Reviews

Deathtrap (1982)

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In 1982, Ira Levin’s 1978 play Deathtrap was adapted into a film directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Michael Caine, Dyan Cannon, and Christopher Reeve. As the film opens, playwright Sidney Bruhl (Caine) watches in abject horror as his latest play is met with audience disgust and disinterest on its opening night. This is but the latest in a long line of flops for him, and he drowns his sorrows at the watering hole next door, where his friendly bartender tries to convince him that it can’t be all that bad before turning on the TV over the bar and tuning into multiple scathing reviews from critics. He calls his wife Myra (Cannon) to let her know he’s going to tie on a bender, and arrives home to the gorgeous converted windmill in which they reside the following morning, where he scolds her for smoking, as she is already under treatment for a heart condition. To add insult to injury, he complains to his wife that he has just received a manuscript from a former student he doesn’t even remember, soliciting feedback, and that the script for “Deathtrap” is perfect: five characters who will be easy to cast, a single set, and a hell of an ending. “It’s so good that even a talented director couldn’t ruin it,” he says, before latching on to the idea that he could lure the younger playwright to their secluded home, murder him, and steal his script.

Myra doesn’t believe that he’s serious about the idea, but when Cliff Anderson (Reeve) arrives to their cottage later that evening and divulges casually that the has no notes (or anyone waiting for him) at home and that the only two copies of Deathtrap are currently in the house, Sidney decides to go for it, and the two bury him in the vegetable patch. Before they can clean up, the two are visited by a celebrity psychic named Helga Ten Dorp (Irene Worth), who happens to be leasing a house from a neighbor in the lead up to her appearance on The Phil Donahue Show. Helga had a feeling that something dangerous was afoot, catching a few brief glimpses of danger and destruction that she can’t quite puzzle out, although their meaning is more clear to the Bruhls. After she leaves, the couple go to bed, only for Anderson to reappear at their doorstep in the middle of the night and clobber Sidney with a log, at which Myra drops dead from her heart failing. And that’s when things start to get really interesting. As the film’s tagline says, it’s not a whodunit, it’s a “who’ll-do-it.”

There are a lot of stage-to-screen adaptations that don’t understand that the transition between the two mediums requires a bit more massaging than just dropping the whole script into a word processor and changing the formatting a bit. Often, when the stagebound work is about the world of theater, the effect can arguably be worse as it draws attention to the fact that it hasn’t really been fully translated, just transferred. (A notable example: the change in Ulla’s dialogue from “Why Bloom go so far stage right?” to “Why Bloom go so far camera right?” seems like a meaningless and easy update between the stage and film productions of The Producers, but one joke works and the other doesn’t.) Deathtrap could very easily fall into this trap (no pun intended), but despite most of the film taking place entirely within the walls of the Bruhl home, it still feels like it extends beyond the limitations of that small set. When the events of the first act are being composed as a play later in the film and characters banter about what should happen next, the meta-textual nature of it could easily go so far up its own ass as to be annoying, but Levin is a very talented wordsmith and Lumet is a great director, so what ends up on screen is magical, alchemical even.

In its time, the film was dogged by a certain controversial element that I don’t want to reveal here, as it tips the hand of one of the movie’s many plot twists, and did so at the time for the contemporary audience as well. (Don’t even go to the film’s Wikipedia’s “Reception” section until you watch it.) I feel rather sorry for the people who were spoiled in 1982 and couldn’t go into this with completely fresh eyes, as I did. I watched this alone in a hotel room while traveling for work and gasped audibly at a few of the places that the narrative went, and laughed out loud at the witticisms of the characters (and the situations in which they find themselves) twice as often, and that’s not counting every time that Helga showed up to casually bump the board and all the players on it. Despite that, the film was well received by contemporary critics, although it appears that it was common to compare the film to Caine’s earlier picture Sleuth (a two-hander in which he plays the younger man having an affair with Laurence Olivier’s wife, with Caine and Olivier as the only actors in the entire thing), directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. The comparison is admittedly an easy one, but from our vantage in 2026, it’s easier to see the two as companion pieces. Deathtrap certainly works better in conversation with Mank’s picture than it does with Sleuth’s 2007 remake, despite the clever choice to move Caine into the Olivier role and cast Jude Law as the handsome young lover.

Deathtrap doesn’t seem to be available for streaming anywhere easily accessible at this time (other than ok.ru, where I’m sure the quality is not very good). I have the feeling it likely rotates on and off of Tubi from time to time, and it’s always worth checking to see if your local library has it on DVD. Just keep your ear to the ground so you know when it’s coming, but not so close that you learn too much about its shape. You’ll be glad you did.

-Mark “Boomer” Remdond

Primetime (2026)

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Robert Pattinson is on a roll this year. With his lead role in The Drama and a major supporting role in The Odyssey already under his belt, and with Dune: Part III still on the horizon, one of his most anticipated performances of the year was his portrayal of Chris Hansen, onetime host of Dateline specials entitled To Catch a Predator (contrary to the film’s depiction, it was never a self-contained, weekly series). Directed by Spermworld & Some Kind of Heaven helmer Lance Oppenheim, the film takes place during To Catch a Predator’s highest cultural saturation point, the mid-aughties, in the lead-up to the fateful day when Hansen and his crew’s participation in a botched arrest resulted in a man’s suicide.

(Please note: what follows is a summary of the narrative of the film, not a fully factual accounting of any real person’s history.) A decade after a trip to South Asia resulted in Hansen discovering the remains of countless children who had been trafficked from villages in the region, he finds himself haunted by this failure to save them. In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks and the resulting national hysteria, the “War on Terror” is in full swing abroad, personified in Stone Phillips reporting from Afghanistan, and at home, in the form of Hansen’s personal crusade to entrap and pillory child predators on national television, the town square stocks of the twenty-first century. Aspiring actor Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), believing that he’s auditioning for Dateline’s reenactment segments with the sole intent of getting an official credit so he can join the Screen Actor’s Guild and get his union card, learns that he will actually be used as the “nubile” bait to lure sexual predators into Hansen’s carefully laid trap. Behind the scenes of To Catch a Predator, tensions are brewing between ratings-chasing producer Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) and slimy cyber-vigilante Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher), the founder of the Perverted Justice website that Hansen partnered with for To Catch a Predator. Also along for the wild ride is Del (musician Phoebe Bridgers), another decoy whose youthful androgyny allows her to play both young girls and boys.

On his very first day, Dan is traumatized when one of the predators (Jonathan Lipnicki) immediately exposes himself and puts whipped cream on his private parts before Hansen can enter the room. Andie, still distracted by running the show while Hansen confronts the man, half-heartedly congratulates Dan on his performance while also giving him some kind of medication for “migraines,” setting up one of the film’s primary themes: who is the real predator here? This has been a source of discussion online in the months leading up to the film’s release, as conservative reactionaries have painted “liberal Hollywood” as releasing a film intended to demonize a man that many see as a positive force (despite the lack of actual legal consequences for the majority of the predators caught). Although the events of Hansen’s life are remixed in order to make a point about the man’s questionable ethics (Hansen’s personal life falls apart when his wife, played by Anna Faris, learns of an affair, which did not happen until 2011, long after the 2006/7 time frame of the film, and conflates reporting Hansen did about sweatshops in India with one about sex trafficking in Cambodia), I’d argue that it creates a portrait that is more flattering to Hansen than most would believe. We get a clear, understandable demonstration of what the stakes are to him, and while the real-life Hansen has been quoted as saying that he sleeps well at night free of any guilt over his contribution to the suicide of Bill Conradt, Pattinson’s Hansen is clearly shaken, humanizing him in a way that the real-life Hansen’s own account does not.

