If there’s anything especially noteworthy about the post-WWI romance Mothering Sunday, it’s the sex. By most metrics, the film is exactly what you’d expect from a BFI-funded costume drama in which a deflated Colin Firth & Olivia Colman mope around a cold, tidy estate in mourning of their young sons, lost to the horrors of war. At the same time, it’s unusually fixated on the sexual awakening of that grieving couple’s young maid, often in raunchy detail. Mothering Sunday features way more onscreen semen & peen than you’ll see in other stately costume dramas of its ilk (provided by The Crown‘s Josh O’Connor, in case that matters), to the point where there are multiple(!!) scenes depicting cum stains on bedsheets. It’s not overflowing with fun, adventurous sex scenes or anything; it’s not Season 1 Bridgerton. Instead, it lingers on one unrushed, afternoon-lit sexual encounter that reverberates loudly through the rest of the maid’s life, as told in a loose, disorienting mix of flashbacks, flashforwards, and looping images.
Shirley’s Odessa Young stars as the maid in question, a sheltered service worker who’s given a full sex-ed crash course by a family friend (O’Connor) of her employers (Firth & Colman). In the lull between World Wars, the English village where she works is suffering one of the rare scenarios in history where dick is in short supply, which is why it’s especially risky that she crosses class lines to steal the heart of the only eligible bachelor around. The story is mostly anchored to their final tryst, an especially sweaty, intimate afternoon avoiding the usual village conversation about how many young men are dead & missing from their lives. Before that afternoon, the maid is a naive child who knows little of the world inside her body or out. Long after, she’s a self-assured literary genius who’s destined to suffer way more heartache than losing her first love. It’s during that final afternoon together when she finds a way to truly be herself for the first time, especially in moments when she’s left alone without her wealthier, more experienced lover looming over her.
The loopy, dreamy editing style is a double-edged sword. It’s disorienting to the point where I couldn’t get a handle on the whos, whats, and whens of a very simple story for way too long, but the film would be a forgettable, standard-issue post-WWI romance without it. As is, it gives the story a languid kind of sensuality that I appreciated, and frees it up from having to adapt every moment of the source material novel. This is more a film of sensory details than one of linear storytelling. It lingers & distracts, intercutting memories and losing time as if it were reminiscing through post-sex pillow talk instead of dictating a memoir. Its attention to prurient, raunchy detail fits snugly in that editorial headspace, so much so that it’s easy to forget it’s a tragedy – several times over. I’m honestly not sure it all comes together as anything solid or commendable, but it pairs its climax with a true stunner of a musical piece that almost convinced me it was nearing genius (or, at least something more substantial than most period romances in the same vein):
It’s not something you’ll detect as quickly as my love for horror or sci-fi, but I’m an easy sucker for costume dramas. Other genre fans are organized & mobilized enough to throw their own conventions where oceans of nerds line up to have Elvira sign their bald spots, but there isn’t really an equivalent for the costume drama (unless there are Ren Faire booths I don’t know about; please report back, if so). And yet, if you’ve ever found yourself sipping Pinot Grigio at an opening-weekend screening of a Downton Abbey movie, you know the fandom for costume dramas can be just as electric. One buffoonish misstep from Mr. Molelsey at a stuffy dinner party and the crowd goes wild. In that insular, quietly fired-up subculture, the names Merchant Ivory invoke rock star adulation the same way names like Romero, Carpenter, and Cronenberg get horror nerds’ brains whirring. Somehow, I had never seen an Merchant-produed, Ivory-directed movie myself, though, despite the phrase “Merchant Ivory” being a recognizable adjective for a type of buttoned-up, award winning costume drama that I very much enjoy. I recently filled in that knowledge gap with the producer-director duo’s breakout hit A Room with a View, which earned them three Oscars, four BAFTAs, and decades’ worth of household name recognition.
Predictably, I had a wonderful time with it. For all its Awards Circuit prestige, A Room with a View is a small, sweet romcom of manners that recalls the heightened social-maneuvers humor I love in Jane Austen comedies (please do not lecture me about the century’s difference between the Regency & Edwardian eras; I assure you I do not care). What really floored me is how stacked the cast is with genre giants of the costume drama, all working in delicious harmony like spoonfuls of honey stirred into afternoon tea. And since there would be no practical use for fully reviewing this genre-standard award magnet that hit American shores the year I was born, I’d mostly just like to discuss each member of the main cast individually. Here’s a quick listing of the central players in A Room with a View, ranked from most to least essential.
1. Daniel Day-Lewisas Cecil Vyse – DDL plays the ultimate dipshit fop, an uptight misogynist dandy whose wealth & status make him look like great marriage material on paper . . . until you spend ten seconds in his slimy presence. It’s incredible how easily he steals the show, considering that he doesn’t appear on-screen for at least the first third of the runtime. Once he crashes the party, though, he delivers a sublimely hateworthy comedic performance that the movie would be hollow without.
2. Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy Honeychurch – HBC is even more of a costume drama heavy-hitter than DDL, and I have to assume this early role was what landed her all that steady work in the unsteady past (unless there’s a huge Lady Jane fan club out there that I’m unaware of). She’s a perfectly furious, frustrated teen as the film’s lead, stuck between the rich idiot she should want (DDL) and the hot idiot she does want (TBA). Her furrowed brow while concentrating on complex piano pieces conveys a rich inner life in contrast to the sheltered social one she’s allowed to live outside her head, which makes her a great audience surrogate for young costume drama nerds who can’t wait to move out of their parents’ house. She’s also got gloriously thick, extravagant curls of hair that are enviable at any age.
3. Maggie Smith as Charlotte Bartlett – Speaking of Downton, Dame Margaret Natalie Smith brings long-established stage & screen prestige to the proceedings, even if she’s not allowed to cut as loose as she does with her withering quips as Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham. She’s in the same uptight chaperone role here as she plays in The Secret Garden, except her stiffness makes her the butt of her sister’s jokes instead of inspiring fear & good behavior in the teen she’s supposed to be keeping in check (HBC). I’m sure it’s just a stock character Smith plucked out of her 60+ years & 80+ IMDb credits worth of experience acting on camera, but she does it well, and the punchlines at her expense are always solid (often to the refrain of “Poor, poor Charlotte”).
4. Denholm Elliott as Mr. Emerson – More of a That Guy character actor than the legendary Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliott is nonetheless equally matched as her doddering comic foil. He’s cast as a sweetheart eccentric, one whose “tactless”, “indelicate” boisterousness constantly pulls the rug out from under the rules-obsessed chaperone. He also gets to ramble at length about the inane gender politics of who should get to have “a room with a view” at the opening hotel setting, a scene that feels like a contemporary SNL sketch written by a comedian who’s only seen the trailer, not the movie proper.
5. Fabia Drake & Joan Henley as the Misses Alan – The perpetually traveling spinster “sisters” are the closest thing the movie offers as aspirational objects of envy, especially if you read them as covert lesbians in a Boston marriage that everyone else just has to tolerate.
6. Judi Dench as Eleanor Lavish – You’d think Dame Judith Olivia Dench would rank as worthier competition to Dame Maggie Smith here, but her trash-novelist side character isn’t afforded much momentum to make a dent on-screen. She does push Smith’s uptight nerd into her biggest fuck-ups, though (including spilling the beans on her young cousin/ward’s scandalous, unchaperoned kiss, published for all to read under a half-hearted pseudonym), which makes for some great comedy at her expense. Poor, poor Charlotte.
7. Simon Callow as The Reverend Mr. Beebe – There are plenty of misbehaving vicars out there in cinemaland, but not many get to hang dong while roughhousing with their flock in the local swimming pond. You’d expect it to be the bigger shock that HBC runs into her naked crush or her naked brother when she stumbles across said roughhousing on an afternoon stroll, but the naked vicar earns the biggest laugh.
8. Rupert Graves as Freddy Honeychurch – HBC’s younger, rowdier brother is exactly who you’d expect to stumble across in the throes of flagrant public nudity. He doesn’t have much effect on the film’s tone or plot, but he is a playful, delightful source of chaos that makes HBC reluctant to graduate from childish japes to sincere adult emotions & romance.
