christopher abbott

NOFF 2025: Ground Report

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In my previous dispatch covering this year’s New Orleans Film Fest, I previewed a few selections from the program before they premiered in-person, primarily focusing on documentaries about niche pop culture relics: the 80s house music scene in Chicago, the recurring 90s SNL character Pat!, and the bare-all story of the noise-rock circus act Butthole Surfers. Now that the festival’s in-person portion has concluded (with Virtual Cinema selections streaming online through Sunday, 11/2), I’m here to log some on-the-ground reporting to cover selections I caught on the big screen. The five titles reviewed below are all narrative features that screened during NOFF at various venues throughout the city (namely, The CAC, The Prytania, and The Broad) — some to ecstatic crowds, others to little fanfare. They’re loosely ranked from my personal favorites to my least favorites, but all are worth checking out if you have any interest in their reported style or subject. There will be one final dispatch covering this year’s NOFF in the form of a post-fest podcast with local critic Bill Arceneaux once the virtual portion has concluded in early November, and then the film festival department of the Swampflix newsroom will be furloughed until French Film Fest returns to The Prytania in the Spring, same as ever year.

The Plague

As NOFF coincides with my annual Halloween Season horror bingeing, I always find myself scanning the program for titles that fit both needs. This year, there were more horror-adjacent titles on offer than usual, including a few straight-up horror comedies about sex curses (see below), sexy zombies (see further below), and sex-obsessed Nice Guy puppets (Your Own Flavor). The scariest movie I’ve seen all month, however, was a coming-of-age drama about hazing rituals at a middle school-age water polo camp. I don’t know that Charlie Polinger’s debut feature The Plague fully qualifies as a proper Horror Film, but it neatly fits into a social-anxiety horror canon with titles like Eighth Grade, The Fits, and Raw. At the very least, it’s itchy & squirmy enough to register as a psychological thriller, and its lengthy scenes of slow-motion underwater cinematography offer it an otherworldly, nightmarish beauty that verges on the supernatural — a welcome break from the all-too-real dramatizations of school age bullying. A near-guaranteed moneymaker genre in recent years, horror offers up-and-coming directors the chance to take stylish risks audiences won’t sign on for otherwise, so it’s not especially surprising to learn that Polinger’s next project is going to be an adaptation of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” for A24, starring Mikey Madison (which was previously adapted by Roger Corman into what is comfortably one of the greatest horror films of all time).

The closest The Plague comes to having “a star” is Joel Edgerton in a supporting role as the water polo camp’s whistle-blowing sad sack coach, who’s scarcely present to supervise. The rest of the main cast are preteen boys who’ve been largely left alone to establish their own social hierarchy, with newcomer Everett Blunck playing Ben, the latest, gangliest addition to the crew. The title refers to a hazing ritual the boys have invented in which the most awkward kid among them has been socially diagnosed with a vaguely defined plague that manifests as a skin-shredding rash, banishing him from any direct interaction with the rest of the class. Ben is unsure how much he wants to participate in this ritual at first, but he’s ultimately willing to punch down as long as it means he’s not the lowest rung on the social ladder. That status doesn’t last forever, though, and the gradual, subtle ways he gets “infected” by the plague are horrifically familiar to anyone who remembers having an “awkward phase” at that age. The Plague hits especially hard for Millennials who suffered their worst social nightmares in the early 2000s, since its 2003 setting is consistently anchored by eerily accurate cultural markers like endless repetitions of the “Okayyy” Lil Jon punchlines from Chappelle’s Show, a forgotten mating call from the time. It’s remarkably well observed in depicting the gendered bullying that boys suffer at that age (with the neighboring girls synchronized-swimming camp being quarantined to a walled-off realm worthy of its own sister movie), with only the otherworld liminality of swimming underwater to offer any sense of relief. It’s an nerve-racking film about how all children are monsters, one that’ll make you glad you never have to be one again.

Fucktoys

The Plague will enjoy a Prestige Season theatrical rollout in hopes of landing on a few High Profile critics’ Best of the Year Lists, boosting its public profile. The future of Annapurna Sriram’s campy sex comedy Fucktoys is much hazier in the film-distro crystal ball, partly due to the expletive in its title (and the 100 minutes of depravity that ensues). Sriram herself stars as down-on-her-luck sex worker who learns in the opening scene that the reason she’s been going through it lately is that she’s been struck with a curse. When she asks her most trusted psychic (local legend Big Freedia, in a scene-stealing role) how this could’ve happened, the psychic shrugs it off with the explanation that sometimes “It be like that.” After consulting several other psychics around town for a second opinion the way cancer patients will desperately bounce from doctor to doctor, she quickly accepts that the curse is real, and starts working overtime to earn the money for a lamb-sacrificing ritual that will lift said curse, freeing her from the string of heartbreaks & rotten luck that has been derailing her life. Of course, this premise is mostly an excuse for Sriram to travel around town from john to john on her vintage moped as she gets her cash in order, providing the plot structure needed to justify flooding the screen with quirky side characters and one-off sex gags. Then, things get genuinely horrific as the threat shifts from vague supernatural curse magic to real-life john with drug & ego issues, consciously souring the mood in frank acknowledgement of the dangerous risks that come with regular sex work (i.e., men).

