allows the tempo to drift from hangout movie to slow-cinema abstraction. He mostly finds the humor & humanity in the minor, unimportant behaviors of his small cast of minor, unimportant men. Meanwhile a series of local Halloween-themed radio commercials and an opening news broadcast voiced by Frederick Wiseman keep the energy up with loud, frantic background chatter. As an end-of-an-era movie about people who’ve outlived their purpose, it’s unavoidably melancholy, but it moves quick, looks great, and delivers constant laughs as it waits out the final hours of the day.

-Brandon Ledet

Mickey 17 (2025)

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When we recently did our podcast episode about The Big Sleep, Brandon mentioned that he had already seen Mickey 17 and briefly shared his thoughts about it. One of the things that he noted was that when Bong Joon Ho makes a movie that is primarily for a Western audience, he foregoes a lot of the subtlety that is maintained in the films that he makes with his homeland in mind. Which is to say that I think he thinks we’re all a little stupid over here (and he’s not wrong). Memories of Murder and Parasite are films with lots of subtext and subtlety (although the latter doesn’t hold back with its themes), while Snowpiercer and Okja are—and I mean this in the most affectionate and respectful way possible—a little obvious. When I think about Bong’s body of work, the scene that comes to my mind most often and the one that stands out most clearly is the sequence from Snowpiercer in which Tilda Swinton’s androgynous Minister Mason delivers a speech to disruptive back-of-train passengers. “A hat belongs on the head,” they say, “And the shoe belongs on the foot. I am a hat; you are a shoe.” Mason’s voice drips with disdain and hatred. Theirs is a demonstration of not just their slavish, religious devotion to class distinction, but just how furiously angry power can be when it reinforces itself, how the veil of civility (barely) conceals a snarling dog. 

So when you hear mixed things about Mickey 17, and people talking about how the film is obvious, well, they’re not lying to you. Mickey 17 is an obvious movie. It lacks subtlety, and I can see how people may feel that they’re being talked down to, or how the film’s lack of nuance in its themes could make it feel like a Disney Channel Original version of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, if you’re feeling extremely uncharitable. I would never go that far, but I will say that my expectations were not exceeded. 

Three decades from now, dimwitted Mickey (Robert Pattinson) has run into some trouble with a mafia-connected loan shark, alongside his friend Timo (Steven Yeun). The two decide the best solution to their problem would be to escape the dying planet aboard a corporate ship bound for worlds that humans seek to colonize. Timo is able to talk himself into a pilot position immediately, while Mickey signs up to be an “expendable,” a person whose primary role is to take on dangerous jobs during the long spaceflight. Sometime between the present and the not-too-distant future, scientists figured out how to 3-D print cloned human bodies and how to transfer memories between them, allowing for people to essentially create backup versions of themselves in case of death. When the technology was virtually immediately used for criminal (and homicidal) purposes, its use was banned on earth, but due to the dangerous nature of starfaring, one “expendable” is allowed per starship. Aboard, Mickey meets and falls into immediately reciprocated love with Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a security officer. The ship on which they are travelling is commanded not by a seasoned space veteran but by manchild former (read: failed) politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a character who exists to be an amalgamation of celebrities cum “leaders” but whose details make him a very (read: not at all) thinly veiled parody of the current U.S. president. Along for the ride is his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), whose rather thin characterization—she’s obsessed with sauce—goes largely unnoticed as Collette gives another fantastically over the top performance. 

Over the course of their journey, Mickey isn’t just given dangerous jobs to do, he becomes the subject of outright inhumane laboratory tests. His brain gets backed up onto a hard drive every week and then he gets printed out again when he dies. He’s put outside in a spacesuit in order to be exposed to cosmic radiation; he’s used to collect spores from the new planet’s atmosphere so that a vaccination to the diseases present on the planet can be created; he’s exposed to an ongoing series of nerve gas exposures in order to develop new biological weapons. One would also have to assume that, as his rations keep being halved over and over again, one of the Mickeys must have starved to death. It’s not a charmed life, but Mickey is so in love with Nasha that he doesn’t mind dying over and over again as long as they are together. Things go sideways, however, when he’s left to die after falling into a crevasse. He’s rescued by the tardigrade-like aliens that are native to the planet and brought back to the surface, and when he manages to get back aboard the ship, he learns that his replacement, Mickey 18, has already been printed. If anyone learns that there are two of them, they’ll both be killed and the brain backup deleted in accordance with law, and Sen. and Mrs. Marshal are all too happy to kill both Mickey and the tardigrade aliens (whom they dub “Creepers”) despite the indigenous life form’s apparent sentience. 

