brandon ledet

The Headless Woman (2008)

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2008’s The Headless Woman is the kind of thoroughly inscrutable arthouse film that poses even the meaning of its title as a riddle. Is Maria Onetto’s protagonist-in-crisis “headless” in the “Where’s your head at?” sense? The film is a week-in-the-life portrait of a wealthy Argentine woman who we never truly get to know, because by the time we meet her she’s not quite acting like herself; she goes through the motions of her usual daily schedule, but her mind is elsewhere. Is her titular headlessness a reference to director Lucrecia Martel’s tendency to push her characters to the furthest edges of the frame? We often see Onetto’s figure literally headless, as she is cropped & contorted so that her face is obscured from our eyes. My favorite, most baseless theory is that the title is a slight mistranslation from a Spanish-language idiom meaning The Concussed Woman, as that is our POV character’s least questionable condition. She has a head; she just smacks it really hard in a car accident, leaving her dazed for days on end as she stubbornly refuses medical diagnoses from both doctors in the film and the audience in the theater.

Besides the figurative opaqueness of its title, another common arthouse complaint that The Headless Woman invites is that “Nothing happens.” That would ring especially true for anyone who arrives late to the theater, since exactly one thing happens in the first few minutes, and if you miss it you’re fucked. The film opens with indigenous children playing in the canals off a service road, followed by a sequence of a white Argentine aristocrat (Onetto) driving recklessly down the same dusty path. She hits something with her car while reaching for her cellphone, but instead of stepping out to investigate what it was, she momentarily pauses then drives away — concussed and afraid. The next week of her life is a test of just how little effort she has to put into her daily routine to maintain her bourgie lifestyle. Annoyed family members, indigenous servants, and professional underlings guide her way as she sleepwalks through her schedule, distracted both by the guilt of possibly having killed a child with her car and by the physiological effects of a head injury. Eventually, she snaps out of it, repairs her car, dyes her hair, and moves on with her life. Nothing happens, and that’s entirely the point.

The Headless Woman is often billed as a psychological thriller, which I suppose is abstractly true. Although there’s not much action or momentum in the fallout of the opening car accident, Onetto’s concussed protagonist is often in danger of hurting more victims because of her temporarily headless state. Whenever she drives a car or shows up to work at her dentistry practice, there’s tension in what damage she might cause while her mind is adrift. Imagine if your next dental surgery was performed by Dougie Jones of Twin Peaks; it’s a nightmare scenario. Ultimately, though, it’s the stasis & rot of her inaction that causes the most damage, as she takes several days to admit to herself that she very probably killed a child. When she manages to voice that confession to loved ones, they immediately shut her down and reassure her that it was likely just a dog, encouraging her to continue to do nothing until the details are muddled and the transgression is forgotten. The constant attention paid to her interactions with the servant class indicate that it would be an entirely different story if she had struck a white child instead of an indigenous one, but that’s a story told through observation, not confrontation. The thrill is in puzzling through the intent behind every image & interaction Martel offers, leaning more psychological than thriller.

I’ve now puzzled my way through three of Martel’s works, and they all are determined to rot in a similar kind of immoral inaction. In her name-maker debut, La Ciénaga, the wealth class of Argentina drink their days away poolside while their estates are gradually reclaimed by nature and their indigenous servants continually refill their cocktails. In her most recent budget-escalator, Zama, an 18th Century Spanish officer is assigned to lord over the indigenous people of Argentina, with no specific orders except to await more specific orders. There’s a gradual madness built by the lack of action or momentum in all three works, and they all point to a cruel, culture-wide pointlessness in the nation’s colonization. Likewise, our figuratively headless protagonist is maddening in her lack of momentum or direction, a psychic wound that does not heal just because she eventually snaps out of it. That immoral stasis & mindless occupation doesn’t make for especially thrilling stories beat to beat, but it leaves a lot of room for the audience to think about the meaning behind each of Martel’s images, which are uncanny in their sinister ordinariness: a room temperature coffee pot, a staticky wedding video, a limp body seen only through the dusty veil of a rearview window.

-Brandon Ledet

Hamnet (2025)

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All of the advertising for and critical response to Chloé Zhao’s prestige-season adaptation of Hamnet will lead you to expect a much shallower film than what it actually is. Having not read the novel myself, I’ve so far only understood Hamnet to be the weepie version of Shakespeare in Love: an Oscar-bait Hollywood drama about the death of William Shakespeare’s young child, Hamnet, the tragedy that inspired him to write the near-eponymous play. The loudest critical responses to the film adaptation have either been in praise of or in resistance to the ways that actors Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley perform that parental grief as Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes Hathaway, respectively. I’m enough of a sucker for period-piece melodramas that I would’ve been onboard for that relatively small story about one historically famous couple’s version of art therapy, but the film turned out to be much grander & fuller in scope than that. It hits on much broader themes about how we’ve all lost a genuine, Pagan relationship with the natural world and how making art can be a form of witchcraft that brings us back to it. And it only manages to do so by primarily functioning as Agnes’s story, not William’s.