For a low-budget sex comedy filmed mostly on the industrial backroads of rural Louisiana, Fucktoys has an impressively stylish look to it. Shot on film and decorated with a self-driven dedication to Swinging 60s psychedelia, it looks like a dusty Polaroid found locked away in a box of antique sex toys. Sriram sets the film in a fictional, fantastic setting she calls Trashworld, made entirely out of what appears to be hand-built sets and thrifted vintage clothing. That setting and the over-the-top character work will likely earn Fucktoys a lot of convenient comparisons to the Mortville trash world of John Waters’s oeuvre, but in practice it hits a lot closer to Gregg Araki’s work: sincerely sexy & sensual while still remaining outrageously bratty & garish. The film certainly has a lot of harsh political messaging behind its flippantly slutty comedic antics, constantly calling attention to how the wealthy live by different rules than the rest of us, putting the servant class at constant risk. Sriram just works hard to make sure she’s not portraying the sex-worker lifestyle as a nonstop misery parade, seeking out the pleasure & humor in every scenario where money & hexes aren’t ruining the vibe. It’s the kind of bongripping comedy where the protagonist owns a full Doug Funny wardrobe of the same uniform outfit in multiple copies, and if someone writes down a phone number in lipstick, it’s almost certain to be 555-666-0420.

Queens of the Dead

The joke-to-laugh ratio in Tina Romero’s debut zomcom Queens of the Dead is not nearly as successful as Fucktoys‘, but it’s got a similar, admirable sense of political flippancy. George Romero’s daughter builds off her family name here by staging a standard zombie siege picture in the exact style pioneered by her father; the location under siege by the zombie horde just happens to be a drag club. A queer cast of misfit characters (played by the likes of Love Lies Bleeding‘s Katy O’Brian, I Saw the TV Glow‘s Jack Haven, Drag Race‘s Nina West, Pose‘s Dominique Jackson, and comedy legend Margaret Cho) hole up in a Brooklyn gay bar during a cookie-cutter zombie breakout, with one straight-guy straight man on hand to play their comic foil (Quincy Dunn-Baker). All the crew has to do is survive long enough to ride a Pride Parade float out of town at dawn without turning on each other under the pressure of the nonstop zombie invasion. Petty grievances about past professional betrayals, disrespected identity markers, and refusal to adapt to the new rules of drag bubble to the surface as they pass time at the nightclub’s open bar, but they repeatedly revert to the assertion that they’re Family, and all they have is each other in a world that would gladly tear them apart.

Queens of the Dead is heavy on jokes and light on gore. Sure, a character might suffer a nasty rat bite or axe wound here or there, but Romero never goes for the obligatory horde-hands disemboweling spectacle of the Living Dead series, tastefully choosing to keep her characters’ organs on the insides of their bodies. Instead, she nods to her father’s legacy with winking one liners like “When there’s no more room in Hell . . . there’s an app for that.” To that end, it’s amusing that much of the undead ghouls the central Family has to protect themselves from are the drag-enthusiast public, who continue to scroll & post for Insta clout well after they’re infected by the zombie plague. You’d think they’d be fighting off undead MAGA instead, but I suppose that supply would be short in Brooklyn. The overall effect is less gnarly or politically savvy than it is, simply, cute. I don’t know that it would’ve been made or widely distributed (soon, through Shudder) without the director’s connection to the larger Romero legacy, but it’s got a good heart and it easily passes the Mark Kermode-patented Six Laughs Test for determining whether a comedy qualifies for a passing grade.

The Testament of Ann Lee

The only film on this list that isn’t a debut feature is, thus, the one that bears the greatest weight of expectation, so I suspect it’s one I might’ve ranked higher had I been totally blindsided by it. Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee arrived at the festival with pre-packaged Awards Season prestige, complete with its own security guards scanning the audiences for smartphone pirates who might dare to leak a camrip before the film’s official late-December release. Fastvold is most prominently discussed on the prestige cinema scene right now in the context of her careerlong professional collaboration with husband Brady Corbet (with whom she co-wrote last year’s Oscar-nominated The Brutalist, as well as this immediate follow-up), but it’s her 2020 period drama The World to Come that most had me excited to see her back in the director’s chair. A historical lesbian romance with an unusually deep bleak streak, The World to Come set an expectation for dramatic heartbreak that The Testament of Ann Lee never comes close to achieving, despite the severity of its own story. Instead, Fastvold indulges in the stylistic experiment of making a deeply bleak movie musical, finding more fascination than resonation with her titular historical subject: the enigmatic founder of the American religious sect The Shakers. The most the two films have in common, really, is their casting’s assertion that Christopher Abbott would make a terrible husband.