It’s a small detail, but one of the things that I liked at the beginning was that we see Mickey and Timo wearing the shirts for their failed macaron business, which features the slogan “macarons are not a sin.” It’s an unusual slogan but one that makes some modicum of sense since desserts and sweets are often considered an indulgence. However, we later learn in the film that “multiples are not a sin” was a rallying cry for a certain perspective on the question of the legality of the human backup-and-restore program. This all leads us to see how short-sighted Mickey is, as he clearly would have to know enough about the cloning process to see this as a reasonable macaron peddling tagline, but he also isn’t paying enough attention to know what he’s signing up for when he first enlists as an Expendable. Further, his taking inspiration (or willingness to go along with Timo’s inspiration) from a complicated legal and social issue for a myopic macaron business is more insight into Mickey’s doofiness. There is a charm in that, though, and the way that Nasha is instantly smitten with this dumb, lost puppy is endearing, as is her ongoing devotion to him despite the personality changes—some almost imperceptible, some quite obvious—that come with each rebirth. 

Shortly after Mickey 17 returns to the ship and discovers that Mickey 18 is already up and about, Mickey 18 takes it upon himself to assassinate Marshall. 17 is able to stop him in time, but this action reveals their existence as multiples and also ends in the death of one of two baby Creepers who came aboard the ship inside of a rock sample. There’s some slapstick, Ruffalo bellows as Marshall, the little cat-sized alien beings run around, then one of them is gunned to pieces. My viewing companion leaned over to me and said “I hated that,” the moment that the sequence ended. I didn’t agree, but I also understand that Mickey 17 isn’t going to win over as many people as Bong’s previous works have; it’s a familiar theme of his in a new environment and with different sci-fi trappings, but for some, it just doesn’t have that same “wow” factor. Unfortunately, I find myself completely sympathizing with the underwhelmed.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Urban Legend (1998)

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The 1998 college-campus horror Urban Legend resides at the crossroads of two major 1990s cultural projects, both involving the legacy of Wes Craven. First & foremost, it’s a post-Scream third wave slasher, coasting on a deluge of self-aware meta horrors starring young, hot teen actors who are conscious they are in a horror movie and provide live commentary on the tropes of the genre as they’re systematically killed. In this case, the famous-at-the-time teenyboppers in question (Alicia Witt, Jared Leto, Tara Reid, Joshua Jackson, etc.) attempt to guess the next patterned kill of a serial murderer who’s recreating long-debunked urban legends rather than recreating famous movie scenes—like in Scream—but the effect is the same. The secondary project of Urban Legend was part of a larger 1990s effort to reclaim the public reputation of Robert Englund as more than just the creep who played Freddy Kreuger, presenting him instead as a kind of effete academic. His late-80s turn as the Phantom of the Opera transported his Freddy Kreuger persona to the more refined cultural space of a period-piece opera house.  He later turned up as himself in Craven’s proto-Scream meta slasher A New Nightmare, appearing out of Kreuger drag as a thoughtful, classically trained actor haunted by the grotesqueries he was typecast as post-Elm Street fame. In Urban Legend, Englund’s past professional triumphs as Freddy Kreuger still linger in the audience’s mind as his character is floated as the most obvious suspect in the serial-killer investigations, but he’s quickly cleared of guilt and presented as something much more respectable: a bespectacled, leather-patched college professor and the leading expert in his field, which conveniently happens to be urban legends.

