Welcome to Episode #236 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Hanna discuss a selection of genre films that screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, starting with Good Boy (2025), a haunted house story as seen from a dog’s POV.
00:00 Welcome
04:36 Good Boy 17:00 The Ugly Stepsister 30:00 It Ends 36:26 Predators 49:43 Zodiac Killer Project 1:00:53 Dead Lover 1:05:00 The Shrouds 1:16:05 LifeHack 1:20:20 Cloud 1:38:17 Hallow Road
There was a moment during the local premiere of the cyber-heist thriller LifeHack at this year’s Overlook Film Festival when the Canal Place shopping mall’s fire alarm was pulled, disrupting the movie with flashing lights & wailing warnings of a non-existent emergency. In a touch of serendipity, this occurred just when the film’s teenage-gamers-turned-hardened-criminals have invaded the corporate offices of their target, seconds before triggering their own in-film fire alarm to avoid arrest. It wasn’t until that real-life intrusion on the preposterous third-act heist that I realized just how much tension I was feeling as the fictional heat closed in. So much of the movie is guided by teens goofing off online via innocent memes, insults, and flirtations that the audience hardly notices just how high the stakes have become until their crime scheme spectacularly falls apart — despite the story opening with their ringleader being interviewed from prison post-heist.
That carefree flippancy is exactly LifeHack‘s greatest strength as the latest addition to the “screenlife” subgenre (a term coined by its own producer, Timur Bekmambetov). It follows in the footsteps of larger scale screen-capture thrillers like the Unfriended & Missing series (both also produced by Bekmambetov), simulating the user interface of a laptop as its drama unfolds in the free-floating windows of various computer programs, and introducing the audience to a small friend group of video-chatting teens before putting them in peril. Only, most entries in the genre have been, understandably, miserable in tone. The teens in most screenlife thrillers have a nightmare of a time online, hounded by hackers, kidnappers, and ghosts through the screen’s glowing window into their bedrooms. In contrast, the teens of LifeHack are having a grand old time online, constantly joking & pranking their way through what turns out to be a fairly severe, high-profile crime. Even when reacting to the immense danger they find themselves in, their descriptors never escalate beyond inane phrases like “cringe” and “not chill.” It’s just not that serious to them, which in its own way is a unique source of tension for the genre.
It’s difficult to nail down exactly why LifeHack is set in 2018. The references to pop culture iconography like Salad Fingers and the OMC hit “How Bizarre” suggest that director Ronan Corrigan is a little too old to be nostalgic for the late 2010s as his teen years, so it’s possible that the hyperkinetic editing of the film’s dozens of whiz-bang computer programs just took that long to assemble into narrative coherence. The only reason its setting matters, really, is that the four amateur-hacker teens’ cyber-heist is committed against the personal Bitcoin fortune of a right-wing tech bro dipshit who starts to eerily resemble Elon Musk’s public persona the longer the movie dwells on his fake-press details. There are enough Andrew Tates, Peter Thiels, and Jordan Petersons out there that the resemblance to Musk’s real-life persona as the king of the dipshits doesn’t matter much, but the happenstance of the resemblance becomes unignorable by the time the movie’s villain is wielding a flamethrower in press photos with the exact juvenile carelessness that Musk recently wielded a chainsaw. It’s easy to root for the kids to rob him blind.
The mechanics of how they steal his blockchain money, how they get caught, and how they negotiate their way out of the direst consequences of the haywire heist are worth discovering in the film itself rather than in a review. It is a thriller, after all. The only thing you really need to know is that the kids are a delight and their online target is an Alpha Grifter avatar for all modern youth-culture evils, so we’re always rooting for them to wriggle their way out of handcuffs. Personally, I do miss when early screenlife thrillers leaned into the digital, intangible ambiguity of human existence online, so that full-on horror movies like Host & Unfriended could unashamedly deal in the supernatural without limiting themselves to real-world computer logic. However, it is refreshing to see a version of this genre that acknowledges that kids still have fun online, gaming & goofing off with friends they don’t always have the chance to share physical space with. LifeHack is the breeziest, least grim screenlife thriller I can name, and it still manages to spike your heartrate when it needs to.
