Welcome to Episode #263 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a selection of genre films that screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, including Larry Fessenden’s hipster NYC vampire flick Habit (1995).
00:00 The Overlook Film Festival 01:34 The Boulet Brothers 10:26 Hokum (2026) 18:55 Buffet Infinity (2026) 25:40 Buddy (2026) 36:01 Faces of Death (2026) 39:46 Obsession (2026) 43:10 Leviticus (2026) 44:48 The Furious (2026) 47:33 New Group (2026) 49:15 Boorman and the Devil (2026)
Every year at Overlook Film Fest, you’ll overhear some pedantic grumblings about what films do or do not technically qualify as horror, which is ostensibly the festival’s main programming hook. Personally, I love that the festival abides by loose genre definitions, since it’s allowed some of the more surreal, dreamlike titles to sneak into the line-up, like Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cloud, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, and Jennifer Reeder’s Knives & Skin, which were each met with some audible festivalgoer confusion. That’s why it was such exciting news that Overlook introduced a new sidebar selection of titles for this year’s lineup that freed it from having to even pretend that every offering is strictly horror, avoiding the complaint entirely. That “Side Shows” sidebar was described in the program as “genre diversions from horror tailor made for the world of the Overlook,” and the very first title that screened in the sub-section delivered on the promise: a not-even-horror-adjacent action thriller that featured some of the most gruesome, fucked up gore gags you could find anywhere at this year’s festival. It was a raucous good time, and no one felt hoodwinked.
The Furious is a child-abduction martial arts revenger from longtime fight choreographer Kenji Tanigaki, who seems determined to leave no audience left unimpressed with his commitment to craft. Much like this year’s straight-to-streaming actioner The Forbidden City, The Furious takes great care in staging elaborately brutal fight choreography so that each blow is just as precise as it is inventive, recalling the 80s & 90s Hong Kong action heyday when Tanigaki would’ve gotten his start. This particular outing is way more ruthless & relentless than The Forbidden City, though, both in the extremity of its violence and the extremity of the real-world evils that violence aims to avenge. After his daughter is abducted by human traffickers in broad daylight, an ordinary tradesman with extraordinary martial arts skills (Mo Tse) teams up with a rogue investigative reporter (Joe Taslim) to systematically murder every scumbag involved, freeing the children they’re holding hostage in the process. It’s the kind of man-on-a-mission action thriller that sincerely believes all the evils of the world can be solved with the swing of a hammer, like You Were Never Really Here restaged as an action thriller.
The sizes & shapes of the hammers our heroes swing vary wildly, from ball-peen to sledge to bike peddle to concrete chunk on a pole. When Mo Tse gets the hammer-vengeance started by taking down an entire underground MMA nightclub with just the ball-peen in hand, his over-the-top ultraviolence is scored with Mortal Kombat-style techno, signaling that the party is getting started. The Overlook Side Show screening was near-riotous from those first few minutes of mayhem until the very end, with the crowd loudly groaning at every hammer-smashed skull and cheering on the swift justice against every ghoulish villain in our heroes’ path. The Furious takes a pro wrestling approach to morality, with very clear faces & heels on either side of the good vs. evil divide. Simplistic or not, it’s difficult to not get emotional watching children get put in peril for petty payouts by heartless goons, especially when those children start bonding and looking after each other in their dingy-dungeon captivity. Despite the severity of that subject, Tanigaki keeps the mood oddly light & fun, continuing the Hong Kong fight-choreo tradition of utilizing every single prop that appears onscreen during the fights: garbage bags, ladders, water cooler bottles, whatever’s hanging around. It’s shockingly grim, but it’s also a total blast.
Because of its predilection for hammers and its momentary indulgence in a sideway-scroller hallway fight, The Furious will likely inspire a lot of comparisons to Park Chan-wook’s breakout cult classic Oldboy, but I think that sets up a much narrower expectation of the action’s scope than what Tanigaki’s imagination for fight gags can deliver. Personally, I found myself thinking back to the wild tonal swings of RRR, which alternates from abject human misery and sublimely goofy genre payoffs at the same delirious pace. Speaking of which, The Furious is very likely the best action movie I’ve seen sinceRRR, give or take Furiosa. It also very likely means something that every action movie I’m likening it to in this review happens to be about some form of human trafficking, solving a complex international issue with simple acts of brute-force justice. That simplicity is a major strength here, especially in the way it invites genre-savvy audiences to cheer in unison one gory gag after another. I hope the Overlook programmers were encouraged by that loudly enthusiastic reception and will push the new Side Shows section to even further genre extremes next year. Let’s see how wild & fucked up this beautiful thing can get.
