Reviews

Star Trek: Section 31 (2025)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

In 2026, the Star Trek franchise will celebrate its sixtieth anniversary, and this upcoming summer will mark thirty years since the thirtieth anniversary marketing push coincided with my being babysat by a family of Trek fans who introduced me to what has become a lifelong obsession. That 1996 anniversary was marked by a huge jump in merchandising of toys, knick-knacks, and fan publications, and since the franchise had two shows airing at the time (Deep Space Nine and Voyager) and that November saw the first solo feature outing of the Next Generation crew in First Contact, it had significant cultural visibility. Ten years later, the fortieth anniversary in 2006 found the franchise dead, as the end of Enterprise in 2005 meant that ‘06 was the first year since 1985 that the franchise hadn’t produced either a film or a season of television. The first show to air post-Enterprise, prequel (at least at first) series Star Trek: Discovery, would miss the fifty-year anniversary by a year and premiere in 2017, where it proved … divisive. Nevertheless, Discovery ushered in a glut of Trek content, having now concluded its fifth and final season, Picard had a three-season run, animated sitcom Lower Decks aired five seasons, and kids’ cartoon Prodigy ran for two seasons. With all of these having concluded, that unwieldy number of series has come to an end. As of the sixtieth anniversary, Strange New Worlds is the only continuing series, with even that having already wrapped its final two (yet to be broadcast) seasons, with a new series, Starfleet Academy, launching in January. 

Both of the then-running series produced episodes for the thirtieth anniversary. DS9 aired “Trials and Tribble-ations,” which used state-of-the-art compositing to insert characters from the series into one of the original show’s most memorable episodes; Voyager less successfully produced “Flashback,” which relayed the untold story of what Sulu was up to during the events of Undiscovered Country. One would think that, having missed doing anything special (other than releasing Beyond to very little fanfare) for the fiftieth anniversary, the franchise’s current helmers might have considered doing something special for the sixtieth, but instead, we got a surprise “feature film” dumped directly onto streaming a year early, sometime after it was first announced as another series in Paramount’s massive streaming library. To explain, I’ll have to build you a timeline because, just like this movie, this review has to dump a lot of exposition on you multiple times in order for any of this to make sense. 

On October 6, 1967, Star Trek airs “Mirror, Mirror,” the first of what will be far too many trips to the so-called “mirror universe,” where the peaceful Federation is replaced by the brutal and totalitarian Terran Empire. In April of 1998, Deep Space Nine airs the first episode of the series to reference “Section 31,” a covert operations unit acting within Starfleet against its declared principles of egalitarianism, democracy, and peace. On the 24th of September 2017, Star Trek: Discovery, a new series starring Sonequa Martin-Green as Michael Burnham, debuts; Burnham is introduced as the first officer of Captain Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), who dies during the two-part feature length premiere. Later in that same season, Discovery takes its own adventure into the mirror universe, where Yeoh returns as the evil version of Georgiou, the emperor, who returns to “our” timeline at the end of this galavant for a redemption arc that was, at best, misguided from its inception. Georgiou is eventually recruited into Section 31 as part of the second season’s story arc, and the news was released that Paramount was developing this as a spin-off to star Yeoh. This was put on hold due to COVID, and then in March of 2023, Yeoh won an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once, meaning that she didn’t really have as much time for all this Star Trek nonsense as she had before. I assumed that the project had simply been cancelled, but it was suddenly re-announced as a one-off non-theatrical feature and hastily dumped into everyone’s home screens, where it managed to be hated by just about everyone. I kept this one in my back pocket for a while because I knew our well of Star Trek annual podcast discussion topics was starting to run a little low. After covering First Contact in 2023, we talked about the documentary Trekkies in 2024 and the even more tenuously Trek-related Please Stand By in 2025; I figured this one would do for our 2026 topic. In those malaise-filled days during the holidays, however, I decided to give this one a pre-screen watch, and I could not in good conscience subject Brandon to it. 