In a way, The Shakers make perfect sense as the subject for a musical, given that their worship practices involve rhythmic dancing & chanting that could inspire captivating filmic spectacle. Think of the communal breathing/grieving ritual in Midsommar, repeated at feature length. The problem is that the Shaker hymns composer Daniel Blumberg extrapolates into full musical numbers don’t really go anywhere. When Shaker founder Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried) is imprisoned for her heretical beliefs, she sings repetitions of the phrase, “I hunger and thirst, I hunger and thirst, I hunger and thirst” with no lyrical variation for minutes on end, to the point where the audience is more exhausted than the character. It’s her belief system itself that saves the film from total tedium, though. Ann Lee was persecuted for daring to ask whether society would be better off if we all agreed to sing & dance instead of having sex, ever. It turns out the answer depends on how bad the sex you’re having is (i.e., whether you’re married to Hollywood hunk Christopher Abbott). The Testament of Ann Lee is most impressive in how it works as both a sincere depiction of its subject’s religious ecstasy and as a harsh criticism of religion as a mechanism for making one person’s sexual hang-ups everyone else’s problem. I have a feeling that if Blumberg’s songs were better realized and if Fastvold’s name didn’t carry so much weight from previous projects, I’d be singing its praises instead of downplaying its successes. As is, it’s a memorably strange anomaly, an indulgence I suppose Fastvold has well earned by working on knockout titles like The World to Come, The Childhood of a Leader, The Brutalist, and my beloved Vox Lux.

Mad Bills to Pay

A more reasonable person wouldn’t have any pre-screening expectations for The Testament of Ann Lee, but I have been made unreasonable by the year-long attention I pay to movie podcasts with the budget & access to send critics to international film festivals. Maybe the Oscar Buzz generators of Awards Season podcasts like Prestige Junkie & The Big Picture that put movies like Ann Lee on the radar for large audiences are a reasonable thing to listen to; I dunno. What’s really shameful is the close attention I pay to festival-coverage episodes of the NYC cinephile podcasts Film Comment & The Last Thing I Saw, which often get me hyped up for microbudget oddities that have no name recognition outside a small circle of obscurity-obsessed pundits who trade deep-cut titles as a form of social currency half a country away from where I live. Sometimes, my nerdy notetaking during those conversations pays off wonderfully, as it prompted me to catch The Plague as soon as it was available, one of the most rewarding theatrical experiences I’ve had all year — festival or no. Often, it’ll lure me into making time for the kinds of underplayed, subtle-to-a-fault indie dramas I have no personal interest in beyond their value to The Discourse. Again, I acknowledge that it is shameful. I’ll also acknowledge that I had no business watching Mad Bills to Pay in particular, which seems to have spoken to that NYC cinephile crowd specifically because it’s set in The Bronx, a lesser-filmed borough of the city (as opposed to the more often-seen Brooklyn & Manhattan).

Mad Bills to Pay is a summer-bummer indie drama about ill-prepared parents-to-be in The Bronx. It’s a very quiet movie about very loud people, a paradox from the Sean Baker School of Character Studies. Newcomer Juan Collado stars as the 19-year-old Rico, who sells home-mixed cocktails called “Nutcrackers” to people partying on the beach, drawing attention with the constant sales pitch, “Nutties, nutties, nutties, nutties!” A macho brat in a domestic world entirely populated by women, most of his non-“nutties” vocabulary consists of variations of “Babe, babe, babe,” and “Bro, bro, bro” as he whines like a toddler who’s not getting enough attention (or, more often, not getting his way). After getting accustomed to Rico’s daily rounds of video games, bong rips, junk food, and public displays of alcoholism, we’re confronted with the out-of-nowhere revelation that he’s going to be a father, having impregnated the 16-year-old Destiny (fellow first-time actor Destiny Checho). The two children are very obviously not ready to have children of their own, which inspires endless shouting matches as they struggle & fail to assert their maturity to mothers who know better. Those frequent top-volume arguments are in direct contrast with the docudrama filmmaking style, framed with the cold, impartial distance of a security camera. Every single scene is another indication that the parents-to-be should seriously consider adoption or abortion instead of introducing a baby into their volatile relationship, all the way to the very end when it’s far too late. Meanwhile, a seemingly authentic portrait of Dominican American communal life in The Bronx is sketched out in background detail. First-time director Joel Alfonso Vargas delivers a confident, competent version of a kind of festival-circuit movie I always struggle to personally connect with, as my tastes tend to drift towards the more abstracted, dreamlike end of the medium. Since I’ve also failed to connect with recent years’ other festival darlings like Past Lives, Janet Planet, and Aftersun, I’m willing to chalk this one up to the go-to critical quality markers like Subtlety, Nuance, and Restraint just not being my thing. Your own mileage may vary, especially if you have any affinity for day-drinking in The Bronx.