As much as I love the movies, I hate moviegoing audiences – at least en masse. Chatting with individual festival attendees at this year’s Overlook Film Fest was as warm & friendly as always, like meeting up with old friends who I’ve technically never met before. Then, watching Boorman and the Devil at that same fest reminded me just how rare of an experience it is to celebrate the artform with a like-minded crowd. David Kittredge’s documentary about the production & public perception of John Boorman’s Exorcist sequel The Heretic is an intensely alienating experience for true cinephiles, a reminder that most people who go to the movies don’t care at all about art. They are not open to being challenged; they demand satisfaction. It’s repugnant. Even when Kittredge gets cutesy about the mass-audience rejection of The Heretic, I could feel my blood boiling in general misanthropy, loathing every person I see on the street like that one Robert Crumb comic panel.
After the overwhelming financial success of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, Warner Bros threw an obscene amount of money at Linda Blair to return for a cash-in sequel, alongside new-to-the-franchise costars Richard Burton & Louise Fletcher. They also gave free rein to New Hollywood auteur John Boorman to take the Exorcist story in any direction he wanted, an opportunity Boorman leveraged to deliver a hypnotic arthouse nightmare that recalls The Exorcist in name only. His vision was met with wide public derision, derailing his career until he could redeem himself with another hit in Excalibur a few years later. So, who are we supposed to side with here? The incurious audience who laughed The Heretic off the screen for taking chances instead of delivering more of the same? The studio executives who lost money or an artistic gamble? Or the artist himself, who improbably staged a literal fever dream on someone else’s dime? There is only one morally acceptable answer.
Boorman developed a life-threatening fever while filming The Heretic, a direct result of his own overly demanding ambition. That wasn’t the only on-set disaster. Burton struggled to stay sober enough to deliver his lines while standing still. Fletcher barely made it through the shoot before needing to have her gall bladder removed in emergency surgery. Blair spent long hours dangling off the roof of a skyscraper, unharnessed. Meanwhile, Boorman’s sick-leave absence opened a power vacuum for his screenwriting partner Rospo Pallenberg to run wild & unchecked on set, an off-putting presence that almost inspired open mutiny. The production was so troubled that the crew joked it was cursed by the demon Pazuzu himself, but none of that would’ve mattered if Boorman ultimately delivered a hit.
Kittredge relays these production-delay anecdotes from people who were actually there via tried-and-true documentary clichés that barely liven up the still set-photo imagery: first-person narration in his own voice, talking-head interviews with film critics & historians, cut & paste animation, and periodic chime-ins from fellow filmmakers with no direct association to the subject at hand (namely, Karyn Kusama, Mike Flanagan, and genre-doc mainstay Joe Dante). However, while Kittredge doesn’t match Boorman’s sense of poetic imagination, he is sincerely in awe of it, which goes a long way. This is not a movie about how Exorcist II: The Heretic was a laughable disaster; it is a story about how ambitious, risk-taking art isn’t always appreciated by the public, who’d rather laugh in mockery then get lost in cinematic poetry. Fuck ’em. They don’t know what they’re missing.
Looking back, it’s impossible to fully measure the impact that David Robert Mitchell’s indie horror phenomenon It Follows has had on the past decade of high-concept, mid-budget genre filmmaking. Predating Robert Eggers’s atmospheric folk horror The Witch by a full year, It Follows now registers as ground zero for the “elevated horror” trend of the 2010s (give or take The Babadook). Its supernatural stalker plot about a shapeshifting, sexually transmitted specter has directly influenced works as cerebral as Brea Grant’s feminist head-trip Lucky and as lizard-brained as Parker Finn’s suicide-virus thriller Smile. It’s a little silly, then, that Mitchell is currently working on a proper It Follows sequel titled They Follow, considering how many iterations there have already been on the original’s mood & conceit. I even saw a new one just this week at The Overlook Film Festival, which borrows the invisible-stalker device from It Follows for a story about an entirely different kind of sexual menace.