9. Rosemary Leach as Mrs. Honeychurch – The siblings’ mother might get in a few great laughs with her passive aggressive jabs at “Poor, poor Charlotte,” but she doesn’t make much impact outside that mockery of her sister. I also couldn’t tell if the actor looked at all familiar, or if she just had a vague resemblance to Kathy Bates.
10. Julian Sands as George Emerson – Has Julian Sands ever delivered a good performance in anything? He’s at least laughably bad in films like Boxing Helena & Argento’s Phantom of the Opera. I foolishly assumed he landed those jobs because he was impressive in the Merchant Ivory costume dramas that predate them, but holy shit, his overly mannered performances don’t even feel at home in the overly mannered past. It’s a testament to DDL’s movie-making performance as the ridiculous cad Cecil Vyse that George Emerson comes across as HBC’s best option for love & marriage. You could replace Sands with a cardboard cutout of a romance-novel cover model and the movie would be exactly the same. He’s reliably useless.
Welcome to Episode #164 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss four classic comedies directed by Charlie Chaplin, starting with the anti-fascist satire The Great Dictator (1940).
00:00 Welcome
00:57 Elevator to the Gallows (1958) 05:25 Last Night in Soho (2021) 09:45 Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) 13:05 Studio 666 (2022)
18:50 The Great Dictator (1940) 38:30 City Lights (1931) 47:00 Modern Times (1936) 1:01:45 Monsieur Verdoux (1947)
I’m not much of a Foo Fighters fan, so I probably shouldn’t be reviewing something that could be described as Foo Fighters: The Movie. And yet, the Foo Fighters vanity project that somehow got pushed into wide distribution this year was a tribute to something I am a huge fan of: 80s metalsploitation. Studio 666 is a goofball throwback to metalsploitation classics like Trick or Treat, Shock Em Dead, and Rock n Roll Nightmare, complete with authentic plot tropes about backwards Satanic recordings & ancient incantations that open portals to Hell. It’s telling that even the Foo Fighters know their usual Dad Rock riffage does not hit the genre metrics of that tradition, so they traded their signature stadium sound for a thrash metal soundtrack under the pseudonym Dream Widow. They demonstrate a genuine, nerdy appreciation for vintage metalsploitation here, so even though I don’t care much about the band, I still think it’s cute they wasted everyone’s time & energy making a tribute to the genre, then distributing it as if it were a Real Movie.
Even if it is cute on a big-picture conceptual level, in practice Studio 666 is a constant battle between predictably awful one-liners and shockingly decent gore gags. There isn’t much plot to fill its expansive 106min runtime. A demon possesses Dave Grohl while he’s pushing the band to record their 10th studio album on location at a haunted house, so he slaughters his seemingly infinite bandmates one by one in increasingly gruesome ways. There’s a lot of dead air to fill between those kills, which is mostly gobbled up by Gen-X Dad Humor about how Dude Stuff like backyard grilling rocks and new age Chick Stuff like meditation sucks. The band slacks, cusses, shrugs, and mugs away the runtime, coasting on assumptions that the audience finds them adorable. Thankfully, their banter is occasionally interrupted by some spectacularly gnarly gore: hammers to the skull, decapitations via gardening shears, bifurcations of the chainsaw, etc. There’s no real invention or momentum to the kills, which punctuate the band’s hangout slacker humor instead of overpowering it, but they’re at least grotesquely tactile in a way that feels true to the splastick & metalsploitation traditions of olde.
I’m sure that dedicated fans of the Foo Fighters as the last true Stadium Rock Gods (give or take the Red Hot Chili Peppers) would find a lot more to chew on here. If nothing else, the recent passing of the band’s second-in-command musician Taylor Hawkins adds an extra layer of morbidity to the premise, especially considering the tabloid rumors concerning his exhausted relationship with the workaholic Grohl (shown here literally working his bandmates to death). Coming to it as a horror fan, I can’t say there’s much to mine here beyond a few retro practical effects shots and an out-of-nowhere endorsement from genre legend John Carpenter. Still, I’m amused that it exists – at least in the abstract. It’s charming that the biggest Guitar Rock band in the world spent their cultural capital reviving a dead horror subgenre from the Satanic Panic era, especially considering how fiercely Evangelical our culture is becoming at large (again). If it were 20min shorter & 200% funnier it might’ve even been Good.