-Brandon Ledet

Poor Things (2023)

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“We are a fucked species; know it.”
“We are all cruel beasts – born that way, die that way.”
“Polite society is fucking boring.”
“Polite society will destroy you.”
“All sexuality is basically immoral.”

Poor Things is the kind of movie about the total scope of life as a human being that allows characters to voice those kinds of abstract philosophical statements, often with immediate dismissive pushback from the poor souls hearing them.  In that way, it’s the culmination of everything provoc-auteur Yorgos Lanthimos has been working towards since early antisocial provocations like Dogtooth & Alps.  He’s always had a coldly detached fascination with basic human behavior & relationships, but he has yet to dissect & catalog them all in a single text the way he does here.  Every new Lanthimos movie feels like it’s poking at some assumed social norm as if it were a corpse he found in the woods.  Poor Things finds that naive interrogation at its most scientifically thorough & perversely fun, to the point where he articulates the entire human experience through repurposed dead flesh.  In doing so, he’s clearly made The Movie of the Year, and so far the movie of his career.

Emma Stone stars as the repurposed corpse in question: a suicide victim who has been reborn as a Frankenstein-style brain transplant experiment in a mad scientist’s Turn-of-the-Century laboratory.  Her monstrous “Daddy God” creator—played with pitiable Elephant Man anguish by Willem Dafoe—initially keeps his experiment on a short leash, confining her entire life to his grotesque but lavish home.  She eventually breaks free, though, as all Frankenstein monsters do, and ventures into the world as an adult-bodied woman with the mind of a rapidly developing child.  Her resulting interrogation of the world outside her home is intensely violent, as anyone who can picture an adult-sized toddler throwing a temper tantrum would expect.  It’s also intensely sexual, as she can find no joy more immediately self-fulfilling than orgasmic bliss but lacks basic understanding of that joy’s socially appropriate boundaries: assumed monogamy, acceptable dinner conversation, the stigma of sex work, when & where it’s permissible to masturbate, etc.  If she is meant to represent humanity at its most basic & untouched by learned social restrictions, she represents us as insatiably horny, violent beasts who have to consciously strive to learn empathy for each other because it is not innate in our souls.  It’s a hilarious, uncomfortably accurate assessment of the species.

If there’s any one particular social norm that Lanthimos naively interrogates here, it’s a gendered one.  Much of the reanimated monster’s exploration of Life is limited by the men who wish to control her.  First, her Daddy God confines her as a domestic prisoner, the same way all fathers of young women fear their freedom as autonomous adults.  Once she’s loose, a small succession of selfish bachelors aim to trap her again in the domestic prison of marriage: Ramy Youssef as an ineffectual Nice Guy, Mark Ruffalo as a dastardly fuckboy fop, and Christopher Abbott as a sociopathic abuser.  All the men in the monster’s life seek to control her in ways that stifle her self-development.  It’s a movie about male possessiveness just as much as it’s about the absurdities of Life & societal decorum in that way, and the heroic triumph at the center is mostly in watching the creature fuck & read her way out of her patriarchal bonds to become her own person.  At times, that sentiment is expressed through philosophical assessment of what it means to live as an ethical person in modern society.  More often, it’s a crass celebration of women being annoying & gross in public despite the men around them demanding they calm it down.  It’s oddly uplifting in either case.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s films have become more recognizably comedic since he broke through to a wider audience with The Lobster, and they’re all the better for it.  There’s a sense of playful collaboration here where the director allows each contributor freedom to run wild: Stone & Ruffalo in their sketch comedy acting choices, cinematographer Robbie Ryan in his fish-eye lens fantasia, screenwriter Tony McNamara in his violent perversions of vintage humorist quips.  It’s telling that the only work that’s directly alluded to onscreen (besides, arguably, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its James Whale mutations) is Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, another prankishly prurient comedy of manners.  Lanthimos has always morbidly poked at social norms & decorum with this same curious outsider’s perspective, but never before while taking so much obvious glee in the act, nor on this wide of a scope.  I rarely have this much fun thinking about how we’re “a fucked species” of “cruel beasts,” and how our rules of appropriate social interaction are so, so very “fucking boring.”