He’s no hero, of course; there are none here. Despite telling Dan that the credit he should be getting for his role in the To Catch a Predator enterprise is “hero,” it’s clear from the very beginning that the people with boots on the ground are all in it for their own glory. Sure, Hansen has personified the evil of sexual predation into a cave-dwelling monster that he sees lurking in the bushes, but we get a clear picture that he sees himself as “Chris Hansen of NBC” before he sees himself as anything else, including a husband or a father; he even answers the phone for his wife with his full name and affiliation. He has no qualms about showing a rough cut of an episode to his very young sons, even waking them up in the middle of the night to play the tape for them, and his increasing excitement about getting To Catch a Predator into primetime and competing against ABC’s ratings juggernaut Lost shows that he’s more interested in chasing Nielsen numbers than perverts and pedophiles. That carries over to the rest of the crew, all of whom are given the opportunity to choose to do something more meaningful and positive with their lives but (other than Del, who walks away when she feels that the team has crossed a moral line) choose not to. Hansen meets a man on a plane (Creed Bratton) who expresses his admiration for what Hansen is doing and wishes that he could kill every person that Predator entraps, which Hansen finds off-putting, but there’s ultimately very little difference between that man and Van Erck, whose arguably positive intentions are overshadowed by his compulsions. Andie is given the chance to jump ship  to a different candid camera show that creates scenarios in which normal people can rise to the occasion and intervene when they see someone being harmed (What Would You Do?, with John Quiñones), and although she is tempted, she still decides to stay with Hansen and crew. The last we see of her, she’s staring at the blood splatter from a suicide painted on the interior of a house window and claiming that she can still find a way to make this into compelling television.

Ultimately, Dan does end up getting what he wants, his SAG card, but only after leaving the show. Hansen may be our main character here, but he’s static and unchanging, while Dan is the person who is more dynamic. The question of who is predatory and who is preyed upon comes through most clearly in his story, as he begins as an innocent who falls under Hansen’s control. The older man inarguably grooms him. He buys the seemingly underage Dan alcohol at the hotel bar, plays catch with him and compares the boy to his own children, gives the kid jewelry, allows his associate to give Dan drugs, and masterminds the metaphorical machinery that requires Dan to perform youthfulness, innocence, and hairless prepubescence. Each action has a purpose, of course, and doesn’t seem out of the ordinary in isolation, but that’s the point. Predation doesn’t always look like sending explicit messages online, and fearmongering about internet predators deflects attention away from the more common form of grooming, which is usually done in person and by someone that the victim knows and trusts. Prevention of both requires parental supervision, and Hansen’s representation as a largely absent and uninvolved father shows that his obsession with fighting a moral war (for everyone to see and praise) makes him exactly the kind of parent whose children fall victim to the evil that he’s supposedly opposing. 

Hansen’s war was largely unsuccessful, as we can see now living in the world he helped create. Fewer than half of the men who were lured by Hansen and team ever faced prosecution, since the evidence against them was inadmissible due to how much To Catch a Predator skirted the borders of legality. For all the hunts for a “whale” to take down, there was an actual gigantic cabal of elite pedophiles and pederasts active during that time period with massive paper trails, and there’s an argument to be made that making these predators seem pathetic, dim-witted enough to fall for the sting operations, and easily apprehendable contributed to the fact that members of that cabal were (and still are, within our government) operating with impunity. It certainly didn’t put an end to online predation, especially given that it’s moved from shadowy corners of the internet where unsuspecting youth could theoretically be lured into a kidnapping or assault to front-page misogyny that has rotted the hearts and souls of an entire generation of young men. The film doesn’t hold your hand as it traces that line, but it’s there.

Early reviews of the film were marked by praise for Pattinson’s performance, and he is quite strong here. He makes Hansen a human being, even if the portrait is of a man whose quest was in vain. The MVP here, however, is Wever, who does a lot with the comparatively little she’s given. If you’re looking for a scathing indictment of a man whose televised windmill tilting and desire to create a primetime pillory had little real world positives, you won’t find that here, nor will you find a flattering portrait of a reporter whose secondary goals were praiseworthy. You’re also not, as the reactionaries would like you to believe, going to see a story about how the abyss gazed back. This is about people who were given every opportunity to change course, whether it be stepping away from the keyboard and getting psychological help for their illness, backing away from the limelight to have a real relationship with their family, or finding a way to do their work in a way that didn’t cost them their soul, and chose not to. Grim stuff.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Chronovisor (2026)

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Chronovisor is one of my favorite films that I’ve seen all year, and also one that I will find myself reluctant to recommend to others. Similar to 2024’s Last Things, it is a kind of science fiction documentary, and although I was thoroughly enraptured by it, I must also acknowledge that it is a film in a challenging, novel format, and it will likely be a difficult sell for most audiences. The question of whether one will find it fascinating or banal will largely come down to how much you enjoy doing research. This is a roughly 100-minute feature in which the first eighty minutes involve watching someone else performing academic research and cross-referencing various texts and recordings before the final twenty minutes turn into a psychedelic sequence that is both dream and nightmare. If you have the patience for it, it’s quite an experience, but I also don’t expect that many viewers in the audience will be willing to go along for the entire ride.

Dr. Béatrice Courte (Anne Laure Sellier) is a professor at Columbia University whom we meet boring her colleagues over dinner with a long monologue about oratory rhetoric and mind palace techniques. It functions as a litmus test for the rest of the film. If you’re as disinterested as her dinner companions are, you’re not going to enjoy the rest of the movie, but if her extemporaneous lecture about historical memory techniques intrigues you, you’re going to be completely engaged. She returns home to her lonely apartment and resumes her ongoing research, which largely revolves around a parascientific device, the titular “chronovisor.” Allegedly invented by a group of scientists and clergyman, foremost among them a Benedictine monk named Pellegrino Ernetti, the chronovisor was a device that, by interpreting the “echoes” of events, allowed the user to view and even photograph history, including the day of Jesus of Nazareth’s crucifixion. Through reviewing videotapes of lectures, reading through dozens of historical texts in multiple languages (which are translated for us in the audience as textual overlays on the page), listening to cassettes of talks given by various pseudoscientific figureheads, and playing vinyl records of Gregorian chants collected by Ernetti, Beatrice uncovers a historical mystery, one with potentially unfathomable effects on our understanding of history, faith, and reality. Was the chronovisor real? What happened to it?

The camera’s eye alternates between providing an omniscient view of Béatrice as she goes about her research in various sumptuous, antiquated libraries (the press materials mention the German Society of Philadelphia, the NYC Yale Club, and the George Peabody Library at Johns Hopkins) and allowing us to see the documents and magazines that she peruses from her first-person point of view. This is the place where the film will either succeed or fail to engage the audience, as it effectively captures the feeling of doing research, which is something that I find delightful while understanding that my reaction represents a fairly small minority. Other than a couple of dinners that she attends with her fellow scholars that establish that she is isolated even within the academic world and a single scene in which she requests a long list of material from an unseen librarian, we don’t see her interact with others until she’s fully devoted to the pursuit of the truth about the chronovisor, as she concocts various narratives to spin over the phone with publishers, biographers, and distant relatives of Father Ernetti and his cohort. All the while, the text on screen that lays out the events of his life and research vacillates between factual translations of texts and hyper-edited remixes of the words therein into montages that read like flash poetry.

