Reviews

Hypochondriac (2022)

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Hypochondriac is a slow-building psychological horror in which a clay potter is haunted by the physical manifestation of his childhood trauma.  Whatever expectations you may have about its tone or intent based off that description and the nonstop flood of self-serious Trauma Horror that’s followed in the years since Hereditary is likely off-base.  To start, the metaphorical Trauma Monster is represented onscreen by a low-rent Halloween-costume wolf, falling somewhere halfway between the Donnie Darko bunny & The Babadook.  Furthermore, the monster wolfs ass.  Hypochondriac is an irreverent, queer, oddly erotic approach to mental breakdown psych-horror.  It never fully tips into horror comedy territory, but it constantly prods the audience to laugh for much-needed tension relief.  More atmospheric horror films about Trauma & Grief would do well learning from its levity.

We meet the adult version of our potter-in-crisis dancing to Jessie J while working a shift at the LA hipster pottery boutique that pays his bills.  He appears relatively happy & well-adjusted considering the violent childhood clashes with his schizophrenic mother that creep up in sporadic flashback.  He’s employed, romantically paired, stable.  That is, until a single phone call from his estranged mother’s cell sends him spiraling – losing his mind, the function of his hands, and every relationship he’s built as an independent adult in his freaked-out moments of dissociation.  The Donnie Darko-inspired Trauma Wolf who appears during these episodes doesn’t physically attack him, exactly, but it scares him enough that he hurts himself.  His unresolved, unsafe relationship with his mentally ill mother (and his own loosening grip on reality) is the real villain of the story, and the wolf mostly show up as its mascot.  When they touch, it’s more often to make out than it is to tear each other apart.

Hypochondriac is more charming than it is thrilling or scary, but it does have plenty of charm.  From its flashes of heartfelt romantic tenderness to its ZAZ-level parody of the pottery wheel scene from Ghost, the movie is a constant surprise in a way that few Trauma Metaphor horror films have been in recent years.  It has its own unique visual language in a way you wouldn’t expect from such a low-budget effort, framing most of its action through the fish-eye lenses and high-angle pans of security cameras but breaking off into kaleidoscopic mirrors in the most intense moments of dissociation.  Director Addison Heimann is brimming with D.I.Y. ambition here, and judging by the “Based on a real breakdown” title card that kicks this off, it’s all coming from such a personal place that it’s easy to root for him.  I can’t say his debut feature is a knockout, but he has my full heart and attention.

-Brandon Ledet

Deadstream (2022)

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Because I’m such a glutton for screenlife horror films, my expectations when approaching each new entry in the genre are pitifully low.  For every genius laptop-POV thriller out there like Unfriended, Host, and Spree, there’s ten times as many dull, uninventive imitators like Searching, Safer at Home, and Untitled Horror Movie.  Screenlife filmmaking is such an easily affordable, attention-grabbing gimmick that the genre has become overcrowded to the point where it’s no more of a novelty than carbon, oxygen, or tap water.  I’m still always thirsty for more found footage chillers about cursed internet broadcasts, though, so I couldn’t resist the unassuming haunted house horror comedy Deadstream when I saw it on the program for this year’s Overlook Film Fest.  I went into the movie expecting more post-Unfriended mediocrity, which is likely why I found it such a constantly surprising delight.  It got huge laughs in a way that transported me back to Overlook’s joyous screenings of One Cut of the Dead the last time the festival was staged in-person in 2019.  It’s easy to roll your eyes at the simplicity & tardiness of its premise in a market overcrowded with so much screenlife #content, but Deadstream is a verified crowdpleaser.

Deadstream essentially does for Blair Witch what Host did for Unfriended: borrowing its basic outline to stage a chaotic assemblage of over-the-top, technically impressive scare gags.  A found-footage horror comedy about an obnoxious social media influencer getting his cosmic comeuppance while livestreaming his overnight tour of a haunted house, it also functions as a kind of internet-era tech update for the vintage media nostalgia of the WNUF Halloween Special.  The influencer in question is a smartass YouTuber with a popular channel named Wrath of Shawn and a sub-Ryan Reynolds sense of humor.  He’s occasionally funny but relentlessly grating, not to mention casually sexist, racist, and classist.  Hot off six months of “cancellation” for an “insensitive” YouTube stunt he’s reluctant to sincerely discuss, he attempts to earn back his audience & sponsors with a night spent in the aforementioned haunted house.  There, he runs afoul the ghost of “Odd Duck Mildred”, a Mormon-raised poet and victim of suicide who violently hijacks his livestream to promote her own poetry.  Even while being supernaturally tortured for his sins against humanity & good taste, Shawn remains brand-conscious in his self-referential catchphrases and shameless audience engagement tactics – a true heel to the end. 