After a pre-credits sequence that establishes Georgiou ascended to the throne after killing her own family before scarring and enslaving her last competitor (and lover) for control of the empire, we’re in the primary narrative dimension of the 23rd Century, where a ragtag group of mercenary specialists has converged at a space station outside of Federation territory to prevent the sale of an omnicidal weapon. Coincidentally, the sale is set to take place in a bar/hotel/space station operated by the fugitive Georgiou. She catches on rather quickly and the leader of this group, Alok (Omari Hardwick) explains the situation and introduces his team: shapeshifter Quasi (Sam Richardson), psionic “honeypot” Melle (Humberly González), exoskeleton-bound Zeph (Robert Kazinsky), and Starfleet liaison Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl), the only character here with a canon precedent. Also on the team is Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok), who appears to be Vulcan but is actually a microscopic life form operating a humanoid mech suit. Georgiou teases them about their ho-hum plan and then introduces a new, more exciting one that predictably goes awry, allowing for her to discover that the weapon is of her design from her previous life as Terran Empress before it’s taken by a masked man. A “now it’s up to these unlikely heroes to save the galaxy” plot ensues. 

To this movie’s credit, it certainly looks expensive. That’s not the same thing as looking good, mind you, but it is worth noting. A hefty chunk of change was clearly invested in the Section 31 series, which is probably why this exists in the first place. This “film” is so clearly cobbled together from the ideas of an unproduced TV series that it’s actually divided into episodes, I mean “transmissions,” with individual titles. Even without them, the episodic narrative beats of cliffhanger and resolution at forty-minute intervals would telegraph this structure. This makes for narrative chaos, since instead of three distinct acts we’re dealing with a film divided into thirds which are then subdivided into their own rhythms of rising and falling action; it’s muddled, to say the least. The writing likewise leaves a great deal to be desired. Screenwriter Craig Sweeny’s background largely lies in mystery procedurals, as he was an executive producer on Elementary, of which he wrote sixteen episodes, and has since gone on to create and serve as exec producer for Watson. Section 31 tries to have some mysteries, but if there’s anyone who didn’t assume that the masked villain was Georgiou’s presumed dead lover/enemy from the moment they appeared on screen, then that person has probably never seen a movie before. The mole—there is, inevitably, a mole—likewise is the person you’d most suspect based on simply having seen any movie of this kind before. 

This might have worked better if there had been some breathing room. If the audience had a week between the installment where we introduce the fact that Fuzz can fly out of his Vulcan mech suit and into other cybernetics to futz with them and the next episode where said mech suit seems to be operating on autopilot while Zeph’s exoskeleton is acting up, then maybe it would have felt like more of an “ah-ha” moment. As it is in the text itself, it feels like more of the script’s tendency to overexplain the new elements that it introduces while also showing the frayed edges where character arcs are whittled down. This is most obvious with Quasi, who was presumably so named because his shapeshifting would have been a metaphor for being unsure of himself in the version of this that went to series. The characterization for this is thin throughout before becoming unusually pivotal to the climax when he has to trust his instincts and push one of two buttons. It’s all very surface level and rote.

Worst of all, however, are the film’s shuddering attempts at comedy. Sam Richardson is primarily a comedic actor, but the lines he’s given to deliver here are all absolute duds. The joke about whether the galaxy-threatening MacGuffin is called “godsend” or “god’s end” must have lasted less than thirty seconds but felt like it went on forever. Fuzz’s constant leaps to anger over perceived microaggressions about his size or species are, as comedy, dead on arrival. This film forced Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh to use the phrase “mecha boom boom” as a reference to sex with a person with cybernetics. Overall, however, the person I felt the most sympathy for throughout was poor Kacey Rohl, a Vancouver-based actress who’s one of those performers who’s always giving a quietly powerful performance, whether as budding sociopath Abigail Hobbs on Hannibal or in (my favorite) her recurring role as tough-as-nails hedge witch Marina on The Magicians. Yeoh is capable of making every stupid line given to her in this work on at least some level, but Rohl is tasked with some lifting that made me embarrassed on her behalf, like when she has to give herself a pep talk about how she’s a science officer and “science is just controlled chaos” in a scene that sees her skedaddling out of frame repeating “chaos, chaos, chaos!” She’s also the one given the most jarring instances of modern slang, like “whatevs” and calling Georgiou a “bad bitch.” Not a single comedic moment lands, which means that if you’re not going to be surprised by any of the film’s twists, you’re not going to find satisfaction in good character arcs or the humor, meaning that there’s nothing of value here to make the investment of the studio’s money or the audience’s time worthwhile, a film truly for no one. 