It’s compelling stuff, if the prospect of doing research into a paranormal device is exciting to you. As such, I would expect this film to land best with a viewer who enjoys variations on mystery narratives and who is already in tune with this kind of “ride along with the investigator” narrative, by which I mean that this is likely to find an audience among (patient) people with an interest in true crime. That may seem ironic, given that I myself am not a proponent of that genre generally, but it’s ultimately rather fitting, given that the chronovisor is real, or at least, it was a real hoax. Pellegrino Ernetti was a real Italian monk, one who really did generate and distribute a wealth of scholarship about Gregorian chants and other early ecclesiastic music, and he really did announce the invention of the chronovisor in the May 1972 issue of Domenica del Corriere (Italian for Sunday Courier). That article, “A Machine Has Been Invented That Photographs the Past,” was the catalyst for writing/directing/editing duo Jack Auen and Kevin Walker to dig into Father Ernetti’s claims, just as we witness Béatrice doing. Although the “evidence” provided for the chronovisor’s functionality was ultimately refuted; a widely distributed, supposed photo of Christ was found to be identical to a souvenir postcard of a Lorenzo Coullaut Valera sculpture in a remote Spanish church, and the alleged recreation of the lost Latin tragedy Thyestes was dismissed by a contemporary academic as betraying that its author had only a rudimentary understanding of the language. Chronovisor takes this real-life counter-evidence as proof of deliberate suppression, and builds a mystery around it.

Of course, you probably surmised from the breakdown in the opening paragraph above, Béatrice does eventually track down the location of the device. By this point in the narrative, we have learned that users of the device not only observed the events of the past but became psychically entangled with them, so we know that Béatrice’s discovery does not bode well for her. We once again bear witness to what she sees through her own perspective, as she engages with the machine and perceives history through a distorted lens that brings the “etch-a-sketch” visuals of the 1984 erotic thriller Blind Date to mind. This is the part of the film that I would expect to alienate the true crime audience, as it will speak more to fans of experimental filmmaking, and once you’ve met enough members of both those groups, you’ll understand that the overlap in the Venn diagram between them is small. That’s a great misfortune, as this is a very rewarding journey for those patient enough to allow the mystery to be doled out to them in this novel and inventive form.

As a visual effort, Chronovisor is gorgeous. It’s shot on 16mm, which gives a lot of text and depth to what we see on the screen, which is wise when many of the shots are almost indistinguishable from a still photo. Béatrice is portrayed not by a trained actor but by an actual academic. Sellier is a faculty member at the London Business School, NYU’s Stern Business School, the Columbia Business School, and a Cartier-Chaired Professor at the Paris School of Advanced Business Studies. That may not seem to be terribly aligned with Béatrice’s area of expertise, but she is currently researching creativity, cognitive biases, and human perception of time, and she carries that academic authority into the role, such as it is. Béatrice is, ultimately, little more than a cypher who decodes the mystery of the chronovisor for the audience to experience vicariously. What little we might surmise about her as a character other than her dedication to study is all interpretive (she wears a wedding ring despite no mention or appearance of a spouse, from which we can speculate a motivation on her part to see a deceased partner, but nothing more). This is not to the film’s detriment, however, any more than its insistence upon the use of antiquated technology is. If one were to forget or overlook the presence of recent car models on the street or a letter being dated (via typewriter!) February 2026, then the film feels like a period piece until the moment that Béatrice picks up her smartphone to start making calls. It makes for a bit of playfulness, which is welcome in a film that most people will complain feels like a group study project.

If I’ve managed to sell you on Chronovisor, the distributor’s website currently includes a “where to watch” drop-down at the bottom of the page so that you can check for screening dates near you.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Trouble with Harry (1955)

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I first saw The Trouble with Harry on a VHS that I bought from a video store on Essen Lane in Baton Rouge that was driven out of business by Blockbuster, around 2008. My roommate at the time hated the film when we watched it together, and I, at the height of my first Alfred Hitchcock phase, defended the film against his criticism. Upon rewatch, however, I must admit that he was right; this is not a good movie. 

That’s a shame, because it opens very promisingly. A young boy named Arnie (Jerry Mathers, aka Beaver Cleaver) is playing with a plastic toy ray gun on an autumnal Vermont hillside when he hears gunshots and drops to the ground. As he continues to explore, he comes upon the dead body of a man dressed in a gray suit. When he runs off to tell his mother, retired (alleged) naval captain Albert Wiles (Edmund Gwenn, of Miracle on 34th Street fame) emerges from the woods, where he has spent the day hunting for rabbits despite the land being posted. Upon discovery of the same body, he believes that he must have killed the man with a stray shot and resolves to bury the corpse to avoid arrest. His attempts to dispose of the evidence are continuously interrupted, however, first by the appearance of local spinster Miss Gravely (Mildren Natwick) who accepts his explanation and condones his course of action before inviting him to tea that afternoon, then by a wandering hobo who steals the dead man’s shoes, followed by the eccentric local doctor, Greenbow, who is so absorbed in his reading that he fails to notice the body even when he trips over it, and finally by Arnie and his mother, Jennifer (Shirley MacLaine), who identifies the body as that of Harry Worp, her estranged husband, before dragging her son off for lemonades.

All are residents of the small town of Highwater, which appears to have only about four other residents in total. Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe) is a gadabout artist with empty pockets, and although he has failed to sell even one of his paintings, local general store owner Mrs. Wiggs (Mildred Dunnock), a widow, finds his work beautiful, if incomprehensible. Her son, Clay (Royal Dano), is the sheriff’s deputy in the town, who supplements that position’s low income by repairing and reselling antique cars. After Sam and Clay have a brief interaction that demonstrates Sam’s lack of respect for law enforcement and Clay’s simple-minded nature, Sam goes to a scenic spot for some charcoal sketches, drawing the dead man’s feet sticking out from behind a bush without realizing what he’s espied. When he goes to inspect the man, he meets Captain Wiles, who tells him the whole story. From there, Harry’s body is buried, un-buried, interred, dug up, buried again, and then retrieved one final time over the course of a single day, as various parties realize that they may be the party actually responsible for his death.

Like Under Capricorn before it, this one barely qualifies as one of Hitch’s “thrillers,” if one categorizes it that way at all. There’s definitely a mystery, but this is a comedy first and foremost, and a screwball one at that, featuring character studies of the eccentric villagers of Highwater, Vermont. It’s odd that it feels so out of place, as the crew was full of longtime Hitchcock collaborators: composer Bernard Herrmann (nine films together), cinematographer Robert Burks (twelve collaborations, including several of the greats), costuming by Edith Head (eleven films together), and screenplay by John Michael Hayes (only four collaborations, but includes Rear Window). This should be running like a well-oiled machine, and several of the pieces do even if the total is less than the sum of its parts, with the standout positive being the visuals. In the special features for North by Northwest, one can find an advertisement for that film that features the director introducing it as if he were a travel agent selling the viewer on a cross-country trip from New York to Chicago to South Dakota; for all that it’s lacking, The Trouble With Harry could almost function perfectly well as an actual advertisement for Vermont during changing of the leaves. The scenery is so gorgeous and so well photographed that, before the film’s actual plot started to chug along, I was already earmarking this as a potential perennial favorite to watch every fall. What Douglas Sirk and Russell Metty did for New England winters in All That Heaven Allows, Hitchcock and Burks are doing for New England autumns in The Trouble with Harry.