At the turn of the millennium, Michael Townsend spent five years as a drawing instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design, but unbeknownst to his colleagues, during that time, he and seven other artists were working on something unbelievable. Inspired by a 2003 radio advertisement for the then-new Providence Place Mall in which a woman expressed her excitement about the shopping center’s opening and how it would allow her to get everything that she needed for her life in one place and expressing a desire to “live in the mall,” Townsend set about finding out if this would be possible. Over the next few years, he and several others, including fellow Providence-based artists and even a few of his students, managed to locate an unused vacant space within the mall itself and, over time, turned the 750 square foot “void” into a (mostly) habitable space, before being discovered by the mall’s powers that be and being evicted. In the nearly two decades since, the others who assisted in making the mall their home have remained unnamed—Townsend is no narc—but recently participated in the creation of Jeremy Workman’s most recent documentary, Secret Mall Apartment.
I was intrigued by the premise, but I didn’t expect to be moved by the film. On social media recently, I saw someone calling out the documentary Waiting for Superman as being propaganda for charter schools and denouncing the way that contemporary critics had been too kind to it. This led into a discussion about documentaries that included a quotation about how a documentary that does not improve one’s knowledge about the subject more than reading an article about it is one that should be met with criticism. (With James Gunn’s upcoming Superman film, you can imagine that even with boolean additions, searching for “waiting for superman” was a futile endeavor in trying to find this discussion again.) Secret Mall Apartment is much more than that, weaving together a tale of a group of artists in opposition to gentrification, as well as a more subtle narrative about the ephemeral nature of art, that its beauty (like our lives) are meaningful not because of permanence but because of impermanence. Nowhere is this more clearly made evident than the section of the film which focuses on Townsend (and his students)’s work with in tape art, as instruction (as we see Michael teaching a class of students about using masking tape as a kind of temporary graffiti), as installation (as seen when the camera tours the Hasbro Children’s Hospital and all of the art there that was made by and in collaboration with patients), and as memorial (when Townsend and some of his students spend half a decade creating silhouettes all over Manhattan in the shape of four superimposed hearts).
It’s the last of these that’s the most transitory, as even the website that was used to document this project is now defunct. (When this was noted during the documentary, I wondered if this was true and if the website was really gone, but even when checking the WayBack Machine’s archive, all of the pages I could find looked like this, so it does appear to be well and truly lost.) That transient nature of art is made manifest early on, when Townsend and others speak about the experience of losing Fort Thunder, an underground art collective in a Providence textile factory that hadn’t been in operation since the 1860s; for five years at the end of the last century, the place was used as a living and working space for artists and musicians. However, while the Providence Place Mall was being built—notably with no entry access on the side that faced the Olneyville district that it butted up against—developers turned their eye to that warehouse district as a place that they could further capitalize upon, and they ultimately did destroy Fort Thunder. It was this parasitic ideology, the desire to completely fill out “unused space” in every way possible, that was part of the inspiration for the Providence Place apartment artists, as they, too, were finding a way to fill an empty part of the mall which had come to dominate the city. We also get to explore an outdoor exhibit that Townsend created even earlier, a hidden public space that was only accessible by slipping through train tracks and entering a sort of covered canal, in which he had placed dozens of human figures. That exhibit, Fort Thunder, tape art, the secret apartment itself — all of these things are fleeting. The secret apartment is recreated as a set for the film, and we get to see it being explored by Townsend, his now ex-wife Adriana Valdez-Young, and others, and it serves as a stage to recreate the day that Townsend was caught and apprehended in the apartment. And then, we see it dismantled.
And yet, in all of this, there are things that remain eternal, and which we do carry with us. Several of the other members of the secret apartment crew retain, to this day, the keys used for entry into their protest/clubhouse (the building of a cinder block wall and the installation of a door is one of the highlights of their activity). One of them was originally painted with flames, the image of which has long since been worn away on the key’s surface but remains, in some small form, in the grooves. That’s where we carry art with us, and where it stays—in the grooves. It’s a surprisingly moving piece, and I can’t wait for others to see it.
In the 2000s, Kiyoshi Kurosawa captured the sinister liminality of the early Internet in his online ghost story Pulse. Two decades later, Kurosawa’s Cloud meets the Internet where it currently is in the 2020s: crassly capitalistic and decidedly non-mysterious. Instead of promising a new digital frontier where humanity can diverge from its corporeal form into something new & vaguely defined (and, thus, horrific), the Internet is now just another point of sale for banal, capitalist trade. It’s all empty opportunism as far as the mouse can click, leaving us selfish, isolated, and misanthropic in a competitive market of products instead of ideas. As a result, Kurosawa’s latest rumination on the Nature of the Internet is flatter & hollower that it is imaginative or atmospheric, but the implications of what living online has done to our souls are just as scary as they were in the temporal snapshot of aughts-era online culture in Pulse.