If we wanted to think of this one as something close to an anniversary special, it’s worth noting that virtually every member of this by-the-numbers ragtag group seems to be functioning as a reference to a previous Star Trek film. As mentioned above, Melle is a Deltan, an alien species introduced in The Motion Picture, and Alok is a genetically augmented human left over from the Eugenics Wars like Khan while the “godsend” device also functions very similarly to the Genesis Device from that film. Fuzz is introduced as a Vulcan who laughs uncharacteristically, as was Sybok in the cold open of Final Frontier, and Quasi is identified as a Chameloid, a species only ever heretofore mentioned in Undiscovered Country. The use of future Enterprise-C captain Rachel Garrett references the launch of the Enterprise-B in Generations, while Zeph’s cybernetic exoskeleton deliberately evokes the image of First Contact’s villainous Borg. These allusions are relatively subtle in comparison to the more overt bits of fanservice that Trek fans are presumably supposed to gawk at, which I won’t bother to get into. The truth of the matter is that Section 31 is not only a bad Star Trek movie, it’s also a bad film in general. Despite the film angling for a continuation in its final moments, I hope we never get another one.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Shakedown (1988)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Midway through the 1988 police-corruption thriller Shakedown, Sam Elliott’s undercover cop hands a revolver to Peter Weller’s disheveled lawyer and asks, “You know how to use one of these?,” and Weller responds in his default, deadeyed deadpan, “Fuckin A, bubba. I’m from New York City.” It’s a throwaway action-movie one liner, but the entire picture is framed within that assumption that anyone who’s tough enough to survive 1980s NYC street life is always a half-second’s notice away from engaging in some good, old-fashioned gun violence. The movie opens with Law & Order veteran Richard Brooks minding his own business smoking crack in Central Park, when he’s approached by an undercover “blue jean cop” who reaches into his jacket for a concealed weapon. By the time the ambulance arrives, both men are bleeding to death on the ground from gunshot wounds, with no witnesses having seen who shot whom first. To determine whether the crack dealer (Brooks) fired his gun in self defense, the public defender assigned to his case (Weller) has to team up with the only blue jean cop he trusts (Eliot) to shoot even more guns at even more cops & drug dealers across the city’s seedy underbelly. They start shootouts in the backroom brothels above 42nd Street porno theaters; they pistol-whip perps during fistfights on Coney Island roller coasters; they chase stolen cop cars through homeless encampments and set fire to the resulting wreckage. Fuckin A, bubba, welcome to New York City.

Shakedown doesn’t have the same lost-and-found mystique as the recently restored Night of the Juggler, but it emerged from the same vintage gutter sludge. Narratively, it’s a by-the-books buddy cop thriller, except one of the cops happens to be a lawyer . . . and maybe also a robot. Peter Weller is as glaringly inhuman as always in the lead role of a long-suffering public defense attorney who’s tempted to leave the street-level grime behind in favor of a cushy yuppie lifestyle at a private firm. He says he’s tired of having to defend the “the scumbags, the jerkoffs, the sex freaks, and the killers” of NYC in court, but anyone who knows him sees right through the facade. When he’s assigned to defend the Central Park dealer who killed an undercover cop in self-defense, you can tell he loves the job far too much to ever walk away. In order to prove his client’s innocence, he has to team up with the only non-corrupt cop left in the city: Sam Elliott, a humble Texan expat. We meet Elliot in a grindhouse cinema, watching an absurd downhill skiing shootout from director James Glickenhaus’s previous feature The Soldier, teasing the insane action spectacle to come once he & Weller hit the streets and turn up the heat. The movie quickly delivers on that promise, scoring its whirlwind tour through pre-Giuliani New York City with the infinite supply of “ghetto blaster” boomboxes that used to decorate every street corner, along with the dealers & sex workers who operated them.

