Dark Match (2025)

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Very early on in the first year of Swampflix, I reviewed a bad-on-purpose horror comedy called WolfCop, about a werewolf who’s “half man, half wolf, and all cop”. I remember having fun with the absurd novelty of that film’s premise and throwback 80s aesthetic, but I also remember finding the plot-heavy journey to those pleasures to be frustratingly tedious. A decade later, not much has changed. WolfCop director Lowell Dean has a new straight-to-Shudder horror film called Dark Match that repeats all the exact highs and lows of his werewolf-cop movie, except now mapped to the milieu of 1980s regional pro wrestling circuits. Infinity Pool & Possessor cinematographer Karim Hussain makes great use of Dark Match‘s late-80s setting by submerging its hyperviolent pro wrestling matches under a thick layer of VHS haze, often shooting its actors in uncomfortable, drunken close-ups like an unexperienced videographer operating the era’s bulky cameras for the very first time. The story also works its way up to a fun, bloody bar-napkin premise once it lures its minor pro wrestling promotion out to a backwoods cult compound for untelevised death matches, which turn out to be a Satanic ritual involving novelty weapons themed to Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water. The problem is that it’s a long, trudging journey to the over-the-top joys of that core premise, repeating all of the sins and virtues of WolfCop along the way.

If there’s anything that’s improved about Lowell Dean’s high-premise genre exercises in the past decade, it’s in Dark Match‘s tonal progression towards sincerity. Wrestling hall-of-famer Chris Jericho hams it up as the rural cult leader who’s engineered the death matches that liven up the third act, but he’s mostly included as a prop. Aisha Issa stars as our POV wrestler, Miss Behave, who’s the most talented grappler on her promotion’s roster but has to play heel due to the small-town racism of the venues they entertain. A stunted career spent putting over bubbly blonde white women leaves the Trinidadian cynic in an eternally rotten mood, which makes her sharply aware of the sour vibes at the Satanic cult’s pro wrestling sleepaway camp long before the death matches’ decapitations & disembowelings. The resulting tension falls somewhere between a straight-to-streaming knockoff of Get Out and a straight-to-streaming knockoff of Green Room, paling in comparison to either overt reference point. Thankfully, the four killer wrestling bouts at the center of the film liven things up with some true, gruesome novelty, and the sincerity of Miss Behave’s journey to that violent escalation prevent it from devolving into winking, smug irony. Unfortunately, those matches make up less than a third of the total runtime, and the remaining scenes of sincere drama are effectively dead air.

For a much more efficient, satisfying version of what Dark Match is going for, check out the 2011 novelty horror Monster Brawl, which simulates a feature-length pro wrestling Pay-Per-View where all of the combatants are Famous Monster archetypes: a werewolf, a mummy, a zombie, a Frankenstein, etc. However, please keep in mind that everyone I recommend that movie to absolutely hates it. Dark Match only truly comes alive during its gore-gimmicked pro wrestling bouts, having obvious fun with the visual textures of vintage TV broadcasts of the sport (despite the implications of its title). Monster Brawl maintains kayfabe for its entire runtime, never breaking from its TV broadcast premise for jags of dramatic tedium. That fully committed format leaves a lot more room for supernaturally violent in-ring action, which is the only reason an audience would stream one of these novelty horrors in the first place. Given that Monster Brawl is loved by seemingly no one but me, maybe it doesn’t matter that Dark Match falls short of its fully-fleshed-out ideal. Maybe all that matters is that, like Lowell Dean, I’m still wasting my time on disposable trivialities like this ten years since our last passing moment together. Regardless of whether the movies that bond us are any good, we are brothers in schlock.

-Brandon Ledet

Companion (2025)

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It’s no surprise that Companion is advertised by association with producer Zach Creggers’s previous film Barbarian, as there’s a lot of fun being had by mixing an inconsistent light tone with a genuinely tense horror atmosphere, bending what could otherwise be pretty straightforward genre fare into something novel. Iris (Sophie Thatcher) is the sweetly innocent girlfriend of Josh (Jack Quaid), with whom she had a cute first meeting at a supermarket. The film opens on them making their way to the lakehouse of Sergey (Rupert Friend), who is the boyfriend of Josh’s friend Kat (Megan Suri). Also joining for the weekend are Kat and Josh’s old friend Eli (Harvey Guillén), and Eli’s partner Patrick (Lucas Gage). After an awkward interaction between Kat and Iris that establishes Iris’s belief that Kat hates her isn’t all in her head, the group has a little dance party and Iris’s reaction to the story of Patrick and Eli’s own meet cute implies she may be overinvested in her relationship. Things go completely awry the next morning when Sergey attempts to assault Iris while the two are alone at the lake shore, with deadly results. 

I’m going to go into BIG SPOILERS here, even though I’m not sure we can even call them that, since the marketing for this film has largely given it away. In fact, one of the friends that I invited to the screening I attended spoiled herself from the trailer so much that she decided she didn’t even want to see it. It’s almost impossible to talk about this movie without getting into it. Still here? Okay. The title “Companion” isn’t just about Iris being Josh’s girlfriend; it relates to the fact that she is a gynoid girlfriend. If you manage to avoid being spoiled for this, as I was, this is foreshadowed several times. First, Iris awakens in the car when Josh says “Iris, wake up,” which doesn’t seem unusual at that time but later turns out to be her activation phrase (with its inverse being her sleep mode instruction). She’s also extremely polite to Josh’s self-driving car, which seems to bemuse him, and Kat later tells Iris that the latter’s existence makes her feel replaceable. The hints get thicker as the revelation approaches, like when Iris responds with precise temperature and forecast information when Josh asks her what the weather will be like that day. 