Premiering locally at the horror-leaning Overlook Film Festival, Cloud asksatruly scary question: What if online flamewars became physical, literal, and consequential? It turns out they’d still be at least a little bit silly and a lotta bit pathetic. Masaki Suda stars as a shameless online retailer who buys limited-supply products at wholesale prices en masse to deplete supplies so that he can resell them to desperate buyers at extortionist prices. Think of the pricks who force concerts to immediately, artificially sell out on Ticketmaster for personal profit, and you get the gist. It’s easy to screw his buyers over from the safety of online anonymity, but things turn violent when those buyers band together to get revenge on him in the meat space — threatening to live-stream his torture as retribution for his crimes. Only, even that vigilante organization has been disjointed by the selfishness of online culture, causing them to squabble & fall apart instead of acting as a collective. Deadly slapstick violence ensues.
The flat, digital cinematography of Cloud, combined with the slow escalation of its daylit absurdism, is more reminiscent of Kurosawa’s sci-fi satire Doppelganger than something as moody & menacing as Pulse. As with several other Kurosawa stories, it all culminates in a warehouse shootout, leaving practically everyone dead on the concrete as victims of capitalist violence. It isn’t until Kurosawa pushes past that banal, real-world violence into something more immensely, supernaturally evil in the final coda that the entire picture comes together. Cloud is a slow build to a loud, buffoonish conclusion, followed by a moment of “What have we become?” existential crisis. It’s the kind of movie that only becomes more thematically complex & darkly hilarious the longer you dwell on it after the credits roll. Some of that dwelling is extratextual too, given that its current festival-circuit rollout has been compromised by the film being leaked in its entirety via a Twitter link for brief online clout — the exact kind of selfish, misanthropic behavior that the film satirizes.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the Shaw Brothers’ laser-wizards martial arts actioner Buddha’s Palm (1982).
For anyone out there arguing that movie studios should start cutting “unnecessary” sex scenes for the sin of not “advancing the plot,” I recommend seeking out populist art from earlier, safer decades, when that kind of conservative moralism was more shameless. Take, for instance, the teen-punks-on-the-run love story Times Square from 1980, which had all of its sex & kissing scenes removed post-production by money men who were scared that its queer themes would cut into the film’s profitability. The surviving prints are proof of sex-scene-censorship in action, leaving behind implications of sapphic teen romance without any physical consummation that might scare off the cinematically illiterate who don’t catch on. Of course, this very nearly ruins the movie. Not knowing exactly when the two girls at the center first acknowledge their mutual attraction is alone frustrating enough, but there’s also so much communication & characterization lost by averting the audience’s eyes from their bedroom intimacy that it feels like a story half-told. This is the future Liberals want: sexless, indistinct, defanged. That contingent even gets their own onscreen avatar in the form of the film’s villain, Peter Coffield as a Liberal politician who’s campaigning to “clean up” the smut of late-70s Times Square, to make it safer for families (and business). Eat up, prudes.
That politician’s daughter is effectively our main character: Trini Alvarado as a sheltered Uptown Girl who’s essentially left catatonic by her father’s blowhard moralizing. She’s checked into a mental hospital for being an inconvenience in her father’s busy schedule as a public figure, despite the fact that there’s nothing medically wrong with her. Her hospital roommate is a street-smart punk rocker played by newcomer Robin Johnson (counterbalancing her porcelain-doll fragility with some manic Linda Manz brashness), who might legitimately be mentally ill. The girls quickly bond over mutual disregard for the authority figures in their lives and make a break for it, fleeing the hospital in a stolen ambulance to their new, domestic life squatting in a warehouse by the river. It’s unclear exactly when their friendship tips over into romance, thanks to post-production censorship, but that aspect of their dynamic is undeniably present throughout. They write each other poems, they scream each other’s names, they wear each other’s clothes; they’re in love. Meanwhile, their new life on the streets is turned into a publicity flame war between the Liberal politician who believes Times Square has become an “X-rated” public space in need of governmental censorship and a shock-jock radio DJ who wants to keep the city grimy for the punk-at-heart, played by an especially pouty Tim Curry.