Shakedown is classic NYC sleaze with a stacked cast of always-welcome reprobates. Honeymoon Killers legend Shirley Stoler briefly pops in as a takes-no-shit security guard. Corman veteran Paul Bartel plays a night court judge in a single scene. David “Richie from Sopranos” Proval plays the corrupt cop who mans the evidence desk at the local precinct, stubbornly blocking Weller from the evidence that proves his client’s innocence. It’s a never-ending parade of celebrity cameos for anyone who happens to be the kind of person who would be watching a 1980s corrupt-cop thriller named Shakedown. After recently seeing Weller in Of Unknown Origin & Naked Lunch, Stoler in Frankenhooker, and Bartel in Basquiat & Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, it felt like a kind of season finale for my personal year in trash movie watching. So, I’ve come up with a quick, arbitrary metric to see how it ranks against other vintage New York schlock thrillers I’ve watched this year: determining its production crew overlap with my two most recently watched TV shows. According to the IMDb “Advanced collaboration” search, Shakedown shares 50 collaborators with Law & Order and 27 with The Sopranos. That’s ahead of Night of the Juggler (28 Law & Order, 6 Sopranos) but behind Cop Land (an impressive 75 Law & Order, 73 Sopranos). Of course, that’s more raw data than it is analysis, but all you really need to know about this movie anyway is that it’s aggressively grimy and Glickenhaus blows shit up real good. The rest is just character actors & mise-en-scène.

-Brandon Ledet

Bean (1997)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Cinema is a democratizing artform. While the average family might not be able to afford a trip to see an opera or a ballet in-person, anyone with a library card can get a taste of those highbrow artforms by borrowing Powell & Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann from the library for free. Moviegoers regularly get exposed to great works of literature, far-off gorgeous vistas, and heady academic pursuits just by keeping our eyes on the screen, distracted from the financial inequalities that separate us from enjoying those experiences in real life. For instance, as a small child growing up in Chalmette, Louisiana, there was no chance I was ever going to travel to Paris to see the iconic American painting Whistler’s Mother in person, but thanks to the British culture-clash comedy Bean, I was educated on the piece’s historical importance anyway. Thanks to Bean, I was also exposed at an early age to the refined tastes of dry British wit, as embodied by the titular rubber-faced goon, Mr. Bean.

The basic premise of Bean hinges on Americans’ assumption that because Mr. Bean is British, he is therefore an erudite sophisticate. In reality, he is a working-class dolt who can barely keep his job as an art museum security guard, which mostly entails sitting quietly in a chair. Bean is such a disastrous embarrassment that his employer ships him off to America as the unlikely shepherd for the aforementioned James McNeill Whistler painting, risking major lawsuits & profit loss just to be rid of him for a while. It takes a few days for the Los Angeles clout chasers who are purchasing that famous painting to catch on that Mr. Bean is not the art-history expert Dr. Bean they made up in their heads when they heard he works for a British art museum. By then, he has already destroyed the multi-million-dollar painting through a series of escalating slapstick pratfalls, threatening to take down the life & reputation of an American museum curator with him (played Ghostbusters II‘s Peter MacNicol). And so, Whistler’s Mother was never the same again, in the film or out.