Unfortunately, sumptuous scenery does not a great, or even good, film make. Things begin to tank the moment that Sam appears on screen; the wisecracks he rattles off are neither wise nor cracking, and I genuinely am unable to tell if Forsythe is making the acting choice to render Sam Marlow the most annoying character in the entire Hitchcock canon or if he’s simply trying to do the best he can with a bad script and failing. Unlike the audience, the other characters within the film are charmed by him, which is a baffling choice, although it may be chalked up to the fact that he’s the only man in Highwater who isn’t a child, elderly, or dead. He volunteers to guess Miss Gravely’s age and pegs her at fifty despite her only being forty-two, and not a single woman in this town bashes a cider jug over his head for his impertinence. MacLaine plays Jennifer Rogers like a woman blissed out on pills, which one could hardly blame her for if this were the case (her first husband died six weeks before she learned she was pregnant, and her single brother-in-law married her out of a sense of obligation before leaving her alone on their wedding night because of his horoscope), but she seems to just be like that, and it doesn’t make for exciting viewing. The dialogue for everyone is overwritten, which causes the so-called jokes to mostly land with a dull thud, although I did get a chuckle or two every once in a great while. As a result, although this one is only 100 minutes long, it drags along to its conclusion. The only character I really enjoyed was Mrs. Wiggins, whose half-mean jokes about her dead husband and her fascination with Sam’s (hideous, hideous) paintings give her a depth of character that the others struggle to achieve, as they fall back on cliches and eccentricities instead. 

The DVD I got from the library identifies this as part of the Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection Blu-Ray set, with the cover identifying it as an “Alfred Hitchcock Masterpiece.” I regret to inform you that this is a lie, and my college roommate was correct. A film that is only for Hitchcock completists or someone who is looking for a movie to put on, muted, in the background at a harvest festival after-party; don’t trouble yourself with it otherwise.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom (2026)

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In case you haven’t already met him, Shaun is a claymation sheep, one who’s too smart and too independent for his own good. Initially introduced as a side character in Aardman’s flagship Wallace & Gromit shorts, Shaun the Sheep has since gone on to become a name brand of his own, headlining an eponymous stop-motion TV show in which his mischievous schemes cause great episodic trouble for the farmer & dog that are supposed to be keeping him fenced in. The show is subverbal, with characters exclusively communicating in expressive grunts instead of using their words, which levels the intellectual playing field between the humans and farm animals in the cast. It’s a consistently, cozily delightful set-up for some classic silent comedy gags, and it’s proven to be popular enough to inspire a series of feature-film sequels outside the confines of television. 2015’s Shaun the Sheep Movie played as an action-spectacle escalation of the Shaun the Sheep TV show, dragging Shaun and his fellow barnyard animals off the farm and to The Big City in the George Miller tradition. Then, the series temporarily lost its way in its attempt at Atomic Age sci-fi pastiche in 2019’s Farmageddon, which disrupted the calming simplicity of its silent-comedy-farm-life premise by allowing a cutesy, hyperactive space alien to invade the scene, dragging the whole enterprise down to the low-attention-span antics of a Trolls sequel. Thankfully, while shifting genres to horror pastiche in the newest addition, the Shaun the Sheep franchise has retreated to the warmer tone and core character dynamics that separate Aardman Animations from the lesser, computer-animated DreamWorks of the world. Shaun is back causing covertly anthropomorphic mischief, the farmer gets into exponentially absurd mishaps through no fault of his own, and all the other people & animals hanging around have a sweetly silly time watching their hijinks ensue — this time while hanging Halloween decorations to help each other get into the seasonal mood.

The Beast of Mossy Bottom opens with the farmer and his animals waking at dawn with the creaky mobility of zombies rising from their graves. Once they’re alert and going about their separate days, both halves of the farm set about getting their Halloween plans in order; the farmer works on mustering up the courage to invite the local vet to his town’s annual Halloween Hoedown, while Shaun works on growing a secret pumpkin patch that would allow his fellow sheep to carve traditional jack-o-lanterns behind the farmer’s back. After a gruesome mishap massacres Shaun’s precious pumpkins in a blood-orgy of gourd guts, the determined sheep decides to play mad scientist and invent a growth serum that will rapidly develop new full-size pumpkins from seed in a couple days’ time, so they’ll be ready by Halloween. Only, his mad science experiment works too well, and the pumpkins never stop growing. Naturally, the serum is also mistaken for hair-growth gel by the balding farmer, who thinks he has a better shot at landing a Halloween Hoedown date if he can regrow the luscious locks of his youth. So, Shaun lives out the classic sci-fi horror plot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein while the farmer finds himself in more of a Peanut Butter Solution rapid-hair-growth situation, of which it’s unclear whether the homage was at all intentional; it’s more important to know that his new hirsute look gets him mistaken for an errant sasquatch monster by freaked-out townsfolk. Certainly, there are blatant, unmistakable callbacks to more famous horror iconography elsewhere, including onscreen references to Psycho, Thriller, Dracula, Night of the Living Dead, and Friday the 13th. Those references are all likely to go over the heads of the children in the target audience, though, the same way that the first Shaun the Sheep movie got away with referencing Taxi Driver, The Terminator, and Silence of the Lambs without offending overly protective parents. It’s the kind of horror-movie-reference starter pack that can acclimate younger viewers to a lifelong genre fandom without immediately scaring them off with the macabre.

This latest Shaun the Sheep outing is Halloween-season kids’ fluff; it also might be the best movie in the series to date. The closest it gets to actively scaring children is in its climactic introduction of a kaiju-scale jack-o-lantern monster, but even that gag is quickly revealed to be all in good fun. Mostly, the scene-to-scene scares are character based, keeping the farm-life silent comedy of the series as simple as possible. For instance, when the town vet visits the farm, everyone is scared for entirely personal reasons: the farmer because he is scared of women, the animals because they’re scared of vaccinations. When the farmer’s Gromit-like hound is tasked to retrieve his missing, sasquatched owner, he visualizes the farmer’s scent as a ghost made of green vaporous stench. The Halloweeny quality of the picture is mostly due to seasonal decor. Jack-o-lanterns, rubber bats, mad-scientist lab equipment, and mysterious monster footprints decorate every set piece, while it’s continually clear that no one is in danger of suffering anything worse than a pratfall. The only real sour note is the film’s department-store pop music soundtrack, which has been a consistent earsore throughout this series. Only, this time the end credits play over a delightfully corny plot-summarizing rap song in Halloween goof-off tradition, so it’s difficult to get too angered up about it. Is The Beast of Mossy Bottom legitimately just as good as the first Shaun the Sheep movie or is its Spirit Halloween Store set decor just an especially pleasant backdrop for its old-school silent comedy gags? It’s difficult to say for sure, but The Beast of Mossy Bottom is unmistakably more successful as a Shaun the Sheep horror pastiche than Farmageddon was as the Shaun the Sheep take on alien-invasion sci-fi. It manages to naturally integrate the holiday into Shaun’s farm-disrupting antics without distracting from the show’s streamlined sitcom premise, and as a result it might incidentally inspire some future monster-movie fandom in impressionable youngsters along the way.