Of course, the only reason to return to Urban Legend all these decades past its expiration date is to pinpoint what, exactly, is the most 1990s-specific detail about it. There are plenty of late-90s time capsule contributions competing for that honor: frustrations with dial-up internet connections tying up a shared phone line, Joshua Jackson’s frosted-tips Peroxide hairdo, a meta joke at the expense of Jackson’s Dawson’s Creek fame, “Goth 4 Goth” campus hookup message boards, needle drops from Stabbing Westward and Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. When I saw the film was screening on a Monday evening down the street from my house, I didn’t attend in hopes that it would hold up as a wrongly dismissed 90s classic, à la The Rage, The Craft, or Cherry Falls. I attended out of nostalgia for the film’s value as a retro Blockbuster Video rental, watched alone on my bedroom VCR when I was old enough to crave teenage transgressions but too young to experience them first-hand. It was a pleasant time to return to, if not only to reminisce about a moment when teen slashers were slickly produced, hot commodities. Every exterior scene involves a completely unnecessary crane shot, and every nighttime slashing sequence is set during a music video-style thunderstorm for atmospheric effect, flaunting money most modern slashers couldn’t afford to scrape together. The only embarrassing thing about the movie, really, is watching the adults in the room have to play archetypes for mouthbreathing teens’ entertainment: Brad Dourif as a creepy gas station attendant, Loretta Devine as a Coffy-obsessed campus cop and, of course, Robert Englund as a learned professor of the macabre.

As for the urban-legends-obsessed serial killer conceit, even the teenage victims point out that the premise is “a bit of a stretch.” There are a few obvious go-to urban legends that map well to the teen slasher format. There’s the classic “The call’s coming from inside the house” story of the babysitter being killed by a home invader, restaged here in a frat house much like how the foundational 70s slasher Black Christmas restaged it in a sorority house. The first kill involves an axe murderer hiding in the backseat of a woman’s car, played for ironic humor as she sings along to the “Turn around” refrain of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” painfully off-key. The killer’s motivation being a disastrous prank version of the “flashing headlights gang initiation” legend is similarly effective. Three or four clever kills are not enough to fill the 100-minute runtime, though, which inspires the movie to reach for urban legends that don’t fully map to the genre. In the most egregious example, one character is force-fed a combo of Pop Rocks & Drano in a violent escalation of the schoolyard myth that combining Pop Rocks & soda will explode your stomach. Otherwise, things get exceedingly silly when the legends are updated with modern twists, like switching phone calls for online chatrooms or creating new teen slang in which victims-to-be each share their “favorite U.L.” at the campus coffee shop. With the gnarly exception of a microwaved dog, the violence of the film is never especially gruesome, but it does find plenty of novelty in its post-Scream meta slasher premise. It’s a wonder there were any legends left for its two less-remembered sequels; it seems like this one ran through all the standards.

If you want a smart, level-headed version of this movie, you’re much better off revisiting the 1992 classic Candyman, which starts with a grad student recording a broad range of urban legends before settling on one specific, hyperlocal one that destroys her life. The modern folklore academia of Urban Legend is much broader, and it only serves two cynical purposes: cashing in on the popularity of Scream and making Robert Englund appear intellectual. A couple decades later, the only cultural significance the movie has gained is as a reminder that Jared Leto was once passable as a normal, functional human being, albeit a strikingly pretty one. Everything else is pure late-90s nostalgia, the cinematic equivalent of binging Stabbing Westward & Cherry Poppin’ Daddies music videos on YouTube.

-Brandon Ledet

Fade to Black (1980)

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“Why don’t you live in the real world with the rest of us?”
“No thanks.”

During the opening credits of the early-80s horror curio Fade to Black, our serial killer anti-hero Eric Binfold (Dennis Christopher) is mumbling to himself about Bogart & books, likely in reference to the Howard Hawks noir The Big Sleep. He’s then revealed to be lounging in his underwear, studying local TV broadcast & repertory theatre listings in the newspaper to plan out his week. His bedroom is wallpapered with movie posters for violent genre films like Don’t Bother to Knock, Frenzy, and White Heat. His first kill, halfway into the film, is pushing his wheelchair-using adoptive aunt down their apartment stairs, inspired by an infamously vicious murder in Kiss of Death. He is later depicted masturbating to a Marilyn Monroe poster while wearing a Nosferatu t-shirt. He changes his name from Eric Binfold to Cody Jarrett in honor of James Cagney’s performance in White Heat, reflecting the way he deals with his mommy issues by violently lashing out against the world. Eric Binfold is living my exact life and watching the exact same movies I am, except that he’s a sociopathic murderer, and it scares me.