While I don’t think the kissing or sex scenes removed from Times Square would have been redundant, I did laugh at the redundancy of the concluding title card that announces it was “filmed entirely on location in New York City.” This a film that spends half of its runtime strutting up and down 42nd Street in search of classic New York City cool before Giuliani power-washed it off the sidewalk forever. It’s a treasure trove for movie freaks who like to take notes on what’s being advertised on vintage marquees in the background. Its soundtrack is overflowing with classic New York City bands, including The Ramones, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, and that one Talking Heads song where they name-drop CBGB. The runaways aren’t solely fighting to carve out a place for themselves at the edge of adult surveillance & censorship; they’re also fighting to make it big as micro-celebrities in the first-wave NYC punk boom. They brand themselves as The Sleez Sisters, smashing televisions on city streets as a vague protest of modern complacency and crashing the alt radio station to speak directly to their adoring public of frustrated, sheltered teen girls. The major political question at the heart of the film is who really owns New York City, the freaks who walk the concrete or the inhuman politicians who govern their public & private lives from afar? It’s a question with a loud, celebratory answer, as observed from the rooftops by Tim Curry & Robin Johnson, who survey the city streets below from gargoyle perches like a punk-rock Batman.
Times Square is the most [SCENE MISSING]iest movie I’ve fallen in love with in a while. It was crudely chopped to bits by The Man, but its crudeness & messiness is at least appropriate for a story about teenage runaways in love. Director Allan Moyle has, understandably, expressed frustration over the surviving, compromised cut of the film, but he still at least seems proud of its documentation of Times Square’s final days in sleaze, and he effectively plagiarized its rooftop concert ending for his record-store hangout comedy Empire Records years later. The film shares a lot of post-production-fuckery woes with fellow teen-girl-punks-on-the-lam relic The Fabulous Stains, but it likewise has outlived attempts to chop it down and achieved a kind of cult-cinema immortality. To be clear, though, it’s a great film despite its sex-and-smooches censorship, not because of it. Audiences have been robbed of experiencing the film’s full passionate glory by Liberal do-gooders who sought to make a safer, cleaner picture at the expense of honesty & art. It’s the same political principles that scrubbed Times Square clean of all of the grit, smut, and vitality that made it interesting and replaced them with a Disney Mega Store & Guy Fieri’s latest restaurant venture. Congratulations, the streets are no longer X-rated; now it’s just as formless, indistinct, and sanitized as everywhere else in this corporate hell hole of a country.
Hal Hartley’s The Unbelievable Truth is an interesting picture. Robert Burke plays Josh Hutton, a man who returns to his hometown after serving a prison sentence. The truth of what actually happened in the past is something that the film builds to while we in the audience hear various different versions of events passed around as gossip, but all retellings place the blame on Josh for the deaths of his girlfriend and her father. Said deceased are survived only by a young woman named Pearl (Julia McNeal), who works as a waitress in a diner alongside Jane (Edie Falco). Pearl is friends with our other lead, Audry (frequent Hartley collaborator Adrienne Shelly), a high school senior full of relatable angst about the presumed imminent end of the world in nuclear fire; as she says, “the human race never invented anything that it didn’t use.” This existential dread is a counterpoint to the Gen-X apathy of her peers, other than Pearl, whose own childhood tragedies have given her a resilience that tempers her. Josh reappears in town and quickly gets a job working for Audry’s mechanic father Vic (Christopher Cooke), who is frequently at odds with his daughter about her plans for the future. She’s been accepted to Harvard, but she and Vic constantly bargain over whether she will attend that university or the local community college, or if she will study literature or broadcasting, and what promises Vic has to make in order to get her to compromise.
Audry and Josh meet and there is an immediate connection. Both are separated from the community around them, with her as the philosophically inclined old soul and him as the misunderstood loner with a troubled past who loves reading about history. At her graduation party, Vic is talked into paying for a portfolio of photographs for Audry by an agent, and although this initially seems to be nothing but a con, Audry finds work quickly and often. She’s upset that Josh didn’t come to the party, but she and Pearl spend some time together and Pearl admits that she thinks Josh is a nice man despite her family’s history with him and gives Audry the go-ahead to pursue him. Josh, for his part, lives ascetically, dressing all in black like Johnny Cash when he’s not in his mechanic overalls, living in his father’s abandoned house, and abstaining from drinking. This results in him being compared to a member of the cloth multiple times, as his celibacy prompts fellow mechanic Mike (Mark Bailey) to ask him, aghast, “like a priest?” and still later, when Josh asks that Audry not call him “Mr. Hutton,” she counters that she feels like she should call him “Reverend.” Vic isn’t happy to learn about this budding romance and forbids the two from seeing each other, once again bargaining with her about her future and what he’s willing to pay for and what he expects in return (namely that she’ll proceed to go to college as promised after her modeling gap year, and in return he won’t fire Josh). When Audry ends up in a jewelry ad that features her in the nude, Vic is convinced by Mike that Josh is reliable, and thus sends him into the city to bring Audry home.