Iris herself is a model from the Empathix company, and although the companionship droids that they provide have safeguards built in—the same strength as a human of the same build, programming that prevents the droids from harming people or other living things, and an inability to lie—Josh has “jailbroken” her so that she responded with lethal force to Sergey. This is part of an elaborate plan between Josh and Kat to steal Sergey’s money, with Patrick and Eli in attendance to unwittingly provide corroborating testimony that Sergey was killed by Iris. When Josh reactivates Iris in order to “say goodbye,” he sets up his own downfall, as she is able to escape from the lakehouse and flee into the wilderness nearby, and Josh et al must track her down and reboot her before the police arrive in order to disguise his complicity in her reprogramming and ensure their impunity in Sergey’s death. 

Like Barbarian before it, this is an exciting ride with twists and turns beyond the initial reveal that Iris isn’t the girl she seems to be that propel the action along. Jack Quaid plays a variation on his 5cream character, the seemingly nice, perfect boyfriend who turns out to be a pathetic manchild whose motivations are driven by a sense of entitlement. In that slasher, it was that he was a superfan with a grudge (“How can fandom be toxic?”). Here, he’s a seemingly unambitious man who rants about nice guys finishing last and demonstrates other such personality flaws. That’s two-for-two for movies getting a lot of mileage out of Quaid’s cute face and presumed innocence, but I hope we don’t go to that well too often (this screening featured a trailer for his upcoming action-hero-who-can’t-feel-pain flick Novocaine, and it’s nice to see him doing something different). I praised Sophie Thatcher up and down for her work in Heretic, and she carries this movie with aplomb. Iris is both Sarah Connor and the Terminator (a comparison that the film makes textual through both recreating the metal endoskeletal hand scene and putting a killer android in a police uniform à la T2), determined but not unstoppable. I’m sure a lot of this may seem derivative to some: yes, we also saw sliders for personality traits for robotic humans on Westworld; yes, this is in some ways another take on The Stepford Wives. But all writing is rewriting and all creation is remixing, and Companion is clever and novel in its approach. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Feels Good Man (2020)

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The first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidential term have surprisingly been defined more by the daily stunts & shenanigans of unelected government official Elon Musk than they have been by the actions of the president himself. Sure, Trump is signing a relentless barrage of hateful, unconstitutional Executive Orders that are threatening to crumble decades of social & economic progress in a matter of days. That was fully expected, though, especially if you paid any attention to the “Project 2025” agenda advertised during his election campaign. Musk’s overt, oligarchic influence on these Executive Branch actions have been just as nefarious but much more bizarre, especially as an extension of the failed meme humor of his current reign as the Villain King of Twitter. It’s not enough that Trump & Musk are wielding institutional power to reshape America with a straight-up Nazi agenda; they’re also irony-washing that Nazi ideology through several layers of internet meme humor, so that their above-board, bought-and-paid-for coup is read as a humorous prank meant to “trigger the libs,” not to welcome in a new, shameless era of American fascism. Between Musk’s “DOGE” branding, his juvenile obsession with the numbers 69 & 420, and the bar now being so low that his executing a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration now qualifies as a “dog whistle,” it’s clear that we’re living through America’s first 4chan presidency. Evil has never been so inane.

If you catch yourself wondering how, exactly, we got here over the last few years, I’ve seen no better explainer than the 2020 documentary Feels Good Man. A 90-minute history lesson on the memeification of a cartoon stoner frog may sound trivial in the context of America’s Nazi takeover, but Feels Good Man somehow does a better job explaining & contextualizing that far-right political shift than any other film I’ve seen – predating and overriding all of those QAnon docs that auto-populated on every streaming service in the years following the January 6 coup attempt of 2021. The stoner frog in question is, of course, Pepe the Frog, the breakout character from alt-comics artist Matt Furie’s cult series Boys Club. A soft-spoken San Francisco stoner who’s been drawing goofy frog doodles his entire life, Furie confides that Pepe is the Boys Club character he most personally identifies with . . . which is a brave thing to admit given the character’s eventual perversion and radicalization in the Hell pits of 4chan once it escaped the pages of his comic book. A single frame of Boys Club in which Pepe explains to his burnout roommates that he urinates with his pants completely lowered to his ankles because it “feels good man” was a funny enough image that it started getting shared on the internet outside the context of its source material and, as the movie argues, somehow snowballed into Donald Trump becoming the 45th President of the United States.