Fade to Black is an uncomfortably prescient film about how anyone with a Letterboxd account is an antisocial degenerate. It makes visual allusions to early slashers like Psycho & Halloween to help guide the audience with genre-template guardrails, but the horror classic it most closely resembles is Willard. All Eric Binfold wants to do is be left alone to watch his movies, but he keeps being hassled by family, coworkers, and bullies who interrupt his hobby. Like how Willard eventually exacts revenge on the world by weaponizing his own hobby of training rats, Eric snaps and goes on a killing spree using The Movies as his weapon of choice. He dresses as vampires, cowboys, and classic-noir gangsters, hunting anyone who belittles his favorite pastime of sitting alone in the dark, watching a glowing screen. Dennis Christopher gives an intensely nervous performance in the role, calling into question why Willard got the Crispin Glover remake treatment instead of this one. He’s also, of course, a prototypical incel – not committing his first murder until he’s stood up by an Australian flirt who happens to vaguely resemble Marilyn Monroe. What a dweeb; I hate that he’s so relatable.

The real horror here is the isolation & frustration of dedicating every waking thought to the antisocial pursuit of Watching Movies. It’s an unhealthy lifestyle, but given the choice between “escapist trash” and the cruel mundanity of the real world, it’s a relatively attractive one. The trick when “going to the movies a lot” is “your thing” is to remember how to talk & relate to other people in the hours you inevitably have to spend outside the theater. You can’t just fire off movie trivia at normal, functional human beings and consider the exchange Polite Conversation. Universal’s Famous Monsters aren’t famous to everyone; you have to recognize that you are the town freak, not the local genius, and adjust your behavior accordingly. When Eric’s killing spree spirals fully out of control and he takes the Marilyn impersonator hostage at gunpoint, the taboo he can’t wait to break is touching a movie theater screen with his hands, something that wouldn’t register as a blasphemous transgression to most. He’s an avatar for Cinephile Brain Rot at its most rotten, another reminder to periodically step outside the cinema and touch some grass.

-Brandon Ledet

Juliet of the Spirits (1965)

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The standout sequence in Juliet of the Spirits that dropped my jaw lowest in the theater was its ugliest & most mundane. The 2015 restoration of the 1960s Fellini classic is, for the most part, a gorgeous swirl of vibrant color. It’s a dark fantasy movie in which the Italian master invents the cinematic language for later texts as disparate & monumental as Lynch’s dream sequences, Jodorowsky’s circuses, and Friedkin’s exorcisms, all rendered in sinfully lurid Technicolor. That was all expected, though. What really caught me off guard is when Fellini pauses his gaudy reverie to also invent the cinematic language for the television program Cheaters. It happens in the sequence where his real-life wife & muse Giuletta Masina visits the private detective agency that’s been trailing her husband, and they play back to her a full week of documented adulterous behavior. The way the head dick in charge narrates the sepia-tone surveillance footage with time stamps and sneering innuendo is so specific to the Joey Greco era of Cheaters that I now understand that reality TV show to be a loving homage to the film’s legacy. Such is the power of Fellini.

Much like an episode of Cheaters, watching Juliet of the Spirits feels like intruding on a private domestic dispute that’s really none of our business. Our director is working through his real-life conflicts with his wife by illustrating his own adulterous behavior onscreen, through the avatar of actor Mario Pisu. Giuletta Masina stars as Giuletta Boldrini, a wealthy but lonely housewife who’s increasingly isolated by the extramarital indulgences of her husband Giorgio, played by Pisu. As Giorgio spends increasingly long stretches away with his latest fling, Giuletta seeks spiritual advice from the dark arts, meeting with a series of psychics & mystics in search of a calmer, wiser perspective on her broken marriage. This pursuit opens her mind to a loud circus of perverted spirits & ghosts that constantly parade through her head, pulling her out of her Catholic comfort zone towards a larger religious truth: pleasure is the true religion, and she should be cheating too. The whole thing plays like a plea from Fellini to his wife to start cheating on him to help balance things out and to take her mind off the marital injustice he initiated.

Unlearning Catholic guilt is easier said than done. The proto-Exorcist imagery results from a childhood memory in which Giuletta starred as a martyred saint in a church play, burned alive for the transgression of accepting Christ in her heart. Anytime the adult Giuletta considers indulging in an extramarital affair (with a handsome ghost, demon, or otherwise), her mind flashes back to this scarring memory, which has taught her to associate Earthly pleasure with guilt & pain. Everyone around her is fully enjoying what being alive has to offer—especially in the pleasures of the flesh—and yet Giuletta continues to fret, unable to let go and enjoy herself as much as her wandering husband. Buried somewhere in the film’s increasingly dreamlike imagery, there’s eventually a healing moment in which she frees her flaming inner child from her Catholic shackles and comforts her with a motherly embrace, but it’s still not enough to fully make up for what Giorgio has done to their marriage. Maybe Fellini’s admitting personal guilt there more than he’s attempting to shake his wife loose from her own self-limiting Catholic guilt. Again, it’s not really any of our business.