-Brandon Ledet

Quick Takes: Summer Flings

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It’s summertime, which means every movie marquee in America is clogged with corporate slop, and even the more artistic counterprogramming offered at your local multiplex is going to be a frantic superhero IP refresher like Shin Kamen Rider or Across the Spider-Verse.  There’s no refuge for weirdo cineastes in these conditions, which means that I won’t be leaving my couch much until Halloween & Oscars schlock reclaim their rightful screen space in October.  Naturally, I’m still watching movies, but I’m trying to keep everything light & low-key instead of getting my brain hammered smooth by the fast & furious transformer machinery of the summer’s new release schedule. 

As a result, I’ve been watching a lot of quiet indie films about love & romance in recent weeks, none of which will be lighting up my personal Best of the Year list at the end of 2023 but all of which have been a pleasant distraction while soaking up AC at my home box office.  So, here are a few short-form reviews of the smaller-scale, smaller-budget romances I’ve been watching this summer.

Rye Lane

When I try to name the most romantic movies of all time, the walk-and-talk European meet cute Before Sunrise is high on the hypothetical list.  Its 2023 equivalent, Rye Lane, continues the Before brand tradition of casual first-date swooning but shakes up the usual Beformula by transporting the action to the mostly Black neighborhoods of South London.  Meeting by chance at a mutual friend’s hilariously hacky art show, two South Londoners endlessly chat on what spirals into an accidental all-day first date, despite their recent, respective heartbreaks over failed relationships.  Their getting-to-know-you banter is decidedly low-key, but their walking tour of hip city neighborhoods provides a vibrant, near-psychedelic backdrop of food, art, fashion, sex, and music.  One sequence involving a petty heist temporarily raises the stakes (as our giddy couple breaks into an ex’s flat to liberate a vinyl copy of The Low End Theory), but for the most part the will-they-won’t-they tension of their tryst has an obvious, inevitable and, most importantly, adorable conclusion.

Rye Lane offers all of the usual chaotic, inexplicable behavior of a bubbly romcom, except now matched with chaotic, inexplicable camera work.  The whole thing is shot with a Soderberghian fisheye lens, bending a familiar modern comedy template around the constantly surprising visual flourishes of music videos & vintage animation.  Its central hook-up story of a meek man shaken out of his comfort zone by a manic pixie dream hedonist isn’t ever mind-blowing, but its warped visual presentation often can be.  In short, it’s a feel-good Before Sunrise for the Instagram era, and it’s a shame that its direct-to-Hulu distro means it has a much smaller chance of making a splash as that 90s indie-scene charmer.

Emily

Wuthering Heights may be the greatest romance ever written, but its story of life-long ferocious obsession & betrayal isn’t likely to be described as “small” or “low-key” by anyone who’s actually read it.  However, this factually loose biopic of its author imagines a brief, intimate affair that might have inspired its tale of feral, soul-destroying love, dragging it down to the level of a more recognizable, real-world romance.  Emma “Maeve from Sex Education” Mackey stars as a teenage Emily Brontë doing field research (i.e., getting her heart broken) before writing the novel that made her infamous.  According to the movie’s made-up version of events, her source inspiration behind Cathy’s wild, untamed desire for Heathcliff is split between the only two young men in her life: her libertine brother and their isolated village’s local curate. Thankfully, the story never tips into full-on incest (although that wouldn’t be too out of place in a Wuthering Heights context).  Instead, the young Brontë shares a fiery, oft-consummated passion with the clergyman – which is just sinful & blasphemous enough to justify its supposed connection to the novel, especially once the curate breaks her spirit by abruptly breaking things off.

Emily may not be useful as a historical text, but its deviations from the facts of Brontë’s sheltered bookworm life help make it an entertaining tribute to the greatest romance ever penned.  There’s something especially endearing about the way her handwritten prose & poetry are too powerful for the small-minded prudes around her to gaze at directly (including her sister & fellow author Charlotte, whom the film slanders as a proto-Karen scold).  Once a grief-stricken Emily sits down to scribble the entirety of Wuthering Heights in a single, furious tantrum, the fictionalized power of her writing can come across a little goofy, but it helps that the novel in question has stood the test of time as an incendiary work that either enraptures or enrages its readers to this day.  More importantly, the film itself is a gloomy love letter to all angsty goth girls everywhere, often making Brontë’s imagined loves & literary triumphs secondary to her iconoclastic status as a teenage “free thinker” who dabbles in opium, dirty poems, and the occult.  It’s romantic in its portrayal of a doomed fling that can only last a single season, but it’s also romantic in its aspirational posturing as a ghost story about the original shy-girl goth kid who became infamous for her dark-sided art and her intense brooding on the moors.