The rural horror story Leviticus shares some notable cast & crew with the recent Aussie hit Talk to Me, including actor Joe Bird (the cursed hand’s most brutally tormented victim) as its teen-in-peril lead. Leviticus plays more like a spiritual sequel to It Follows, though, shifting that seminal film’s focus from heterosexual desire to a wholly queer sensibility. Instead of the It Follows demon being sexually transmitted among careless hetero twentysomethings, it’s forced upon gay teenagers as a supernatural form of conversion therapy. The shapeshifting demon’s form is also no longer randomized the way it was in Mitchell’s film. It instead appears before its victims in the shape of the person they desire most, acting like the gay-conversion version of those Disulfiram pills that “cure” alcoholics by making them sick when they taste booze. The goal appears not to be curing teens of their homosexuality, exactly, but to frighten them too much to act on their desires, lest they be gaybashed by a demon that looks like their hottest crush.
Bird stars as a lonely teen who’s just moved to macho small-town Australia with his religious zealot mother (Mia Wasikowska, who not too long ago was playing youthful brats instead of their stern maternal figures). He quickly develops a mutual crush on a classmate (Stacy Clausen), who only expresses his desire in private – first through roughhousing, then through smooching. The boys’ timid love story would make for a cute indie rom-dram if it weren’t for all of the religious nuts in town, who have developed a hypnotic ritual involving a butane lighter that chains gay teens to the aforementioned variation on the It Follows demon. The rules of the curse are fairly simple. The demon looks like the person you desire most, and it only attacks when you are alone. The metaphor that first-time director Adrian Chiarella is getting at is a little vaguer, though, to the movie’s benefit. Much like It Follows, it finds a way to physicalize a form of sexual menace & repression without overly explaining what it represents in dialogue (a temptation later derivatives like Smile cannot resist).
That’s not to say that Chiarella doesn’t make a coherent point with this conceit. It’s clear that the real evil here is the isolation caused by small-town bigotry, forcing gay teens into the darkest of closets. The cure for not being destroyed by that desire is to never be alone, to be out in public instead of saving your romantic trysts to private hookups, locked away in dingy warehouses where you can never be sure if you’re making out with a boyfriend or his evil doppelganger. There’s some heartfelt, meaningful social commentary in there, but the basic rules and mechanisms of its central metaphor are just mysterious enough that it doesn’t feel overly schematic in the moment. If there’s anything Chiarella doesn’t handle especially well tonally, it’s in the overall bleakness of every last interaction. Leviticus is a dour film with little room for humor in its metaphysical exploration of the tyranny of the closet. That tonal severity is appropriate for its subject but a little grueling to trudge through at feature length. Even It Follows included a few sight gags between its slow-burn scares, and that’s clearly the template we’re working with here, as we so often are.
Is there a more dependable path to horror filmmaking success right now than getting your start in sketch comedy? Following in the recent footsteps of sketch-turned-horror comedians Jordan Peele, Zach Cregger, and the Philippou Brothers, up-and-coming director Curry Barker has graduated from YouTube prankster to buzzy horror auteur du jour. The connection between those two artforms feels obvious, at least in the way that they deal in high-concept premises that need to be quickly explained and then immediately punctuated with punchlines. There’s an overt, sadistic humor in the way Barker cyclically builds & relieves tension in his debut feature Obsession that feels like a natural progression from the sketch comedy format. More importantly, these post-YouTube sketch creators speak directly to a youthful audience, playing to the prankish sensibilities of teens & twentysomethings instead of dwelling in the overly patient rhythms of recent decades’ “elevated horror”, which is quickly becoming the genre equivalent of le cinéma de papa.
I mention the youth appeal of Obsession up-front because it’s a movie tailored for people whose greatest concern in life is still their unreciprocated romantic crush, or who’s fucking whom at that their go-nowhere retail job. There’s more cowardly, unreciprocated yearning in this gross-out gore film than you’ll find in even the wimpiest teen-romance anime. Yes, you will see skulls crushed, skin carved, and house pets desecrated, but the most discomfort you’ll feel is in watching a twentysomething coward fail to muster up enough courage to confess he has a crush on his coworker. Instead, he resorts to supernatural magic, making a wish on a cursed children’s toy that she will love him “more than anyone in the whole frickin’ world.” Of course, the wish quickly backfires, as our yearning anti-hero can’t handle the intensity of being desired instead of quietly doing the desiring himself, in private. Don’t worry, he’s also cosmically punished for the crime of using magic to coerce a peer into a nonconsensual sexual relationship, cruelly & usually.
Michael Johnston does a perfectly cromulent job playing that supernaturally tortured anti-hero, remaining a useless coward all the way to the very end. He’s frequently told by the more magic-savvy mystics in town and the One Wish Willow customer service reps that he can break the spell at any time by killing himself, but that would require action, while he is purely a creature of thought. Johnston convincingly contorts his brow with worry while considering his increasingly grim, shrinking options, never brave enough to act on any one of them. However, the real discovery here is his costar Inde Navarrette as his magically coerced crush, who’s tasked to deliver a much bigger, bolder performance. Through Navarrette, Obsession turns Quirky Movie Girlfriend behavioral tropes into a grotesque horror show, delivering cinema’s first truly scary Manic Pixie Nightmare Girl. It turns out, the Quicky Movie Girlfriend archetype is still a little cute even in that context, and Navarette performs some of the best uncanny smizing seen onscreen since Anna Kendrick first became a star. She does other tricks too, like strutting backwards, discovering culinarily unconventional sources of protein, and acting as her new boyfriend’s personal sleep paralysis demon – whatever it takes to keep them close.
In its broadest terms, Obsession is a classic “careful what you wish for” Monkey’s Paw story, and Barker has admitted in a recent Fangoria interview that he initially got the idea while watching the “Monkey’s Paw” vignette from the Simpsons‘ Treehouse of Horror specials. It’s probably notable that Jordan Peele named his own production studio Monkeypaw Productions after the same short story, just as it’s notable just how much Obsession‘s house party sequence recalls the ritualist peer-pressure magic of the Philippou Brothers’ Talk to Me. Barker clearly belongs in this new class of sketch-to-horror auteurs, unafraid to prank his audience with shamelessly unfair jump scares. All that matters, really, is getting the laugh or the gasp from the audience in the moment, which Obsession did remarkably well at its local premiere opening this year’s Overlook Film Fest. Leave the worry about good taste & artistic restraint to the elevated horror fuddy-duddies of the recent past.
Many longtime Scream fans were horrified by what happened to their beloved slasher franchise this year, after the brand chose to self-implode rather than to employ actors vocally opposed to the ongoing Palestinian genocide. Just a few months later, it turns out not to be such a big deal that Scream 7 was a morally & creatively bankrupt shit show after all. The producers got what they wanted in reliable name-recognition box office returns from the politically apathetic masses, and the more discerning audiences who boycotted can now get what they want in the new Faces of Death: a reboot of a legacy horror franchise that questions the ways the genre has changed in the decades since its start. 2026’s Faces of Death has a lot more to say about modern audiences’ relationship with violent entertainment media than any Scream movie has in at least fifteen years. Notably, it does so by tracking the ways horrifically violent imagery has moved from the cineplex to our smartphones, including news footage of the aforementioned genocide.
Euphoria‘s Barbie Ferreira stars as a content moderator for a TikTok-style social media platform called Kino. She spends long, demoralizing days approving or disapproving user-flagged content on the platform, flooding her brain with the most heinous imagery & behavior her fellow humans can conceive & shoot. Much like with the original 1970s mondo movie Faces of Death, it becomes increasingly difficult for her to differentiate what violent content is simulated vs. what is authentic, pressured by her corporate higher-ups to avoid being overly censorious. The plot gets meta when she stumbles across an anonymous account that’s recreating the most gruesome scenes from Faces of Death “for real,” and she struggles to convince anyone in her life that she’s uncovered an active serial killer. When she takes this discovery to online message boards, she is subsequently abducted by that killer to star in his next viral video. Many flame-war social media posts and real-life bludgeonings ensue.
If the new Faces of Death has any overt shortcomings, it’s that it’s not nearly scary nor upsetting enough to earn its title, at least not to the desensitized eyes of a social media addict such as myself. That largely appears to be the point. Technically, this is a bloody bodycount slasher, but all of its payoffs are purely intellectual. Longtime collaborators Daniel Goldhaber & Isa Mazzei (Cam, How to Blow Up a Pipeline) clearly took on the project as an opportunity to discuss the ways snuff-footage media akin to the original Faces of Death has become mundane thanks to the social media feeds that relentlessly overstuff our brains with real-life grotesqueries. There’s more meaning in the transition of its fictional news broadcast switching from vertical smartphone footage of a suicide to a fluff piece about a puppy shelter than there is in the cruelty of any particular kill. The movie isn’t especially scary, but it is remarkably thoughtful about the current corporate-sponsored hellscape we all willing enter every day through our phone screens.