We meet Agnes & William as young no-namers who are violently in love but haven’t yet fully established their place in the world. As much as they adore each other, their individual natures pull them in separate directions. William’s theatrical ambitions draw him to a busy life in The Big City, while Agnes thrives in the country woods as far away from London as she can get. The central conflict is not so much the grief that couple suffers when they suddenly lose their child to illness, but the dissonance in how they personally process that grief after the fact. A falconer & herbalist who’s viciously rumored to be “the daughter of a forest witch,” Agnes is in tune with the natural flow of life & death, but that flow is frequently disrupted by civilized townsfolk who drag her out of the woods and into the unnatural rituals of Christian society. She’s neither allowed to give birth in the way that feels natural to her (alone, standing in the woods) nor grieve familial loss in her own way (directly, without averting her eyes). When her young son dies and her husband fucks off to the city to continue his work in the theatre, she perceives the abandonment as his own close-hearted rejection of life & nature, lumping him in with the phonies who won’t let her simply be herself in the woods because it’s not Proper Behavior. It isn’t until she sees the resulting play William names after their son that she understands that he can only grieve through his art, and that his act of creation on the stage is its own form of witchcraft — however foreign to hers.

The final act of Hamnet—when Agnes is reunited with and says goodbye to her dead son’s spirit through her husband’s art—is powerful stuff. It cuts right through the knee-jerk cynicism that usually prompts me to dismiss the Oscar-hopeful studio dramas that flood the release calendar this time of year. In particular, I was moved by a shot of Agnes looking up to the stage at her son’s dramatic ghost that mirrors earlier sequences of her looking up to the flying spirit of a deceased pet hawk, illustrating in a small gesture the separate but parallel magics she & her husband practice. It’s that tension between the old & modern ways that makes Zhao such a strong fit for the material. Her docudrama filmmaking style is incongruous with the costume drama genre, but her security-camera modernity clashes with the Old World natural setting in a way that echoes the spiritual divide between Agnes & William’s respective worldviews. The only times the movie loses its way, really, are the brief moments when Zhao strays from Agnes’s POV to catch up with how William is getting along in the city. There’s an especially corny reading of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy that temporarily breaks the movie’s spell as William works out his feelings on his own, but that’s less the fault of Paul Mescal’s performance than it is a misstep in intellectual rigor behind the camera. Hamnet is only truly about Hamlet in the final minutes when Agnes engages with that work from the audience pit, armed with Jessie Buckley’s trademark combative smirk. When it sticks with her, it soars. Thankfully, that accounts for most of the runtime.

-Brandon Ledet

America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of (1973)

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Tony Ganz & Rhody Streeter only made films together over a couple of years in the early 1970s. A few of their documentary shorts aired on the syndicated PBS series The Great American Dream Machine, which was simpatico with their collaborations’ wryly humorous portrait of the nation. Otherwise, their catalog of shorts remained unseen by a wide public audience until their recent exhibitions in New York City, now collected under the anthology title America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of. Because of that spotty history of distribution & scholarship, there wasn’t much context for what Gap Tooth‘s weekly repertory audience would be seeing when the collection premiered in New Orleans last week, besides the films being rare. It was a packed room anyway. The ten Ganz & Streeter shorts that make up America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of were met with shocks of laughter and stretches of stunned silence, depending on the mood of the moment. The individual films weren’t produced with a unifying theme or intent in mind, but since they were made with such a small, consistent crew in such a short period of time, they end up forming a singular mosaic picture of 1970s America — especially the white parts, the very white parts.

America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of is at its strongest when its shorts are hitting on a common theme, illustrating a postcard advertisement for The American Dream as a prepackaged plastic commodity. The opening short “The Best of Your Life (a.k.a. Sun City)” plays like an early prototype for the recent surreal retirement community doc Some Kind of Heaven, inviting the audience into a 3D brochure to gawk at all the uncanny weirdos who reside within. The other standout shorts in the set also work as ironic advertisements for the kitschiest corners of American monoculture: a novelty sex resort in “Honeymoon Hotel,” a Christian Nationalist death cult in “Risen Indeed (a.k.a. Campus Crusade for Christ)”, an elevator music studio in “A Better Day in Every Way (a.k.a. Muzak)”, a finishing school for adults in “Woman Unlimited”, and a billboard advertisement painters’ studio in “Sign Painters (a.k.a. Signs)”. It’s in these ironic snapshots of microwave-dinner America that Ganz & Streeter land their biggest laughs, likening retirees’ synchronized workout routines to soldiers Sieg Heiling their Fuhrer and infiltrating anti-hippie Christian activist circles who believe Communists to be Satanists engaged in a literal holy war. At the same time, they find a way to mock institutions instead of laughing at individual interview subjects. Later documentaries like Grey Gardens & Gates of Heaven would soon take on a similar project to much wider attention & acclaim: recording sweetly humanist interviews with ordinary, everyday weirdos like you & me, who happened to have gotten wrapped up in fascinatingly unreal scenarios.