I have a general affection for Anthropology of the Internet documentaries that immortalize disposable online ephemera for cinematic prosperity, especially when they capture the sinister atmosphere of the Internet’s dankest dungeons (see also: the Russian dashcam compilation The Road Movie, the evil-clown sightings doc Wrinkles the Clown, and Jane Schoenbrun’s Slenderman doc A Self-Induced Hallucination). Even so, Feels Good Man does a better job than most at explaining how its own subject’s online virality led to real-world consequences outside niche meme forums. It chronicles Pepe the Frog’s transformation in the hellfires of 4chan from loveable frog to “the new swastika”, explaining how users who identified with Pepe as much as its creator had to force the frog to “go dark” to protect him from “normies” (i.e., women) who might identify with him as well. Because 4chan is an attention-economy culture that mostly traffics in “ironic” racism, this effort manifested as Pepe becoming a mouthpiece for Nazi rhetoric and an online dog whistle for alt-right C.H.U.D.s. Making Pepe as bigoted as possible became a kind of online game, and it gave real-world Right Wing ghouls a way to signal to the keyboard Nazis at home that the Trump-led establishment shared their values without abandoning their more buttoned-up, traditional voter base. That co-opting seems a little quaint now that Elon Musk is Sieg Heiling on an official government stage, but it was a major stepping stone that led us here.

The half of Feels Good Man that explains how 4chan memes created a new Nazi America is populated with all the expected demons of 2010s alt-right ascension. Pepe’s Nazi radicalization was directly inspired by Steve Bannon’s political strategy to “flood the zone with shit,” which has become the go-to playbook for the Trump-led Republican Party. During the infamous street interview when Richard Spencer is punched in the face by a protester, he’s explaining his Pepe the Frog lapel pin to a reporter at the moment the fist connects with his jaw (which the movie graciously repeats in several loops for our viewing pleasure). Pepe is even transformed into a direct stand-in for Trump himself, outfitted with a new smug facial expression and a Trumpian wig. Most critically, former Infowars blowhard Alex Jones is sued for copyright infringement by Matt Furie after using Pepe’s image on a fundraising campaign poster, marking Furie’s too-little-too-late attempt to reclaim his intellectual property from the worst people alive. The half of the film that’s about Furie’s astonishment & unpreparedness for the Internet’s hateful perversion of Pepe is adorably naive and populated with fellow alt-comics artists who are sad to see their friend suffer in this exponentially shitty shithole of a world: Lisa Hanawalt, Johnny Ryan, Aiyana Udesen, etc. Their attempt to reclaim Pepe and save his reputation was heavily outgunned, though, since the opposition included literal White House occupants.

It’s easy to roll your eyes at the twee preciousness of Furie’s pleas for good vibes and kindness as opposition against the hateful scum who’ve stolen & desecrated his art, but I appreciate the sentiment. I could not have sat through an exhaustive recounting of how 4chan “elected a meme as a president” and ushered in a Fourth Reich for the LOLs without a little kindness & levity. Being reminded that there are still sweet, reasonable people in the world who are oblivious to the deep well of evil on the other side of their computer screens was a calming counterbalance to the infuriating co-opting of meme culture to enact real-world fascism detailed elsewhere in the film. Five years later, it’s clear which side of that divide is winning the Culture War, but it’s also clear that they cannot create anything substantial themselves worthy of sharing & celebrating; they can only pervert, corrupt, and drain the humor & life out of previously existing art & language (which explains their more recent fondness for generative A.I.). As evidenced by the interstitial animations that imagine what it might be like if Boys Club had been adapted into a psychedelic Adult Swim sitcom instead of a Nazi dog whistle, Pepe deserved so much better than the hell-world we live in. He’s a cool frog.

-Brandon Ledet

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (2025)

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Nearly ten years ago, a trove of presumed lost photographic prints and negatives belonging to the late exiled South African photographer Ernest Cole was discovered in several Swiss bank deposit boxes. Cole, born in 1940, was a critical component in the eventual overturning of the policies of apartheid in South Africa, as the 1967 release of his photobook House of Bondage was one of the first pieces of media to expose the inhuman cruelties occurring in South Africa under the hand of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd (the “architect of apartheid”). Exiled as a result of this act of activism, Cole ended up in the United States, where he ultimately died—essentially homeless—in 1990. At the time, much of his work, which he had stored in a boarding house storeroom and had been unable to regain access to, was assumed to have been tossed out and lost forever, until the 2017 Swiss bank discovery. One of Cole’s last living relatives, a nephew, was flown into the country to collect these items, and found himself unable to get any information about why his uncle’s work had ended up in the safe at this bank, who had deposited it, or how they had paid for it. 

Ernest Cole: Lost and Found spends some time on this Swiss mystery, and I want to get that out of the way first since it is, to me, the least important aspect of this documentary. When it was first mentioned that Cole’s assumed-lost work had been found intact and preserved in the SEB vault, I considered this a cause for joy, and it didn’t occur to me to presume malice on the part of whoever put it there. Surely, it would have to be someone who wanted to keep that material safe and preserved. If someone wanted to get rid of his documentation of social injustice, they would just destroy it, right? Once we learn later in the documentary that Cole’s mental (and physical) health had degraded to the point that he was unable to regain possession of his work before his death, one could almost imagine some Good Samaritan rescuing the work from being hauled away in the back of a sanitation truck, although this doesn’t explain how it ended up on the other side of the Atlantic. When the doc revealed that there were a remaining 504 photographs that the Swiss government was still fighting for possession of with Cole’s estate, I was a bit more convinced of the possibility of malintent on the part of whomever had spirited away Cole’s work. It was only after I started to write this paragraph that it struck me that I might be failing to inspect the colonialism of the idea altogether since any preservationist instinct that removed art from Africa to “protect” it by storing it in Europe is, well … colonialist by default. We may never know how a collection of Cole’s work ended up there, but its return to Cole’s family prompted filmmaker Raoul Peck to create Lost and Found, and it’s an unequivocal good that this film exists. 