-Brandon Ledet

Hope (2026)

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Hope is the latest film from The Wailing director Na Hong-jin. Early reactions were fairly mixed, and now having seen the film myself, I can understand why. For much of its run, Hope is an exciting action thriller, with thrilling chase scenes, suspenseful sequences, and quiet moments of humanity. All of this works quite well, especially when we see less of the monster(s) that are running around and causing trouble, but once we do see them, it takes a downhill turn before ending on a truly bizarre note, one that comes after a film that’s a little too long for its own good.

Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) is the police chief of Hope Harbor, a South Korean village that abuts the Demilitarized Zone, the population of which is made up largely of elderly people and supermodel-hot younger folks. He’s summoned by his cousin Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) to the site of a mutilated cow that Sung-ki and his fellow hunters discovered in the middle of the road. The cow’s corpse shows evidence of being attacked by some large animal with razor-sharp claws, which the hunters convince Bum-seok a tiger must have been responsible for despite the unlikelihood that a large cat would have been able to cross the minefields that lie between them and the rest of the continent. Upon returning to town, Bum-seok learns that several other locals have been killed, and his attempts to call in additional manpower are rebuffed due to wildfires that are raging elsewhere, prompting him to ally with a retired colonel named Ahn Nak-yeon (Lee Sang-hee), whom he finds hiding in a culvert after his own encounter with the monster. Out of sight, the monster rages on, as it leaves a trail of broken bodies and buildings in its wake. After Bum-seok accidentally shoots and kills a local who was hiding from the monster, he ends up facing the creature itself and narrowly escapes only because of assistance from his rocket launcher-toting rookie, Im Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon). After a long and costly conflict, the monster is killed, and its body turned over to a local surgeon to perform an autopsy, although she’s not able to cut through the creature’s hide with anything less than a chainsaw. Sung-ae assists with triage in a makeshift hospital, where she learns from one of the locals that he had seen several of the creatures in the woods, indicating that the danger is far from over. Elsewhere, Sung-ki and his hunting buddies are still looking for the tiger that threatens the village when they stumble upon a crashed spaceship in the forest, one that has a control room that features seating and buttons for very, very large crewmembers.

The creatures here are the film’s weakest point, in multiple ways. The alien designs are unique, and it’s a mark in the film’s favor that they’re individually designed with distinctive textures and faces, but that does not necessarily mean that they’re good. Western actors like Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Lost in Space’s Taylor Russell are credited here, and I suppose you can see the resemblance between them and the aliens that they voice (in an alien language) if you look hard enough, but I’m at a loss to understand what they bring to the film other than marquee appeal outside of Korea. The quality with which they are rendered on screen varies wildly from scene to scene, with some sequences looking like they were built for a PS2 game while others are smoother and more convincing. They’re a much more threatening presence when they’re not onscreen, when dismembered bodies are discovered in collapsing buildings or the only evidence of their presence is the far-off sounds of gunfire cut short by screaming. Characters can see over rooftops that cars are being thrown around like toys, and it’s quite effective.

I can concede that it’s likely that we’re meant to find the aliens uncannily human but off-putting considering the revelation that they are intelligent creatures seeking a lost child, who has already been killed by a hillbilly taxidermist named Yang-bae (Eum Moon-suk, a handsome former K-pop star who’s saddled with goofy teeth). The intention is to induce fear and then humanize them; I get that. I just don’t feel that it’s very successful, and it’s not all entirely down to the design. For one thing, this isn’t exactly new ground, given that the “man is the real monster” isn’t a novel monster-movie concept at this point, and the reason it’s so well-worn is because it forces the audience to look inward at their own prejudices. Here, however, the blame for the interspecies conflict falls solely in the lap of a trigger-happy bumpkin. No one is going to look at this man onscreen and see themselves, and it’s a change from the formula that demonstrates why the trope exists in the first place. There’s also a lot of sudden and unexpected lore that ends up being shoehorned in during the film’s final act, belabored exposition that largely comes via the form of not-very-interesting dialogue between Vikander and Fassbender (I mean, um … let me check my notes here … “J’aur” and “Ma’veyyo”). Some of it re-establishes what we’ve already gleaned from the scenes with our human characters, including their search for the missing alien child, but it also drops several extra-terrestrial proper nouns that are a lot to try and take in after two hours of runtime that was mostly a humans-versus-monsters movie. 

This is a film that feels incomplete, and it’s not just the cliffhanger ending that gives it that quality. Hope doesn’t feel like half of a narrative; it feels like a 95% complete monster film and a 35% complete sci-fi epic. That adds up to more than 100%, of course, which is reflected in the film’s whopping 156 minute runtime. That should be more than enough to tell a complete story, but it doesn’t. There are dangling plot threads on the human side that are left to be resolved in a sequel if one is made, most notably the fallout of Bum-seok’s shooting of a non-combatant, but it’s almost all the way there. The alien side of things is just getting started, with the sudden crashing of another, larger spaceship into a mountain on the horizon near the film’s conclusion, and all of the political machinations that are implied by the too-late info dump, which isn’t of interest to me in the slightest. Given that Na is known for releasing films at a glacial pace (the aforementioned The Wailing was his last picture, and it was released in 2016), it’s strange to me that he would create a film so open-ended and demanding of a sequel. Worse, Hope features such great action sequences that it demands to be seen on a big screen, but the ultimate experience is so taxing that it is a film that will work best when you’re at home and can take bathroom breaks, where the horseback battle with a galloping alien creature isn’t going to hit as hard. 

All of this sounds pretty negative, but I’m not trying to talk you out of experiencing the film. Reports that it is the best monster movie in years are no more an exaggeration than critical responses that the film is an overlong, narratively confused beast. Going in with that knowledge, I think you’ll still find plenty to enjoy; just caffeinate beforehand and feel free to run to the restroom when the aliens start talking to one another.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Resident Evil (2026)

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Screaming Mad George passed away this year, and there hasn’t been nearly enough public mourning over that loss for my taste. The 80s gore wizard was so uniquely talented as a visual artist (as especially evident in his collaborations with director Bryan Yuzna) that he would get special title card credits like “surrealistic make-up effects by Screaming Mad George” or “surrealistic visual design by Screaming Mad George,” each well earned by the mutant freak shows that would follow in all-timer gross-outs like Society, The Guyver, and Freaked!. The recent announcement of George’s passing was quietly received by the general movie-loving public, so it was nice to see him finally, properly honored by the surrealistic gore effects of Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil adaptation, even if the homage was unintentional or indirect. The snowbound setting, mutated dogs, and tentacled humanoids of Resident Evil are naturally drawing a lot of comparisons to Rob Bottin’s legendary creature effects for The Thing, but I still felt the presence of George’s screaming-mad spirit in the theater opening weekend. There’s something about the anything-goes nightmare reconfigurations of the human form in Resident Evil‘s creature designs that can’t help but recall Screaming Mad George’s calling-card works in addition to Bottin’s, and I think it’s beautiful that you can now find the fucked-up surrealistic ideas he developed in a major studio adaptation of a video game playing in every multiplex across America. It used to be that you had to go to the video store to rent disreputable schlock like Silent Night Deadly Night 4: Initiation to see what screaming-mad stuff George was cooking up; now it’s being projected on thousands of screens nationwide.