Any one of those on-topic shorts could land as someone’s personal favorite in the collection. Personally, I laughed the hardest at the robotic corporate speak of the “Muzak” and “Sign Painters” docs, as straightlaced business suits passionlessly explained how they’ve turned once artistic mediums into uniform, sellable products. The candy-colored splendor of the “Sun City” retirement home tour and the women’s-mag “Honeymoon Hotel” ad is also undeniably enticing, making for the most visually striking and spatially disorienting selections in the bunch. It’s the other, “off-topic” shorts in the collection that really make those works stand out, though. You don’t get a full sense of just how uncanny & inhuman the collection’s portrait of American culture is until they cut away from the Norman Rockwell postcards to black & white snapshots of real people struggling with real problems in real environments. In “Help-Line” & “Y.E.S.,” desperately lonely people on the verge of making life-ending decisions re-establish tenuous human connections via phone call. In “Bowery Men’s Shelter,” New York City alcoholics and discharged mental patients find a temporary place to sleep between psychotic episodes & binges, barely limping along to the next day. The furthest-afield inclusion is “Hoi: Village Life in Tonga,” which leaves America entirely for a quiet anthropological study of indigenous Tongan social life. It was the very first film that Ganz & Streeter shot together and, while it doesn’t fit in tonally or thematically with the other shorts in the collection, it does help contextualize their countercultural-outsider approach to American anthropology in the more idiosyncratic shorts. Not for nothing, but “Hoi” & “Bowery Men’s Shelter” are also the only films in the collection in which non-white subjects are interviewed, making for some politically productive tension in their contrast with other subjects, like the prayer-warrior fascists of “Campus Crusade for Christ”.

If there’s anything especially remarkable that Ganz & Streeter achieved with these short-form American anthropologies (besides conveying a clever editorial eye for selecting environments & industries worth documenting in the first place), it’s in their avoidance of outright condescension. The uncanny, hyper-American scenarios they captured on film range from conceptually funny to outright evil, but the people who are trapped within them are consistently charming regardless of their participation. The nation’s cultureless rituals have made fools of us all, and so we can only feel warm comradery with our fellow fools who’ve fallen into its strangest crevices. That warm humanism is especially apparent in the closing short, “A Trip Through the Brooks Home,” which expands on an interview with a married couple who live in the Sun City retirement community profiled in “The Best of Your Life.” It’s very simply a guided home tour, but there’s a pervasively sweet awkwardness to the husband & wife at the center of it, recalling the Mitch & Micky folk singer duo of Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind. It’s that generosity towards its subjects that makes America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of such great theatrical programming, as you can hear individual members of the audience being delighted by one isolated character quirk at a time. Hopefully, it’ll be more widely available soon, both in theaters and at home, since it’s both a useful historical document of vintage American kitsch (especially when juxtaposed with genuine American suffering) and a godsend for cult cinema freaks who’ve already rewatched similar human-interest docs like American Movie, Vernon, Florida, and Heavy Metal Parking Lot too many times to count.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #253: Oldboy (2003) & Old Movies, New Directors

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Welcome to Episode #253 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon & Boomer catch up with older movies from some of this year’s best directors, starting with Park Chan-wook’s infamous gross-out revenge thriller Oldboy (2003).

00:00 The year in review
39:18 The Colors Within (2025)
50:14 Resurrection (2025)
55:38 Hamnet (2025)

1:03:05 Oldboy (2003)
1:31:00 The Twentieth Century (2019)
1:49:00 Straight Up (2019)
2:13:33 Liz and the Blue Bird (2018)

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

FYC 2025: The Slow Death of Cinema

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Is cinema dying? I don’t think so. Between local festivals, streaming premieres, awards screeners, and routine trips to my neighborhood theater, I watch about a hundred or so new releases every year, and there’s always plenty of daring, imaginative art out there worthy of being championed. Of course, there’s far more disposable garbage than there is buried treasure, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth digging. The allure of watching nothing but already-canonized classics from decades in the past and dismissing the cinema of the moment is that the digging has already been done for you. It’s easy to flippantly say that cinema is dead or complain that they don’t make ’em like they used to while sticking to long-beloved titles from the past, ignoring the blander, shittier movies from earlier eras that have been forgotten to time. The ratio of good-to-bad art has remained fairly consistent. Sure, comparing the dishwater-dull screengrabs from Wicked: For Good against the Technicolor fantasia of the classic MGM Wizard of Oz is dispiriting, but there are hundreds of forgotten Westerns, melodramas, and gorilla-suited monster movies from 1930s Hollywood that are just as artistically bankrupt as Jon Chu’s recent CG babysitters. Meanwhile, there’s ecstatically great work being made & distributed right now, seen only by those curious enough to go looking for it outside the Wicked-overrun multiplexes. So, I found myself feeling a little conflicted while watching a recent double feature of art films about the slow, ongoing death of art films. Both Bi Gan’s Resurrection and Radu Jude’s Dracula grimly declare cinema to be dead, looking in the temporal rearview for signs of life & art in a supposedly decaying medium (starting with parodies of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu in both cases, weirdly enough). The argument is somewhat self-defeating, though, since both films present newly mutated cinematic forms & iterations by poking at the century-old artform’s still-bleeding corpse. They offer an arthouse equivalent of the rapidly alternating “It’s so over”/”We’re so back” cycles of social media commentary on cinema’s constant death & rebirth in a single self-conflicting message, prompting me to switch between nodding along and shaking my head until I felt dizzy.