That lack of genuine scares is no fault of its masked killer, played by Stranger Things‘s Dacre Montgomery. Covering both the ice-cold intellectualism of Hannibal Lecter and the perverse sensuality of Buffalo Bill, Montgomery’s Arthur is the total package. He’s converted his suburban McMansion into a makeshift movie studio, restaging scenes from Faces of Death because reboots are favored by the algorithm. He finds his own sense of style in the process too, murdering his victims via automaton contraptions constructed out of department store mannequins. He’s even transformed himself into a living mannequin of sorts, via skinsuits & masks, further removing himself from the violence he films for views. Everything is mediated through an artificial remove, to the point where his final showdown with Ferreira’s final girl mostly plays out on their individual laptop & phone screens even while they’re standing feet apart in the same blood-spattered room. It’s chilling to think about, even if it’s not especially scary to watch, unlike its namesake source of inspiration.
Faces of Death recently saw its local premiere at The Overlook Film Festival, where Goldhaber & crew gushed about how wonderful New Orleans is as a shooting location. Besides a brief throwaway scene set at a corporate crawfish boil on the lakefront, there isn’t much indicating that the story is set here, whereas most New Orleans movies make sure to toss in a few French Quarter scenes for local flavor. There’s probably some substantive commentary in there about the way screenlife has flattened all modern living to one locationless artificial world devoid of discernible local culture, as this is a movie entirely made of metatextual commentary about the current state of things. The Scream franchise used to think about these kinds of things too, before it devolved into cataloging the life & love soap opera milestones of Sidney Prescott, et al. Now you have to find your Slasher With Ideas kicks elsewhere, starting here.
In Kristoffer Borgli’s international breakout Sick of Myself, a woman becomes jealous of her boyfriend’s sudden art-world fame, so she fakes a disfiguring medical condition to one-up the attention he’s been getting online. In the funniest scene, she worries that her CT scan results at the hospital will expose this fraud, imagining an official medical diagnosis that she is “a liar” with “a bad personality,” which is legally punishable by death. Borgli’s first American film, Dream Scenario, follows the foibles of a schlubby college professor who becomes a living meme when he inexplicably starts appearing in people’s dreams across the world, a phenomenon that quickly sours once the novelty wears off and everyone’s sick of seeing his uninvited face. Borgli’s latest, The Drama, smartly continues the understated fantasy-sequence playfulness of those two previous pictures, often illustrating its characters’ intrusive thoughts as they occur in real time, then doubling back to show those characters as they actually are: unremarkable in their social anguish. Like Borgli’s previous films, The Drama also presents an absurd scenario that can easily be read as a moving think-piece on the nature of “cancel culture” but somehow never fully tips into reactionary apologia. His flippant engagement with hot-button topics in the “cancel culture” era teeter dangerously close to a kind of online edgelord conservatism but, so far, he’s always landed somewhere on the safe side of good taste. His interest appears to be on exploring the ways that our internal thoughts, however momentary, might betray our external politics, and he finds an endless wealth of humor in that tension.
The Drama starts with a young couple’s fairy-tale love story, sprinting through the full romcom meet-cute, first-date, romantic-proposal cycle in rapid montage. Borgli very quickly maps out what a crowd-pleaser romance between stars Robert Pattinson & Zendaya might look like if Hollywood was still interested in producing such a thing before he announces the stakes of his latest prank. Days before the couple’s wedding, they engage in a dinner-party game where everyone at the table confesses the worst thing they’ve ever done. It’s an uneasy but revelatory ritual that pushes through some of the awkward shame of the “getting to know you” phase in a young romance, until Zendaya’s character gets her turn. Her confession crosses an invisible social boundary that she doesn’t realize exists until it’s too late, and everyone else present is so shocked that it threatens to derail the wedding they’re supposed to be celebrating. Notably, what she confesses is technically a thought crime, an ugly impulse that she did not ultimately act on but very seriously considered. It’s also something I won’t dare to spoil in this review, since it is the bait on the film’s proverbial hook, something that is meant to be discovered and digested in real time with the bride-to-be’s immediate social circle. All I can say, really, is that this first-act reveal positions The Drama as a throwback to a kind of classic water cooler romcom, however bleak, with certified movie stars on their worst behavior. You’re supposed to ask yourself how you would react to it while you watch Robert Pattinson go through the same hypothetical turmoil, and you’re supposed to find your own sense of morality lacking in the process.
There’s plenty of ammunition here for the offended to dismiss Borgli as a shock-value provocateur, but I don’t think that’s the case. Once you get past the initial shock of its first-act confession, The Drama finds some genuinely productive provocation is asking how much modern outrage is personal, as opposed to communal. This is not a typical “How much can you truly know a person?” thought exercise. It instead asks whether modern moral outrage is driven less by the thought, “Am I okay with this?” than it is by the thought, “What would other people think of me if I were okay with this?” Very little of the central conflict is mediated through phone & computer screens like in Borgli’s previous pictures, but it still feels like it’s depicting a moral crisis specific to a post-social media world. Pattinson’s protagonist is not allowed time to internally process what he’s learned about his fiancée’s past; he’s pressured to immediately take a moral stance on it as a kind of performative social spectacle, causing great anxiety as he attempts to keep his shit together for the ultimate social spectacle: an expensive wedding. The pressure of publicly responding to this moral crisis makes for great comedic tension as the wedding deadline approaches, and it inspires anxious daydreams & nightmares that recall the low-level surrealism of Borgli’s previous works. It’s neither his meanest nor his most expressive film to date, but it does manage to throttle its audience with various social & moral crises while most of its imagery ultimately amounts to People Talking in Rooms — an increasingly rare feat at the American cineplex.
I thought I was too cynical to be charmed by the sci-fi adventure film Project Hail Mary, and with good reason. Just this week, I was looking at news reports about the progress of the real-life space adventures of Artemis II, which in its first few days produced photographic documentation of the dark side of the Moon while traveling further from Earth than any astronauts have previously gone, and my first thought was “Wow, what a waste of resources.” Why are we spending so much money on space travel and moon colonization research when those same funds could be used to immediately house, feed, and medicate people who are struggling on the planet we already inhabit? Basically, I had a full Gil Scott-Heron moment, too knee-jerk cynical to appreciate the wonders of “Whitey” orbiting the Moon. So, how could I hope to be charmed by the outer space adventurism of Project Hail Mary, which spends its entire 156min runtime forcibly cramming that same sense of wonder into its audience’s skulls? Well, it’s helpful that it’s a work fiction, one that can create immediate, dire stakes that make an exploratory mission into outer space immediately necessary to save human lives back on Earth. Even more helpfully, its heaping helping of Hollywood schmaltz is delivered via one of the most charming actors of our time, so that it doesn’t matter how cynical you are about the exorbitant expense of space travel; it just matters whether you personally find Ryan Gosling funny.
Gosling stars as an unassuming middle school science teacher who wakes up dazed & alone on a long-distance space mission, unsure how he became an astronaut. In a dual timeline structure, we learn the history of how he got there and the future of what he can achieve, both related to a mysterious substance that is threatening the continuation of life on Earth by dimming the Sun. In both timelines, he teams up with a hard-to-read scientific genius that he must learn how to communicate with in order to functionally collaborate: an Earthbound human played by Sandra Hüller and a fellow space-traveling alien creature played by a puppet, shaped like a collection of rocks. In both timelines, the plot is entirely constructed of problem-solving scientific experiments, breaking down the grand mission of returning home safely after saving the Sun into a series of simpler, less daunting puzzles. The scientific specifics of these sequential experiments seemingly don’t mean much to directors Phil Lord & Chris Miller, who find more inspiration in the source novel’s broader themes of the bravery that ordinary people can find in the grimmest of times, as long as they have a reason to hope & dream. If that sounds a little hokey, it’s because it is, and composer Daniel Pemberton frequently scores the film like he’s working on an allergy medicine commercial about a stuffed-up suburban mom who can finally enjoy life because she can breathe again. However, just because it’s hokey doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, which is something I should probably keep in mind the next time the world goes gaga over a rocket launch.
The space-exploration adventurism of Project Hail Mary is ultimately secondary to its person-to-person social interactions, charting Gosling’s transformation from an isolated misanthrope to humanity’s bravest soldier. He starts the film wary of people as an abstract idea, but he’s continually won over by his fellow scientists on a one-on-one basis, and it’s consistently charming to watch him warm up to the concept. He’s an overly chatty fella for someone who doesn’t like attention, and the movie essentially asks him to put on a one-man show against screen partners figuratively or literally made of stone. Gosling makes warmth & humor look effortless, getting so cozy in his oversized sweaters that his eyeglasses eventually hang entirely off his face as he pleads his case. Meanwhile, Sandra Hüller is expertly humorless, playing icy straight man to his charming schlub shenanigans. It’s a shame that the narrative’s dual timeline structure limits how much of their onscreen chemistry we get to see here; they’d kill in an Old Hollywood screwball throwback where their warm-and-icy dynamic clashed at feature length. Thankfully, though, Gosling also has a great rapport with the rock puppet, conveying a genuine enough sense of friendship that I was occasionally moved to tears by their mutual kindness (despite the fact that there’s technically only one actor onscreen during their scenes). In short, Ryan Gosling can charm anyone, no matter how tightly our arms are crossed at the start.
I should be clear that I don’t actually believe that exploratory space missions like Artemis II are a waste of public resources (at least not compared to even more egregious wastes on police & military weaponry). There are plenty of online articles around explaining how past space missions have led to scientific developments like solar power, water purification, prosthetic limbs, heart pumps, and various other technologies that benefit humans back on Earth. Even in Project Hail Mary‘s all-important mission to save our dying Sun, Gosling’s ship is equipped with smaller experiments in the background studying plant growth and other mundane processes. My initial animal-brain response to these far-reaching space missions just happens to be a cynical one, and then I have to be reminded why they matter in the bigger picture. Project Hail Mary‘s success is in the way it translates that bigger-picture space research through more intimate, humanist concerns. Ryan Gosling’s unremarkable schoolteacher protagonist is on a mission to save all of humanity, but all of the emotional beats in that story are narrowed down to how he interacts with the person immediately in front of him, whether they’re from Germany or from an alien planet. It’s practically a workplace comedy in that way, a sitcom where Gosling’s job is doing science and his favorite coworker is a talking pile of rocks.
Kristen Stewart has great taste. You can tell that by how she’s capitalized on her Twilight notoriety in the past couple decades, leveraging her early teenybopper name recognition to work with directors like David Cronenberg, Pablo Larraín, Rose Glass, and Olivier Assayas in her cinematic adulthood. You can also tell by watching her own directorial debut The Chronology of Water, which features a flood of striking, well curated images that convey a deeper interest in the artform than you might expect from an actor-turned-director. Stewart smartly sidesteps a lot of the familiar pitfalls actors stumble into while transitioning to the opposite side of the camera. It’s typical for those projects to function largely as an acting showcase, allowing their performers an overly indulgent amount of onscreen real estate to run wild and chew scenery. She certainly gives her star, Imogen Poots, a lot to do as the film’s constantly flailing protagonist, but most of the meatier dramatic moments are chopped up & scattered throughout a purposefully chaotic edit, avoiding any potential backsliding into stage-play theatricality. However, that chaotic edit is where Stewart makes an entirely different kind of rookie mistake, the one most that young directors make when translating a novel that they love to the screen. Adapted from the eponymous Lidia Yuknavitch memoir, The Chronology of Water is a rushed, overlong onslaught that attempts to cram in every detail from its source text in direct illustration instead of re-interpreting that text for a new medium. The film covers author Yuknavitch’s life from traumatic childhood to literary notoriety, including long chapters of her story that mean more to her personally than they do to the filmgoing audience (such as her academic mentorship under Ken Kesey, portrayed onscreen by a haggard Jim Belushi). You can tell that Yuknavitch’s story meant a lot to Stewart on the page, and she wanted to bring it to the screen because of the vivid images it evoked, not because it was a convenient vehicle for hammy acting. She just never got a handle on the “kill your darlings” process of editing, choosing instead to stage every one of those images while Imogen Poots strings them together with a voiceover narration track pulled directly from the source text.
If there’s a textual justification for the way The Chronology of Water rushes through the details of Yuknavitch’s personal life, it’s that it takes a long while for the author to express what’s happened to her. We’re immediately aware that she grew up in an abusive household, cowering in fear of her monstrous father (Michael Epp), whose presence is a constant threat to her, her older sister (Thora Birch), and their alcoholic mother (Susannah Flood). At first, the only clear details of that abuse are the feelings of its effect, with the women of the house tiptoeing on eggshells to not draw the father’s attention, so that every sound in the mix thunderous & painful – like a snapping bone. As a high school & college-age Yuknavitch, Poots intentionally avoids processing those details for as long as she can, disappearing into drugs, alcohol, anonymous sex, and the adrenaline rush of competitive swimming instead of emotionally reckoning with what’s happened to her. It isn’t until she starts writing poetry and personal essays in the film’s back half that she can express the details of her childhood abuse in concrete terms, and the audience gets a much clearer, more horrific picture of what was done to her. Until that point, The Chronology of Water is constant rush of contextless snapshots from Yuknavitch’s life, but the connections between them and the memories that spark them start to make more sense by the time she’s learned to express herself instead of avoiding herself. It’s a conceptually interesting approach to telling Yuknavitch’s story, but the problem is that there’s so much crammed into the frame that the individual details leak through your fingers like water. Yuknavitch describes her semi-confessional approach to creative writing as “telling the truth in lies,” which is an axiom that Stewart finds inspirational but does not fully absorb herself. She’s too enamored with Yuknavitch’s writing to alter the details of her biography, attempting to preserve the truths from the page instead of re-interpreting them into a more coherent cinematic lie. Yes, drops of blood diluting into the water pooled on the shower floor makes for a gorgeous, evocative image, but that image is itself diluted by the excess of everything else Stewart throws at us in the 128min runtime.
I was thinking a lot about The Chronology of Water’s rushed, scatterbrained pacing while watching Catherine Breillat’s 2001 breakout Fat Girl, which screened at Gap Tooth the same week of its local release. Where Stewart rushes, Breillat cruelly dwells, forcing her audience to sit with the details of childhood sexual abuse as they’re happening in real time. Alternately titled under the dedication “For My Sister” in its original French, Fat Girl details the uneasy sisterhood shared by two French teenagers on a beachside vacation. The younger sister (Anaïs Reboux) is suffering the hellish awkwardness of puberty while the “older” one (Roxane Mesquida) believes herself to be a mature woman at the advanced age of 15. Her premature adulthood is challenged when she successfully attracts the romantic attentions of an Italian college boy who’s also vacationing nearby, and she finds herself inviting him over to the bedroom she shares with her less glamorous sister, who only halfway pretends to be asleep while the young couple fools around. A large portion of Fat Girl‘s runtime is dedicated to detailing the step-by-step process of coercive statutory rape, which is then downplayed & rationalized by two in-over-their-heads teenagers who are dabbling in sexual experiences they aren’t mature enough to fully interpret, much less consent to. Once this abusive tryst is inevitably discovered by the girls’ parents, the vacation understandably ends, and we travel back to their home in a tearful long-distance car ride menaced by big-rig trucks that threaten to physically crush the family with the slightest turn of a steering wheel. Then, Breillat physicalizes the constant threat of macho violence in a shocker ending so abrupt it practically plays like a punchline to a sick, sad joke. Even then, the teenage girl response to adult masculine violence is to play it off as no big deal, performing a kind of know-it-all maturity they couldn’t possibly have earned in their short time alive. In The Chronology of Water, the audience is just as distanced from the full brunt of that childhood trauma as the protagonist; in Fat Girl, we’re fully aware of what’s happening to the kids as it’s happening to them, even if they remain clueless until long after the end credits.
You don’t have to go all the way back into the early-aughts archives to find easy points of comparison for KStew’s directorial debut. If nothing else, it premiered at last year’s Cannes along with two fellow miserabilist coming-of-age dramas that tormented school-age swim teams: Julia Ducournau’s Alpha & Charlie Pollinger’s The Plague. Thanks to its seaside vacation setting, Breillat’s Fat Girl also offers a fair amount of swimming-pool escapism to its titular odd-girl-out protagonist, suggesting that there’s something about the sensory deprivation and bodily freedom of an underwater realm that’s a huge relief for teens going through pubescent hell (or for the audiences watching them go through it, anyway). The Chronology of Water and Fat Girl also share a thematic link in their depictions of sisterhood, in which a younger dead-eyed sibling suffers jealousy over the apparent grace & poise with which their older sister navigates the same childhood traumas. Truthfully, none of that was really why Breillat was on my mind while catching up with KStew’s debut. The reason The Chronology of Water had me thinking back to the abrasive, morally challenging feminism of the 2000s & 1990s was that Stewart was taking obvious delight in that era’s most transgressive provocations. Imogen Poots models the distinctly 1990s fashions of the source memoir’s setting, just as she models the social faux pas of a young affluent woman repeatedly using the word “cunt” in mixed company. Much like Breillat, Lidia Yuknavitch’s work is rooted in an era when it was more daring to talk about the supposedly shameful details of women’s bodies, and Stewart seems enthusiastic to bring every liquid she can from that text to the screen: blood, puke, spit, cum, shit, menstruate, the full flight. She makes a point to pause on a chapter when Yuknavitch finds that BDSM offers just as much bodily escapism as the swimming pool, depicting Poots being tied up & whipped by a professorial Kim Gordon. It’s a tangent so compelling that it could’ve inspired its own feature film, but Stewart has no time to dwell on it without sacrificing everything else that happens in Yuknavitch’s memoir, so she quickly moves on to the next unpleasant incident. Breillat offers you no such relief. Fat Girl is all one long, unpleasant incident, with child locks on the car doors to prevent your escape. Stewart may share Breillat’s furious enthusiasm for provocation, but she doesn’t yet fully match her talent for sadism, for (moral) better or for (artistic) worse.
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