It probably says something about the current moment in mainstream filmmaking that a splatter-gore horror comedy based on a video game feels like a no-brainer sure thing for a major studio to produce, when a few decades ago it would’ve been budgeted as a direct-to-video B-picture. Zach Cregger cashed in his industry clout after the unlikely success of his Oscar-winning whatsit Weapons to make the grossest, gnarliest horror comedy he could manage, timed perfectly to the industry’s current shift away from superhero actioners to memeable horrors and video game IP. There are no discernible themes or metaphors behind most of the imagery in Resident Evil. Instead of playing into the “elevated” trauma-metaphor horror trends of the past decade, it operates on pure video game logic. Weapons favorite Austin Abrams stars as a gig-economy worker who’s tasked to deliver a medical cooler to the zombie shoot-em-up game’s infamous Raccoon City headquarters, where a science lab is desperately awaiting his arrival. Along the way, it becomes clear that Raccoon City is ground zero for some kind of body-transforming virus breakout, making the delivery comically impossible as Abrams is attacked by one undead mutant freak after another. Structurally, it’s an all-in-one-night story built on crisis-to-crisis problem solving, like an absurdly gory redux of After Hours or Miracle Mile. Experientially, it feels like playing a video game as an unskilled novice, with Abrams’s in-over-his-head delivery driver voicing the audience’s overwhelmed, underprepared reactions to each unholy tentacled beast that lunges at him as if he were operating a game console controller instead of a real-world human body. Everything that happens to him is a nightmare, but it’s all for our low-stakes, time-passing entertainment.

It may sound like I’m downplaying Resident Evil‘s artistic merits by characterizing it as a themeless video game playthrough, but that is not my intent. It took Paul W.S. Anderson and Mila Jovovich five Resident Evil adaptations before they realized that this premise plays best as a playthrough spookshow in 2012’s Retribution, whereas Cregger’s vision for the property is immediately, sharply clear-eyed. Video-game storytelling tropes are a major asset to making sure this latest adaptation feels fresh and of-the-moment. In most instances, a CGI-animated throwback to practical gore effects of the Screaming Mad George era would feel disappointingly stale, but Resident Evil is just inventive enough in its constantly mutating creature designs and just modern enough in its video game puzzle-solving narrative to dig itself out of that 80s nostalgia pit. In a time when most directors are afraid to set their horror stories in the current moment because of the intrusive presence of smartphones, Cregger is one of the few who understands how those phones can add to his movie’s scares instead of detracting from them. The cold, isolated beam of the flashlight app on Abrams’s phone as he navigates the haunted house setting of each video-game-level sequence is essential to the movie’s visual palette and, by extension, to its modernity. Likewise, there’s something of-the-moment in the delivery dude’s under-his-breath jokiness as he’s assaulted by one brain-breaking mutant monstrosity after another, since that’s just what it feels like to leave the house to accomplish any basic task in recent years. All public life is an anxiety-inducing horror video game, but you do have to play along (if not only to make a little money), so the only option, really, is to joke to yourself along the way. I won’t claim that Resident Evil is the first or the best movie to modernize that screaming-mad 80s splatterfest sensibility to the current moment; it’s got titles like Deadstream, The Substance, and Cregger’s own Barbarian to compete with for those superlatives. It is super impressive to see that sensibility blown up to this major-studio scale, though, and it’s a hoot to holler at with first-weekend horror crowds instead of quietly watching it alone on a rented VHS tape.

-Brandon Ledet

Welcome Space Brothers (2026)

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It’s been a good year for new documentaries about vintage public access television. The succinctly titled Public Access offered a broad retrospective of public access TV in NYC’s punk & hippie days, the Robin Byrd profile Bang My Box took a deep dive into the pornier waters of those NYC TV shows, and now the UFO cult profile Welcome Space Brothers has jumped coasts to cover the Californian public-access cinema of the Unarius Academy of Science. Well, calling Welcome Space Brothers “new” is somewhat of a stretch. It has spent several years in distribution limbo since its initial festival premieres (the same limbo where Public Access now lingers), but the warm-hearted UFO cult documentary is currently enjoying a city-by-city road tour and recently screened at The Broad. Like this year’s other public access TV docs, it introduces an alluring archive of outsider-art filmmaking from America’s recent weirdo past: a series of indoctrination videos from a Californian cult who believe space aliens are arriving soon to free mankind from the intergalactic trauma echoing from our past lives. It might be the most useful of the trio for audiences who like to do their own exploring, though, since some of the psychotronic “psychodrama” movies it covers are accessible on The Internet Archive instead of being trapped on a private collector’s moldy VHS tapes. You can easily go learn the “science fact” of Unarius’s science fiction UFO-landing movies anytime you’re bored enough to open your heart to another world.

From the outside, Welcome Space Brothers might appear to be a true crime exposé of a shadowy cult organization with a nefarious leader and brainwashed membership, but it’s immediately apparent that Unarius is largely harmless as a collective. It says a lot that the cult itself has been promoting this documentary’s various screening dates through their mailing lists, which I know first-hand as a subscriber who was auto-enrolled after buying a copy of their most notorious production, 1980’s The Arrival, from their archaic website. To the cult, Welcome Space Brothers is a potential recruitment tool, amplifying the reach of their cosmic message far beyond the puny broadcasting capabilities of San Diego-era public access channels, where they started. To most audiences, it reads as a true crime picture without the crime, exposing a secluded community of mysterious cultists as a kind of eccentric art collective. Instead of blowing the doors off Unarius headquarters to reveal abuses of power hidden inside, it mostly just finds a collection of lonely dorks making psychotronic video art together about their favorite subjects: the trauma of their own past lives and the space aliens who are soon to liberate us from those recursive shackles. They’re mostly playing arts & crafts, developing their own unique house style of gawdy drag revue sci-fi kitsch, as beautifully captured in their 70s & 80s heyday of backyard communal filmmaking. As the title suggests, they have nothing to hide. They’re welcoming you in.

Welcome Space Brothers is most useful as a guided tour of Unarius’s pre-existing cinematic output, which can be bewildering to outsiders. It’s not especially substantial as a standalone piece, but it does a great job chronicling the various inner-circle power struggles that shaped Unarius’s golden years, which is essential insight for fully comprehending the communal therapy aspects of the group’s psychotronic theatre. It’s an insular scene with its own designated faces & heels, as lorded over by the cosmic fairy godmother Ruth “Uriel” Norman, whose space-alien drag queen persona was in itself a communal art project. It’s clear when you spend some time with Unarius’s cinematic output that The Arrival is their most fully realized grand-scale art project, reaching delirious heights of video art sci-fi psychedelia the group never achieved before or since; it’s just not clear why until you better understand the behind-the-scenes dynamics of the various weirdos who made these pictures, since everyone but Uriel was stripped of personal attribution in the credits. Welcome Space Brothers explains the real human drama behind the major Unarius titles, which initially earned their ironic so-bad-it’s-good notoriety from local stoners who caught them out of context on late night public-access broadcasts. You could even feel that shift happening in real time at The Broad, where the crowd’s initial titters & jeers at the cult’s absurdity slowly quieted down as we got to know the eccentric characters as individuals, each worthy of intergalactic love & empathy. They’re the only cult I’ve ever trusted with my home address, and I’m excited to be further indoctrinated by their psychodrama videos now that I better understand them as communal diaries rather than as pure aesthetic objects.