If either of these sprawling cinematic eulogies express any hope for the future of the artform, it’s Bi Gan’s film. An abstract sci-fi fantasy parable, Resurrection personifies dream-logic Cinema so it can watch it evolve over a century of increasingly narrowed formal refinements & constraints. It’s set in a loosely defined future where humanity has discovered that the key to avoiding death is to stop dreaming, creating an underground class of dissidents called Deliriants who continue to dream despite the new norm. The Deliriant of this particular story is the shared, personified dream of Cinema: a Nosferatu-styled monster whose beating heart is a film projector. He starts his journey in a German Expressionist dollhouse, peering out of warped Dr. Caligari windows in an early-20th Century opium den before his corporeal form expires in the vibrant poppy fields outside of Oz. His spirit lives on in other Deliriant forms throughout the decades, though, re-emerging in an amnesiac noir realm, a Buddhist temple ghost story, a card-trick conman hustling saga, and a vampiric Y2K gangster picture (each life representing one of the five senses, for reasons I cannot confidently explain). Unfortunately, charting the gradual mutations of the artform in this way means what starts as total lucid-dreaming freedom in the Silent Cinema era gradually becomes grounded & rigid in its thinking, with Bi Gan’s declared aesthetic influences abruptly stopping in the late 1990s; even the noir segment feels closer to Alex Proyas’s Dark City than anything recognizable from the 1940s (give or take an homage to the hall-of-mirrors shootout in The Lady from Shanghai). The most overt acknowledgement Bi Gan makes to the cinema of the now is in the gangster-vampire segment’s extensive long-take “oner,” a digital-era stylistic flex he became synonymous with in his 2018 breakout A Long Day’s Journey into Night. According to Resurrection, cinema started as freeform poetry that was slowly pinned down and strangled to death by the restrictions of real-world logic. By the end, Bi Gan is begging the world to start dreaming in the old ways again, so the medium can find new life in a better future. That might be a little dismissive to the cinema of the now, but it’s at least willing to believe the corpse can be revived.

Radu Jude is not so hopeful. The Romanian prankster’s death-of-cinema comedy Dracula only arrives at the scene of cinema’s death to playfully piss on the corpse, like a Calvin & Hobbs bumper sticker. Jude reportedly pitched his take on Dracula as an off-hand joke while struggling to secure funding for projects he actually cared about, and the resulting 3-hour sketch comedy revue largely plays as a punishment for everyone who encouraged him to paint himself into that corner. His onscreen avatar is a huckster with tireless Roberto Benigni energy (Adonis Tanta) who has been hired to direct a modern interpretation of Dracula but has no ideas on what to shoot. Having just barely put in an effort to change out of his pajamas, he fires off several prompts to a generative A.I. program that helpfully “writes” different Dracula scenarios for him, which are individually acted out in commercial grade digi-cam vignettes. The actual scripts for those varying skits were obviously written by Jude, not A.I., as he takes wild potshots at previous Dracula adaptations from the likes of F.W. Murnau, Francis Ford Coppola and, most recently, Robert Eggers. The vignettes are frequently interrupted and derailed by generative A.I. animation in order to supplement their budget, however, assaulting the audience with digital slop we usually only see by accident when clicking down the wrong Facebook rabbit hole. Jude conveys some muted respect for Dracula cinema of the past here, but he mostly demonstrates a combative relationship with the subject. The film opens with repeated A.I. line readings of the phrase, “I am Vlad the Impaler Dracula, and you can all suck my cock,” which are later rebutted by modern-day Romanians shouting their own expletives in return, like “Lick my pussy, Dracula!” and “Suck Popeye the Sailor’s dick.” Beneath all of the crass humor, there’s some genuine political anger at the heart of the project, just as there was in the Andrew Tate-spoofing segments of Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. He takes the time to illustrate how Vlad the Impaler, Dracula exploited & terrorized the Romanian people, how Romanian people are still being exploited & terrorized by the political powers of today, and how their exploitation & terror has now been commodified by an entire century’s worth of post-Nosferatu Dracula cinema. He’s not only declaring cinema dead, stomped into the dirt by generative A.I.; he’s also saying good riddance to bad rubbish.

If either of these films are actively aware of & engaged with current cinema, it’s Dracula. Radu Jude’s hijacking of Bram Stoker’s cinematic legacy is not so much the movie of the year as it is the movie of the moment: an AI-generated shitpost dispatched from the still-settling rubble of pop culture proper. It just sees nothing inventive or exciting about the modern art of the moving image except maybe in the exterior shots of Roku City or in pop up ads for boner pills. In contrast, Resurrection‘s reverence for the cinema of the distant past is less dismissive of the current moment as hopelessly dead than it is instructive on how it can be rejuvenated. I was in total awe for the first couple segments of the interlocking anthology film as it integrated the visual trickery of cinema’s early days among the likes of Murnau, Méliès, and Lang with a more modern approach to the craft. That spell was broken as its stylistic markers drifted closer to the current moment, though, especially by the time I realized it was going to declare cinema’s time of death as occurring just before the 21st Century began. Again, I feel compelled to contend that there are still daring, worthwhile works being made to this day, and that the artform is still very much alive. Cases in point: Bi Gan’s Resurrection & Radu Jude’s Dracula, no matter what they’d tell you themselves.