Released in 1989, The Unbelievable Truth reminds one in some ways of another alliteratively named director’s teenage romance angst film, Cameron Crowe’s Say Anything. Our main character is an oddball, like Lloyd Dobbler, except this time she’s a teenage girl, and what isolates her from her peer group is her resignation to her absolute faith that the apocalypse draws nigh. She’s precocious and bright, but her certainty about the uncertainty of the future means that the moment that she’s given the chance to live in the moment by making decent money as a model, she gets distracted from all of the gloom and doom; this is epitomized when she tells Pearl that she doesn’t even keep up with the news anymore. She’s the one who pursues Josh, not the other way around, and he really only seems to entertain the idea of entering into something romantic with her once she’s matured from experiencing more of the world outside of the suburbs that she’s always known. It’s unclear just how old Josh is, but Burke manages a way to convey both a world-weariness from his time in prison as well as a kind of innocence that he’s managed to maintain a hold on. Audry’s mother tells her a version of the story of Josh’s guilt and when Audry questions it, she says that the girl was too young to remember, but other dialogue implies that Audry was an infant at the time. One gets the feeling that more attention was paid to imagery than to those little details (or the dialogue for that matter).
Another film that this one draws to mind is the 1990s Winona Ryder vehicle Reality Bites, as few other films lean so hard into Gen-X disaffection. The problem is that, when viewed by a modern audience, Reality Bites presents a main couple who both struggle with “selling out” into a lifestyle that is very appealing to anyone of the same age as the characters in every generation since. As Lindsay Ellis put it in one of her video essays years ago, everything is so much worse now, and, in the time since that essay’s release, there has been no further improvement in, uh, anything. Somehow, despite having the same sort of spoiled-for-choice opportunities, Audry remains likable and grounded, and we empathize with her early adulthood ennui and the altering states of being (a) panicked about preparing for a future and (b) resigned to the fact that there is no future. It may just be that Shelly is simply that likeable, like Lloyd Dobler and his boombox.
Stylistically, there’s fun being had here. Having watched several of Hartley’s short films prior to sitting down to this one, I think I was prepared for this to be a film that would, in a scene in which Audry and Josh discuss their passions, be more focused on the images on screen than the dialogue. There are some great performances in scenes between the two, but they appear so sporadically, sprinkled in among scenes where the two monologue at each other with snippets of poetic-sounding but meaningless phrases. Half of these exist in order to provide a reason for some tableau that Hartley has created rather than because they provide further insight into character. This is a mixed bag. But Burke and Shelly sell it, even when it shouldn’t work, and that can also be owed to the presence of the mystery of Josh’s past helps keep the gears moving even when things start to feel like they’re running in place.
Although nothing in the film made me laugh out loud, it has a decent sense of humor. Much of the repartee is pretty good, and it works with these actors. Cooke’s performance as Vic and all the ways that he deludes himself or gets talked into things make him more fun than his curmudgeonly nature would imply. There’s also a pretty good recurring bit where Audry’s ex-boyfriend Emmet (Gary Sauer) keeps physically attacking every man that he sees in Audry’s proximity, as he can’t believe that she would leave him for any other reason than that there is another man. There are interstitials to represent time passing (“A month, maybe two months later”) and as an interjection (“also,” “but”) which feel just irreverent enough for an indie like this. A lot of the jokes read as if they would come off a little too campy if the film weren’t taking itself mostly seriously. For example:
Audry: Did you make love to Josh?” Pearl: No, did you? Audry: No. Pearl: Why not? Audry: I just got here.