Sanctuary

It’s not exactly true that there’s no artsy counterprogramming in theaters right now.  In some ways, I’ve just been trained over the pandemic to treat this kind of low-budget, low-stakes movie as a small-screen experience that I’ll eventually catch whenever it hits streaming.  So, I have admittedly shot myself in the foot several times over the past month, skipping out on local showings of Past Lives, Monica, You Hurt My Feelings, and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.  I guess I’ll be cramming in those titles in the mad scramble to bulk up my Best of the Year list in December.  In the meantime, though, I did recently venture out of the house to see the single-room two hander Sanctuary, despite it being no bigger nor flashier than those competitors.  I suppose after already being suckered into watching Piercing, any movie where Christopher Abbott is tortured by a high-class dominatrix is something of an Event Film for me, although I can’t say either example so far has been especially exceptional.  In Sanctuary, Abbott’s pro-domme tormentor is played by Margaret Qualley, who refuses to take “No” for an answer when her millionaire hotel-heir client (Abbott) decides to break off their professional relationship just as he takes over his dad’s business and the real money starts flowing in.  Feeling like he owes his success to her sexual “training” and like their sessions have transcended a purely transactional nature to something more sweetly romantic, she holds him hostage in his luxury hotel suite until he caves and gives her everything her volatile whims demand.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of Sanctuary.  It’s either a disappointingly flat erotic thriller or a charmingly daffy romcom.  Maybe it’s both.  It needed to feel like a finely constructed stage play to fully work, but its ditzy internal logic is written more in the spirit of online erotica.  The result is something like an off-Broadway adaptation of Succession fan fiction (a Roman Roy fantasy, specifically), which can be adorably goofy in the moment but quickly falls apart under any prolonged scrutiny.  I did laugh at the camera movements that simulated the power dynamic flipping between characters by literally flipping the frame upside down (a move that’s coincidentally mirrored in Emily, which enters the twisted mind of Emily Brontë by literally twisting the camera’s zoom-in on her dark goth-girl eyes).  I also chuckled at the baffling, seemingly arbitrary decisions those characters make every few minutes, either to convey the frustration & desperation of someone who’s wildly horny or to convey the frustration & desperation of a screenwriter who doesn’t know how to keep the story going.  I appreciated that Qualley kept the mood light by playing her domme persona bratty instead of severe, but I can’t say that her performance wouldn’t have been better suited for, say, a Rachel Sennott or a Mia Goth or a Mia Wasikowska – one of whom has already proven her worth in this exact Abbott-teasing scenario.  I don’t know.  I’m the exact target audience for this kind of perversely playful filth, and yet I walked away from the theater only mildly satisfied, so I can’t imagine most people will work up much enthusiasm for it.  At least there are no green screen backdrops, and Christopher Abbott isn’t playing a superhero?  Arthouse victories can feel so minor this time of year, but I’m still thankful that they’re out there.

-Brandon Ledet

Black Bear (2020)

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There have been a few truly great entries in what I call the Writer’s Block Thriller genre in recent years, a canon once populated only by Charlie Kaufman screenplays. Titles like Staying Vertical, Sybil, and Ismael’s Ghosts haven’t exactly dominated the pop culture discourse, but they’re fantastically frustrating headtrips for the few audiences who discovered them in their film festival & Netflix algorithm burial grounds. These are films in which a creatively constipated artist stares at the blank page until they go mad, eventually getting further & further wrapped up in pointlessly absurd, go-nowhere conflicts created mostly by avoidance of completing their own work. The Writer’s Block Thriller is often a meta, heavily neurotic genre that’s mostly about their off-screen creators’ personal & professional anxieties more than they are about characters or plot. Even when done well, there’s an embarrassing layer of narcissism that weighs down the exercise, which can feel like reading a stranger’s tell-all diary. When done poorly, it can feel like reading an exceedingly boring stranger’s diary, which doesn’t at all help with the second-hand embarrassment.