It’s been four years since Ari Aster’s Hereditary and twice as long since Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, so we’re well past the point where it’s easy to take atmospheric horrors about grief, motherhood, and mental illness for granted. Already this year, I’ve seen Andrea Riseborough headline her own entry in that genre with Here Before and Sandra Oh do the same (to much lesser impact) in Umma. That’s why it’s difficult to get excited about the low-budget Irish indie You Are Not My Mother, which continues the trend with no flashy stars or gimmicks to set it apart with any freshness or novelty. Still, while You Are Not My Mother is far from the first (or best) Metaphor Horror about the ways mental illness can haunt multiple generations of a family, it is a solid one. It’s pure genre filmmaking in that way, and TV actor Carolyn Bracken does her best to keep up with the virtuosa mother-in-distress performances of Toni Collette and the like to make sure it meets the genre’s relatively high standards.
Boldly, this small-scale indie horror opens with a ritualistic baby burning, just so you know it’s not fucking around. That white-hot cold open is necessary to establish its genre boundaries, since the first act is essentially a domestic drama about hereditary mental illness, with no other clear signals that it’s a horror film. Three generations of depressed women occupy a small suburban home: a despondent grandmother (seen mysteriously burning a baby in the opener), her bed-sick daughter, and the granddaughter who can barely rouse those two caretakers for a simple ride to school. Things turn wicked when the typically reclusive mother disappears for days without warning, then returns a chipper, model parent with a newfound energy that does not feel true to her usual deflated self. The traditional horror markers ramp up from there, as the granddaughter confronts her mother’s sinisterly cheery imposter in the week leading up to Halloween, with the matriarch above them finally spilling her guts about why she burned that baby and who she failed to protect with the ritual.
The Halloween setting of the final act is more than just a horror mood-setter. You Are Not My Mother conveys a reverence for the Gaelic origins of Samhain unseen in the genre since 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch. If it does anything to set itself apart from modern trends of Metaphor Horror about grief, mental illness, and motherhood, it’s in the way it retrofits that template into a folk horror tradition – drawing in faerie & changeling folklore to conjure a sense of Old-World dark magic. I suppose there’s also something novel about the film’s choice of POV, in which the mother-in-crisis is estranged as a monstrous Other, mostly seen through the terrified eyes of her freaked-out child. Otherwise, you know exactly what you’re going to get from a modern, slow-burn horror in this style at this point, so there’s nothing to really say about You Are Not My Mother‘s quality, except in comparison to other films of its ilk. In terms of new releases, it’s not as thrilling as Here Before but also not as dully generic as Umma; it’s middling.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Brandon and Boomer discuss the farcical, anti-capitalist body horror How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989), starring Richard E. Grant.
00:00 Welcome
01:00 Miller’s Crossing (1990) & Barton Fink (1991) 12:00 Murder, She Wrote: South by Southwest (1997) 15:45 The Conjuring 2 & 3 (2016, 2021) 26:00 Morbius (2022) 32:40 After Yang (2022) 36:50 Gagarine (2022) 43:15 Neptune Frost (2022)
Do you think Colin Farrell starts his workdays by looking in the mirror and declaring, “I’m going Lobster Mode on ’em”? At the time, The Lobster felt like a significant departure for the pretty boy Irish actor, but he’s played enough emotionally hollowed sad sacks in the years since that LobsterMode Farrell has become its own subgenre: The Beguiled, Voyagers, Widows, Killing of a Sacred Deer (obv), and now the sentimental sci-fi chiller After Yang. I expected Farrell’s post-Lobster run to show off much more range in his new turn as a Serious Actor, but he only breaks out of Lobster Mode when he’s working in goofball genre films (see: Farrell going Penguin Mode in The Batman). For the most part, if you’re casting Colin Farrell in a sincere drama, you’re going to get the same quiet, inward brooding with the same furrowed brow and the same gravely grumble of a voice he’s been delivering since he first worked with Lanthimos in 2015. He’s good at it, but it would be nice to see him perk up a bit.
The gloomy predictability of Farrell’s performance aside, I was thrilled by After Yang as an ultra-modernist sci-fi picture . . . for its first half hour. It leads with its best scene: a DDR-inspired opening credits montage where several families compete in an online dance-off in impossible, isolated photo-shoot voids. It really gets the blood pumping, only to coast from there on waves of loneliness & grief. Farrell stars opposite Jodie Turner-Smith as adoptive parents of a young Chinese girl (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). They are loving but inattentive, purchasing an android model (Justin H. Min, the titular Yang) as a babysitter & Chinese Cultural Ambassador, looking after their child while feeding her a steady stream of “Chinese Fun Facts.” Most of the movie is concerned with what happens after Yang stops functioning and is effectively decommissioned. Is he an appliance they should leave on the curb with the rest of their weekly suburban waste, or is he a legitimate member of the family deserving of a respectful burial?
Reductively speaking, this is the mawkish family-drama sci-fi of Bicentennial Man repackaged as a quieter, more cerebral meditation like Marjorie Prime. My declining interest in its central story was more a question of genre tastes than artistic success, as director Kogonada only uses the thrills of future-tech paranoia as a starting point for a much calmer, less sensationalist conversation. Farrell’s rattled patriarch starts the film skeptical of the inner lives of the clones & technosapiens that now live among traditional humans, a cultural conservatism that’s reflected in his life’s work cultivating & brewing authentic teas (in a future-world that’s converted to single-use packages of flavor crystals). He pays shady characters to break into the deceased Yang’s memory banks, fearful that they’ll find spyware recordings of his family’s intimate moments, but instead he discovers that Yang was his own separate person with his own inner life. Yang’s stored memories play like a film school thesis project from a young director who just saw their first Malick – collecting small, sunlit details from the world around him in a digital scrapbook that’s useful to no one else outside his head.
That switchover from cybertech paranoia to lingering questions about the borders between humanity & its closest imitators is admirable, but it doesn’t leave much of a narrative drive to propel the movie across the finish line. When it’s a seedy backroom thriller about A.I. surveillance, it has its hooks in my flesh. After the switch, it’s just mildly melancholic & sweet, with about ten consecutive endings it quietly drifts past in search of a grander purpose. It doesn’t help that Farrell goes full LobsterMode in this instance, since his low-energy moping does little to fill the void left by the genre switch. I had some hope in the opening minutes that Kogonada made the actor jump around to shake himself loose & awake with some DDR choreo, but he immediately regressed to his Lobster state in the very next scene. At this point, I have to assume that’s exactly the performance he was hired to deliver, considering that he’s been reluctant to try anything else in recent years, at least not when the role calls for a Serious Actor.
Welcome to Episode #163 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, Britnee, and Hanna discuss Jacques Demy’s anti-incest fairy tale musical Donkey Skin (1970).
At its best, cinema is honest artifice. At its best, cinema is fiercely provocative & political. It’s a shared dream; it’s poetry. Neptune Frost is cinema at its best. The genderfucked Afrofuturist sci-fi musical is the kind of start-to-end stunner that feels so peerless in its fury & creativity that there isn’t a clear, pre-established critical language to fully discuss what it’s doing. In genre terms, it triangulates unlikely holy ground between the communal-solidarity sci-fi of Bacurau, the dreamworld lyricism of Black Orpheus, and the “Hack the planet” online resistance culture of Hackers. Otherwise, it’s untethered to tradition, using the digital tools of internet-era filmmaking to build an entirely new cinematic sensibility from scratch. While so many genre filmmakers are stuck mining the past for retro nostalgia triggers, Saul Williams & Anizia Uzeyman are honest about the look & means of the moving image of the present, and as a result Neptune Frost feels like the future of sci-fi in the medium.
Neptune Frost‘s resistance to clear comparison or definition is integral to its design. It boldly opposes every institutional structure it can hurl a brick at, from major oppressive forces like Capitalism, Christianity, and rigid Gender boundaries to more pedestrian concerns like Plot. There are two lovers at the center of its loose, musical fantasy: a coltan miner mourning the loss of his brother and a non-binary traveler mourning their loss of place & community. They find each other in the Rwandan savanna, and their love for each other combines with their hatred of modern civilization to create a new way of engaging with spiritual life & the physical world. Other refugees & dissidents appear drawn to their subsequent political commune like a spiritual magnet, finding a way to collectively “hack” into the world’s computer systems from their remote locale through the power of their own hearts & minds. Enough characters have names like Innocence, Philosophy, and Tekno that Neptune Frost feels like it should have a clear metaphorical guide to its scene-to-scene events, but I would be lying if I could say that I can make full sense of it (or that I’m even confident about my vague overview of its big-picture premise). Since it’s all conveyed through music & poetry, though, it doesn’t have to make logical sense; it just has to be emotionally potent, and I felt every minute of it deep in my chest.
I do believe there is a clear guiding force to its political messaging, at least. As much as it sets out to methodically undermine every single institutional structure in its path, it’s all filtered through a very specific disgust with the mining of coltan in countries like Rwanda & Burundi, where horrifically exploitative working conditions are treated as a necessary evil to powering the world’s smartphones. It’s openly confrontational about this trade-off, starting with a needless death in a coltan mine and referencing “Black-bodies currency” in its free-flowing song lyrics. The beauty in its political subversion is in the way its savanna hacker commune turns the tools of their oppressors against them, using the community of online connection to overpower the systems that profited from its creation. It’s a purely electronic mode of spirituality & political fury that feels more real & vital to modern life than the organized religions & pre-existing political movements it’s supplanting. I don’t know that it offers a clear, real-life solution to the exploitation of coltan miners, but it does have a clear ethos in how online political organization is necessary to create meaningful change in the physical world, despite the exploitation that makes that connection possible.
The closest I’ve seen previous experiments in form approximate Neptune Frost‘s specific mode of political-resistance sci-fi euphoria was in the feature-length music videos Dirty Computer & When I Get Home. I love both of those films for their boldness in pushing the medium to its outer limits, but I don’t think even they quite match Williams & Uzeyman’s far-out achievements here. More importantly, they’re both relatively recent works, which means Neptune Frost is at the forefront of something new, something not yet fully defined. It’s a thrill to behold, even with the uneasy balance between its political hopefulness and the real-world misery that drives its resistance to current status quo.
Our current Movie of the Month, 2015’s Embrace of the Serpent, is an angry, hypnotic condemnation of colonialism, capitalism, anthropology, and all the various other ways white outsiders “bring hell and death” to the Amazonian regions of South America. Shot in a high-contrast black & white and set in two parallel, interlinked timelines, it takes a deliberately nontraditional approach to its journey along Amazonian rivers. In particular, it stands out as a modern subversion of the white explorer-centered narrative of (the Congo-set) Heart of Darkness, undermining the bravery & nobility of even its most enlightened white intruders while offering broader, more humanizing empathy to the Amazon’s Indigenous populations than previous descendants of the novel bothered to. Its unusual visual aesthetics & narrative structure feel deliberately distanced from how the Heart of Darkness adventure story is usually told onscreen, emphasizing the academic & political deviations in its dramatic themes.
When Embrace of the Serpent first hit theaters in 2015 (as one of the first films to play at The Broad Theater, during the first year of Swampflix, forever ago), it felt like a total anomaly. In the seven years since, there have been several additional South American-set Heart of Darkness subversions that have made their way through the film festival circuit (and through the doors of The Broad, incidentally), making Embrace of the Serpent feel like the start of a modern cinema trend that’s still building in momentum. To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to see more films about the “hell and death” white outsiders have brought to the Amazon, regardless of the purity of their intent or curiosity.
The Lost City of Z (2016)
James Gray’s The Lost City of Z is the most direct, obvious companion piece to Embrace of the Serpent, which in a lot of ways makes it the least rewarding. It’s not a terrible film, exactly, but the most it did for me was make me appreciate Embrace of the Serpent more through comparison. While Embrace of the Serpent is a dreamlike meditation on the cultural & environmental ravages of colonialism as seen through the eyes of the Indigenous people who’ve suffered it, The Lost City of Z is a lot more straight-forward & traditionalist in its presentation & choice of POV. It’s less of a subversion of the Heart of Darkness narrative than it is a continuation of previous doomed on-screen explorations like Fitzcarraldo & Apocalypse Now. Its themes are so loudly pronounced, and its narrative flow is so rigidly episodic that it plays more like an expensive TV show than proper cinema, presumably to stay true to the spirit & sequence of events in its source-material novel.
Like Embrace of the Serpent, Gray’s film uses the work of a real-life historical figure (British explorer Percy Fawcett, played by Charlie Hunnam) to explain how colonialist disruption of Amazonian life & culture has been perpetuated by even the most well-intended, forward-thinking academics. Fawcett sets out to prove that the tribes of the Amazon region—thought to be subhuman by his fellow learned Brits—have built complex civilizations that long predate any similar British structures. On his repeat missions into the region, he intends to prove the humanity of the people indigenous to the land, but instead he’s essentially mapping out new courses for rubber extraction, something that only becomes more valuable as Europe nears WWI. It’s a “Be careful to not destroy what you wish to discover” story, but it’s told with such an uncritical, semi-heroic appreciation of Fawcett’s moral character that it feels almost retrograde in its politics (despite Fawcett’s real-life academic work still being relevant to modern anthropological study). Essentially, The Lost City of Z is only worth a recommendation to anyone who found Embrace of the Serpent to be a little too loose & ambiguous, offering a cleaned-up, watered-down version of its ideas in a more easily digestible package.
Swinging wildly in the other direction, Alejandro Landres’s Monos de-centers the heroic white interloper’s POV entirely in its own subversion of the Heart of Darkness template. Julianne Nicholson plays the only colonizer in the main cast: a medical doctor captured by an isolated faction of armed soldiers on the Columbian mountaintops. She’s also the only adult, held hostage at gunpoint by a teenage militia who’ve only known a violent world in opposition to her kind. While Embrace of the Serpent & The Lost City of Z treat the ravages of colonization in the Amazon as a past event that needs to be studied as history, Monos looks to its continuation into a dystopian future. We already contextualized Embrace of the Serpent as a post-apocalyptic tragedy in our original discussion of the film, but Monos makes that context a clear, distinct circumstance of its setting. It also pushes Embrace of the Serpent‘s dreamlike qualities even further into an intense, unknowable apocalypse – complete with a typically chilling Mica Levi score. If Embrace of the Serpent ushered in a new era of Heart of Darkness subversions, Monos feels like its most exciting, daring follow-up to date.
Like in Embrace of the Serpent, the most challenging aspect of Monos is getting your bearings. What’s clear is that we’re spending a couple tense hours in the Amazon jungle with a teenage militia as they struggle to maintain control over a political hostage and a sustenance-providing milk cow. The details surrounding that circumstance are continually disorienting as the whos, whys, and whens of the premise are kept deliberately vague. The temporal setting could range from thirty years in the past to thirty years into the apocalyptic future, limited only by the teen soldiers’ codenames being inspired by 80s pop culture references like Rambo & Smurf. The political ideology of The Organization that commands this baby-faced militia is never vocalized, hinted at only by the fact that the mostly POC youth are holding a white woman hostage. The film doesn’t waste any time establishing the rules of the world that surround this violent, jungle-set microcosm. Instead, it chooses to convey only the unrelenting tension & brutality that defines the daily life of this isolated tentacle of a much larger, undefined political resistance. It’s maddening – purposefully so. The sights, sounds, and performances that flood the screen are consistently, impressively intense, especially once they leave the mountaintops to traverse the crushing river rapids below. This is the post-apocalyptic world that past colonizers & adventurers have left behind; it’s a nightmare.
If Embrace of the Serpent & The Lost City of Z look to the past of colonialist exploitation in the Amazon, and Monos looks to its inevitable future, Icaros: A Vision might be a vision of its uneasy present. It’s a psychedelic drama that discusses the ways Amazonian people are still exploited by capitalist & colonial greed to this day, except it focuses more on the psychotropic medicines of the region instead of rubber extraction. Upon recovery from a near-fatal bout with breast cancer, visual artist Leonor Caraballo traveled to Peru to seek therapeutic guidance from the country’s local ayahuasca clinics, specifically the infamous Anaconda Cosmica, to help emotionally process her unexpected confrontation with mortality. While participating in the religious ritual of ingesting the psychotropic plant with the guidance of shamans, Caraballo saw a vision of her own death and returned to her home in Argentina convinced of two things: 1) that she was going to die of the cancer’s soon-to-come aggressive return and 2) that she had to make a film about her experience with the ayahuasca plant. The result of these convictions, Icaros: A Vision, partly serves as a therapeutic processing of dread & grief personal to Caraballo’s story. However, the film also strives to capture the religious reverence Peruvian people find in plants like ayahuasca and to poke fun at outsiders who treat the ritual that helped the filmmaker through her darkest hour like a colonialist act of tourism. Unfortunately, Caraballo did not live to see the completion of her own film; she guided much if its post-production decision making from her death bed with the help of her co-director Matteo Norzi. What she left behind, though, is a visually striking, peacefully meditative look at the culture surrounding ayahuasca rituals, recalling the eerie dreamspace explored in Embrace of the Serpent.
An American woman arrives at Anaconda Cosmica unsure of how ayahuasca rituals can help her process her fear of death and whether she even has the courage to find out. Other patients paying for the privilege of the retreat are addressing issues varying in severity from addiction & self-harm to alleviating a stutter to improve an acting career. The mood of the retreat is decidedly peaceful, a tone commanded by the always-present sounds of the jungle. Invading thoughts of technology, particularly MRI scans of the American woman’s cancer, interrupt the reverie on occasion, but don’t fully elbow out the serenity of the jungle until the nighttime ayahuasca rituals start & end. During the routine ceremonies, a shaman-in-training peers into the various hallucinations of his patients (or “passengers,” in the movie’s parlance) as if he were literally switching channels on a television. The spiritual difference between natural & technological imagery could not be clearer, as the young shaman attempts (through the ritual of meditative breathing & song) to save the paying customers from invading dark thoughts that could spoil their trip. Early on, the film is about his efforts to save the protagonist from the crippling fear of death sparked by her cancer diagnosis. However, at some point that dynamic flips. The American woman, now strengthened by the psychedelic therapy sessions, helps the shaman face his own fears of an incurable medical diagnosis. It’s interesting to see the service industry aspect of their relationships subvert itself as they naturally become better acquainted through the deeply intimate ritual of ayahuasca ingestion, but more importantly the film uses their tender interactions as a purposefully humanist window into a culture that could be depicted as all meditative chants and visual hallucination if not treated with enough open-minded empathy.
Icaros: A Vision is a quiet, still, meditative piece that fully lives up to the visual focus indicated by its title. Everything from muscular river dolphins & the green of the Peruvian jungle to video game imagery & bright florescent piss shape the film’s all-encompassing meditations on life & death. Somehow, the overall effect is more hypnotic than it is showy or gimmicky. Leonor Caraballo’s background as a visual artist shows in the way she carefully frames each isolated hallucination, but her vulnerability & ultimate mortality as a human being is what affords the work a solemn but rewarding purpose. Humor at the expense of “passengers” who treat the Anaconda Cosmica like a luxury hotel and its (non-actor) employees/residents like servants are slyly mocked in a social politics-minded undercurrent of humor. That comedy is just one thread in a larger tapestry, though, and the overall picture includes a hypnotic, but encyclopedic catalog of plants that are important to Peruvian culture, an ethnographic documentation of ayahuasca rituals’ adoption as tourist industry fodder, visual attempts to capture the vivid hallucinations triggered by those rituals, etc. It’s not as outwardly angry of a film as Embrace of the Serpent, but it’s one that brings the same cultural & political criticisms into a modern context that make them even more vivid in my mind.
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