On the page, there’s something about that which reads like a joke from Clue, but it’s delivered here in a way that elicits a smile but not quite a laugh. Perhaps the best bit, however, occurs when everyone converges on Josh’s house in the finale for various different reasons, converting the film into a bit of a farce for a while. Pearl has information that could help Josh, Audry has realized that Josh came to New York to look for her and has the wrong idea about her living situation, Vic seeks to confirm that Josh was able to get her back, and Mike is looking for Pearl. It’s fun, and the wrap-up from there is sweet.
I’m not sure that I would recommend this to everyone. The back-and-forth can run on quite a bit sometimes, but it ultimately averages out to be a very lovely movie that will sit on a shelf in your mind and give you warm feelings for a long time to come.
The erotic thriller is alive & well . . . in France and in France only. From François Ozon’s Double Lover to Justine Triet’s Sibyl to Yann Gonzalez’s Knife+Heart, all of the best erotic thrillers in recent memory have been French productions, likely because the European festival circuit is the last surviving refuge for Mid-Budget Movies for Adults. Even the master of the Hollywood erotic thriller, Paul Verhoeven, had to make his most recent contributions to the genre there, in Benedetta & Elle. French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie has been a recent MVP in keeping the genre alive in particular, at least since making his beachside cruising thriller Stranger by the Lake. Lower-profile follow-ups like Staying Vertical and, now, Misericordia have kept up the eroticism of Guiraudie’s 2013 name-maker, even if they’ve strayed a little further from real-world logic into outright surrealism. Staying Vertical found Guiraudie making a Charlie Kauffman-style existential thriller about a writer’s block crisis that spirals its protagonist’s life out of control . . . with unexpected jags of menacing eroticism. With Misericordia, he’s made a surprisingly gentle, grounded variation of the Pasolini classic Teorema . . . with unexpected jags of menacing eroticism. God bless the great nation of France and all the perverts therein, Guiraudie especially.
Drawing inspiration from Terence Stamp’s angelic slut in Teorema, Félix Kysyl stars in Misericorida as a mysterious outsider who serves as the target for an entire community’s sexual desires. Only, in this case he’s not a total stranger to those many, many potential sex partners. Jérémie returns to his hometown from a life in the Big City to mourn the loss of his former employer, the town baker. He lingers beyond the normal funereal mourning process to relive his teen years in the home of the recently widowed baker’s wife, where he’s constantly bombarded by unspoken sexual advances from everyone in the small-town social circle: the widow, her priest, her son, and her son’s best friend – the last two of whom seem totally unaware that they’re even flirting. All of this social pressure and the expiration of his welcome quickly culminate in a violent crime that leaves Jérémie under surveillance & interrogation by the local cops. He spends his days halfheartedly foraging for mushrooms in the woods to appear innocently busy. Meanwhile, he’s paranoid about leading the cops to the shallowly buried evidence of his crime of passion, which has become a suspiciously fertile garden bed for off-season mushrooms. Everyone seems to know he’s guilty, but no one wants to turn him in, in case they might be able to consummate their lust for him. Yet, he can’t leave town without looking like he’s fleeing a crime scene. He’s essentially imprisoned by his fuckability.
There are no actual sex scenes in Misericorida, which sounds absurd for a Teorema riff from the director of Stranger by the Lake. It’s a low-key, autumnal thriller that propels itself with sexual tension, though, often so erotically charged in its otherwise casual exchanges of dialogue that the entire project plays like an understated prank. There’s something undeniably perverse, for instance, when Jérémie is pressured to receive the town priest’s confession from the ordained side of the booth. Although there’s no actual sex, Guiraudie finds room to squeeze in two on-screen dicks – one limp, one erect. There’s even something slyly funny about Félix Kysyl’s costuming as Jérémie, styling the 30-something actor’s hair with an inappropriately boyish look that presents him as a kind of expired twink. Does that look say something about his arrested adolescence, possibly as a result of his past sexual tension with the now-deceased town baker? I have no idea, but it does add to the strangeness of his erotic dynamic with his more geriatric sexual suitors. In general, it’s difficult to pinpoint any specific social commentary or prescriptive point of view in Guiraudie’s work. If his quietly surreal erotic thrillers say anything about the world, it’s just that sex & violence are a constant aspect of human nature, as natural of forces as the wind blowing trees outside. For whatever reason, those winds just seem to blow harder & louder in France.