Black Bear fits very snugly in the Writer’s Block Thriller genre, if not only because it plays more like an academic writing exercise than it does a complete work. Aubrey Plaza, Christopher Abbott, and Sarah Gadon co-star in this meta mental-breakdown thriller as narcissistic filmmakers & artists who are bad at their jobs and bad at their relationships. They start the film as Brooklynite hipsters staging a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? type dinner party from hell while on an artists’ retreat in the woods. Then, their character traits are scrambled & reassigned for a second, paralleled scenario in which they all continue to manipulate & berate each other in feel-bad Edward Albee tradition – this time for twice the length. These two lopsided segments are rigidly separated by chapter breaks & a repeated image that resets the stage like a rotary dial: Aubrey Plaza sitting at a writing desk, frustrated by the blank page. It plays as if writer/director Lawrence Michael Levine had access to a nice woodland cabin location & a few talented actor friends for a long weekend, but no clear idea of what he wanted to accomplish with those resources. You can practically see him sitting at his own writing desk, unable to get any work done because petty arguments with his friends & lover are looping loudly in his own neurotic skull. The result feels labored, uninspired, self-indulgent and, worst of all, pointless.

If there’s anything useful that came out of this Creative Block writing exercise, it’s in gifting the three central actors a lot of archly hyper-emotional dialogue to play around with. I’ve seen some claims that this is Aubrey Plaza’s best work to date, which can only be assumed if you haven’t been paying attention to her work in recent years; she’s been just as great in much better films (Ingrid Goes West, The Little Hours, Joshy, hell even The To Do List & Dirty Grandpa). Still, it’s true that the second, overreaching segment of the film allows her to run wild & manic in a way we only really get to see from Elizabeth Moss in recent years (an unavoidable comparison, given the central premise’s parallels with Queen of Earth), a mode that Plaza is deliciously sinister in. As frustrating as Black Bear‘s structureless meandering can be in a narrative sense, it is consistently impressive as an actors’ showcase. That feels like an intentional feature of the writing too, which loosely sketches each character as an over-the-top stage play archetype rather than a real person. In the film’s best scene, Plaza is trapped at a dinner table listening to a couple systematically contradict every one of each other’s statements in an absurdly endless flood of bickering & snipes – the one time both the writing and the performances seem in sync instead of circling each other in search of a purpose.

The most frustrating thing about Black Bear‘s shortcomings is that it’s totally aware of its own pointlessness. In the opening segment, a character openly asks a filmmaker “How you can you make something if you don’t have anything to say?” with the incredulity of someone who just sat through a screening of Black Bear. Levine even works in a parody of a Kubrickian asshole director who allows his creative hubris to drive his collaborators into the ground with endless takes & headgames in empty pursuit of some unattainable intellectual exercise that’s above everyone else’s heads. By all accounts, Kubrick was a total nightmare to work with, but at least his films all felt like they had a clear vision & sense of purpose. By contrast, this movie feels like a placeholder for an idea that never fully formed by the time production wrapped. If the best Writer’s Block Thrillers feel like reading a filmmaker’s personal diary, Black Bear feels like flipping through an abandoned, forgotten sketchbook. It’s all very lopsided, unfinished, and not quite ready for public view.

-Brandon Ledet

Possessor (2020)

/ swampflix / 10 Comments

The most often repeated observation about actor Andrea Riseborough is that she loses herself in roles to the point of being unrecognizable.  Among other examples, Riseborough’s turns as the titular metalhead loner in Mandy, the titular grifter in Nancy, and the daughter of the titular dictator in The Death of Stalin are all so distinctly unique in both performance and physicality that it might not even occur to you that the same actor was cast across the roles.  That chameleonic quality might be frustrating for Riseborough’s professional need for name recognition, but it is fascinating to watch in terms of pure excellence in craft.  It’s also, I assume, a major factor in why she was cast as the lead of Brandon Cronenberg’s latest feature, Possessor, which seemingly took note of her absence of persona and built an entire fucked up sci-fi horror around it about the loss of Identity.  A damn good one too.

Riseborough stars as a near-future corporate assassin who hacks into unsuspecting marks’ bodies to pin her public executions on them, avoiding arrest and collecting massive bounties.  We catch up with the assassin one too many missions into this grotesque routine, losing her grip on her own persona as the borders blur between her host bodies and her original self.  Much of the film involves an especially disastrous mission where she cannot escape the host body she intends to assassinate a Jeff Bezos-type Big-Tech Asshole with, trapped inside his dirtbag son-in-law and becoming increasingly violent the longer she loses herself in the role.  The two dueling personae inside that one shared meatbag start to fight for control in increasingly upsetting ways, represented onscreen through surrealistic melting wax figures & video art freak-outs.  It’s a fight between actors Riseborough & host-body Christopher Abbott to take over as protagonist just as much as it is a fight between assassin & unsuspecting scapegoat.  Both performers are spectacularly upsetting as they squirm uncomfortably inside their own warring bodies, but it’s a struggle that speaks directly to Riseborough’s reputation as a chameleonic actor in particular.