-Brandon Ledet

FYC 2025: Cozy for the Holidays

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Every FYC awards screener mailed to critics this time of year includes severe legal verbiage about how they are to be viewed, warning against obvious transgressions like online piracy and more grey-area faux pas like watching soon-to-be-distributed titles in the presence of family & friends. Given that these screeners tend to flood critics’ inboxes in the holiday stretch between Thanksgiving & Christmas, it’s safe to assume that second warning is widely ignored. Critics, film journalists, and awards pundits often travel home with armfuls of FYC DVDs and e-mail inboxes overflowing with screener links that they’re supposed to review at the exact moment that they’re also supposed to be spending time with family. There’s going to be some unavoidable bleedover there. While more harrowing titles like Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You & Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love might be saved for a late-night laptop watch once the house has gone quiet, it’s inevitable that softer, more amiable fare like Mike Flanagan’s Life of Chuck or Celine Song’s Materialists will make its way to the living room TV at one point or another while the family is enjoying being cozy in each other’s presence. I do wonder how that home-with-the-family programming narrows down what critics & awards voters make time for during the annual holiday-season screener push. It’s gotta be easier, for instance, to sneak in a viewing of the latest Rian Johnson murder mystery, Wake Up Dead Man, in a shared living space than, say, Radu Jude’s 3-hour, semi-pornographic A.I. shitpost Dracula. Cozy living room viewing isn’t necessarily the enemy of art, though, and there are plenty of worthwhile new releases that won’t alienate or horrify onlooking relatives who are just trying to enjoy some Thanksgiving leftovers without being psychologically scarred. I even found myself drifting toward the cozier end of the screener pile over this past holiday week, saving the freakier, more esoteric stuff for when my family was napping in the other room.

Without question, the coziest option from this year’s holiday screener deluge was Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale — a movie so pleasant & unchallenging that it’s functionally an episode of television. Workman costume drama director Simon Curtis goes overboard mimicking crane shots with drone cameras in every exterior scene to convince the audience that we’re watching a real movie and not a TV special, but anyone who’s still keeping up with this series knows why we’re here. The only reason to watch The Grand Finale is to catch up with old friends from Downton Abbey‘s heyday, checking in on beloved characters like kitchen-comrade Daisy, surprise power-player Edith, and village moron Mr. Moseley for what the title promises will be the final time. Showrunner & screenwriter Julian Fellowes is shamelessly working on autopilot here, borrowing the A-plot conflict (in which longtime Downton queenpin Lady Mary struggles to maintain her social status after the public shame of becoming a divorcee) from the second season of his more current project, The Gilded Age. Both that A-plot conflict and the B-plot villain (an obvious confidence man who is emptying the pockets of the Granthams’ American cousin, played by an overqualified Paul Giamatti) are brushed aside with about 40 minutes of runtime left to go, so that the movie can get down to its real business: saying goodbye . . . for now. I have a hard time believing The Grand Finale will prove to be all that final in the years to come, as it’s likely Fellowes & company will find other ways to squeeze a few more dollars out of the Downton Abbey brand now that its theatrical-film cycle has officially run its course. To my discredit, I’ll also keep watching these addendum episodes to the show for as long as he keeps making them, since I’ve spent enough time with these characters by now that they’re starting to feel like actual family, especially now that they’re no longer in danger of anything permanently damaging ever happening to them again. All the big shocks & deaths are behind us; the future is looking purely, unashamedly cozy.

Besides low-stakes costume dramas, the epitome of cozy movie programming is Studio Ghibli animation: My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Kiki’s Delivery Service, the classics. There weren’t any cozy anime titles left on my to-watch pile this year (although I will continue to sing the praises of Naoko Yamada’s rock ‘n’ roll sleeper The Colors Within to anyone who’ll listen), but thankfully French animators came through with a close-enough equivalent in the children’s sci-fi fantasy adventure Arco. Hayao Miyazaki’s career-long fascination with pastoral nature and the miraculous mechanics of flight are echoed in this story of a future society that supplements their cloud-city farm work with time travel technology that requires them to fly in rainbow arcs. The youngest member of that family, Arco, gets stranded alone in the past, where he meets a girl his age who’s living a similarly restricted, overparented domestic life. They go on their first truly independent adventure together, ultimately at the expense of losing time with their family. The animation is consistently cute, and the dual-timeline sci-fi worldbuilding opens the otherwise small story up to moments of grand-scale wonder. Between this, Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds, and Mars Express, it’s starting to feel like there’s a nice little new wave of sci-fi/fantasy films forming in French animation studios right now. Mars Express is a little more Blade Runner than Arco or Sirocco, which skew a little more Ghibli (making them less distinct in the process) but they’re all pleasant & enchanting enough in their own way. The semi-retired Miyazaki can’t issue a new Boy and the Heron dispatch from the back of his chain-smoking brain every year, so we’re going to have to settle for his closest equivalents if we don’t want to end up rewatching Kiki’s Delivery Service every time we get cozy under a blanket. Arco ably does its job in that respect, helping keep traditional animation alive in our own CG Disney dystopia.

It’s possible that Arco might earn an Oscars nomination for Best Animated Feature and the latest Downton Abbey episode might score a stray Best Costume Design nod elsewhere, but it’s difficult to imagine that either awards campaign will result in any statues. To find a genuine awards contender in the FYC screener pile, you do have to go a little dark & serious, which can be challenging if you’re trying to keep things cozy around your family. Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value was already automatically going to be in awards consideration after the previous attention earned by his breakout hit The Worst Person in the World, but it’s got an especially good chance given how eager it is to please instead of alienate. At times, Sentimental Value is very simply a nice movie about a nice house. At other times, it is simply a sad movie about making a sad movie. It’s the perfect programming selection for the holiday season if you’ve got a few adult members of the family who need a break from the kids’ incessant rewatches of KPop Demon Hunters & Minecraft Movie, especially if they have the luxury of time to visit an actual brick-and-mortar theater outside of the house. Reinate “Worst Person” Reinsve returns as Trier’s muse, playing another thirtysomething who can’t quite get her shit together. This time, she’s a Norwegian stage actress on the verge whose touchy relationship with her estranged film-director father (Stellan Skarsgård) comes to a head when he writes a screenplay for her to star in. When she firmly declines, an in-over-her-head American movie star (Elle Fanning) takes the part instead, inadvertently stirring up decades’ worth of familial tragedies & betrayals. The movie is largely told from the POV of the family home, where the autofictional meta drama is going to be filmed, which opens the story up to a larger family history than the simple father-daughter conflict that I’m describing. It’s all very warm, solemn, and sophisticated in the exact way you expect an awards-season drama to be, and I’m sure its demonstrative good tastes & behavior will be rewarded in the months to come.

Being cozy isn’t everything; it’s not going to earn Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale any statues. It might help Sentimental Value‘s awards-season chances, though, especially when its closest new-release equivalent on the scene right now is a gut-wrenching drama about grieving the death of William Shakespeare’s young child. You’re a lot less likely to put your family through Hamnet than taking them to see a movie about a modern-day father & daughter repairing their relationship through some light art therapy, which helps attract awards-voter eyes to the screen.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Sister Midnight (2025)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the deadpan arranged-marriage horror comedy Sister Midnight (2025).

00:00 New Orleans Bookfair
02:40 Star Trek
06:06 Went the Day Well? (1942)
09:00 Black Angel (1946)
11:04 Angel’s Egg (1985)
15:00 Universal Language (2025)
23:00 Wicked: For Good (2025)
29:45 Friendship (2025)
34:11 The Running Man (2025)
40:30 Boys Go to Jupiter (2025)
46:06 Die My Love (2025)
50:35 Wake Up Dead Man (2025)
58:17 No Other Choice (2025)
1:08:22 Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (2025)
1:10:51 Keeper (2025)
1:15:27 Sentimental Value (2025)
1:19:10 Alpha (2025)
1:24:46 Dracula (2025)
1:28:20 Arco (2025)
1:32:07 Lurker (2025)
1:38:48 If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025)

1:44:22 Sister Midnight (2025)

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Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Even more so than fellow bloviators Luca Guadagnino and Guillermo del Toro, Quentin Tarantino is mostly in the business of pitching movies these days, as opposed to actually making them. There have been so many Deadline press releases covering Tarantino’s unrealized projects over the years that they’ve justified their own Wikipedia page, ranging from recent hits like his hyper-violent Star Trek reboot and his “retirement” film about a vintage porno critic to his more classic threats to update titles like Halloween, Westworld, The Man from U.N.CL.E., Lucio Fulci’s The Psychic, and Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. One of the more promising projects in that pile of discarded drafts was Tarantino’s urge to direct the 2006 adaptation of Casino Royale, returning the pop culture image of James Bond to his 1960s roots. The project obviously went in another direction, hiring Daniel Craig to play the famous spy in a self-serious series of grim, grey thrillers set in the modern day. It’s easy to imagine the Tarantino spin on the franchise, though, with a new found extremity of violence in Bond’s international espionage, peppered with brighter colors & snappier dialogue in the stretches between world-saving kills. And thanks to the new straight-to-Shudder thriller Reflection in a Dead Diamond, it’s even easier to imagine than ever before.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond approximates what the Tarantino version of a James Bond film would’ve been like, except it’s much less talky and even more absurdly, stylishly violent than what you’re picturing. One of the details from Tarantino’s Bond pitch was that he wanted to bring back Pierce Brosnan as an older, more grizzled version of the character than the typical suave playboy type. Similarly, Reflection in a Dead Diamond is as reflective as its title suggests, casting giallo veteran Fabio Testi as an octogenarian spy who’s struggling to enjoy his retirement, since a neighboring guest at his luxury hotel on the French Riviera has triggered memories of his more exciting past. The more typically Bond-like Yannick Renier appears as the younger version of the international superspy John Diman, as memories of a violent past and the calmer facts of the present mix in what plays like Alzheimer’s induced hallucinations. The movie alternates between the two timelines at a dizzying rhythm, with Diman reliving his sado-masochistic battle with a femme fatale diamond smuggler with such urgency & ferocity that the audience quickly loses track of what’s real and what’s imagined. And that’s before we’re introduced to another past, faceless enemy who kills his targets by tricking them to believe they’re living in a genre film, executing them with the calling-card appearance of the word “Fin” — bringing in another note of Tarantino-style meta theatrics.