Nearly all of the footage within the film is Cole’s own, as are the words; LaKeith Stanfield provides voiceover that is taken from Cole’s correspondence and other writings, weaving together the narrative of a life. Cole talks about where he grew up, how a racist campaign of term-redefinition and expansionist neologisms led to the destruction of homes, communities, and families of native Africans under European rule. He escaped with his negatives and published House of Bondage, and as a result of his political exile, found himself adrift in a world that he had no hand in making and in which he could find little purchase. An attempt to expose the racism of the American South as he had the racism of South Africa was mounted, with Cole being sponsored by publishers to travel, but contemporary critics were less receptive to this work. Whether this is purely a matter of Western tendencies to find depictions of injustice abroad moving and empathy-inspiring while bristling when we see it in the mirror, or if there is some validity to the idea that his artistic eye was less capable of capturing the emotion of his subjects because of the cultural differences between the kind of racism that they experienced, I shall leave to your discretion. Despite the horrors of what he saw at home, his exile had a profoundly depressive effect on Cole, leaving him constantly in search of work and making it nearly impossible for him to keep a residence for long. Changes in leadership at publishing houses would mean that he was only half paid for a job and thus never finished it, and the discrepancies between how Cole would describe himself in his journals (not depressed) versus how his friends remember him to have been at the time (severely affected by depression) reveal a man who was lost, alone, and who never fully recovered from what he witnessed in his youth. Ultimately, he never did return home, although his aged mother was able to be at his bedside in New York when he died on February 19, 1990, just eight days after Nelson Mandela was released from prison in one of the defining moments in the collapse of the apartheid regime within the next few years. 

This documentary is deeply felt, wonderfully composed, and unfortunately timely. The portrait of Cole that is created is a warm but not overly sentimental one. The narrative choice to use only Cole’s words is one that means that the voiceover informs but does not contextualize and, thus, requires you to build the story yourself from the juxtaposition and editing rather than having your hand held about what you should be thinking or how you should feel. One feature that stood out to me particularly was the frequent appearance of filmed political speeches and U.N. forums that, for decades, repeated the same tired canards justifying a lack of embargoes or sanctions against South Africa. “It would only harm those we are trying to help” says the U.N. president in grainy black and white footage from the 1960s, and which is said again by his successor in the 1970s, before being repeated almost word-for-word in vibrant color video of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I have to be honest with you; it’s bleak, and the portrait it paints of what’s in store for us in the coming years is even bleaker. When House of Bondage was released, it created a sense of moral outrage in the populace that, even at full force, was completely incapable of causing national and international leadership to take any action to end apartheid. We’ve spent the last 15 months with constant, new images of harrowing, monstrous, evil violence enacted by an apartheid state that currently exists, and the modern American is so inured to this kind of wickedness that the coalition of those who are rightly horrified is mocked, belittled, shouted down, fired, and legally silenced by conmen, grifters, and empowered bigots. If it took two and a half decades for apartheid to fall despite international (citizen-level) support for its abolition, then it does not bode well for the end of any current campaign of government terror, when people are unmoved by the plight of their fellow man. The past is never dead. It is not even the past. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Cruise (1998)

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Collecting over three years of footage, 1998 saw the release of Bennett Miller (Moneyball, Foxcatcher, Capote)’s hilarious documentary The Cruise, centering around oddball New Yorker Timothy “Speed” Levitch. Throughout the 90s, Levitch was a guide for various New York sightseeing tours; during the time in which the doc was filmed, he was working for Gray Line, with whom he has a contentious relationship, while he and a former co-worker fondly recall having worked for Apple Tours in the past. The film takes its title from Levitch’s life philosophy about “cruising” (no relation), an idiosyncratic ideology about how life “should” flow. This approach to life finds Levitch working twenty hours a week giving tours (no more, no less) and spending the rest of his time enjoying “the cruise.” In many ways, his belief system is more about what systems and concepts he defines as being “anti-cruise,” which range from the obvious examples like the institution of policing, to more personal examples like people who have personally wronged him and Gray Line for instituting the use of work uniform shirts, to more esoteric instances like the NYC grid pattern.

Levitch’s New York is a more complex presentation than we normally get, as most of the people who are interested in showing off “their” New York usually follow a virtually identical script where they fellate the city to the point of apotheosis. I don’t have any particular dislike for the city—I quite enjoy myself there—but in all cities there is a vocal chorus about how their city is the best city in the world, baby! (For those of you based in Swampflix’s home of New Orleans, you’ll recognize this hometown tendency from the number of shirts that say “Only New Orleans is real, everything else is smoke and mirrors,” etc.) Like most of the things that people consider to be unique about their city, this is not unique to New York, but because of the sheer amount of our shared media that is produced there, it is the one whose citizen propaganda is often spread farthest and widest. As such, I don’t blame anyone who’s sick of it, but this is a piece of filmic art that shows something a little different, a more thoughtful, critical, and nuanced portrait of a city that could only come from one particular point of view. 

Of course, that’s not to say that the New York of Levitch and Miller still exists. As a document of the end of the twentieth century, the film is in fascinating conversation with Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, a collection of essays about the New York that was and its counterpoint in the New York that is, mostly drawing attention to the way that the Giuliani administration transformed the city into a real estate investment and playground for the rich and helped to institutionalize and cement the strata of class difference. Levitch is a man who is homeless but never unhoused, gliding (or rather, cruising) through life as a series of couch surfing and house sitting adventures, sustaining his lifestyle through the delivery of screeds for and against the city to a captive audience. Levitch’s NYC is ephemeral and fleeting, and nowhere is this more present than in a notable sequence in which Levitch tells someone that one of his favorite activities is to go to the plaza between the World Trade Center towers and spin around until he makes himself dizzy, then lie down on the ground and look up at them so that he feels like they’re falling down on top of him. 

We get a great taste for what a tour from Levitch would be like, as he pontificates how many blocks apart certain writers and other artists lived from where they are passing, about the unity of those actors and playwrights in a singular city and in a singular past is less interesting than the difference and distance between those thinkers in space and time. Art and artistry are delineated through proximity but not bound together by it, except in the ways that Levitch weaves together disparate facts into a cohesive whole. He’s obviously well-versed in the city’s rich history, with him occasionally delivering off-the-cuff lessons in architecture to the documentarian following him on the street during his “off hours.” He calls attention to the undulation of the curves of ceramic building shells—better than stone because of its lighter weight and easier affixation to the steel that undergirds the construction—and then, in a kind of religious spasm, compares the curvature of the building to the shape of a woman and makes noises of rapture. He describes the “utter catharsis” of architecture as phallic enterprise in the body of the Empire State Building from within “its silhouette.” He’s exactly the kind of person that it’s wonderful to be able to observe from a distance, to get to know through the remove of the camera lens, because while he’s very funny and is a fantastic entertainer, he is exactly the kind of person one would imagine has an energy that it would be difficult to be in the presence of for longer than the length of a sightseeing tour.

Levitch is a person who’s too much of a character to be fictional, a man who, if he were generated from the mind of an author, would be too grating and strange for us to identify with, but because he is a real person in our real world, we must accept his existence as fact. A font of unconventional wisdom with a vast knowledge of history and literature, there are moments when I found myself identifying with him very much. There’s a particularly fun bit near the end in which Levitch goes on a tirade about all of the people who have wronged him in his life, from unrequited childhood crushes to teachers to members of his family, and it’s wonderful stuff. I’m sorry that I never got the chance to get a tour from Levitch, even if I can’t help but wonder if I’d ever fully recover from the experience. As the film is currently in re-release, the local arthouse where I attended a screening noted that they had reached out to the distributor to see if it would be possible to have Levitch do a Q&A or even just videoconference in for an introduction. Apparently, the distributor said that this was far from the first request of this kind that they had fielded, but that “[they]’re having trouble finding him.” What a legacy; in fact, I fear that having to comment on this might be too anti-cruise for him to want to participate, so there’s a part of me that hopes they never find him, and he’s still out there, unfettered.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #231: 187 (1997) & Inner-City Schools

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Welcome to Episode #231 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss a grab bag of 90s movies about well-meaning teachers confronted with the violent chaos of inner-city schools, starting with the 1997 Sam Jackson vehicle 187.

00:00 Welcome

01:55 Presence (2025)
02:56 The Brutalist (2024)
06:14 The Cranes are Flying (1957)
08:17 The Lives of Others (2006)
14:39 It’s Complicated (2009)
18:13 Two Days in Paris (2007)
20:48 Willard (1971)
23:12 The Colors Within (2025)

28:17 187 (1997)
50:06 Dangerous Minds (1995)
1:03:17 Sister Act 2 – Back in the Habit (1993)
1:24:16 High School High (1996)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

The Colors Within (2025)

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The coming-of-age anime drama The Colors Within is about a teenager with extreme synesthesia who forms a synthpop band to express her unusual relationship with color through song. It’s a much gentler picture than that descriptor implies. Naoko Yamada’s color-pencil sketchbook vision is exceptionally quiet for a story about teenage rock ‘n rollers and exceptionally pale for an animated movie about the divine beauty of color. It celebrates the soft smears of color you see when you view the world without eyeglasses. It dwells in the dead air of band practice as the collective idea of a song is just starting to materialize, before it has any foundational structure to cling to. The three members of the band are each fragile recluses who spook easy, to the point where you’re skeptical that they’ll ever have the courage to perform for an audience. When all that restraint melts away during the climactic concert, however, the relief of its release feels good enough to make you cry.

Our protagonist is an adorable, shy teenager who can only relate to the people around her by reading the colors of their auras. Her sweetness and mental abstraction are a kind of social liability, so her only real friend at her Catholic boarding school is a well-meaning nun who encourages her to find “secular ways to honor God” outside the official curriculum. The opportunity to do so presents itself when an older, more rebellious classmate drops out to work at a local bookstore, and a panicked schoolgirl crush inspires her to demand they start a band together to keep in touch. A third lonely, shy musician who hangs around the bookstore brings the project together, but it’s a triumph that mostly manifests as long stretches of downtime between sparse songwriting sessions.

While our protagonist’s synesthesia is presented as a defining character trait, it really doesn’t affect her journey to self and communal discovery except in providing the language to express something she can’t otherwise vocalize. This is mostly a story about youthful, innocent yearning, both in romance and in art. Every member of the band has a secret, both in their unexpressed attraction to each other and in the ways their individual duties to education, work, and religion conflict with their art project. A lot of their yearning is just the desire to spend more time creating that art, finding it difficult to engineer opportunities to all meet in one place, working on one idea. I remember finding time to practice to be an eternal struggle back when I used to write songs for punk bands in high school & college, but I also remember the times when everything aligned just right for us to play songs together satisfying my soul like few other joys of my youth. It’s easy to be nostalgic while returning to that distinctly teenage headspace, so the story can feel like it’s set decades in the past despite all the smartphones and laptops.

The music our trio of sweethearts eventually plays together is catchy, soulful, and well worth the effort of waiting through the stunted progress of its writing. It’s also the music of dissociation, finding immense beauty, joy, and creative expression through the distinctly intangible sounds of synths, theremin, and guitar feedback. Synthpop is a perfect aesthetic choice for a character who sees the world through hazy, swirling aesthetics. It gives her a way to reinterpret her visions of color into the sounds of color, in the process expressing her love for her bandmates in a more direct way than she could previously express anything about anyone. None of the routine prayer nor rigid interpretation of God’s will at her Catholic boarding school ever approaches anything so purely divine. Thankfully, there was one cool nun around to help her see the positive value in those secular pleasures without feeling any unnecessary, residual shame for the indulgence. This is how I remember writing songs with my friends feeling at that age, but that is not at all how I remember my own Catholic schooling.

-Brandon Ledet

Presence (2025)

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There’s a playfulness in the basic tech and form of every Steven Soderbergh picture that invites us to wonder what new toy the director is going to be most excited to play with. However, there isn’t much time to wonder in his new haunted house picture, where his playful tech-tinkering is at its most immediately conspicuous. Shot in a single house over the course of eleven days, Presence is a ghost story told from the 1st-person point of view of the ghost. It’s a clever premise that frees Soderbergh to be as playful with the camera as ever, handling the equipment himself as he follows around his small haunted-family cast and constantly directs the audience’s attention to the act of observation through his wandering lens. The resulting image is a kind of supernatural found footage horror that leans into the improbability of the genre by strapping its GoPro to a ghost, so we don’t question why the camera continues rolling once the violence starts; we only question why that camera operator is choosing to observe what we see (and to ignore what we don’t). The last-minute answer to that question gave me a shock of goosebumps and made me want to immediately rewatch in the way that the best ghost stories do. It’s in the asking of the question where Soderbergh gets to have his fun, though, and it’s delightful to see a filmmaker this many decades into their career still excited by the opportunity to play with the basic tools of their craft.

Lucy Liu stars as the high-strung, wine-guzzling matriarch of a nuclear suburban family. She’s poured all of her hopes and self-worth into the athletic achievements of her jock teen son Tyler (Eddy Maday), whose burgeoning persona as an egotistical bully is directly correlated with the effort she puts into supporting his swim-team dreams. Meanwhile, her daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) is treated as the mother’s genetic leftovers, molding in the back of the fridge while the father (Chris Sullivan) solemnly shakes his head in exasperation. It’s not an especially complicated family dynamic, but it’s one that becomes increasingly eerie & foreboding as it’s filtered through the security-camera eyes of a ghost. At the start of the film, the ghost is trapped in an empty, echoey suburban house, and what fills that void once its tenants arrive (with the help of a comically unprofessional real estate agent played by Julia Fox) are the typical horrors that haunt the modern American family: loneliness, mental illness, drugs, alcohol, the violent radicalization of young men, etc. As the most isolated member of the family, Chloe is the most vulnerable to those horrors, and so the ghost (and, by extension, the audience) spends the most time watching over her, eventually stepping in to protect her from whatever harm can be prevented by a noncorporeal force . . . since no one alive seems especially motivated to actively help.

Since it’s a formal experiment more concerned with what’s implied by every subtle movement of the camera than it is a mechanism for delivering routine scare gags, most audiences are going to be reluctant to engage with Presence as a horror film, likely likening it to titles like A Ghost Story, Nickel Boys, and Here. Personally, I found its icy, distancing approach to form to be effectively chilling, and the movie I most thought about during its runtime was the creepypasta novelty Skinamarink. Both films repurpose the filmic language of the found footage horror genre to coldly observe the isolation & cruelty of modern domestic life from an impossible supernatural vantage point, dwelling on an eerie mood that most people only feel when we’re alone in an empty home. Presence ultimately forms a more traditional narrative than Skinamarink thanks to the mainstream professionalism of screenwriter David Koepp, choosing to answer the question of its ghost’s mysterious identity in a final explanatory reveal instead of letting it hang in the air. I appreciate Soderbergh’s eagerness to bring distancing, arthouse abstraction into mainstream venues in that way, along with implied political commentary that reaches beyond the boundaries of his increasingly small, generic stories. Like other recent Soderbergh successes Unsane & Kimi, Presence is high-style genre pulp that only becomes complex & nuanced when you poke at the decisions behind its creation – most importantly, in this case, the decisions on where to point the camera and when to look away.

-Brandon Ledet

Tomie (1998)

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A few months ago, we talked about the 2000 live action Junji Ito adaptation of Uzumaki on the podcast. This month, my most frequent arthouse viewing companion wanted to take over calendar duties for our outings, and he expressed immediate interest in Tomie, based on a particular line in the blurb calling it a “peculiar tale of an evil high school femme fatale whose kiss drives men to madness.” The “kiss” element is perhaps overstated there, but this is nonetheless a creepy little feature that I enjoyed quite a lot, and is a much more accessible film than Uzumaki was. 

Tsukiko Izumisawa (Mami Nakamura) is a young photography student living with her boyfriend Yuuichi (Kouta Kusano), a chef at a local restaurant. She’s also undergoing regressive hypnotherapy under the care of Dr. Hosono (Yoriko Douguchi) to uncover what really happened to her during a recent period of total amnesia. She gets an update from her landlord that there’s a new tenant in the apartment beneath hers, a recent high school graduate named Kenichi (Kenji Mizuhashi). Although she does not meet her new neighbor, we get to see that he is raising a decapitated head as a baby, which very quickly transforms into a child, then a teenager under his care. This is Tomie Kawakami (Miho Kanno), who is not so much a young woman as she is some kind of evil entity, as we learn from Detective Harada (Tomorowo Taguchi), who comes to Dr. Hosono with a seemingly impossible story. As it turns out, he’s looking for Tsukiko, as she and another young girl named Tomie were classmates and best friends, before their entire class broke out in a rash of murders and suicides, with Tomie ultimately being decapitated. However, upon further investigation, he has found a series of such events that have been happening for over a century, all centering around a woman with the name Tomie Kawakami, her seduction of a man with a wife or girlfriend, and an outbreak of madness and violence that ends with Tomie’s death. He has come to believe that there is a supernatural element at play, and that learning the truth about what happened during the period that Tsukiko cannot remember holds the key to solving the mystery. 

As we watched Uzumaki so recently, it’s difficult not to view this film in conversation with that one, especially as they were also released in such close proximity to one another. Uzumaki is an artifact of early digital filmmaking, with sickly green color correction, Further, that film’s narrative demand for repeated spiral imagery also required the use of computer-generated imagery which was not up to the task at hand. Although Tomie also centers around people being driven mad and acting out violently, the impetus is merely the presence of a wraithlike woman, which makes for a much easier transition into live action presentation. We don’t see Tomie’s face until long after the film’s midpoint. Instead, we see her from the back, her face completely hidden by her hair, or in silhouette. There are no distractingly bad CGI tornadoes or hair spirals here to detract from the horror that the film is trying to convey, and Tomie remains a frightening presence throughout as a result. She lingers in doorways, she glides down the street in pursuit of a victim, and our lack of an impression of her makes this all the more interesting. She enters (or re-enters, rather) Tsukiko’s life through her extended circle, first by having her caretaker move into the downstairs apartment sight unseen, then by getting a job at the restaurant where Yuuichi works, where her (still invisible to the audience) beauty causes the manager and Yuuichi’s co-workers to start to compete for her affection, with disastrous results. Even Tsukiko’s landlord eventually falls under Tomie’s spell, attacking her when she enters the flat below hers and discovers the dead body of one of her friends. Eventually, the two are reunited, and their true history is revealed. 

Apparently, this film kicked off a franchise that includes eight more movies about Tomie, continuing the story from where it ends here (Tomie: Replay, was even released on a double bill with Uzumaki). This was fairly common practice for J-Horror of the time; just take a look at how many sequels there were to Ju-on and Ringu, both of which were released in the same year as Tomie. There’s not much information about those films online, certainly not enough for me to make a judgment about whether they’re worth checking out. I’m sure that there’s value in continuing to adapt the rest of the manga on which they are based, but this is a perfect example of an understated horror film that, despite being an adaptation of a longer, serialized work, functions as a singular text unto itself. Nakamura’s Tsukiko is a character who should be more widely recognized as an archetypical, textbook-perfect final girl. I appreciated the attention to detail that a woman with amnesia might find herself drawn to photography, perhaps the most documentarian method of artistic expression, as an art form, even if she’s not very good at it. We learn in the backstory that Tsukiko spread pictures of Tomie around school with “monster girl” written on them, and she has recurring dreams about this photograph that portend a dark reunion between the two girls in the near future, as well as a connection that’s more consequential than it initially appears. 

When it comes to effective screen boogeymen, Tomie herself is a standout as well. For much of the film, we see very little of her. In the first scene of the film, she’s just a head in a plastic bag, a singular eye peering out of it (which became the film’s iconic poster image), and then we see nothing of her face for a long time. Even in the scene where Detective Harada visits Dr. Hosono, he shows her a picture of the class of students that Tsukiko, Tenichi, and Tomie were in, but Tomie’s face is scratched out, as if the precise nature of her evil prevents her image from being recreated. When she gets work at the restaurant where Tsukiko’s boyfriend works, there’s a distinct contrast between the malice the audience feels radiating from her and the effect that her face, which remains in shadow, has on the men around her. It’s effective, and the reveal that she looks like a normal girl—a pretty girl, certainly, but no more so than any of the other women cast in the film—but one with an otherworldly oddness. This did start to come apart a little at the end, however, as I prefer her unassuming soft-spokenness over whatever was happening at the end when she was trying to feed Tsukiko live roaches. It moves from deft and subtle to a little too vibey, and the shift moves too quickly to fully work. 

Still, this is a perfectly fun late-90s J-horror movie. It reminded me of others from about this same time. In particular, the hypnotherapy plot reminded me a lot of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure released just the year prior. The conversation between the two films was further solidified by this movie’s violence largely emerging from people being mesmerized (although this time it’s by a demon). There’s also something very The Thing about the way that Tomie is an unslayable enemy who, even when reduced to nothing more than a head, will regrow like a starfish to restart a cycle of violence. Definitely worth the watch if you can find it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Closely Watched Trains (1966)

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At the time of posting, the social media platform TikTok is back online after briefly being banned in the United States over some vague Red Scare surveillance paranoia involving the app’s ownership by a Chinese company. Despite having called for this ban during his first presidency, Trump has found an executive-order workaround for the Supreme Court’s decision against TikTok’s fate in the US, retroactively pinning the unpopular decision to the recently concluded Biden administration. The brief banning of the app inspired US TikTok users to flock to an alternative platform to alleviate their #content addiction (including the Chinese-owned app RedNote, which spiked in American usership), and it also had me reflecting on what TikTok has contributed to Online Film Discourse. Like with all platforms, there are both good & bad data points that color TikTok’s character, from the shameless shilling for corporate media that the app’s Influencer class indulge for red carpet access to the stray surges of interest one out-of-nowhere video could draw to obscure works like Żuławski’s On the Silver Globe. Overall, though, when I think of what “MovieTok” (which I would happily rename “FlikTok” if I had the power) brings to Film Discourse, my mind goes to the trend of slagging art films as purposefully inscrutable puzzles that cinephiles only pretend to appreciate in order to appear smart. Anytime a celebrity lists a European art film during their “Letterboxd Top 4” interviews on the platform, a TikToker mocks their supposed pretention in a parodic video listing fictional titles.  Instead of expressing curiosity in any film outside the bounds of the MCU (or their more recent Major Studio equivalents), they make up a “4-hour black and white film about the Serbian government through the eyes of a pigeon.” It’s a stubbornly ignorant way to approach unfamiliarity with art, and I personally hope it dies with the app.

For any younger audiences doubtful that black & white European art films can be accessible & entertaining, I’d recommend checking out the 1966 Czech New Wave classic Closely Watched Trains, which was accessible enough to American audiences in its initial release that it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Closely Watched Trains is a shockingly light entertainment for a black & white Czechoslovakian art film about making sure the trains run on time under Nazi occupation. Its historical circumstances and its final scene are tragic, but structurally it’s a 90-minute boner comedy packed with prurient goofball schtick. While the MovieTok commentariat would have you to expect a Czech New Wave art film about Nazis to be a non-stop misery parade, Closely Watch Trains mostly plays out like one of those coming-of-age comedies about a teen’s sexual misadventures while working their first summer job … except it’s set at the edge of a frosty, war-torn Prague. There’s even a little “Welcome to my life” narration track at the start, as if you’re watching the original foreign-language version of Ferris Bueller instead of a project that was passed over by Věra Chytilová for seeming too difficult to adapt from page to screen. Sure, its final beat is deadly serious about the violent circumstances of Nazi rule, but its scene-to-scene concerns are refreshingly honest about what a teen working their first job outside the house would be paying most attention to: getting laid. It’s a shame that the MovieTok platform isn’t used to introduce younger viewers to a wilder world of cinema through accessible gateway films like this and instead tends to dismiss the entire concept of European Art Films outright for an easy punchline. Or, more likely, the more dismissive responses are the ones that reach a wider audience thanks to the algorithm’s bottomless love for Rage Bait, which is exactly how it works on my own evil #content app of choice, Twitter.

As a coming-of-age story, Closely Watched Trains keeps things simple. A scrawny sweetheart named Miloš attempts to follow in his father & grandfather’s footsteps by apprenticing as a railroad dispatcher. The circumstances of the job might have become a little more strained now that the trains are under Nazi command, but he’s told that if he sticks it out long enough he’ll get to retire with a pension. At the start of the job, he’s offered a crossroads of three different priorities: work, politics, or women. Unsure of which direction he wants his life to go, he tries his hand at each – flirting with rigid professionalism, flirting with a plot to bomb a Nazi supply train, and flirting with a cute train conductor who’s his age and eager to become his girlfriend. His physical urges overpower his higher mind for most of the runtime, leading to a series of proto-Porky’s sexual escapades that include train car orgies, ink-stamped butt cheeks, and a lot of vulnerable discussion of premature ejaculation. As silly as some of these sexual encounters can be in the moment, Miloš has Big Teenage Feelings about them that occasionally raise the stakes of the story into more traditional War Drama territory, sometimes under Nazi threat, sometimes under threat of self-harm. It would be reductive to present the film purely as a comedy, given its political & historical context, but for the majority of its runtime it’s more adorable than grim. Even its more overt indulgences in the art of the moving image are less challenging that they are cute. Wide-shot frames arrange the actors & trains with dollhouse meticulousness, which combined with the dark irony of the sex & romance recalls the work of Wes Anderson – maybe art cinema’s most widely accessible auteur.

I do not have much at stake in the ultimate fate of TikTok, but I do have something to say to the art-phobic influencers of MovieTok. There is no reason to be intimidated by the Great Works of European Cinema just because they’re initially unfamiliar. No matter how artsy, The Movies are ultimately just as much of a populist medium as TikTok #content; you can handle it.

-Brandon Ledet