Brandon Cronenberg does little to avoid the inevitable comparisons to his father’s previous triumphs here.  As the assassin’s bloodlust for grotesque, pointless cruelty escalates, the film’s genre shifts from pure sci-fi thriller to outright surrealist body horror in the Cronenberg family tradition.  Casting Jennifer Jason Leigh as the assassin’s handler and using plug & play brain ports as the company’s means to hack into host bodies at least serve as direct acknowledgements of this cinematic inheritance, directly referencing the iconography of eXistenZ in particular.  There’s plenty of modernization & innovation at play here that elevates Possessor above mere tracing-paper ditto work, though.  The horrors of the Jeff Bezos-funded surveillance state that completely obliterates the boundaries of privacy & autonomy to the point of hacking into our goddamn bodies feels distinctly of-the-moment and a worthy application of the body horror tropes that David Cronenberg helped pioneer.  There’s so much about Possessor that’s unique to our current, nightmarishly inane hellscape, including casual use of the term “cuck queen” and non-stop onscreen vaping.  It’s indebted to body horror classics of the past, but not at all tangled up in attempts to recreate them.

It’d be outrageous to claim that Possessor is about Andrea Riseborough’s eerie absence of a solid persona.  On a conceptual level, this is clearly a film that’s most interested in the identity & autonomy we’ve all given up in our march towards a corporate data-mining hell future.  Casting Riseborough in that central role of a professional impersonator who can’t hold onto her original persona as she loses herself in her assignments can’t help but feel like a deliberate, knowing choice, though.  It builds off her established reputation as an actor in fascinating, terrifying ways, which adds additional depth to the bodily & technophobic grotesqueries that drive the plot otherwise.

-Brandon Ledet

Piercing (2019)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Piercing is A Strange Movie, both in pretension and in practice. It’s a tightly wound, carefully mannered character study that titillates with deadly violence & sexual kink for a purpose neither its creators nor its audience can ever quite fully figure out. If the overall goal of the film is to humorously parody the roleplay of adult kink scenarios through the societal manners of buttoned-up dramas from the past, it’s an effect that’s been archived much more convincingly in recent titles like Phantom Thread & The Duke of Burgundy. If it’s simply trying to titillate & amuse voyeuristic onlookers with no further purpose, though, it’s living up to its full potential admirably. Sex & violence are entertaining enough on their own merits, whether or not they serve a greater purpose, and Piercing has plenty of fun with the shameless voyeurism & throwback genre payoffs its buttoned-up kink play parody affords it. It may be a little weird-for-weird’s sake, but it still at least passes for pleasant, playful entertainment – though not quite fun for the whole family.

Halfway between a giallo throwback and a snazzy Euro heist like The Italian Job or Ocean’s Twelve in an aesthetic sense, Piercing is largely a two-hander detailing the deranged sexual & violent impulses of two star-crossed combatants. Christopher Abbott stars as an uptight, sexually frustrated husband who plans to channel his violent resentment towards his wife & baby into murdering an anonymous sex worker with an ice pick. Mia Wasikowska costars as his potential victim – an S&M equipped prostitute who threatens to self-destruct before he has the chance to kill her himself. The film is constrained to stage play-scale settings & act structures as their mysterious, clashing plans play out to disastrous ends. Like all seasoned kinksters, the uptight murderous husband gets most of his thrills from planning & anticipating the act, only to find that reality doesn’t exactly match up with his fantasy. The prostitute proves to be a wild variable that chaotically derails his thoroughly detailed plans in the heat of the moment – perhaps to his own peril. As with Phantom Thread & The Duke of Burgundy, the exact power dynamics of those two sly combatants become the central mystery of the story being told, as they conceal as much of their true selves as they can beneath a falsely calm, civil surface.

Your own appreciation of Piercing may depend on your appetite for these cheeky 70s genre throwbacks in general. If your patience was tested by High-Rise, Free Fire, or Hotel Artemis, for instance, there’s even less fun to be found here despite the allure of the sex & violence in the premise. Its genre nostalgia is blatant, expressed through VHS tape warping in its opening credits, Goblin needle-drops on its soundtrack, and its high-rise apartment exteriors being digitally constructed as impossible miniatures. Still, puzzling your way through the hidden motivations & strengths of its two leads can be wickedly fun. Is the wife giving her husband permission to murder this unsuspending sex worker or is that his auditory hallucination? Is he into auto-erotic asphyxiation or just practicing his choking skills? Is he going to stab his own baby with an ice pick or just having a lark? Watching the film yourself won’t provide any clearer answers to these questions that you could derive from reading this review. Questioning the intent, motivation, and meaning in this violent kink scenario is the entirety of the entrainment value offered here – whether or not it’s been achieved before in better, more meaningful works.

-Brandon Ledet