For all of its messy offscreen domestic drama and the deep psychological pain caused by religious repression, Juliet of the Spirits is often a light confection. Snazzy jazz scores the backyard wanderings of a mystic housecat and the Italo-fashion beachwear modeling of Giulietta’s fabulously amoral neighbor with no attempt to underline the dark-fantasy elements of the plot with any palpable menace. Fellini feels just as preoccupied with injecting eye-searing beauty into every frame of his first in-color picture as he is with working out his domestic issues with his wife. Even the candlesticks in the couple’s home are tinted lavender instead of the typical white, just to squeeze more color into the frame. It is, without question, the most gorgeous, surreal episode of Cheaters in the history of the show; and yes I am including the one where Joey Greco got stabbed on a boat.

-Brandon Ledet

Universal Language (2025)

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Matthew Rankin makes great movies, but I’m not yet fully sure what makes a Matthew Rankin movie specific to Matthew Rankin. His first film The Twentieth Century is one of the best debut features of this decade, and yet the most accurate way to recommend it to the uninitiated is as the best Guy Maddin movie not directed by Guy Maddin. I found myself reaching for similar hypotheticals while watching Rankin’s latest picture, the low-key absurdist comedy Universal Language. What if Wes Anderson directed My Winnipeg? What if Roy Andersson directed True Stories? What if Quentin Dupieux directed Where is the Friend’s House? Thankfully, Matthew Rankin is quickly becoming a distinct enough directorial voice that I won’t have to come up with these lazy rhetorical scenarios for much longer, but there just isn’t enough material out there to fully pinpoint what makes his work unique, at least not yet. For now, its greatness is still familiar to its most glaring reference points.

Set in a parallel-universe version of Winnipeg that’s just as influenced by Iranian culture as Canadian, Universal Language casually slips between Persian & French dialogue & text as a mirror reflection of its characters’ liminal cultural identities. We start at a French immersion school, with Persian students anxious to break away from their eccentric teacher’s disciplinary shouting so they can have wholesome adventures in the Canadian snow. Outside, their small-scale schemes intertwine with the daily toils of a Winnipeg tour guide and a stranger (Matthew Rankin, essentially playing himself) who’s returning to town to visit his ill mother after years of estrangement. In stage-comedy tradition, their stories converge in a single apartment at the story’s climax, but much of the film leaves them traveling & plotting in isolated vignettes. The tour guide is the most solid narrative anchor in that respect, providing the audience a sense of place as he shows off the many uninspiring wonders of Winnipeg’s cultural monuments: an endless tangle of grey interstate highways, a Beige District of nondescript brick buildings, a briefcase that was abandoned on a park bench in the 1970s and left undisturbed due to general Canadian politeness, etc.

Universal Language lounges in a calm, unrushed mood, warming its frozen hands with a hot glass of tea in avoidance of the harsh winter outside. It’s quietly hilarious, though, with an excess of absurdist gags about turkey beauty pageants, sentient Christmas trees, local TV-commercial celebrities, and schoolboy Groucho Marx impersonators that each land with a warm chuckle rather than a full-bellied laugh. Its visual trickery is similarly subdued, especially in comparison with the German Expressionist fantasia of The Twentieth Century. There are two scenes in which a shot-reverse-shot sequence triggers a harshly mundane psychedelia: one that maps out the cubicle-walled limbo of a government bureaucrat’s office and one that swaps two characters’ personae mid-film, recalling Lynch’s Lost Highway. Another isolated sequence of low-key surrealism makes the audience dizzy with double-exposure images of a figure skater dressed in silver like a spinning disco ball. It’s all purposefully underplayed deadpan, so its merits as Great Cinema are much less obvious than they were in Rankin’s previous picture. It’s also much sweeter & more communal, though, suggesting that Rankin is investing more heart into his characters than his production design as he hones his directorial voice. Although many immediate comparisons come to mind while describing what he’s achieved so far, I still can’t fully predict where his mind is going next. He’s an exciting Artist To Watch as a result, even as someone who’s not yet making fully distinct art.

-Brandon Ledet