I do not mean to insult the creative voices of directors Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani by focusing so much on Tarantino here. Cattet & Forzani are formidable genre remixers in their own right, having kicked off the neo-giallo revival of recent years in early titles like Amer & The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears long before lesser filmmakers got there (and having moved on to reinvigorating the spaghetti Western in Let the Corpses Tan after the rest of the industry caught up to them). There’s a delirious maximalism to the couple’s filmmaking style that cannot be mistaken for anyone else’s work, even if their imagery exclusively traffics in the vintage genre ephemera of old. There have been dozens of proper James Bond films produced over the past 60 years (among other schlocky Eurospy knockoffs, some even starring Testi), and not a single one can claim to be half as visually stylish as what’s accomplished here. The screen-print silhouettes of classic Bond intros are animated in sadomasochistic fights to the death where diamonds serve as substitutes for both blood and ejaculate. Comic book panels, split-screen framing, and film projector layering rush to fill the screen with the coolest imagery possible every single moment. The blazing sun reflects off a nipple ring with the dizzying brightness of the lethal boat trip in Purple Noon. Black-leather ninja vamps extend razor-sharp claws through the fingertips of their motorcycle gloves to slash the faces of the goons who get in their way. Fragments of the classic Mission: Impossible clone masks wash up on the beach like a Dalí painting in motion. The femme fatale diamond thief announces her victim’s death by promising that, “Humanity will be rid of your fetid odor.” Cattet & Forzani may have a style of their own entirely separate from Tarantino’s, but as a trio they share a common goal: reviving abandoned genre filmmaking traditions by turning up the volume on every reachable knob until the audience begs for mercy.

The biggest hurdle for getting into Cattet & Forzani’s work is learning to let go of linear narrative logic and just enjoy their surface pleasures for what they are: cool as fuck. Personally, that loose grip on plot worked best for me in the giallo-nostalgic free-for-all of The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, since they were working within a genre that’s always cared more about style than story. The Bond-era superspy picture is a little more rigid in its thriller plotting than the Italo murder mysteries they’ve previously pulled from, but they break away from that restriction by introducing a supervillain who tricks John Diman into believing he is starring in a film within the film, titled Mission Serpentik. That choice frees the movie up to hallucinate whatever hip spycraft imagery it pleases from moment to moment, including absurdly silly details like a disco-mirror paillettes dress that doubles as a wearable camera or a foosball table that doubles as an instrument of death (after its handles are likened to the throttle on a motorcycle). If there’s any one piece of filmmaking Reflection in a Dead Diamond‘s storytelling structure reminded me of, it’s John Cena’s “Firefly Fun House Match” with Bray Wyatt at WrestleMania 36, in which Cena wrestled for the purity of his own soul within the liminal psychic space of his subconscious, untethered from the wrestling ring. Once you accept that John Diman is mostly thwarting enemies within his own mind, Cattet & Bruno are free to take the imagery wherever they please, following whatever whims a post-modern Eurospy picture might inspire. Even twenty years ago, the Tarantino version of a James Bond spy thriller likely would’ve been more grounded to the confines of reality than that, but I have a feeling he would’ve been drawn to very similar high-style, high-artifice imagery. It’s exactly the movie a modern fan of its genre’s retro glory days would want to see come to bloody life.

-Brandon Ledet

Alpha (2025)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

As with most genre films, it’s tempting to discuss Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to her Palme d’Or-winning body horror Titane exclusively through points of comparison. Alpha is Julia Ducournau’s Tideland; it is Julia Ducournau’s Kids; it is Julia Ducournau’s 1990s time machine that only makes pitstops for scenes of vintage misery. The Tideland comparison is directly invited by the film itself, as Alpha is another fantasy-horror tale of a young child haunted by a close family member’s heroin addiction, in which the niece & uncle in that relationship take a beat to watch scenes from Tideland director Terry Gilliam’s better-respected title The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. The Kids comparison is indirectly invited earlier in the story, as we meet the titular 13-year-old-niece-in-peril while she’s unconscious at a high school house party and being tattooed with a dirty needle, exposing her to an illness referred to only as “The Virus.” Whereas Harmony Korine’s misbehaved-teens scare film intended to shock audiences with the seedy details of how HIV/AIDS was actively spreading through children’s unsupervised hedonism, Ducournau’s rearview vision can only grieve the lives lost during the scariest years of that viral spread, when information was as low as the likelihood for death was high. Alpha can’t help but feel a little out of step with the current moment as it dwells on those darkest days of the recent past, but the way it’s haunted by The Virus at least feels specific & personal to its director despite all its convenient points of comparison — especially by the time you do the math to figure out that she would’ve been her protagonist’s age around 1996.

One of the clearest ways Alpha is personal to Julia Ducournau is its visual interpretation of AIDS symptoms through body horror metaphor. In Raw, she depicted a young woman’s coming-of-age struggles through a skin-tearing cannibal transformation. In Titane, she tested the outer limits of familial machismo & gender identity through another monstrous transformation, that time forged in steel. In contrast, the bodily transformations of Alpha are much more solemn & subdued. Victims of The Virus gradually harden into gorgeous marble statues as they perish, coughing up sculptors’ dust in their last breaths before their final, agonized moments are set in stone. It’s a stunning effect that captures both the pain and the beauty of loved ones lost to disease, but it’s also one that deliberately backs away from the confrontational ferocity of Ducornau’s earlier works to instead seek a quiet sorrow. The film’s titular teenager (Mélissa Boros) is the daughter of a doctor (Golshifteh Farahani) who’s been surrounded by the fantastically painful effects of The Virus since its earliest days, most intimately through the slow physical decline of her drug-addict brother (Tahar Rahim). That wayward uncle happens to return home at the exact moment when Alpha is exposed to The Virus via tattoo needle, prompting the mother to worry about the parallels between the two people she loves the most as the family waits for her daughter’s test results. Those results will either foretell Alpha transforming into a human statue, frozen in time, or Alpha surviving long enough to live a full life. It’s a tough couple weeks’ wait, especially for an educated mother in the medical profession.

The worst you could say about Alpha is that it feels stuck in the past on an aesthetic level, somehow landing closer to the de-saturated digital filmmaking of the early 2000s (Tideland, et al.) than the 1990s misery dramas evoked in its themes (Kids, et al.). Ducournau’s earlier films felt like they were giving birth to some new monstrous beast not yet seen onscreen, while her latest finds her lost somewhere in the recent past, dissociated from the current moment. That temporal dissociation is at least appropriate for the film’s longform flashback structure, in which Farahani’s mother figure processes her daughter’s current health scare by reliving memories of her brother’s earlier days with The Virus. At first, those two timelines are clearly differentiated by color grading choices (warm tones for the past; cool, marbled tones for the present) and the respective curliness density of Farahani’s hairdo, but once the prodigal uncle returns to the fold they start to collapse into one simultaneous story. It’s a remarkably confusing narrative structure, but that confusion is somehwat the point. No matter how distanced the doctor gets from the most harrowing days of The Virus, she can’t help but bring the fears & anxieties of those times into the present. Ducournau is very likely making a point there about how survivors & witnesses of the HIV/AIDS epidemic reflexively carry the despair of those years into present-day illness crises (i.e., COVID), and she’s presumably counting herself among them. Whether it’s the point or not, though, the film does feel artistically dated, which is not typically something you can say of her work.

If there’s any current-moment film title Alpha can be easily compared to, it’s this year’s fellow Cannes-premiered oddity The Plague. Ducournau’s latest is paradoxically both more literal and more lyrical than Charlie Pollinger’s knockout debut, but they’re both coming-of-age stories about young nerds stigmatized by their peers for coming in direct contact with a fantastical virus that transforms their bodies. The influence of Ducournau’s own debut, Raw, visibly seeps into the waters of The Plague as the latter film’s fictional virus also manifests in itchy skin that victims habitually shred in an anxious reaction to social isolation. The overlap between Ducournau & Pollinger’s films then becomes uncanny in a pivotal moment when Alpha is bullied in her school’s swimming pool, mirroring the water polo camp setting of The Plague. Whereas The Plague conveys a sharpness in intent & execution, however, Alpha gets lost in its own made-up world & metaphor. In an early scene, Alpha’s classmates struggle to interpret the classic Poe poem “A Dream Within a Dream,” just as Ducournau invites her audience to struggle interpreting the linear timeline between her characters’ past & present through dream-within-a-dream storytelling logic. That temporal muddling ends up relegating the marbled body transformations of The Virus to the background as the character drama it threatens takes precedence, which is a letdown for anyone excited to see one of body horror’s best working auteurs once again do her thing. Instead, we find her searching for something in the haze of the past, making baffling aesthetic choices from scene to scene (not least of all in a few disastrously distracting needle drops) as she stumbles through a foggy memory.  I suppose I should be celebrating Ducournau for retreating further into personal preoccupation rather than delivering Titane 2.0 to dedicated fans, but I also can’t pretend that the result is as rewarding as her previous triumphs. Alpha is more satisfying to think about than it is to actually watch, which I can’t say about Raw, Titane or, for that matter, The Plague.

-Brandon Ledet