The Premature Burial is, unfortunately, not very good. The third Roger Corman film based (very loosely, in this case) on an Edgar Allan Poe short story, this was the only film of the eight that the director made which did not star Vincent Price. The story is that while Corman was in dispute with American International Pictures about what project to film next, he was approached by a film printing lab that wanted to get into the production business. They put up half the funding and Corman provided the other half out of his own pocket, but Price was unavailable due to being under contract with AIP. On the first day of shooting for Premature Burial, the two heads of AIP showed up and said that they were excited to be working with Corman again, because they had just that very morning bought out the film lab that Corman had partnered with. As a result, this one ended up being released by American International as well, but it was too late in the process to change horses, and instead of Price, we get Ray Milland in the leading role. Interestingly, the night that my friend and I ended up renting Goodfellas(as discussed recently on the podcast), we were seeking out Corman’s Masque of the Red Death at the video store and were unable to locate it. It was supposed to be in the “double features” section, as it’s paired with Premature Burial on one of those “MGM’s Midnite Movies” DVDs. It wasn’t there, under “P” for “Premature” or “M” for “Masque,” nor could it be found in the general horror section. When I returned Goodfellas the following week, I decided to check again, and there it was, filed correctly. The weird thing was that the person working that day thanked me for finding it, since the person who had assisted me before had marked it as missing in the system. It’s not a very interesting story, but it is more than you’re going to get from Premature Burial.
After an opening sequence in which a gaggle of grave robbers are digging up a body only to discover the inside of the coffin lid streaked with blood and tattered from scratching, we open on Emily Gault (Hazel Court). She’s arrived at the manor house—on a perpetually misty soundstage moor, of course—of her beloved, Guy (Milland), and although Guy’s sister Kate (Heather Angel) attempts to send her away, Emily insists that if Guy won’t receive her, he must tell her to her face. Kate relents, and we learn that Guy is a pupil of her father, Dr. Gault (Alan Napier), and that Dr. Gault and Guy were present at the desecration of the coffin in the pre-title opening, with Guy feeling so embarrassed about having fainted that he’s ready to end their engagement rather than admit the truth. He reveals that his family has a predilection toward catalepsy, that is to say that they enter into a comatose state that so closely mimics death that he believes his father was buried alive, as he recalls hearing him screaming within his tomb in the catacombs beneath the manor. As a result, he also possesses a paralyzing fear that he will be entombed while still alive, a fear that seeing the corpse that had tried to dig its way out triggered. Emily convinces him that they can work through it together, and he agrees to proceed with their wedding.
At the ceremony, we meet Miles Archer (Richard Ney), whose repeated insistence that he’s truly happy for Emily telegraphs that he and Emily were once in love but that he has lost her. Emily sits at the pianoforte and plays the song “Molly Malone,” which causes Guy to spiral further, as this was the same tune that was hummed by the gravediggers on the night that he went out with Dr. Gault and saw the man who had clawed at the inside of the coffin. Guy then builds an elaborate freestanding tomb with layer upon layer of failsafes that would allow him to escape if he were entombed there prematurely, including a rope ladder that appears at the pull of a sash, digging tools (and tools for the repair of digging tools), and even a couple of sticks of dynamite. The final safeguard, of course, is a dose of poison, so that he could kill himself quickly rather than die slowly. Emily convinces him to get out of this morbid place and go for a walk on the moors, but when he hears “Molly Malone” being whistled, he and Emily are parted, so that she does not see the grave robbers who appear out of the fog (or do they?) to torment Guy.
It’s at this point in the film that my already taxed investment hit an all time low. Guy passes out, and then he has an extended dream sequence in which he is locked in his fancy foolproof tomb, only for all of his various and sundry plans to fall apart. The rope ladder falls from the ceiling, unanchored. The dynamite has dry rotted and crumbles under his touch. When Guy was showing all of his contraptions to Emily and Miles (and thus to the audience), this was already tedious enough, but now we have to go through essentially the same motions and at the same speed, just watching everything not work. It’s the scene that serves as a microcosm of just how much this whole film simply doesn’t work, as Guy runs through the same cycles of depression and paranoia in a way that may be meant to evoke a descent into madness but which ultimately feels repetitive and tiresome. Milland is trying here, I suppose, but there’s never a point before his obsession that we get to meet him and know him as a mentally healthy person, so there’s not that far for him to fall from the person we meet in the first scene to the person he becomes when he actually does get buried alive and then wreaks havoc on those who have wronged him. It’s a short trip between those two mental states, but it takes over an hour to get there.
The pace does quicken a bit around the middle. Emily gives a fairly well written and delivered speech in which she tells Guy that his obsessive fear of being buried alive has made him functionally do exactly that, as he spends his days fully within his tomb. There’s also a bit of fun to be had when someone sneaks down to the family basement and messes around with Guy’s father’s crypt, so that when Kate seeks to prove that their father died peacefully by opening his tomb, Guy’s fears seem to come to life, as it appears his father tried to escape. Things quickly peter out by the end, however, and the reveal of the architect of this attempt to drive Guy mad is hardly surprising. Even if you’re a Poe or a Corman completist, this is one that I can recommend that you skip.
When I think of movies about The Banality of Evil, I generally expect them to be a little, well, banal. The reason The Zone of Interest is such an effectively chilling picture, for instance, is that its visual patina and its editing rhythms are just as coldly impersonal as its Nazi ghouls. It’s framed as automated security-cam footage, documenting the domestic & bureaucratic rituals behind Nazi violence, while Holocaust victims ambiently scream in agony on the opposite side of the garden wall. Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 spy thriller The Conformist takes the opposite approach. The Italo-French co-production is mostly staged in cold, clinical spaces, but its minimalist mise-en-scène is more akin to the fine-art production design of Last Year at Marienbad than anything credibly bureaucratic. The women in its cast model gorgeous 1930s Euro fashions, while the men in their lives dress in full Old Hollywood noir costume, segmented by the graphic parallel lines of Venetian blinds. Driving cars are shot in a wide angle from street level, as if Bertolucci was the main inspiration for Beastie Boys music videos to follow. The rear-projection imagery of train rides are pure Old Hollywood magic, reaching more for pop-art abstraction than real-world novelty. There’s something outright perverse in making a movie about The Banality of Evil so aggressively stylish & beautiful. Somehow, though, that approach doesn’t even register as one of the top-five most perverse things about the picture.
If Bertolucci was trying to make a point by making his Banality of Evil treatise so achingly beautiful & cool (besides attempting to make a name for himself as an up-and-coming auteur), it’s that the Banality itself is contrary to basic human behavior. Our antihero protagonist Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is an undercover assassin struggling to complete his most recent mission because he falls in love with his target’s bisexual wife, likely because he recognizes a mutual queer sexuality in her that lingers in his own persona. However, as the title indicates, he spends his every waking moment suppressing anything about himself that could be read as morally deviant, mostly in response to the childhood trauma of being raised by mentally ill parents and being sexually assaulted by an adult stranger. Marcello volunteers to become an assassin-spy for Mussolini’s Italo-fascist regime, seeking to squash all moral deviancy in others’ behaviors instead of just focusing on his own. When a former professor & mentor (and current political target) accuses him of asserting his conformist moralism “through oppression,” he counters that he’s actually asserting it “through example,” which is so much stranger and more perverse. Fascists don’t usually buy into the restrictive morals they enforce on the masses, at least not behind closed doors. Clerici is the one true believer in fascist bullshit, seeking the ideal of normalcy in a world where it fundamentally can’t exist.
Clerici’s rigid, moralistic worldview is constantly subverted by the animalistic sexual desires & behaviors of every human being he comes into contact with, including himself. The main thrust of the story concerns a semi-requited love triangle with his friend-turned-target’s wife while she torments him by sexually pursuing his own wife, who is too blissfully ditzy to keep up with the dangerous game being played. The tensions & revelations of that sexual competition ultimately have no effect on his actions in the field, since he’s pathologically predisposed to do What He’s Supposed to Do. The only reason he married a woman he doesn’t love is because a man his age is supposed to be married. Likewise, there’s never really any question of whether he will follow through on violently betraying his former mentor; he loves following orders. The Conformist posits Evil Banality as a participatory choice. It’s something that fascists consciously opt into, as opposed to getting swept up in the momentum of a political movement. Bertolucci undercuts any of the spy-thriller conventions of the story to instead dwell on how inhumanly strange that choice is, allowing editor Franco Arcalli to scramble the timeline with a disorienting, overlapping flashback structure. It’s ultimately a hyper-stylized character study of a deeply perverse man, one whose single-minded pursuit of normal human behavior makes him the most abnormal freak walking the planet. Meanwhile, everyone around him is just trying to enjoy a few orgasms before they die, which is the way things are supposed to be.
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