The shitheel YouTuber’s way of delivering frat boy one-liners in a Steve from Blue’s Clues voice is dead-on in its parody of social media celebrity.  He’s so heavily weighed down by his camera equipment & brand-awareness duty to his sponsors that it’s impossible to get him to interact with the world outside his tablet screen with any semblance of sincerity. Thankfully, Mildred is there to slap him around as an undead audience surrogate, throwing exponentially absurd, gross-out scares in his path until the entire house is crawling with spooks & ghouls who’ve joined her cause.  The movie itself never feels like a mess, though, despite its potential to devolve into the found-footage equivalent of Spookies.  It’s very careful to explain the camera angles, editing tech, and audience input that makes its live-feed broadcast plausible, down to Shawn visibly pressing play on his Walkman’s pre-loaded “Shawn Carpenter” soundtrack to build tension.  There’s an ambition in thoroughness & scale here that represents the very best of what the screenlife format can do for filmmakers with little funds but plenty imagination.  Deadstream is an excellent argument that the genre is still thriving even as it’s become more pedestrian.  More importantly, it’s a very funny, effectively scary horror comedy where the worst things happen to the worst kind of person.

-Brandon Ledet

Good Madam (2022)

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Waiting in the lobby for a sparsely attended but vocally appreciative screening of Good Madam at this year’s Overlook Film Fest, I was confronted with a phenomenon that consistently baffles me at festivals: Why do huge crowds always line up for local premieres of big-budget movies that will play in multiplexes nation-wide in a week or two when there’s so much smaller, weirder stuff with no distribution playing on other nearby screens?  The crowds swarming to get a slightly early look at the Scott Derrickson chiller The Black Phone was absurdly disproportionate to my Good Madam crowd, despite the likelihood of the latter film screening at even indie venues like Zeitgeist or The Broad in the next few months being relatively thin.  Is it really all that important to see a new, robustly budgeted movie “first”, before it leaks out to the unwashed masses?

By the end of Good Madam, my bafflement at that impulse did soften a bit.  I can at least relate to the urge to see a new movie with fresh eyes, unclouded by the oncoming storm clouds of Opinions on the Internet.  Specifically, I wish I could have seen Good Madam when it first premiered at TIFF in 2021.  The film is just as emotionally potent & politically relevant nine months later, but since that premiere it’s been met with a spiritual competitor in the 2022 Sundance selection (and Grand Jury Prize winner) Nanny.  Both Good Madam & Nanny happen to revisit Ousmane Sembène’s arthouse classic Black Girl through a supernatural horror lens, so it’s now impossible to consider Good Madam in isolation while that unexpected sister film breathes down its neck.  I’m curious to compare Good Madam to Nanny once they both make their way into the general public, but I also would have loved to experience Good Madam undistracted from the comparison. I would have loved to catch it early at TIFF.

Considered on its own, Good Madam is perfectly chilling & sharply political, pushing past an easy metaphor about a South African home being haunted by apartheid to dig into some surprisingly complex, heartbreaking familial drama.  Our heroine in distress is a single mother mourning the recent loss of the grandmother who raised her and the subsequent loss of her grandmother’s home.  Desperate, she moves in with her birth mother, a lifelong domestic worker who occupies small, undecorated rooms in an extravagant, empty house owned by her white employer.  The creeping dread that torments them in that home is expressed in both physical & metaphorical terms: ghosts of workers & pets who died on-site decades ago; the visual absence of the white, bedridden employer; ominous shots of the woods behind the home; etc.  It all swirls into one heartbreaking tale of how lifelong domestic service work can steal Black laborers away from their real families, a curse that’s often passed down from generation to generation with little hope to break the cycle.

Of course, even as a pair of recent parallel thinkers, Good Madam & Nanny do not exist in a vacuum.  There are plenty recent, vibrant supernatural horror films that take satirical aim at the lingering curse of colonialism & the African diaspora.  Good Madam recalls titles like His House, I Am Not a Witch, and Zombi Child just as much as it resembles Black Girl.  It even has aesthetic ties to the modern American classic Get Out, especially in the way the white employer’s clanging service bell recalls the chilling teacup scrapes of Catherine Keener’s hypnotism technique. The existence of Nanny does not detract from Good Madam’s eerie dark magic in any way. Part of the fun & tradition of genre films is seeing how different titles communicate with & mutate off each other.  I just wish I could have seen the former film without knowing the latter exists, which I suppose isn’t all that different from Ethan Hawke superfans wanting to see The Black Phone before it sparks a proper Discourse.

-Brandon Ledet

Piggy (2022)

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I’ve been working up the courage to watch Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl for two decades now, building its power in my mind as the kind of post-Haneke heartcrusher that’s specifically designed to ruin my day, and possibly my entire life.  The high-style, low-budget thriller Piggy is as close as I’ve gotten to taking that icy Breillat plunge to date, as it processes a lot of the same squirmy coming-of-age discomforts through more recognizable, digestible genre tropes.  Piggy also has a dark, winking sense of humor to it that keeps the mood oddly light as it stares down the ugliest truths of an outcast youth.  Since I haven’t yet seen Fat Girl and not enough of the general public has seen The Reflecting Skin for that comparison to be meaningful, let’s go ahead and call Piggy an update of Welcome to the Dollhouse for the Instagram era.  It’s the kind of button-pushing indie that’s made entirely of pre-existing genre building blocks, so it’s easy to discuss entirely through its similarities to earlier titles, but it still feels freshly upsetting & perversely fun in the moment.

“Piggy” is, of course, a term of disendearment lobbed at our teenage anti-heroine by her thinner, more popular bullies.  While her peers pose pretty for a nonstop flood of Instagram hearts, Sara cowers behind the counter of her family’s butcher shop, desperately hoping to coast her way through puberty unnoticed.  Her bullies are relentless, though, whether they’re the teen girls who oink at her from the side of the public pool or her overbearing mother who berates her for letting candy stain her teeth & expand her belly.  That’s why she’s in no particular rush to rat out her neighborhood serial killer, who shows parasocial sympathy for Sara’s plight by abducting & torturing all of her harshest critics.  Every second Sara withholds the killer’s identity & location from local cops, it becomes increasingly unlikely her nemeses will be recovered all in one piece.  It’s a trade-off she’s willing to make, though, at least of a while.  She’s finally found the space to develop as an independent young adult on the other side of the butcher counter without her bullies suffocating her – using her newfound freedom to experiment with teenage thrills like masturbation, marijuana, and lies.  Besides, she’s developed an incredibly inappropriate crush on her adult serial killer “friend,” so there’s plenty incentive to just sit back & see how it all plays out.

-Brandon Ledet

There’s a satisfying, upsetting progression to how Sara’s violently accelerated maturation is matched by director Carlota Pereda’s visual aesthetic.  There’s a soft, pink innocence & nostalgia to the film’s earliest scenes that feels totally at home in teen girls’ Instagram feeds & bedroom decor.  By the final stretch, Sara is submerged in the dingy dungeon greys of the torture porn 2000s, losing her childhood innocence to her own newfound selfishness.  It’s a worthwhile journey, as she emerges from the other end of that blood-drenched tunnel as a much more confident, fully formed person.  Piggy is more of a character study than a proper thriller in that way; everything is in service of tracking Sara’s emotional development.  And since it recalls so many coming-of-age horror stories that came before it, all it can really accomplish is to add Sara’s name to the list of all-time great outsiders who’ve already Gone Through It onscreen: Dawn Wiener, Maya Ishii Peters, Anna Kone, Dawn Davenport, Juliet Hulme, etc.  I have no clue where Anaïs Pingot of Fat Girl infamy resides on that prestigious list, but I hope to one day have the courage to find out.

Flux Gourmet (2022)

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David Cronenberg isn’t the only auteur fetishist who’s recently revisited his early work to construct a new fantasy world overrun by grotesque performance art.  I didn’t have time to catch Crimes of the Future opening weekend because I spent those four days submerged in the lower-budget, lower-profile offerings of The Overlook Film Festival at Canal Place.  From the vantage point of that Overlook microcosm, the premise & circumstances of Peter Strickland’s Flux Gourmet appeared eerily in sync with what I’d been reading about the new Cronenberg.  Strickland obviously doesn’t have as deep nor as prestigious of a catalog as Cronenberg’s (yet!), but there’s still a clear, circular career arc to his latest bedchamber dispatch.  Flux Gourmet feels like Strickland revising the giallo-tinged Berberian Sound Studio to bring it up to speed with the more free-flowing, one-of-a-kind absurdism he’s achieved in the decade since.  The result is not quite as silly as In Fabric nor as sensual as The Duke of Burgundy, but it hits a nice sweet spot in-between, just as Crimes of the Future reportedly lands midway between the sublime body-horror provocations that made Cronenberg famous and his late-career philosophic cold showers.

Strickland’s preposterous performance art fantasy world is enclosed in an artists’ colony that patronizes “culinary collectives” & “sonic caterers.”  Its current artists in residence are an avant-garde noise band that mic & distort routine, mundane cooking processes for a rapturous audience of pretentious art snobs.  Their work recontextualizes the sounds of food prep as both a difficult-listening version of music and as a low-key form of witchcraft, recalling the fuzzy borders between foley work, madness, and divine transcendence in Berberian Sound Studio.  Despite their inscrutability as artists, they suffer every dipshit rockstar cliché you’d expect from broader, more accessible comedies like Airheads, This is Spinal Tap, and That Thing You Do. The film essentially gives the witchy performance art collective of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria the VH1 Behind the Music treatment, with petty squabbles over what to name the band, how much creative input the frontwoman allows the rest of the “collective,” and what they’re going to eat on tour overpowering the more supernatural goings on at the art institute. 

If Strickland’s kinky, insular phantasmagoria has anything to say about the real world outside its walls, it’s in the way it satirizes the creative process of all commercial art, no matter how fringe or intellectual.  Every character at the culinary art colony has a direct equivalent in the production of music, movies, and fine art.  Gwendoline Christie funds the collective’s work, limiting their creative freedom with producer meddling & studio boardroom notes just to flex her authority.  Longtime Strickland muse Fatma Mohamed plays the hothead bandleader, enraged by every one of her collaborators’ minor creative suggestions, especially Christie’s.  The list goes on from there: Asa Butterfield as a go-with-the-flow bandmate who tiptoes around his hot-tempered bosses; In Fabric’s Richard Bremmer as an insufferable academic who intellectualizes everything the band accomplishes without contributing anything to the project; a faceless audience who shows their appreciation for the band’s performances in writhing backstage orgies; etc.   My personal favorite is, of course, Makis Papadimitriou as a quietly suffering journalist who attempts to remain objective & separate from the work but gets sucked into the absurd drama of the band’s creative process anyway.  Not only is Strickland more appreciative of the journalist’s significance in the artistic ecosystem than most art-world satires normally are, but he also uses the writer as a constant fart-joke delivery system in a way that tempers the film’s potential for pretension.

I don’t know that Flux Gourmet’s art-world parody has as much to say about the creative process as The Duke of Burgundy has to say about romantic power dynamics or In Fabric has to say about fetishistic obsession.  I’m also at the point with Strickland that I don’t need him to prove his greatness with profound statements or unique observations about the world outside his head.  The nail-salon talons & over-the-top Euro fashions of his visual aesthetic remain a constant delight, as does his naughty schoolboy sense of humor.  I wouldn’t recommend Flux Gourmet as Baby’s First Strickland, just as I imagine Crimes of the Future wouldn’t be as valuable of a Cronenberg gateway as bona fide classics like Videodrome, Dead Ringers, Crash, and eXistenZ.  I guess if there’s any way Strickland has the one-up in that comparison, it’s that there’s a lot less homework you’d have to catch up with to understand his whole deal, so Flux Gourmet is an easily digestible delicacy for those with only a slightly advanced palate.

-Brandon Ledet

Swallowed (2022)

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One of my all-time favorite festival experiences was watching the body-horror romance Are We Not Cats? on the Audubon Aquarium IMAX screen during the 2016 NOFF.  Generally, Overlook Film Fest offers way more gruesome, upsetting gore imagery to New Orleans audiences than NOFF does, but there was something about seeing that particular film’s D.I.Y. surgery gore on a 50-foot screen that really made me squirm.  I was thinking a lot about that absurdly ginormous, hideous spectacle while watching the queer body horror Swallowed at this year’s Overlook.  Swallowed‘s tender, grotesque gore may have been scaled down to the more reasonably sized screens of Pyrtania at Canal Place, but its Cronenbergian discomforts recalled that exact Are We Not Cats? IMAX screening in a way that made me outright nostalgic.  It was especially nice to squirm in unison with a freaked-out, in-person crowd, which is exactly what Overlook offers New Orleans horror nerds every summer it returns here – even if they don’t have access to the pomp & scale of an IMAX venue.

Considering how few people showed up to that one-of-a-kind screening of Are We Not Cats?, Swallowed‘s appeal for most gore-hungry audiences is obviously going to have nothing to do with my niche film-fest nostalgia.  Instead, Swallowed stands out as a rare queer horror story that has doesn’t rely on coming-out anxiety or small-town gaybashing for its sources of terror.  It’s even rarer as a movie where fisting (almost) saves the day.  Swallowed is a small-scale story of a drug deal gone horrifically wrong.  Two friends looking for easy money (on the eve of one moving to L.A. to pursue a porn career) take an ill-advised job smuggling narcotics across the Canadian border for cruel, armed strangers.  As the title suggests, they’re forced to ingest the smuggled goods instead of hiding them in their truck, learning far too late that the package in question is no ordinary street drug.  By the time they they’re informed they’ve swallowed Cronenbergian drug-bugs on the verge of “hatching” inside their crisply-abbed gym bodies, the movie makes an abrupt stop.  The back half is less focused on thrilling plot twists than it is on prolonged surgical & scatological bug extraction.  There are some gnarly practical gore gags that keep the tension high throughout, and the always-welcome Jena Malone & Mark Patton put in sharp supporting performances as the no-nonsense dealers who desperately want their bugs back.  It’s all super fucked up & super gay, which is always a winning combo.

Have enough people seen Are We Not Cats? to meaningfully recommend Swallowed as its queer sister film?  Unlikely.  It’s the connection that’s most meaningful to me, though, as this is the exact kind of niche, low-budget genre film I can only watch alone on streaming unless festivals like Overlook bring it to the city.  Its vision of authentic, lived-in gay culture is not exactly inviting to outsiders.  It’s speaking directly to that demographic, zeroing in on gay-specific fears of truck stop cruising gone haywire, overdosing on off-brand boner pills and, most horrific of all, communal tubs of Vaseline.  As grimy as that public-bathroom-hookup corner of gay culture can feel, there’s a real tenderness & camaraderie shared between its two central players (Cooper Koch as the soon-to-be porn star & Jose Colon as his life-long, lovelorn BFF).  The only reason it doesn’t fully tip into the body horror romance territory of Are We Not Cats? is that our heroes in distress are afraid of souring their friendship.  It would be outright sweet if it weren’t for all the psychedelic bug drugs eating them alive from the inside.  I’d recommend anyone whose ears perk up at the phrase “queer body horror” to check Swallowed out as soon as it’s accessible.  In the meantime, please pour one out for the city’s only legitimate IMAX theater, formerly located at the Aquarium.  It’s been decommissioned & dismantled, never to screen 50-foot gore gags again.

-Brandon Ledet

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon (2022)

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It’s usually a meaningless cliché when people say they were born in the wrong era, but I would make an exception if I heard it from Ana Lily Amirpour.  Since her 2014 debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Amirpour has been making the exact kind of high-style, low-effort hangout indies that earned easy festival buzz in the slacker culture days of the 1990s.  Two films later, it’s getting frustrating to see her drag that proud burnout energy into the 2020s.  It makes sense that her debut was a small-scale genre picture that coasted on laidback cool, but her resources have expanded greatly since then and she’s still making low-effort slacker films with attention-grabbing premises and a snotty “Fuck you” attitude.  The only difference is she’s now armed with celebrity stunt-casting & more extravagant locales.  Her post-apocalyptic cannibal whatsit The Bad Batch remains the most frustrating waste of her Flashy Debut clout to date, but its follow-up telekinetic fairy tale Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon is only a half-step up from that disappointment.  Like her previous two films, Mona Lisa leans back & hangs out in a way that makes you wonder why Amirpour is making high-concept genre films when she’d clearly have more fun making no-concept, character-driven comedies.  The marquee promises a bubblegum pop version of Scanners or The Fury, but Amirpour is more interested in making a neon-lit Clerks.

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon isn’t bad; it’s just a little underwhelming.  Imagine if Harmony Korine couldn’t afford to be choosy with his projects and settled for making a straight-to-Shudder Gen-Z update of Carrie for an easy paycheck.  The titular Mona Lisa is an escaped mental patient with violent impulses & telekinetic powers.  She’s effectively a blank slate, having grown up in a padded cell with nothing but a straitjacket & a prison cot to keep her occupied.  Like the DaVinci muse, that internal void invites strangers to project meaning & intent onto her, which says more about their worldview than it does about her own personality (especially the freaked-out cops who want to lock her back up and the scheming hustlers who exploit her powers for cash).  This is Horror of the Hassled, as all Mona Lisa really wants is to hang out, eat junk food, and watch trash TV.  Her potential for violent mayhem is only unleashed when people get in the way of those totally reasonable goals.  Instead of seeking revenge in a cathartic Carrie-on-prom-night showdown with all the jerks who hassle her, she seeks moments of calm at corner stores, laundromats, and TV-lit living room couches.  She’s an out-of-time 90s slacker hanging out in a city of desperate, scheming dirtbags who’d all be better off if they just keep their distance and let her vibe.

Although not a great film, Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon was a great programming choice for opening this year’s Overlook Film Festival.  It’s steeped in plenty N’awlins Y’all flavor to acclimate tourists who traveled here for the fest – starting in the swamps outside the city during Mona Lisa’s initial escape before trudging its way down to Bourbon Street strip clubs, frog ribbits bleeding into grimy DJ beats.  It’s also commendable for offering substantial character-actor roles to Kate Hudson (as a Quarter-smart stripper) and Craig Robinson (as the only kind NOPD officer in the history of the department).  Surely there’s an audience out there hungering for Amirpour’s high-concept slacker thrillers, real freaks who’d love to see Joel Potrykus’s own no-effort comedies dressed up in dingy pop soundtracks & Rainbow Store fast fashions.  I most appreciated Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon as a collection of oddball characters in no rush to do anything in particular.  I, too, would love to live a junk-food life unhassled, downing cases of cheap bear in parking lots with metalhead burnouts and chomping my way through well-done hamburgers at the Claiborne Frostop.  I just wish Amirpour would move away from the vampires, cannibals, and telekinetic witches of her film’s flashy premises, since she doesn’t seem motivated to do anything exciting with those conceits.

-Brandon Ledet

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2022)

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One of the stranger stories out of this year’s Cannes Film Festival was the selection of its opener.  Opening Cannes isn’t necessarily a marker of prestige, since the honor has been bestowed upon such disposable titles as The Da Vinci Code, Cafe Society, The Dead Don’t Die, and Grace of Monaco in the past.  Still, I was amused to hear that this year’s opener was a robustly budgeted French remake of the low-fi Japanese crowd-pleaser One Cut of the Dead.  Final Cut was directed by Michel Hazanavicius, who’s been coasting for a full decade on the notoriety of winning a Best Director Oscar for The Artist.  Otherwise, it appears to be the exact kind of anonymous mainstream comedy that never gets exported outside France, so that Americans assume most of the country’s cinematic output is its small crop of high-brown art films.  Attempting to recapture the magic of One Cut of the Dead is a fool’s mission in any context, but there’s something especially absurd about an establishment filmmaker remaking it with real studio money and then getting the red-carpet treatment at the world’s most distinguished film festival.

One of the reasons it’s foolish for Hazanavicius to attempt replicating One Cut of the Dead‘s niche, low-budget magic is that One Cut‘s director Shinichiro Ueda has already championed his chosen successor.  Ueda has proudly boosted the profile of the low-budget sci-fi one-shotter Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes as One Cut of the Dead‘s adorable kid sister, lifting it out of the festival circuit into international distribution.  If it weren’t for that profile boost, the comparison wouldn’t do Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes many favors.  While One Cut of the Dead transcends its low-budget zombie comedy medium to become a film about the joys of all low-budget filmmaking, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes has a lot less to say about the world outside its single-location microcosm.  It’s an impressive feat in circular-logic thought exercises and microbudget filmmaking, though, and it’s easy to see why Ueda was won over by its surface-level charms as One Cut‘s spiritual successor.  Selling the rights for the Final Cut remake was smart, but it’s nice to see Ueda’s still siding with D.I.Y. art projects on the other side of that paycheck.

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes splits its 70min runtime between two rooms in the same cramped building: a ground-level cafe that’s closing for the evening and one of its baristas’ upstairs apartment.  In a self-creating paradox, the barista discovers that his computer monitor can see two minutes into the future through a lagging stream of the cafe’s security camera.  His future-self informs present-him of this two-minute loop, an anomaly that’s quickly discovered by a growing list of intervening friends who push past his fear & bafflement to test the limits of what the loop can do.  It turns out that two-minute future vision is essentially useless, and the more our bumbling time criminals stretch the boundaries of that frustratingly brief timeframe the more they trap themselves in a self-perpetuating loop of small-scale fate.  There’s some handwringing about the implications of contradicting the (very near) future they’ve already seen play out on the monitors, but for the most part the fun in the film is in watching them fail to expand the implications of this strange, isolated event into something bigger & more significant.

Of course, the only reason Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes has earned any comparisons to One Cut of the Dead is that both films are structured as one-long-takes, testing the limitations of that gimmick the same way Beyond‘s knuckleheads test the limitations of the two-minute time loop.  In One Cut, the one-shot gimmick is a wonderfully concise summation of all the various restrictions of low-budget film production.  Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is a lot less concerned about the authenticity of the gimmick, sloppily “hiding” its cuts in closeups on doors, clothes, and shadows.  It’s a smart way to draw attention as a D.I.Y. production filmed on smartphones, but I got the sense that maintaining the real-time progression of the time-loop experiments was more important than maintaining the illusion of a one-shot production.  In most one-shotters, the intended effect is to prompt the audience to ask, “How did they do that?” in stunned wonder.  By contrast, these two films make it blatantly clear how they accomplished the feat. One Cut proudly highlights its production mistakes as part of its inherent charm, and Beyond doesn’t waste much energy at all on hiding the creases between its shots.  Its time-loop conundrums are its main focus, so that its greatest strengths are in its writing instead of its framing.

In summation, One Cut of the Dead is a modern cult favorite, Beyond the Infinite Minutes is its adorable faint echo, and Final Cut is its flimsy plastic substitute.  It’s hilarious to see which one got the red-carpet rollout at Cannes, even if there is plenty precedent for that exact kind of cornball programming at the fest.

-Brandon Ledet

Pleasure (2022)

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I cannot enjoy professional pornography with the sound on.  The theatrical moans, shrieks, and dirty talk of pro-level pornography are more than a turn-off; they’re painfully grating.  Is that too personal of a confession for an amateur movie review?  Either way, it’s the exact kind of uncomfortable intimacy you endure while watching the porn industry drama Pleasure in public.  The opening credits play over harsh layers of pro-porno moans & dialogue, crewmembers’ names populating on a black screen in plain text.  It sent a familiar shiver up my spine that I could not shake at the theater, since my usual exit strategy is muting my laptop.  Pleasure is all about staring down the least comfortable aspects of professional porn production, from the grotesque theatricality of the finished product to the on-set exploitations consumers willfully overlook in order to enjoy it.  It’s not the best drama I’ve seen on the big screen this year, but it is the most effectively & universally unsettling.

Sofia Kappel stars as the aspiring pornstar Bella Cherry, who emigrates from Sweden to Los Angeles in search of instant, XXX-rated fame.  She succeeds in her mission, quickly graduating from OnlyFans solo shoots in an overpopulated camgirl hypehouse to decadent pro shoots in gaudy, overlit McMansions.  Her ascent is neither fun nor easy.  Cherry experiences exactly one wholly positive shoot in her short career.  Most of her workdays are plagued by boundary-crossing opportunists who weaponize the language of consent & girl-power politics to pressure her into sex acts she is not comfortable with.  She is alienated from fellow performers at every turn, finding little comradery among peers.  Worse yet, her horrific on-set experiences serve as impromptu training courses that guide her own professional behavior, so that she quickly ends up violating the boundaries of other cloutless actresses in the exact same way.  It’s not so much a rise-to-power story as it is a story of moral corruption & physical violation.

Pleasure works best as a sensationalist version of Kitty Green’s The Assistant, or maybe Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls: a scathing look at the abuses, exploitation, and monotonies of all daily labor, told through the microcosm of a niche, especially charged work environment.  Its only setback is that it’s a little too eager to get its political points across in very clear moral & physical violations of its workers’ boundaries, often at the expense of fleshing out their internal lives.  Director Ninja Thyberg describes herself as a former anti-porn activist who’s warmed up to the feminist potential of the medium.  She approaches the L.A. porn industry with harsh the skepticism of an academic outsider.  Even if individual production companies within that industry come out looking okay (mostly just Kink.com), there’s no way to view her ultimate assessment of the industry as positive, or even neutral.  It’s specifically about structural & professional abuse of entry-level workers. Thyberg never feels like she’s condemning pornography as an artform or as a personal choice of profession, though, so her criticisms tend to target the big-picture exploitation of pro-porno’s capitalist sensibilities, which are directly relatable to pretty much any modern work environment, no matter how clothed.  It’s not anti-porn so much as it’s anti-capitalism, which is likely the journey Thyberg’s activism has taken in her personal ideology.

If Pleasure were a character study of Bella Cherry as an exceptional example within her trade, it might have been a more emotionally devastating drama.  Instead, Cherry is more of a symbol than an individual, so the movie is more about her environment than it is about her.  Still, Thyberg makes Cherry’s journey incredibly tense from scene to scene.  She effectively reverses the default POV of POV porn, showing the grotesque close-up details a typical actress would observe in her daily toils – mostly men’s feet, chins, and balls as Cherry shifts through various choreographed positions.  Choral chanting worthy of The Omen overwhelms the soundtrack throughout Cherry’s monstrous, monotonous workdays.  The most uncomfortable details are the weaponized catchphrases of consent, though, as men say things like “No pressure” and “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do” while clearly communicating the exact opposite message.  There were some early giggles in my audience at the movie’s unrelenting vulgarity (especially during the opening credits), but those sounds gradually drained from the room as Cherry wandered deeper into the pro-porno labyrinth.  We all left the theater in a chilled silence, which I suppose means Thyberg’s mission was accomplished just as efficiently as Cherry’s.

-Brandon Ledet

Men (2022)

/ swampflix / 17 Comments

There’s been a lot of recent pushback against the suggestion that A24 has an overriding “house style.”  Younger film nerds who were raised on a cinematic diet of Disney-owned studios like Marvel, Pixar, and Lucasfilm can go a little overboard transferring their fandom of boardroom-directed brands to auteur-driven distributors like A24 & Neon, but I don’t know that they’re entirely wrong to do so.  Some of A24’s unified “house style” is an illusion generated by their brand-conscious marketing & distribution strategies (which are truly admirable in the way they lure broad audiences into seeing niche-interest art films).  I can’t deny that their in-house productions often share common tones & tropes, though, even if that’s only a result of selecting which projects to fund, as opposed to dictating what directors deliver in the final edit.  For instance, I’m confident I would’ve guessed what studio produced the “A24 Horror” film Men before I would’ve guessed which frequent A24 employee directed it.  Alex Garland is usually reliable for a chilly sci-fi creepout (Ex Machina, Annihilation, Devs), not an atmospheric folk horror with a blatant 1:1 metaphor behind all its grotesque imagery.  That’s glaringly recognizable A24 territory, even if general praise for the studio as a corporate auteur can be a little silly.

With Men, Alex Garland updates The Wicker Man for the post-Get Out era and ends up making his version of mother! in the process.  Jessie Buckley stars as the Big City outsider intruding on the strange, insular customs of rural Brits, tethered to her London homebase only through daily Facetime calls with her sister (who provides Lil Rel-style running commentary and eventual rescue).  The small-village cult she stumbles into worships at the altar of Misogyny.  The villagers are so unified in their hatred of women that they all share the same actor’s CG-applied face (Rory Kinnear’s), making the title Men shorthand for Yes, All Men.  This is a purely allegorical exercise.  Buckley’s terrorized heroine might be from a real-world London, but the countryside village where she vacations is outright Biblical in its heavy-handed visual metaphors, complete with a first-act reference to forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.  All of the men (or, more accurately, all of the man) in her vicinity blame her for their own moral & behavioral shortcomings, violently punishing her for their own sins.  Each variation of Kinnear represents a different misogynist archetype, from schoolboy mouthbreather to clueless microagressor to repressed incel to base, hateful animal.  In their sickly presence Buckley realizes that all men are the same, all men are creeps, and their pathetic, self-hating abuses against her are not actually her fault, no matter how deftly they’re excused (which is where the allegory echoes beyond the borders of the village to resonate in her real-world social life).

It’s difficult to parse out which aspects of Men are personal to Garland as an auteur vs. which aspects result from the expectations & standards of A24 Horror as a brand.  It’s a useless distinction in a lot of ways, since I appreciate both the director and the studio for consistently bringing provocative genre films to the American multiplex.  The reason I mention it at all is because Men is near impossible to discuss as a standalone work.  Most of the conversation around it focuses more on broad genre trends than it does on this movie in particular, guided by individual audiences’ personal appetite for yet another atmospheric, allegorical horror with blatant social messaging.  Regardless of the way Men participates in the macro trends of A24 productions or modern horror at large, I do think it’s clear that Garland is exploring something personal here.  It’s an anguished, pathetic expression of guilt about the misogyny lurking in all men—even the “nice” ones—that gets stunningly cathartic in its go-for-broke climax, releasing all of the film’s slow-winding tension in a slimy, disjointed fit of body horror.  If you want, you can continue to track the central metaphor in that grotesque display through the ways one form of misogyny (to borrow a term from Genesis) begets another.  It’s also just a broadcast of ugly, difficult-to-stomach impulses direct from Garland’s psyche, which is the exact kind of personal art I’m always looking for at the movies.  I find it strange that Garland stepped outside his home realm of sci-fi to exorcise these particular demons, but I hope enough people appreciate the effort that he feels it was worth the risk.  It’s a great, squirmy little horror film no matter where it fits in the larger cultural landscape or the director’s own catalog.

-Brandon Ledet