Rowan Atkinson is hilarious as Mr. Bean. That’s just a fact. It’s easy to brush off his style of humor as a haphazard collection of silly face contortions, but I believe there’s a genuine, traditional elegance to his sub-verbal shenanigans. He brought some classic Charlie Chaplin & Harpo Marx silent-comedy clowning to the 1990s video market, whereas American equivalents like Jim Carrey & Robin Williams were more focused on shouting t-shirt worthy catchphrases. When we first meet Bean in the opening scene, he breaks his ceramic mug while running late to work, so he resolves to mix his entire instant coffee concoction in his mouth to not waste time: coffee powder, sugar, cream, and boiling water straight from the kettle — swished around like mouthwash before painfully swallowed. While traveling by plane to America, he manages to explode a barf bag all over his fellow first-class clientele. The movie’s most infamous gag involves losing his wristwatch while stuffing a turkey. When he looks inside to find it, he ends up wearing the entire bird on his head, suffocating to death while stumbling around like a buffoon. Every room he enters is a potential disaster zone. Characters beg him to understand that, “If you do nothing, nothing can go wrong,” but he persists in fucking up everything he touches anyway. Children everywhere love him for it, as do the smartest of adults.

I was only being partially sarcastic in that opening paragraph. Bean really was my first exposure to Whistler’s Mother as a 10-year-old Chalmatian, and most of the movie’s plot revolves around showing that painting respect as one of the most important works of American art, positioning it as the nation’s Mona Lisa. Of course, the comedy’s art museum setting is mostly an excuse to shoehorn Mr. Bean into a quiet, stuffy atmosphere where his goofball theatrics can do the most damage, but it made an impression on me at that age nonetheless. Its jokes about the crass commercialization of fine art in the wide range of Whistler’s Mother merch designed for the LA museum’s gift shops is the kind of low-level satire that kids can feel smart for catching onto. It’s mixed with for-their-own-sake gags like Mr. Bean ironing his tighty-whiteys—which are funny to kids for reasons unknown—but the satire’s there all the same. One slapstick gag involves Bean getting smacked in the head by giant Alexander Calder mobile in the museum’s driveway, which is the perfect meeting point between its high-culture setting and its dumb-as-rocks humor. We’re always going to make idiotic slapstick comedies for kids as long as we’re making movies at all, so we might as well smack the little tikes over the head with some great works of art while we’re at it. It’s a public service, an investment in our future.

-Brandon Ledet

Soul Survivors (2001)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

-Brandon Ledet

Breakdown (1997)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Gaslight, heatstroke, truck hoss.

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

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

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

-Brandon Ledet

Paris, Texas (1984)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

-Brandon Ledet

Rabbit Trap (2025)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

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

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

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

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

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Marty Supreme (2025)

/ swampflix / 9 Comments

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

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

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

-Brandon Ledet

The Headless Woman (2008)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

-Brandon Ledet

The Suspect (1944)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

After finally seeing The Spiral Staircase earlier this year, I’ve been working on watching as many other films from director Robert Siodmak as I can get my hands on, having since also seen and quite enjoyed both The Dark Mirror and Phantom Lady. The calendar year 1944 was a big one for Siodmak releases, as Phantom Lady premiered in late January before being followed by adventure film Cobra Woman in May, Christmas Holiday at (bizarrely) the end of July, and closing out the year with the West Coast premiere of The Suspect on December 22. It’s unclear to me why Universal would release a picture with “Christmas” in the title in the dog days of summer, but The Suspect does fit nicely into the winter holiday season, as the inciting death that occurs in the film happens on Christmas Eve. If you’re looking for a little noir with your eggnog, this one is a breezy, memorable watch that also happens to include the kindly image of Charles Laughton decorating a Christmas tree. 

The film opens with on-screen text announcing the film’s time and place as London in 1902. After a long day as manager of Frazer & Nicholson, a tobacconist’s shop that proudly announces on their windowfront that they are the supplier of tobacco to the British royal family, Philip Marshall (Laughton) returns home to find his wife Cora (Rosalind Ivan) in a tizzy. It seems that Cora has finally gone too far with her continuous torment of their only child, son John (Dean Harens), nagging him to fix the kitchen sink and, when he failed to do so because he was doing overtime work in hopes of a promotion, threw a week’s worth of his calculations into the fire. With John out of the house, Philip announces his intention to move into the boy’s vacated room, telling Cora that there’s no longer a need to keep up their pretense of marital satisfaction now that their captive audience has departed. Cora is incensed, but powerless. 

Thus enters the lovely young Mary Gray (Ella Raines) into Philip’s life. Although he rejects her application to work as a stenographer for Frazer & Nicholson as they are fully staffed, she is nonetheless charmed by his firm-but-gentle remonstrations of the shop’s errand boy, Merridew, for his pilfering of pennies for sweets and to give to the organ grinder’s monkey. When Philip finds her crying on a park bench later, he takes her out for dinner to cheer her up. After a montage of the two of them growing closer over learning to use chopsticks, attending circuses and plays, and generally getting along pleasantly, we learn that he has helped her find a job. Their non-physical love affair must come to an end, however, as Cora refuses to give him a divorce despite their mutual unhappiness, and she extorts him into remaining with her by promising to ruin him socially if he does, and he breaks things off with Mary before going home and putting up a Christmas tree. His hopes that they might be able to find some peace during the holidays even if they have come to hate each other are dashed when Cora announces that she’s discovered Mary’s identity and plans to tell Philip’s employers and friends of his (dubious) infidelity, and that he’ll destroy Mary and leave her penniless and ruined as well. After she heads to bed, we see Philip lift his walking cane from its place beside the entry door, feeling the heft of it in his hands, and we fade to black. 

Ivan’s Cora is admirably loathsome, a truly horrid person with no redeeming qualities. This is made clear in no uncertain terms the moment that she first appears on screen, as her husband can barely make it inside before she starts to hassle him about his work hours and his light-handed treatment of their son, just before we learn about her jeopardization of the boy’s career over a minor household chore. She’s cruel, miserly, and brings nothing but misery to everyone around her, a sociopathically bitter person who manipulates every kind word and attempt at compromise and twists them into something that she can take offense to and escalate through overreaction to perceived slights. It’s frankly a relief when she dies, and virtually everyone is better off for her absence. Her sudden departure from the narrative necessitates the introduction of additional antagonists, who take the form of Scotland Yard Inspector Huxley (Stanley Ridges), who is investigating Cora’s death despite the coroner’s rule that her fatal tumble down the stairs was an accident, and the Marshalls’ slimy neighbor Gilbert (Henry Daniell). Gilbert is established in his first appearances as a perpetually inebriated snob, scion to a formerly wealthy British family of no current notability, who looks down upon his middle class neighbors with great disdain; further, he mistreats his wife from the start and we later even see her bruised from his abuse. It’s based on the activities of the first, Huxley, that the latter, Gilbert, decides to threaten to make up a story about having heard Philip and Cora fighting the night of her death, announcing his attention to blackmail Philip and to go on extorting him for more money in the future. With Philip once again in an untenable position, what can he do? 

With the Hays Code at the front of my mind, I was distracted as the film started to wind down, as The Suspect seemed to fly in the face of its strictures in both spirit and text. According to IMDb, the film was passed by the National Board of Review (certificate #10564, although I have no way of verifying that), but the poster on the film’s Wikipedia page has a “not suitable for general exhibition” notation, so it was definitely reviewed and released. The film was headed for what seemed like a happy ending with scant few minutes left to pull the old Code-accommodating switcheroo that sees our criminal protagonist find himself clapped in irons and sent off to pay for his misdeeds (or dead). John gets that promotion despite his mother’s petulant sabotage and is being sent to the Canadian office, and Philip proposes to Mary (by this time his wife) that they join him, and he makes it all the way onboard their departing ship and even has a final conversation with Huxley that absolves him of all of his (legal) guilt. Of course, it doesn’t absolve him of his (moral) guilt, as he learns that Gilbert’s widow is to be tried for her husband’s apparent murder. Alas, despite being a killer, Philip would never let his kind neighbor go to the gallows for a crime that she didn’t commit, but we still never see him delivered into police custody; he disembarks the ship as Huxley watches, confirming his suspicions. “He’s getting away,” Huxley’s partner says, to which he replies:

“No, he isn’t. He thinks he’s done a pretty big thing. Let’s leave him alone; he’ll come to us when he’s ready. Just keep an eye on him in the meantime.” 

And there we leave Philip, standing in the fog, still a free man. This flew in the face of conventional wisdom, or at least what I thought I know, about the Hays Code. Didn’t it require the death or arrest of the killer, no matter how sympathetic he or she was, in order to be approved for screening? Is that not why James Cagney gets gunned down at the end of The Roaring Twenties? Is that not why Carolyn Jones kills Mickey Rooney at the end of Baby Face Nelson, and why Jean Simmons drives herself and Robert Mitchum over a cliff in Angel Face? Isn’t that why Rebecca’s dramatic reveal is different in Hitchcock’s film from the du Maurier novel? If Hitch couldn’t skirt it when adapting a literary text, then how did Siodmak get away with leaving this film so ambiguous? So I went and re-read the code, for probably the first time in over a decade, and there’s nothing explicit in its guidelines that says a film must show the guilty face consequences. Instead, it states under “Principles of Plot” that “no plot theme should definitively side with evil against good” or “throw the sympathy of the audience with sin, crime, wrong-doing, or evil,” and that “the question of right or wrong [should never be] in doubt or fogged.” 

As such, The Suspect doesn’t break any of the rules by letting Philip walk away to (presumably eventually) turn himself over to Scotland Yard, but it is rather successful in subverting the spirit of the Hays Code. Specifically, when it comes to the treatment of murder, the code states that “technique[s] of murder must be presented in a way that will not inspire imitation” and that criminals must not seem justified. As to the first case, we don’t see Philip kill Cora. In fact, that the act is not depicted is enough to inject reasonable doubt on the part of the audience, and although we get a pretty good idea of how he did it since Huxley acts out, in detail, what he believes Philip did that night, it skirts the “inspire imitation” language by presenting it this way. Regarding whether or not the killing of Cora is justified, that’s left to the determination of the audience, but we’re certainly never treated to a drop of humanity in her that might make us consider the sanctity of her life. Overall, however, the impression that the code gives is one of complete and utter moral absolutism; the law can never be seen as unjust, adultery can never be justified, obscenity of word or gesture is forbidden, the law is good and everything else is evil. The Suspect makes its moral relativism clear in the scene in which we find Gilbert and Philip at odds with one another, as we find ourselves, like Philip, repulsed by the man who “merely” abuses his wife, while we empathize with Philip, who murdered his (probably). It’s not a very flashy picture, but its subtle undermining of blanket moralizing of the time seems almost radical in retrospect. 

I’ve already cited Ivan’s performance as Cora as a standout, but I was also rather taken with Molly Lamont as Gilbert’s unfortunate wife. She brings a lot of warmth and light into a role that could easily be underserved in another feature. Ella Raines, who had been the protagonist of Phantom Lady earlier that year, is lovely here, even if she’s not given much to do other than fawn over Philip; her chemistry with both Laughton and Harens makes up for the relative lack of development. Laughton is himself in quite fine form here, playing a kind, gentle man pushed to the edge and forced to take matters into his own hands. His deftness is shown in the early scene with the errand boy to establish that his interest in cheering up Mary, aside from one slightly leering glance that comes later, is on the up-and-up. By the film’s end, we’re excited for him to start his new life in Canada, far away from all of his bad memories, but his conscience stops him from finding that freedom. It’s poignant, the perfect film to add to your Christmas watchlist if you like your holiday season a little bittersweet. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond