Time and Water (2026)

June 19, 2026June 19, 2026 / swampflix / Leave a comment

Sara Dosa’s latest nature doc Time and Water is the frosty yin to her previous doc’s fiery yang. All of the grand romance & scale of Dosa’s 2022 documentary Fire of Love is on full display in this year’s Sundance-premiered follow up, except the temperature has plummeted to new, icy depths. In Fire of Love, Dosa profiled the love life and scientific research of famed volcanologists Katia and Maurice Kraft, all the way up to their tragic end during an especially violent volcanic eruption. In Time and Water, she instead profiles the life and work of glacier observer Andri Snær Magnason, which allows her to capture the same scale of natural phenomenon while still exploring new territory. The iciness of the subject isn’t entirely literal, either. Magnason’s personal relationship with glaciers is much more mournful than the Krafts’ relationship with volcanoes, as he is most famous for having written the first ever obituary for a dying glacier, not for his passionate love for the living ones. As a result, Time and Water is a chilling ice bath intended to shock its audience into realizing how quickly & permanently we’re losing glaciers to climate change, as communicated through the personal archives & heartbreak of those natural wonders’ volunteer spokesman.

An Icelandic literary luminary, Magnason’s advocacy for glacier preservation is more poetic than scientific. He descends from a lineage of natural explorers with a long history of first-hand scientific observation of Icelandic glaciers’ declining health, but his own professional work on the subject is much more abstract. In somber voiceover, he conveys local folktales about glaciers’ role in creating & shaping his homeland. He defines the mountainous ice blocks as “ice that has come alive,” which I doubt meets the criteria for a scientific designation. Glaciers are “alive” in the sense that they are cyclically melted & rebuilt by Arctic temperatures, though, which technically means that they can also “die.” Magnason first used his literary notoriety to draw attention to glaciers’ terminal health condition in the new climate change paradigm by writing an obituary for the first fallen glacier in 2019, immortalizing in bronze, “Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.” Following that logic, this cinematic adaptation of that obituary does not spend much time explaining the capitalistic profit motives that are accelerating climate change year by year, but instead quietly mourns what’s already been lost while hoping to preserve its loving memory for a distant future.

For all of his cultural concerns as an Icelandic literary voice, Magnason’s investment in the future is largely familial. He narrates this eulogy as if it were a family photo slideshow, which Dosa punctuates with the clicks & whirs of a photo slide carousel. Alternating between the 16mm footage of his ancestor’s glacial explorations and his own digicam records of modern Icelandic homelife, Magnason hopes to visually represent the dramatic before & after of how the local natural landscape has changed while vocally apologizing to his future-adult children about the half-dead world that has been left for them to inherit. The focus on his family’s archival photography is thematically linked to the glaciers’ own natural archive, in the way they can trap vocalic ash and other particulates in ice as a record of passing time. Magnason sees that ice melting away as a kind of environmental dementia, which he’s watched creep into his own aging parents & grandparents as the years pile up on tape. It’s unavoidable to point out how tonally glacial that familial history plays out onscreen — both cold in its mournfulness and slow-moving in its monotony. As a time-elapse portrait of Iceland’s recent decades in environmental crisis, however, it lands a dramatic gut punch that leaves the audience doubled over, breathless.

If Dosa wanted to repeat Fire of Love‘s critical & commercial success, she could have hired Björk to cryptically narrate Magnason’s story the same way Miranda July narrated the Krafts’. Dosa did hire Dan Deacon to echo her previous film’s synth-abstracted score (provided by Air), but Deacon is usually restrained & icy in his own way here — only flashy in momentary flourishes of tape-warp sound effects. The overall mood of the piece is substantially more subdued than Dosa’s previous outing, which is entirely appropriate for a profile of a writer who’s most famous for issuing death certificates to glaciers with the official cause of death listed as “extreme summer heat.” As hard as Magnason works to convey how much his homeland’s beauty is in peril, that subdued mood and the Planet Earth-style nature footage of Iceland’s surviving glaciers does ironically function as a kind of travel ad for the nation, which is likely counterproductive if the end goal is to slow the effects of climate change. It says a lot that National Geographic picked up its distribution out of Sundance; if you caught it on a muted television, you might mistake it for a standard doc about how cool & beautiful glaciers are and not a heartbroken eulogy predicting their certain, mass, impending deaths. Magnason’s voice might not be the most exciting element at play here, but it’s what gives the picture meaning beyond its surface-level beauty, and Dosa was right to cede him so much room to speak from the heart.

-Brandon Ledet

Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round (2026)

June 5, 2026June 5, 2026 / swampflix / 1 Comment

There’s a saturation point with overtly derivative horror movies where, if you make enough of them on a similar topic, they stop being treated as knockoffs and start being treated as a legitimate subgenre. Were there any dedicated fans of Bob Clark’s Black Christmas that initially brushed off John Carpenter’s Halloween as a copycat knockoff in 1978? Maybe, but dozens of Fridays the 13th later, they’re now both understood to be historic landmarks in the slasher subgenre, with little need to distinguish which arrived first. I’m sure the first couple body horrors of the 80s gore era were dismissed as shameless knockoffs by Cronenberg devotees, just as the found footage wave was first met with Blair Witchy skepticism and the giant-turtle creature feature Gamera was understood solely as a Godzilla copycat before there were other kaiju to compare it against. Likewise, when the killer-animatronics horrors Willys Wonderland and The Banana Splits Movie were first released a few years ago, they were initially understood to be shameless knockoffs of the popular Five Nights at Freddy’s video game series (albeit more successful movie adaptations of that series than its officially licensed ones). Since then, there have been enough Five Nights-riffing “What if the Chuck E. Cheese band tried to kill you?” variations that the subgenre has been legitimized with its own name: mascot horror. Write it down, commit it to memory; mascot horror is officially a thing. There will likely be college courses about it at some point, so yes there will be a quiz.

Mere days after Casper Kelly’s “What if Barney was evil?” mascot horror Buddy screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, I saw an online advertisement for the straight-to-Screambox “What if Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was evil?” mascot horror Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round, signaling to me that this newly coined subgenre is having a real moment. If I weren’t aware of Five Nights at Freddy’s or the previously mentioned mascot horrors that beat it to the big screen, I might’ve mistaken Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round as a rushed-to-market mockbuster of Kelly’s Sundance-premiered oddity. They are remarkably similar in narrative structure and production design, framing their mascots-gone-wild horror stories within the rules & rhythms of vintage children’s TV shows. For its part, Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round starts as a direct parody of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, with a kindly, sweatered TV host explaining simple concepts like mailboxes, welcome mats, and memories to the children at home. That last concept proves to be a sticking point for the poor TV host, who discovers that he has lost access to his own memories outisde the pocket universe where he’s stuck hanging out with sock-puppet animals on a fenced-in playground set made entirely out of cardboard. His chipper animal friends needle him about his lost memory in increasingly hostile, passive-aggressive ways until his concept of reality breaks down entirely, and he starts begging the audience through the camera to set him free from his play-pretend prison cell. Instead, his imaginary-friend playground adventure turns into a televised blood bath.

Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round suffers a lot of the same structural issues as Casper Kelly’s Buddy. Both movies are at their most compelling in the earliest stretch when they play as uncanny parodies of vintage children’s TV shows that are just slightly, menacingly off. Once that hyperartificial reality is broken and the ultraviolence starts in earnest, they become much more conventional horror stories, testing the audience’s patience as they meander towards their inevitable, genre-mandated conclusions. Admittedly, the highs are higher in Buddy, while Mr. Monkey‘s lows are much, much lower, which makes for a no-brainer choice if you’re only going to watch one mascot horror this year and skip the other. If there’s anything that makes Mr. Monkey worth a look it’s in the extremity of its ultraviolence, featuring lengthy, torturous scenes of surgical gore as our semi-demented TV host is strapped down to the titular merry-go-round and tormented by the sock-puppet avatars of his own subconscious. Once the mood lighting shifts from bright & bubbly children’s show cartoonery to dingy torture porn grit & grime, the novelty appeal of the picture falls apart, and it starts to resemble the mascot-adjacent slashers of the public-domainsploitation “Poohniverse.” I very much preferred hanging out with the dead-eyed, cheery puppets in their children’s playhouse before it becomes an adult flayhouse, when the scares are centered on odd details like Mr. Monkey‘s dirty human fingernails instead of maniacal screaming & disembowelings, which you can find in pretty much any horror subgenre. The most illuminating thing about the picture overall was how it makes apparent just how ahead of the curve pro wrestler Bray Wyatt’s Firefly Funhouse gimmick was on the current “mascot horror” trend, not to mention the even earlier genre prototype in Wonder Showzen, which predates Five Nights at Freddy’s by a full decade. In that long mascot-horror continuum there isn’t much room for Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round to stand out as anything special in particular, but it’s at least a convenient bite-sized appetizer of what Buddy will offer once it hits theaters later this year.

-Brandon Ledet

On the Ethics of Piracy

May 14, 2026May 14, 2026 / swampflix / 1 Comment

My local video store is run as a non-profit, and one of their ongoing community projects is to offer a window display residency. Artists submit their design concepts, and award recipients get the opportunity to actualize their ideas. Right now, that display is a testament to film piracy:

Unless you’re a real cinemaniac, you’ve probably never seen Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a bizarre forty-three-minute cult film created in 1987 by Todd Haynes. In it, the strife between Karen Carpenter and her (according to the semi-biographical film) controlling brother Richard plays out, with all characters being portrayed by Barbie dolls. Memorably, Karen’s worsening health due to her anorexia is demonstrated by her doll being slowly whittled away. If you have seen Superstar, then the only reason you’ve ever had the opportunity to do so was through piracy. Whether because the use of Barbies does not fall under fair use, because of the presence of contemporary music that is unlicensed, or just because Richard Carpenter raised a big enough stink about it, there’s no way for you to watch this film legally. A copy exists at the Museum of Modern Art, but it is not exhibited. I personally have seen it, and the copy that I watched was on a burned bootleg Maxell DVD-R just like the one recreated in Maura Murnane’s display above.

The question of the ethics of piracy arose recently when I texted Brandon about whether or not we (read: I) should cover the leaked film Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, a continuation of the animated 2005-2008 Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender, following the show’s child characters into young adulthood (some of them had also appeared as elderly characters in continuation series The Legend of Korra). AATLA was set to be released theatrically this year, but Paramount opted to pull the film from its planned cinema release and drop it solely to their streaming service, Paramount+. This announced change ruffled some feathers. Fans who wanted to see the film on the big screen and would have happily paid to do so would now have to sign up for a subscription service to see it, and at a reduced scale than the creators intended; members of the crew and animation teams were likewise disappointed to learn that something that had been created to be visually stunning and grand in scope would not get the opportunity to reach the intended audience. Universally, the decision to paywall the film in the winter was met with criticism. Avatar fans who want to have access to that content are more likely to already be subscribed to Paramount+ in the first place, meaning that the addition of the film to the service would likely have a negligible effect on overall subscription numbers. The money was already spent, there would be no chance for the film to recoup its budget theatrically, and the hellscape that is the current streaming service subscription model grinds on.

In general, although Swampflix and its contributors in no uncertain terms do not recommend piracy, as a legal disclaimer, I’m flexible about what this means for works that are inaccessible due to rights-holders’ choices and decisions. Consolidation of the ownership of all media into a few conglomerates is a bad thing. Even the least cinemanic among us have cottoned on to the fact that every streaming service is less functional, robust, and egalitarian they they once were, and the national government’s antipathy against monopoly prosecution in the death throes of our current economic era mean that it’s only going to get worse. The next inbound round of money-laundering square-dancing means that next year the guy who makes your toothpaste might also own The Little Rascals, or that every time you buy corn chips you’ll be adding a nickel to an account that will eventually fund a live-action Rocko’s Modern Life, or that some anarchocapitalist’s nepotistically inherited pyramid scheme will get to decide whether you can make Dorothy Gale’s slippers ruby or not. The back catalogs of films that are gatekept behind faceless entities are held back not so that said entities can do something with them, but just to keep others from having access.

Or, more frequently in recent years, to cancel huge, completed projects because not releasing them to the public means that they can be written off for tax purposes. It’s far from the worst thing that most of the 1% has done, but like most of their unethical actions, it’s rooted in the seed of all evil: a love of money. A couple hundred internet malcontents with too much time on their hands managed to leverage a global pandemic into browbeating Warner Brothers into releasing a supposed “lost” film at a time when productions were shut down. This emboldened probably the worst people it could have, but it also means that nothing is really set in stone. Three years after its cancellation was announced, Coyote vs. Acme is finally being released this August; maybe there’s even some hope that Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah’s Batgirl might see the light of day someday. But as Brandon pointed out to me when I texted him, there wasn’t really a good reason to review the animated Avatar film when it had a real scheduled release date, even if its release was a downgrade. That’s a different story.

I won’t reveal the circumstances under which I viewed Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender. Maybe someone was screening it at a bar, a bar that has since closed down and therefore no one can be held responsible. Maybe I watched it through a storefront window like a kid in a corny Christmas commercial. Maybe someone burned a bunch of copies onto Memorex DVD-Rs and let them fall off of the back of a truck. A full review will come, when the film is legally available. I would recommend that, should the winds change and you get the chance to see it theatrically, it will be well worth the cost of the ticket. As to whether it will be worth the cost of the subscription to Paramount+, only you, dear reader, know if you’re responsible enough to cancel before the renewal date if Avatar Aang is all that you want to see. I’m not entirely sold on the new voice cast (in short, Toph is pretty good, Katara is acceptable, Aang is iffy but occasionally perfect, and—all love and respect to Steven Yeun—Zuko is completely wrong), but the film is absolutely gorgeous. I struggled to adjust to the cast changes and what I perceived as tonal changes, but by the time Aang was soaring around and having a good time, so was I. I had missed him, and it was good to spend time with him again. If anything, Paramount’s bungling of this whole debacle means that it’s unlikely that we’ll get the opportunity again (unless you count the Netflix live action series, which has its own host of problems). Only time will tell.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

I Married a Vampire (1987)

April 28, 2026April 28, 2026 / swampflix / Leave a comment

You’re not going to get a lot of butts in seats for a movie in which a woman marries a vampire without titling that film I Married a Vampire, but that reveal would be a little more fun if you were able to go into a screening without that knowledge. Of course, the fact that marriage to a bloodsucker is the inevitable outcome of this story is made clear from the outset, when young Viola (Rachel Golden) picks up her parents from the airport in an unnamed city; they’ve arrived in town after learning secondhand from Viola’s sister that she’s gotten married, and are insistent on meeting her new husband. Of course, before she brings mom and dad home, she’s got to give them the whole story of how she met her undead husband …

Two months earlier, Viola lands in not-New York (the end credits thank the city of Boston, but no notable landmarks of any kind are seen in any of her exploration montages) and is ready to start her life anew, far from Iowa. Unfortunately, she falls victim to all of the various swindles that eighties metropoles had to offer; she ends up in a disgusting apartment after getting swindled by a shady landlord, is robbed and grifted by her supposed poet neighbor Portia, gets stiffed for a heavy retainer by a lawyer who promises to help her get her money back from the landlord, gets pressured into giving up her last bit of savings to the cult of Muhammad Buddha Christ, and can only find work as a night cleaner for a man who sexually assaults her. All of this finally starts to change when her co-worker Olivia introduces Viola to her “brother” Robespiere [sic] (Brendan Hickey). Viola, to her credit, immediately cottons on to the fact that they’re vampires, but she later laughs off her suspicions as the result of too much beer and the lingering effects of a horror movie double feature. When she returns to Robespiere when she’s run out of options, she finds herself a new woman, charged with the confidence she needs to get her savings back from the grifters, and if they put up a fight, her new beau can take them out.

There are some genuinely wonderful performances and sequences in I Married a Vampire, even if the film gets off to a sluggish start. Viola’s parents, Morris and Doris, are an interesting pair, since they’re both grumps who are blind to their poor parenting in different ways. Morris, for his part, is quite funny, while Doris’s haranguing of her wayward daughter is less fun. The script is pretty sharp from the get-go, and one gets the impression that writer/director Jay Raskin had a vision that he came close to fulfilling here, but was ultimately restrained by the budget provided him as a result of this being a Troma-level production. Once we get the framing device set-up out of the way, the actual narrative gets underway, and we get to meet a fantastic cast of awful characters. First, Viola encounters Mr. Gluttonshire, who tries to pick her up under the impression that she’s a sex worker. Then, she meets Mr. Keeper, the landlord who tells her that she won’t be able to find a place for $300 a month, but sets her up with an infested shoebox studio for $400… plus a finder’s fee and the deposit ($1000 total, or about $3300 in 2026), eating up a third of the money she worked hard to save for her move. When night falls, she learns that her unit abuts a loud rock venue that also fills her entire apartment with flashing lights.

It’s in this sequence that we meet Portia (Temple Aaron), who all but steals the show. She’s exactly the kind of street-savvy gutter-dweller that you’ve met before, in the movies if nowhere else. She tells Viola that she’s a poet, and that she writes song lyrics for rock bands, and that she can get Viola a great deal on a stereo, only $50! She also explains that the reason they have no water is because they’re connected to the club next door, and they only have water pressure when there’s a good band (when the music is good, no one’s using the bar bathroom, so they’re not competing with the constant flushing for water), which happens every two or three months. Only someone as naive as Viola would be capable of falling for Portia’s obvious bullshit, but it’s charming in its way, and Portia is a tragic figure in her own right. I genuinely believed that she was going to end up on the business end of Robespiere’s fangs once Viola gets her understated revenge later, but she’s the only one who gets off relatively easy, as the vampire merely hypnotizes her to stop lying to and stealing from her friends.

It’s here, in this circumvention of the expectation of how violent this will be, that this stands out for a Troma release. They’re never classy movies, and this one certainly isn’t that, but it demonstrates restraint in areas that other Troma-branded flicks don’t. It’s notable in the quiet, non-bloody, non-gory story resolution that Portia gets, but also in the understated nature of the revenge Robespiere enacts for Viola. You hear “Troma” and think that you’re going to get some geysers of blood or at least some viscera, but most of the violence occurs offscreen, with no gross-out bits at all. Even more shockingly, although Viola is violated by Mr. Gluttonshire, there’s no titillation factor and the film doesn’t use it as an excuse to force the lead actress’s top off. I’m not saying that the N.O.W. should be giving Jay Raskin an award or anything, but for a flick from the studio that brought you Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator, it’s almost admirable. There’s no real violence, we don’t see any of it, and when it’s over, Viola is still fully clothed; it feels almost modest.

The romance between Viola and Robespiere is dreadfully dull, unfortunately, and the sequences wherein she goes to all of her antagonists and asks for her money back, is laughed at, and then gets her revenge via supernatural husband gets a little repetitive. The film runs out of steam once it stops being about all of the nasty urbanites who prey on naive farm girls and watching Viola tolerate it all like she’s the protagonist of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Normally, the revenge portion of these films is supposed to be where all the fun happens, but I Married a Vampire is a little frontloaded with scuzzballs, which means that it doesn’t quite finish as strongly as it ought to, which is likely why it’s mostly forgotten. It’s still well worth checking out, however; just know you’re likely to get distracted in the back half.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Puffy Chair (2005)

March 29, 2026March 29, 2026 / swampflix / 1 Comment

I’m not fully sure where the current film culture consensus is on the Duplass Brothers. They’ve been quietly making low-budget indie dramedies for two decades now, and the larger cultural response to their work has remained at the same low, continual hum. Back when they started in the mumblecore days of the early 2000s, however, their performatively unpretentious filmmaking style made a relatively big splash in the industry, enough to convince established heavy hitters like Jonathan Demme to try their own hand at aggressively casual digicam dramas like Rachel Getting Married. I suppose I feel some personal affection for the Duplasses as Metairie-boys-made-good locals who’ve survived in an industry that’s since moved on after mumblecore’s brief moment in the Sundance sunshine, but I only occasionally dip into their work when it touches on genres I frequent, like the camcorder horror Creep or the sci-fi whatsit Biosphere. Given the wider cultural apathy for their indie cinema contributions (alongside an even harsher indifference to fellow mumblecore pioneer Joe Swanberg), I was surprised, then, that their breakout debut The Puffy Chair was given a 20th anniversary victory-lap release this month, celebrating two decades of quiet, low-budget crowd displeasers from our old pals Mark & Jay.

Mark Duplass stars in this go-nowhere road trip drama, co-written and co-directed with his brother Jay. It’s partially a movie about brothers, contrasting the frustratingly rigid, stubborn personality of Mark’s protagonist with the free-spirit openness of his fictional brother, a habitually jobless artist (Rhett Wilkins). More so, it’s a movie about bros, examining the quirks & kinks of the modern hetero male ego and finding the entire gender lacking in morality & merit. Our two brothers in crisis embark on a road trip to purchase the titular La-Z-Boy recliner as surprise gift for their father’s birthday, hoping to stage a family reunion with a familiar relic from their familial past in tow. They butt heads on the trip, as brothers do, but most of their personal issues arise from their relationships with women. The free spirit in the van falls in love just as quickly as he falls out of it, while our egotistical anti-hero drags out a doomed romance with a long-term girlfriend (Katie Aselton) whom he’d rather bicker with than commit to. The entire trip is shot on handheld, commercial grade digicams as if it were a documentary, and the only major splurge in the budget is the puffy La-Z-Boy, which goes through as much anguished hell as the characters who drag it down the highway. It’s all low-stakes, mildly funny malaise until late-night alcohol binges make the romantic arguments too vicious to bare, and the characters take their frustrations out on the chair instead of parting ways like they should.

The broey sensibilities of The Puffy Chair aren’t an accident; they’re deliberately evoked as a kind of self-skewering. Every detail about Mark Duplass’s self-assured asshole protagonist is seemingly designed to parody an early-aughts indie-scene bro archetype: his floppy hair cut, his American Apparel hoodie, his tighty-whities, his entrepreneurial pursuits as a failed musician turned band manager, his name being Josh. This very clearly a “depiction ≠ endorsement” situation, with the film’s main mission being a character study of the minute ways that Josh is a self-centered prick. Still, there is a kind of default-macho POV emanating from behind the camera that doesn’t feel entirely pointed or intentional, and that broey sensibility might help illuminate why the Duplasses have quietly drifted from the center of the indie filmmaking scene over the past couple decades. The same day that I watched The Puffy Chair in theaters, I had streamed Shudder’s feminist talking-heads documentary 1000 Women in Horror at home, in which women filmmakers are interviewed about their participation in & appreciate of the genre. In it, actor-turned-director Brea Grant relays an anecdote about her early days as a performer where she frequently had to ask male screenwriters what her character does for a living, since she could get no sense of who they were as a person outside their relationships to the male leads. That question echoed in my mind hours later watching The Puffy Chair. Does Josh’s girlfriend have a job? Does she have a life outside the world of Josh? It’s impossible to say.

It’s funny that this movie’s quiet re-release has coincided with a wider cultural celebration of the TV series Nirvanna the Band, which got its own theatrical victory lap earlier this year with Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Both movies parodically skewer the same early-aughts indie scene bro archetype; Nirvanna the Band just has an easier time winning an audience over with overt humor while The Puffy Chair feels sadistically eager to dwell in discomfort. Between them, I feel like I’ve accidentally stumbled into a cursed time machine that only goes back to my worst college years. Their respective soundtracks are a major part of that temporal displacement, with Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie kicking off on a vintage Ben Folds track, while The Puffy Chair includes college-radio hits from Death Cab for Cutie, Spoon, and Of Montreal – all bands that have been collecting cultural dust since the dingiest days of the flip-phone aughts. While last year’s Secret Mall Apartment attempted to revive the new-sincerity hopefulness of the 2000s indie scene, The Puffy Chair & Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie brought me back to that decade as I actually remember it: grotesquely broey, depressed, poorly dressed, in standard definition. To their credit, The Duplasses appear to have been hyper aware of the era’s faults & foibles as they were happening, ready to be captured on MiniDV tapes for Sundance festival audiences’ squirmy mortification.

-Brandon Ledet

A Body to Live In (2026)

March 23, 2026March 23, 2026 / swampflix / 2 Comments

Practically every adult I know socially has either a tattoo or a body piercing, if not both. Even I, a total square, have a few small tattoos myself, which you’ve only ever seen if we’ve hung out in an environment where it was appropriate to not wear socks. It’s increasingly common to see visible tattoos, nose rings, and other low-level body modifications in professional settings, since they’re now so common that they’re no longer transgressive or taboo. It wasn’t too long ago that this wasn’t the case. I remember tattoos & body piercings signaling a much edgier, fringe personality type growing up in the 1990s, whereas they’re now just as casual of a fashion choice as a quirky hat or what color shirt to wear. You can track the timeline of that body-mod culture shift in the new documentary A Body to Live In, which profiles the life, art, and spiritual practice of “modern primitivist” Fakir Musafar. From his early experiments with corset-binding fetish photography in the 1940s through his educational body-piercing and body suspension workshops in the 2010s, Musafar’s entire artistic, spiritual, and professional life was dedicated to the practice of body modification, and he saw that practice evolve from private kink play to public fashion display first-hand, seemingly involved with every major milestone of the journey. So, the documentary doubles as both a portrait of Fakir Musafar and as a broader overview history of body modification in the American mainstream.

I had never heard of Fakir Musafar before seeing this documentary, but he lived such a Forrest Gumpish life across so many various subcultures that I am familiar with that he continually crossed paths with faces that were already familiar to me: fellow self-promoting ritualist Anton LaVey, feminist pornographer Annie Sprinkle, professional Bob Flanagan flogger Sheree Rose, etc. Musafar’s body-mod journey was inspired by pure impulse (charged, at least partially, by unresolved gender dysphoria), and his early photographs were all produced in private, mostly consisting of corseting his body to simulate a female figure and then piercing that figure with needles and heavy ornaments. Once he found likeminded spirits across underground queer subcultures in 1970s California, the practice became much more social & less insular, and he was involved with a seemingly impossible range of extreme subcultures: heavy leather kinksters, Radical Faerie hippies, gallery-scene performance artists, and whoever else would show a sexual or spiritual interest in the ritualistic piercing & contorting of the human body. A lot of ground is covered very quickly as he drifts from subculture to subculture, always positing himself as a kind of mystic elder for the young & uninitiated to up to for guidance. We get to witness the evolution of professional body modification from the very first body-piercing shop opening in 1970s San Francisco to their modern omnipresence in every small town’s strip malls, but it’s always filtered through Musafar’s very particular, singular worldview.

For how impressively influential is subject was in a wide range of hip vintage subcultures, A Body to Live In is surprisingly smart about not devolving into hagiography. Musafar’s most glaring faults & criticisms are out there in the open, including control issues in his private relationships and larger accusations of cultural appropriation. In describing his early, private body-mod practices, Musafar explains that he was often inspired by ethnographic photographs in National Geographic magazines but would not read the accompanying captions, because he did not want the imagery spoiled by journalistic “interpretation.” Later, while promoting his “modern primitivism” philosophy on daytime talk shows, he struggles to articulate the authenticity of his body-mod rituals when confronted by Indigenous audiences who find his pick-and-choose appropriation of their cultures politically offensive. Even the term “primitive” is directly challenged for its political implications in the opening minutes, which might not be expected of a documentary exalting the movement for its positive influence across American subcultures. It’s very thoughtful, measured, and yet sincerely participatory in the body-mod spirituality depicted, making sure to include voices of dissent & discomfort with the practices’ cultural insensitivity while also showing the therapeutic & political good it can do in the right contexts.

Director Angelo Madsen does his best not to personally intrude on the material, except in a brief expression of regret for not asking Musafar a couple clarifying questions while he was alive to answer them. The most stylistic imposition on the material is found in the colorful psychedelia of the photograph development process, which helps transition from still photo to still photo without the clinical rigidness of an art-gallery slideshow. Madsen also arranges individual photos and slides on the screen to deliberately create a frame-within-a-frame distance from the original images, drawing attention to how Musafar’s curation of his photographs pushed his practice further into a fine art sphere than mere personal documentation of religious ritual & sexual kink. Musafar publicized his work through a wide range of artistic mediums, from the still photography he experimented with in his parents’ basement to documentary hosting in 1985’s Dances Sacred and Profane to confrontational performance art in the post-AIDS 1990s. It’s clear that his own body was the medium he was most interested in expressing himself through, though, as evidenced by his decades-long development of his nipples into cylindrical ornaments of great public interest. There’s a range of debate offered by the documentary’s talking heads about whether his primary motivation for that art was sexual, political, intellectual, gendered, or purely spiritual, and it’s to the film’s benefit that no one could definitively answer the question. They’re all partially true.

-Brandon Ledet

“Wuthering Heights” (2026)

March 8, 2026March 8, 2026 / swampflix / 2 Comments

Brandon has already written about Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” and although I was forewarned, my own love for the source material meant that, sooner or later, I was going to have to check this hot mess out for myself. And what a mess it is! Not as hot as one would expect, though, given that the director’s stated intention with this adaptation has been to recreate the horniness that she presumes is the universal experience of all first time readers. The thing about ”Wuthering Heights” is that the text I found myself thinking about most often while watching it wasn’t the novel itself or any of the prior adaptations, but Wicked: For Good. In writing about that film, I posited that its greatest flaw is also its greatest weakness: it only exists as a commercial product because of its connection to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its offshoots, sequels, and adaptations as a brand. The first half of the play (and the earlier film that adapted only that opening half) is allowed to find all sorts of fun things to explore within the “canon” of Oz, since the only thing it carries over is the necessity that, at some point, the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch must eventually become enemies, in the public eye if not in reality. Everything else is fair game. In the second half of the play, which became For Good, every action exists in service of putting the characters from Wizard of Oz into the positions that they will be when Dorothy meets them upon her arrival in the fairy land, so characters march lock-step toward their places in the canon regardless of whether that works on a narrative, character, or even emotionally meaningful level. “Wuthering Heights” has the same problem. I’m not going to say it’s a bad movie because it’s a bad adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which it most certainly is, but it’s a bad movie because it’s an attempt at adapting Emily Brontë’s novel at all.

Widower Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), the tenant of farmhouse Wuthering Heights, returns home from the city with a young boy in tow, whom he “rescued” from a life of being abused by a drunken father so that he can come to the Heights and be abused by a drunken stranger instead. He gives the boy to his daughter, Cathy, who names the child “Heathcliff, after my dead brother,” and the two form a fast friendship. Also present in the household is Nelly, who as the bastard daughter of a lord is not entitled to recognition or shelter, but is welcome to act as the formal companion to Cathy; this relationship is challenged by Cathy’s burgeoning devotion to Heathcliff, who absorbs some of Earnshaw’s parental abuse. Some years later, Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) watch as a procession of carriages deliver their new neighbors, The Lintons, to the manor of Thrushcross Grange. Cathy, who has been raised with no mother and is thus somewhat as wild and unmannered as her lowborn foster brother, sneaks up to spy on Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) and his “ward” Isabella (Alison Oliver) and ends up injuring her ankle and being hosted at Thrushcross Grange for several weeks to recuperate. She returns to Wuthering Heights “quite the lady” and admits to Nelly (Hong Chau) that she has fallen in love with Linton and will marry him; she says aloud that she cannot marry Heathcliff because of their vast social class gap, and Nelly, knowing that Heathcliff has overheard this, keeps this information to herself. Linton and Catherine marry, Heathcliff leaves, Catherine becomes pregnant, and Heathcliff returns, at which point Catherine learns that Nelly allowed him to believe that Catherine didn’t love him. Heathcliff marries Isabella, but he and Catherine begin a brief, torrid affair that ends in tragedy.

If you’re familiar with the novel (or any of its more faithful adaptations, although there are surprisingly few), then that synopsis undoubtedly feels strange to you. It’s like Brontë’s in some ways; the character names are the same and some of the larger events from the novel are present. The exclusion of Hindley, Cathy’s brother and Heathcliff’s primary tormentor (and thus also his wife and child), is very jarring, as is the complete absence of Mrs. Earnshaw. Earnshaw family employee Joseph has also been aged down and cast with a handsome actor (Ewan Mitchell), eschewing the novel Joseph’s characterization as a religious zealot and instead giving him the chance to engage in kinky, largely unseen BDSM with one of the housemaids so that Heathcliff and Cathy can observe them surreptitiously in a way that sets both characters’ sexual imaginations ablaze. Most adaptations focus solely on the Cathy/Heathcliff story and leave out the entire plot about the second generation that constitutes the entire second half of Wuthering Heights, so its excision here isn’t surprising, but knowing that it doesn’t need to take that into consideration, “Wuthering Heights” decides to instead have Cathy not only die, but miscarry her child with Linton, since there’s no reason to have a living child if the story isn’t going to continue. I also can’t fault the film for choosing to narratively manifest the “Nelly is the villain” theory. Although I have personally never accepted that in my reading of the text, it has become the prevailing literary lens for the novel’s academic criticism since James Hafley first posited this thesis in 1958. (If you have JSTOR access, his essay can be found here; it’s a good read even if you, like I, remain unconvinced.)

If you’re not familiar with the novel, none of this may seem like it changes that much about the text, but I can assure you: it does. My distaste for the film could be said to be either (a) entirely predicated on, or (b) have nothing to do with my love of Wuthering Heights, by which I mean that I don’t particularly care that this is a bad adaptation of Wuthering Heights—in fact, the number of faithful adaptations is rare, and I prefer some of the less faithful adaptations over the more detail-oriented ones—I just don’t think this needed to be an adaptation of Wuthering Heights specifically. It almost feels as if Fennell responded to critics’ dismissal of Saltburn as a lesser Talented Mr. Ripley by deciding to take her Wuthering Heights-inspired erotic fiction and—in an inverse of E.L. James filing the serial numbers off of her Twilight fanfiction and publishing it as Fifty Shades of Grey—direct an adaptation of that and call it “Wuthering Heights.” I’m not frustrated with this movie as a fan of Brontë’s; I’m frustrated with it as a movie lover, the part of me that just wants to go to the movies and have a good time. Where this ties into Wicked: For Good is that like that film, “Wuthering Heights” goes awry in having to fall in line with the text that it is branded, meaning that the film is inexorably tied to the text from which it takes its name, when liberating it from that title would have allowed this to go in more interesting directions.

Robbie is very good as Cathy (Elordi is fine), but our two lead characters are so boring. In the film’s second act, we get to see some of the home life of Heathcliff and Isabella, and it’s the best stuff in the movie. Instead of being a victim of Heathcliff’s abuse, Isabella is all-in on his weird degradation play; she gets off on sending letters to Cathy and Nelly lying about how horrid Heathcliff is to her while also clearly enjoying being chained up and treated like a dog. We’ve already gotten a clear look into her bizarre psyche earlier in the film, in which we learn that she has an entire room devoted solely to her hair ribbons, and we get to see her create a fun murder scene in miniature by venting her frustrations at Cathy herself on the doll she made of the woman instead, with a dollhouse tableau that’s as funny as it is disturbing. While sitting in the theater, I couldn’t help but think about how much better a movie “Wuthering Heights” would be if it realized that its most interesting character was Isabella, and the movie had been made about her instead. I fantasized about the film taking a sudden turn into being about Heathcliff realizing that Isabella truly could match his freak and the two of them falling for each other. “Wuthering Heights” could never go in that direction because it’s called “Wuthering Heights,” rather than “[Untitled Emerald Fennell Sexy Gothic Romance starring Jacob Elordi].” The first time that we meet Isabella, she’s sitting in the garden and delivering an excruciatingly detailed recap of Romeo & Juliet to Linton. For a moment, I really was naive enough to think that Fennell was going to do something truly audacious, and that the mention of the play would draw attention to something crucial that Shakespeare’s play and Brontë’s novel share: they are decidedly tragic, non-romantic stories that the general public perceives as romantic. Alas, this was not to be the case, and the director’s much-vaunted “audacity” was once again constrained to the erotic consumption of another person’s bodily fluids (and occasionally egg yolks). Ho-hum.

Where Emerald Fennell does allow herself to get really freaky with things that she adds from outside the text are the moments where the film does actually shine. When she first arrives to live at Thrushcross Grange, Cathy is ushered into a room that Linton has prepared for her by having the place painted “the most beautiful color in the world, the color of [Cathy’s] flesh.” As we enter the room, it looks tasteful enough, but as the camera moves closer we get to see that Linton has had the decorators recreate not only her freckles but the light, almost imperceptible blue veins beneath. It’s delightfully grotesque. The film also occasionally goes for utter camp in a few fine moments, with the standout being the scene in which Mr. Earnshaw dies, surrounded by a physically impossible stack of empty wine and liquor bottles. The film also features very beautiful tableaux; there are several nearly-still chiaroscuro images of characters lit solely by the natural light streaming through a window, calling to mind Rembrandt’s Anna and the Blind Tobit or the Rembrandtian A Man seated reading at a Table in a Lofty Room. Evoking the imagery of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is an easy go-to for Heathcliff’s return, but it’s also an effective choice. Visually, the film’s depiction of Thrushcross Grange having strong juxtapositions of white and blood-red are striking, even if the choice doesn’t seem to have a deeper meaning other than the most superficial symbolism. Any one of those things would have been a delight to see in [Untitled Emerald Fennell Sexy Gothic Romance starring Jacob Elordi], in which Fennell wouldn’t have felt the need to remain bound to “adapting” Wuthering Heights and instead been able to go full bore into the story she really wanted to tell. Instead, we have this disappointment.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Singles (1992)

February 26, 2026February 26, 2026 / swampflix / 1 Comment

There’s a fun storytelling device in Susan Seidelman’s Sex and the City pilot that greatly added to the casual, Gen-X appeal of the show’s early seasons, before being dropped from its format entirely: the direct-to-camera confessionals. In early episodes of Sex and the City, main characters and single-scene players alike were introduced to the audience via street-interview soliloquies, adding to the show’s simulated confessional candor about modern New Yorkers’ sex lives. I used to assume that Seidelman staged those documentary-style interviews as a way to mimic the blind-item anecdotes of Candace Bushnell’s original “Sex and the City” newspaper column, maybe borrowing some visual language from reality TV in the process. In retrospect, that device may have been borrowed from an entirely different early-90s Gen-X relic, separate from the MTV Real World confessionals that they coincidentally recall. Structurally, Cameron Crowe’s 1992 grunge-scene dramedy Singles is a major stylistic precursor for the initial Sex and the City aesthetic, profiling the sexual & romantic lives of lovelorn slackers in the same confessionals-and-vignettes rhythms that Seidelman helped establish for the show. The differences between them are matters of perspective & tone. Singles is set in Seattle instead of New York, it’s cuter than it is raunchy, and its characters are idealistic twentysomethings looking for love instead of jaded thirtysomethings looking to settle.

The core friend group profiled in Singles are connected through the exact kinds of cultural hubs you’d expect to find in early-90s Seattle: warehouse concert venues, hipster coffee shops, and the single-bedroom apartment complexes that give the film its title. All of its characters teeter between remaining single forever and halfway committing to serious relationships, unsure whether they can trust each other or if their hearts are being played with in pursuit of sex. The women are universally adorable: Bridget Fonda as the plucky optimist, Kyra Sedgwick as the cynical pessimist, Sheila Kelley as the A-type stress magnet. The men are varying levels of dopey: Campbell Scott as the careerist yuppie, Jim True-Frost as the dorky wannabe, Matt Dillon as the true-believer grunge scene burnout. They clumsily mix & match as best as they can while struggling to maintain that classic Gen-X air of apathetic cool that shields all raw emotion behind untold pounds of oversized sweaters, flannels, denim, and leather. The story’s scatterbrained vignette structure sets it up to function as a kind of backdoor sitcom pilot à la Sex and the City or Melrose Place, appealing specifically to teens just a few years younger than its characters, itching to move out of the suburbs and live adult lives in The Big City. Instead, it had to settle for reaching those kids through its tie-in CD soundtrack, which was such a successful cash-in on The Grunge Moment that it’s much better remembered than the film it was commissioned to promote.

Singles is so performatively laidback & low-key that it’s easy to underestimate its accomplishments as a Gen-X rom-dram. Consider it in comparison with 1994’s Reality Bites, for instance, which is so overly concerned with signaling its rebellion against Corporate Phonies and the sin of Selling Out that it becomes a kind of phony corporate sell-out product in its own right. Crowe’s handle on the era is much more humanist, recognizing that no matter how much Gen-X pretended to not give a shit about anything, they were still just lonely kids like every other generation before them. Where Reality Bites cast Ethan Hawke as a hunky poster-boy for disaffected slackerdom, Singles cast Matt Dillon as a goofball parody of the same burnout musician archetype, inviting the audience to lean in and search for the lovable lug below his jaded surface instead of shoving his charms in our faces. Crowe’s background as a music journalist doesn’t hurt Singles‘s credibility either, as it allowed him to include progenitors of “The Seattle Sound” like Pearl Jam & Soundgarden onscreen to vouch for the movie’s authenticity. Having his characters awkwardly flirt at an Alice in Chains concert gives the movie just as much cultural & temporal specificity as having Carrie Bradshaw order a Cosmopolitan at a swanky NYC nightclub. Their desires & behavior are universally relatable, though, even if you weren’t around for grunge’s first wave; anyone who’s ever suffered through an uneasy situationship in their 20s is likely to see themselves in it, no matter where or when.

-Brandon Ledet

Eve’s Bayou (1997)

January 11, 2026January 11, 2026 / swampflix / 1 Comment

“All I know is, there must be a divine point to it all, and it’s just over my head. That when we die, it will all come clear. And then we’ll say, ‘So that was the damn point.’ And sometimes, I think there’s no point at all, and maybe that’s the point. All I know is most people’s lives are a great disappointment to them and no one leaves this earth without feeling terrible pain. And if there is no divine explanation at the end of it all, well … that’s sad.”

Debbi Morgan performs that speech in Eve’s Bayou while staring blank-eyed into the Louisiana nightscape. She then catches herself, realizing that she’s been talking to a small child instead of just pontificating into the night air. That intergenerational relationship is the core of this 1997 supernatural melodrama, in which a 10-year-old mystic-in-training (Full House‘s Jurnee Smollett) learns how to make sense of her psychic visions and magic intuitions under the guidance of her Aunt Mozelle (Morgan). Its plot synopsis sounds like it could belong to a Teen Witch-style coming-of-age comedy for kids, but Eve’s Bayou instead frames a decidedly adult world through a child’s eyes. Its witchcraft isn’t used to present playful wish fulfillment for youngsters, but to dredge up heaps of generational pain from the murky bottom of Louisiana swamps so it can finally rot in the sun. The film opens with an adult Eve Batiste recounting her small, Black community’s history as a slave plantation, then announcing that she’s going to tell the story about the summer she killed her father, in 1962. Naturally, most of the story that follows involves a young Eve observing & reacting to her father’s adult (and adulterous) behavior as the audience anticipates that foretold act of violence, but the heart of the story is more about her characterization as the next-generation mystic learning the ways of the world from her Aunt Mozelle.

Writer-director Kasi Lemmons describes her debut feature as autofictional, characterizing the young Eve as “a little bit me, a little bit Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird.” Although raised in St. Louis, Lemmons has vivid memories of visiting relatives in the Deep South (Alabama, not Louisiana) that she felt compelled to illustrate onscreen here, mixed with fictional stories of a philandering town doctor she created for a proof-of-concept short film titled “Dr. Hugo”. Lemmons’s biggest champion, Samuel L. Jackson, stars as that town doctor and town bicycle: little Eve’s doomed-to-die father. Lynn Whitfield plays the matriarch, frequently and credibly described as “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World,” suffering silently as her husband makes his professional & romantic rounds around town while she raises his three kids at home. Eve’s teenage sister Cicely (Meagan Good) takes after their mother’s practiced poise, but the younger Eve is much more resistant to being tamed and instead learns how to interact with the world from her Hoodoo-practicing aunt. The world is split in two between the sibling sets of both generations: a world of magic vs. a world of rational thought. It doesn’t matter which of those worldviews eventually wins out, though, since the end result is a foregone conclusion by the opening narration. Her father will die, and the painful familial secrets hidden by social niceties will eventually come to light.

The mysticism of Eve’s Bayou is more about subjective perception than about supernatural action. Eve and her aunt cannot change the world through supernatural means, but they can see parts of it that others are blind to. Their psychic visions are illustrated in surrealist black-and-white montage, with standalone images of spiders, clocks, and dirty needles superimposed onto the swamps just outside their homes. Lemmons positions the act of conjuring this imagery through cinema as a form of witchcraft, explaining in dialogue that memory is itself “a selection of images” and that the modern world is “haunted by the past.” In the Southern ghost story tradition of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, she invites the ghosts of the past to enter the story through the technological conduits of cameras, mirrors, and word processors. Every individual character’s memory, no matter how rationally minded, is positioned as a kind of supernatural realm in that context, and she does her best not to exclude any one version of the truth in her ambiguous telling of the circumstances behind the doctor’s death. The only character who doesn’t get their say is a disabled uncle who cannot speak due to his cerebral palsy symptoms, so his own memories and accounts of the truth are confined to his own mind. Like the audience, he can only observe, but he’s got a much more direct vantage point in seeing What Really Happened in the lead-up to the tragedy.

Speaking of memory, you might not remember that Eve had a disabled family member in her home, since a producer asked to have him removed from the original 1990s theatrical release, thinking that he would jeopardize the film’s commercial appeal by making audiences “uncomfortable.” The uncle’s place in the story was then later restored in a “Director’s Cut” released in the 2010s, also restoring the film’s core theme of the magical subjectivity of perception & memory. The initial choice to remove him is indicative of the many ways in which the film’s commercial appeal was misunderstood in its initial 90s release. Besides Samuel L. Jackson backing the film as a producer & star, critic Roger Ebert was likely its most vocal champion in the industry, concluding his 1997 review with the declaration that, “If it is not nominated for Academy Awards, then the academy is not paying attention. For the viewer, it is a reminder that sometimes films can venture into the realms of poetry and dreams.” Eve’s Bayou was not nominated for any Academy Awards. It made enough money to register as an indie-level hit, but it still didn’t lead to much of a professional windfall for Lemmons, who spent the most of her remaining career as a director-for-hire in the impersonal world of studio biopics. It’s easy to guess why this movie didn’t attract major studio backing, why Lemmons didn’t become a blank-check auteur, why Lynn “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” Whitfield didn’t become a Hollywood superstar, and why Ebert’s Oscars predictions went nowhere: in a word, racism. Still, it continues to shine as a reminder that sometimes films can venture into the realms of poetry and dreams without straying from mainstream filmmaking sensibilities, even when working outside mainstream filmmaking funding.

-Brandon Ledet