-Brandon Ledet

Onslaught (2026)

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How much of a purist are you about Halloween? Do you wait until October 1st to start your annual horror movie binge, or does Spooky Season start in your household the second summer ends? Regardless of your personal timetable, the new Adam Wingard actioner Onslaught has already officially fired the starting pistol for this year’s Halloween season. The genre-ambiguous John Carpenter homage opens with actress Adria Arjona aiming automatic assault rifles at her backyard collection of Halloween-branded jack-o-lanterns, spraying the desert landscape with pumpkin guts and bullet casings. It’s an image that calls into question whether Onslaught will be veering more towards action, horror, horror-action, or action-horror, then declares, “Who cares? Let’s get out there and smash some pumpkins!”

Wingard reteams with screenwriter Simon Barrett to indulge in the same action-horror mixture they played with in previous cult breakouts You’re Next & The Guest, this time applied to a limited-location siege picture set in a rural trailer park. After a nearby top-secret government science lab (headed by Dan Stevens as a Nazi mad scientist) loses track of its collection of undead supersoldier mutants in an experiment gone horribly wrong, a single mother (Arjona) finds herself defending her modest trailer park fiefdom and the poor innocent souls who reside there (most importantly, Eric Warheim as the local deputy drunk and Reginald VelJohnson as the war vet with a heart of tarnished gold). The world of Onslaught is sparse and underpopulated, but the personalities who fill it are cartoonishly big, especially the Nazi mutant killing machines that attack innocent civilians with a chainsaw, meat cleaver, and guns galore. It’s a military thriller shot and edited like a monster movie, with constant stylistic references to Carpenter’s oeuvre in its synths, text, and squibs.

Onslaught makes some vague onscreen gestures towards contemporary political commentary, but they’re more implied than explored. The opening credits play over a chaotic crash course in the past few decades of American military evils, catching the audience up to the exact fascistic moment we’re currently suffering: the one where the government has deployed a heavily armed, morally unscrupulous army of subhuman freaks against its own everyday civilians. The roided-out zombie mutants that escape containment in the first act are mostly hidden from view as shadowy silhouettes, presented as a force of supernatural evil devoid of any discernible humanity. Once we get a good look at them, though, it’s clear they’ve been costumed to recall federal ICE agents, with makeshift face coverings continuing to obscure their personhood and only the pinhole lights of their inhuman eyes left visible to the public. They make for legitimately scary movie monsters, and they directly echo imagery recently broadcast on the national news.

Politically, I don’t think Onslaught has any more to say about ICE’s state-sanctioned public executions than the vintage VHS title Maniac Cop had to say about maniac cops; it just recognizes that these militarized mutant C.H.U.D.s are scary to the average everyday citizen and exploits that fear to spin an entertaining yarn. Emotionally, there isn’t much to latch onto in the film either. Our gun-nut heroine’s hyperviolent efforts to protect her daughter and her tenants get the heart pumping by injecting it with adrenaline, not by pulling at the strings. This is largely a for-its-own-sake stylistic exercise designed to stoke easy nostalgia for action-horror-loving mouthbreathers, pitched at a DTV-tolerant audience but performed by grossly overqualified cast & crew (including brief glimpses of Rebecca Hall as the Nazi scientist’s wife/dominatrix). It is delicious, though, like a piece of Halloween candy unwrapped a month early in overeager giddiness for the holiday.

-Brandon Ledet

The Paradine Case (1947)

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The Paradine Case is often considered a lesser Alfred Hitchcock picture. The director himself practically disowned the completed product, which was heavily interfered with by producer (and screenwriter) David O. Selznick, who had produced Hitch’s first Hollywood film, Rebecca, and had Hitchcock under contract for the next seven years, which ended with the difficult production of this picture. It was also a financial failure, recouping only half of its budget. It’s mostly left out of the conversation of the director’s successes, but The Paradine Case, despite lacking some of the more exciting features of Hitchcock’s work, proves that even when the man was half-assing it (and fighting the execs), he could still make a damn fine feature. 

The film opens in London with the arrest of beautiful widow Maddalena Anna Paradine (Alida Valli, who would later appear as Miss Tanner in Suspiria) on suspicion of poisoning her husband, a wealthy, blind, retired colonel. The family lawyer, Sir Simon (Charles Coburn), enlists defense attorney Tony Keane (Gregory Peck in his second and final Hitchcock collaboration following Spellbound) to represent her in the Crown’s case against her. Sir Simon’s clever daughter Judy (Joan Tetzel) also happens to be best friends with Tony’s wife Gay (Ann Todd), but Simon insists that his selection of Keane has everything to do with providing the best counsel for Mrs. Paradine, although he admits that Keane has a tendency to lean more on playing to jurors’ sympathies than practicing purely legalistic law. With regards to Keane’s weakness, Sir Simon warns him that he won’t be able to pull off his normal emotional appeals if they happen to argue the case before Judge Thomas Horfield (Charles Laughton, who had previously appeared in the director’s Jamaica Inn and would later go on to direct Night of the Hunter). At a dinner at the Hortfields’, the judge reveals himself to be an utter cad, belittling his wife, the Lady Sophie (Ethel Barrymore), taunting Keane about his upcoming defense, and sexually harassing Gay when the others aren’t looking. 

Matters become complicated when Keane and Mrs. Paradine, despite the latter’s professed love for her late husband and the former’s heretofore happy marriage, find themselves drawn to one another romantically while working on her case. As rumors begin to spread, Gay’s concerns about her husband’s potential for infidelity bloom, and although Keane offers to give up the case, she can see that asking him to do so would only make the tension worse and so spurs him on to see the case through to its end and save Mrs. Paradine from conviction. Keane latches onto the idea of convincing the jury that Colonel Paradine took his own life and goes so far as to suggest that suspicion be diverted to the late colonel’s valet, a French-Canadian man named André Latour (Louis Jourdan), for assisting in said suicide, but Mrs. Paradine refuses to allow Keane to involve him. Convinced of his client’s innocence and desperate for something that might exonerate her, Keane goes to the Paradines’ country estate, where he learns that Latour is still in residence, and is somewhat shocked to find that the man’s room is on the same hallway as the separate suites of both the mistress and the late master of the house, rather than residing in the servants’ quarters. He attempts to make contact with Latour by posing as someone simply looking to rent the house, but Latour evades him, only to come to his inn later that night and tell him that Mrs. Paradine cannot be trusted. Keane refuses to believe this, and returns to London, where he goes to the prison to visit Mrs. Paradine before going home and checking in with his wife. 

The film is essentially bifurcated right down the middle between Keane’s playing detective and the trial of Mrs. Paradine, with the audience heading into the trial without a clear idea of whether or not the accused is guilty of killing her husband. Old Hitchcock stalwart Leo G. Carroll appears for his fourth of sixth collaborations with the director as prosecuting counsel Sir Joseph, and although he only appears in the back half, he leaves quite an impression, and the repartee between the somewhat showboaty Keane, his more staid counterpart on the other side of the courtroom, and Lord Horfield, who does end up presiding over the Paradine trial, is quite a lot of fun to watch. As secrets are revealed over the course of several days of trial, the whole thing unravels, and by the end, Keane is a broken man, uncertain about his future. 

I’m not sure why this didn’t connect with contemporary audiences. In his movie guide, Leonard Maltin wrote of the film that it was “talk, talk, talk in complicated, stagy courtroom drama,” and a more contemporary review from The Nation’s James Agee in 1948 called Paradine Case “the wordiest script since the death of [18th Century ‘father of conservatism’] Edmund Burke.” Courtroom dramas were nothing new at this point, so I’m not entirely certain what could be expected otherwise, and the cheeky dialogue between the three verbal combatants in the courtroom is often much more wickedly funny than either of the aforementioned critics gave it credit for. Like Sam Waterston, Gregory Peck is one of those actors who was born to play a lawyer, and this film was made at the height of his marketability as a star; he got his third Best Actor nomination for Gentleman’s Agreement the same year that The Paradine Case was released, although he wouldn’t win until his fifth nom, for To Kill a Mockingbird. He gets to play a wide range here, from the confident barrister who thinks he can win any case, to a man who’s guilty about the emotional affair he’s fallen into, to an infuriated defender of a woman’s besmirched honor, and finally a determined man driven to excessive rhetoric while trying to save a woman from being hanged. He’s doing excellent work, and it’s a shame that this performance has fallen through the cracks as the film’s overall reputation has remained middling. 

Outside of Peck, the film largely revolves around the performances of Todd, Valli, and Tetzel, who are likewise excellent. Todd manages to invest Gay, who is clearly the less exciting character of the two women between whom Keane finds himself torn, with a lot of pathos. Her standout scene is one in which she acknowledges to her husband that she isn’t happy with the way things are going, but that she would rather Mrs. Paradine get the best possible defense, which she knows Keane is best suited to provide, than let her be sentenced to death and ascend to the point of becoming Keane’s lost Lenore. As she says, it will be easier to fight a free woman for her husband than the woman’s unimpeachable ghost. Valli does great work playing both sides of Mrs. Paradine; she freely admits that her life before she met the colonel was one in which she supported herself by latching onto wealthy men, but that when she met Paradine, she decided she could “be his eyes.” She convinces Keane that her love for the late colonel was genuine, but Valli gives Mrs. Paradine just enough ambiguity to make us wonder if she’s more cold and calculating than she appears, especially after Latour delivers his warning to Keane. Overall, however, I was most taken with Joan Tetzel, whose Judy is, despite being very much a supporting character, connected to all of the events and serves the important purpose of explaining the implications of the various court proceedings to Gay, and thus to us. The relationship between Judy and her father, Sir Simon, was quite an endearing one, with several scenes in which it’s apparent that the old man is consternated by his daughter because she’s already as clever and observant as he is and will only become more so with time. She reaches the same conclusions that he does even as he professes something else entirely, and it’s fun to watch him become flustered that his daughter is just like him. Even as he pontificates that her behavior is unladylike, you can tell that he’s having the time of his life having raised a daughter that he can spar with. Ultimately, the duo serves as the stable, warm heart that helps anchor the film while Keane’s wandering affection affects everything else. 

As previously mentioned, this film is lacking some of Hitchcock’s trademark touches. The Paradine Case does not include any major spectacles or showdowns on or around exciting landmarks, unless one counts the trial itself and its location in an exact duplicate of a real courtroom in London’s Old Bailey. The set took nearly three months to complete and cost $80K (approximately a whopping $1.2M adjusted for inflation), and, since so many of the scenes filmed there would be shot at low angles, it included a ceiling. This no doubt was a technical and logistical nightmare, but even in these circumstances, Hitch was trying something new by running up to four cameras in different locations with each take, which (according to a now-dead link on the film’s Wikipedia page) served as trial runs for Rope and Under Capricorn. It’s not always effective. In many scenes in which Keane is speaking to the court, Sir Simon and another man are sitting in front of him, and it appears that they were superimposed into the shot, which is rather distracting. There are some other attempts at tricky camera work that don’t succeed, with the worst composition being the moment when Latour first enters the courtroom and the camera keeps Mrs. Paradine’s in center frame while it rotates to follow Latour’s entire walk around the cell in which she’s seated. As with Sir Simon, this is portrayed through superimposition of one image on the other, capturing a similar effect to a split diopter shot, but messier and uglier. 

That isn’t to say that there isn’t beautiful filmic storytelling or composition throughout. Although they’re as brief as they are pointless, we get several gorgeous shots of the English countryside when Keane visits the Paradine country home. Once he arrives, Latour’s face is kept in shadow for his entire introduction, and after that he is still seen only at a distance or otherwise unclearly for the entire time that Keane is present, fully revealing himself only when he confronts Keane at the latter’s inn. In that scene, the light fixture in the room, which features several dangling crystals like metaphorical swords waiting to fall, is always framed over Keane’s head. Several scenes find characters facing each other from one or the other side of a set of bars, whether they be the literal ones at the prison in which Mrs. Paradine is incarcerated or various room dividers or lattices. It’s not the most exciting camera work, but it rises far above being merely functional. 

One of the advantages that we have over the contemporary audience is that we have the director’s entire oeuvre to dissect and analyze while they did not. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the pushback at the time, in addition to a lack of confidence in the film from the general public as a result of behind-the-scenes squabbling, was that this is another one of Hitchcock’s forays into the psychosexual, pushing the envelope to see what he can get away with. Keane’s fascination with Mrs. Paradine seems to be at least somewhat stoked by her inaccessibility to him; they never have a moment of true privacy, as every meeting they hold to discuss her defense is in full view of a watchful guard. There’s some intersection of withholding and voyeurism there that deserves to be unpacked by someone who’s better versed in either of those prurient interests than I. When Keane goes to the country estate, he makes his way into Mrs. Paradine’s room, with the housekeeper apologizing for the mess, noting that she was in the process of packing the lady of the house’s things. Inside, Keane finds an intricately carved headboard with an inlaid portrait of the woman herself, and the soundtrack throws in a scare chord when the tracking shot that represents his perspective lands on an open case of her undergarments. Keane grows so uncomfortable that he has to move to a position where the portrait can’t see him. Following dinner at the Hortfields’, when the men in attendance emerge from the dining room after the requisite men’s only, cigar-smoking time, Lord Hortfield is so utterly overwhelmed by the sight of Gay’s bare shoulder that he immediately moves in to sit too close to her on the sofa and move her hand to his thigh under the pretense of admiring a piece of her jewelry. It almost feels like a set-up to have him be more antagonistic to Keane in the trial segment that is to come later, but it’s quickly glossed over instead and makes no reappearance as a plot driver in the second half. Maybe that plot thread was continued in the copious lost footage (the rough cut was three hours long, while the only extant version is 114 minutes), but there’s no way we can ever know. What we do know is that this film has a fair amount of grappling with one’s (and others’) raging sexuality that did make it to the final cut, and it might have been alienating to an audience that didn’t have decades of the director’s work to slot this into as a recurring creative fascination. All in all, however, I think a modern audience will find much more to enjoy here than the film’s reputation might imply. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond