dan stevens

Abigail (2024)

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The earliest press releases for the Universal Pictures horror Abigail reported it as a reimagining of the 1936 classic Dracula’s Daughter, citing Leigh Whannell’s 2020 remake of The Invisible Man and last year’s Nic-Cage-as-Dracula comedy Renfield as similar examples of what the studio is currently doing with its Classic Monsters brand.  Technically, Abigail does feature a vampire’s daughter in its main cast, but that titular, bloodsucking brat’s similarities to Countess Marya Zaleska end there.  No matter what the original pitch for Abigail might have been in first draft, it’s clear that the final product was more directly inspired by last year’s killer-doll meme comedy M3GAN than anything related to the original Dracula series.  Anytime its little-girl villain does a quirky, TikTok friendly dance in her cutesy ballerina outfit, you can practically hear echoes of some producer yelling “Get me another M3GAN!” in the background.  The Radio Silence creative team kindly obliged, churning out another M3GAN with the same dutiful, clock-punching enthusiasm that they’ve been using to send another Scream sequel down the conveyor belt every year.  The movie is less a reimagining of a 90-year-old classic than it is a rerun of a novelty that just arrived last January.

To juice the premise for as many TikTokable moments as possible, Abigail never changes out of her tutu.  The seemingly innocent little girl (Alisha Weir) is kidnapped after ballet practice and held ransom in an old dark house to extort millions out of her mysterious, dangerous father.  She naps for a bit while her captors bicker & banter downstairs, so that each of the likeable, sleepwalking stars (Dan Stevens, Melissa Barrera, Kathryn Newton, the late Angus Cloud, etc.) can all get in their MCU-style quips before they’re ceremoniously slaughtered one at a time.  Then Abigail wakes up, reveals her fangs, and throws in some pirouettes & jetés between ripping out throats with her mouth.  The violence is bloody but predictable, especially if you’ve happened to see the movie’s trailers, which plainly spell out every single image & idea from the second hour while conveniently skipping over the tedious hangout portion of the first.  There is no element of surprise or novelty here beyond your very first glimpse of an adolescent vampire in a tutu, which you already get just by walking past the poster in the lobby. 

In short, Abigail is corporate slop.  The best way to enjoy it is either chopped up into social media ads or screening on the back of an airplane seat headrest, wherever your attention is most often held hostage.  I attended its world premiere at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, which likely should have heightened its fanfare through pomp & exclusivity but instead had the opposite effect.  Screening in a festival environment among dozens of no-name productions with much smaller budgets and infinitely bigger ideas really highlighted how creatively bankrupt this kind of factory-line horror filmmaking can be.  Using the legacy of something as substantial as Dracula’s Daughter to rush out a M3GAN follow-up before a proper M3GAN 2.0 sequel is ready for market conveys a depressingly limited scope of imagination in that context, especially since horror is the one guaranteed-profit genre where audiences are willing to go along with pretty much anything you throw at them.  At the very least, Universal & Radio Silence could have better capitalized off the production’s one distinct, exciting idea by flooding the house with dozens, if not hundreds, of ballerina vampires instead of relying on just one.  That way, it wouldn’t be so boring to wait for her to wrap up her nap.

-Brandon Ledet

Cuckoo (2024)

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Tilman Singer has quickly become the most exciting new voice in cosmic horror.  His debut feature Luz started as a film school thesis project but was so strangely, psychically powerful that it broke out into wide release as one of the very best films of 2019 (according to me, anyway).  I watched Luz as a quietly buzzy horror curio that reached my living room via VOD rental, and I was blown away by the volatile imbalance between its cosmic-scale ambitions and its dirt-cheap budget.  His follow-up sophomore feature Cuckoo arrived in New Orleans with much louder fanfare.  Backed by Neon’s hip-cred marketing machine and starring one of the few non-influencer celebrities that teens care about (Hunter Schafer, of Euphoria fame), Cuckoo is a much hotter ticket than Luz was just a few years ago.  Its recent local premiere at Overlook Film Fest was packed to the walls with horror-hungry eyeballs, and although the enthusiasm in the room sounded mixed, anyone familiar with Luz knew exactly what kind of a surreal mindfuck we were in for.  Cuckoo escalates the verbal psychedelia of Luz to something more traditionally thrilling, hopping genres from demonic possession to creepy asylum horror but maintaining the same screenwriting ambitions of pulling brain-melting ideas out of simple, stripped-down tools.

Hunter Schafer stars as a grieving teen who joins her estranged, emotionally distant, German father’s new family after her mother’s death.  That new, uneasy family unit moves into a seasonally unoccupied resort in the Alps so the father & stepmother can work for the site’s enigmatic owner, played by a cartoonishly evil Dan Stevens.  Of course, the resort doubles as a mad scientist laboratory for Stevens’s Dr. Caligari-style medical experiments, which somehow involve strange shrieking sounds in the woods outside the cabins and the strange woman who makes them.  The movie explains exactly what’s going on in due time, but it’s the kind of explanation that only further twists your brain in knots with every new detail.  What’s important is that Singer effectively squeezes unnerving scares out of simple, straightforward methods, somehow crafting one of modern cinema’s creepiest cryptids by dressing one of his actresses in a trench coat, wig, and sunglasses.  I suppose it’s also important that Schafer’s teen brattiness is what ultimately saves the day, since her resolve to drown out the world with comically large, loud headphones until she’s old enough to move out on her own is exactly what protects her from the wigged cryptid’s aural violence.  She also eventually learns how to love at least one member of her new family, but it’s a perilous road getting there, one with many pitstops on hospital beds.

Cuckoo slowly builds its own unique mythology instead of leaning on traditional creature-feature or mad scientist payoffs.  It’s an impressive mix of sly humor & unnerving psychedelia, one that gets genuinely nightmarish in its forced pregnancy threats but also allows Dan Stevens to goof off with an exaggerated German accent & a magical flute, as if he were a recurring SNL character instead of a villainous fascist.  It’s a great theatrical experience, less so for its visual eccentricities (which mostly amount to time-loop editing & a vibrating frame) than for its aural ones (constant shrieks & gunshots that are best heard loud). I get the sense that all the central collaborators are getting away with something here.  Schafer recently said in a GQ interview that she’s no longer interested in playing roles that center her transgender identity, and this movie doesn’t care about that at all; it just cares how cool she looks wielding a butterfly knife: very.  Stevens also gets plenty of room to go big as an absolute maniac, something it feels like he hasn’t gotten to do on this scale since The Guest a full decade ago.  Then there’s Singer, who’s now found a much bigger canvas and a much bigger audience for his cosmic horror oddities.  I hope his work continues to escalate this way, since he has a lot of potential to become one of the all-time greats in the genre, if not only in his power to bewilder.

-Brandon Ledet

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)

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The current run of American Godzilla movies so badly, nakedly want what Marvel Studios had in its Avengers era that they’re often referred to as The MonsterVerse, named of course after the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  We’re now at a point where the MCU’s glory days are quickly fading in the rearview, but the Marvelification of Godzilla has just been completed.  After a few standalone stylistic experiments that mired Godzilla in grim-grey CGI drudgery and drafted his longtime frenemy King Kong into the Vietnam War, the two towering kaiju have been teamed up by their own Avengers Initiative in a couple dumb-fun action blockbusters designed to sell some opening-weekend popcorn and to tease the next popcorn-seller down the line, whenever another one inevitably arrives.  2021’s Godzilla vs Kong at least maintained some of the colorful cartoon spectacle of classic kaiju battles like 1963’s King Kong vs. Godzilla, arriving as a much-needed return to grand-scale filmmaking in those early years of COVID precautions.  In their second shared title, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, that classic Toho spirit has instead been completely replaced by the quippy, zippy action comedy of a Guardians of the Galaxy sequel.  Immensely talented actors Rebecca Hall, Dan Stevens, and Brian Tyree Henry stand around spewing exposition and inane “Well, that just happened” punchlines while CGI gods fight to start or stop the apocalypse in the sky above.  1980s pop tunes loop continuously on old school tape decks as contrast to the rest of the film’s future tech (including a giant mechanical arm built to enhance King Kong’s already mighty super-strength).  All that’s missing, really, is a talking raccoon, but hey you gotta leave something on the table for the next one.

The New Empire is much more flattering as a King Kong sequel than it is as a Godzilla one, mostly because that series has so many fewer, lower points of comparison.  Godzilla currently has 38 films to his name, while Kong only has 12 – most of which are not tied to the 1933 original.  Within that lineage, The New Empire works best as a stealth remake of 1933’s rushed-to-market Son of Kong.  Most of the best scenes involve Kong taking a young, violent, childlike ape under his tutelage as a mentor.  In an early fight, Kong uses him as a weapon, beating back other, meaner apes with the bitey little bastard’s limp body.  Later, they fully team up as a makeshift father-son duo to take down a Richard III-style mad king and free the enslaved apes who live in the even hollower Earth beneath Kong’s Hollow Earth stomping grounds.  By contrast, Godzilla doesn’t get nearly as much to do.  He mostly just swims to an underwater gender clinic to charge up from blue to pink, emerges to join the fight against the mad king in the final act, and then takes an angry cat nap once everything calms down.  Other surprise kaiju combatants join the battle in the back half, but none are as surprising as the Mechagodzilla reveal in the previous picture.  Mostly, the monsters just follow the same patterns of CGI superheroics we’ve already seen countless times in the past decade, just scaled up to skyscraper size for a false sense of escalation.  Meanwhile, the humans on the ground hang out in CSI-style tech labs, narrating the action like WWE announcers.  Director Adam Wingard does his best to add some style & personality to the proceedings, flinging fluorescent goop at the non-existent camera’s “lens” every time a monster is defeated, but style & personality is mostly just window-dressing when it comes to this kind of four-quadrant blockbuster filmmaking.

If there’s any clear artistic path forward for the American Godzilla picture, it might be in more sincerely tackling the POV of the fictional Indigenous tribes who worship & manage the kaiju of Hollow Earth.  So far in the MonsterVerse, the Indigenous peoples associated with each creature have been exoticized with the same old-school Indiana Jones adventurism that’s persisted in both the King Kong & Godzilla series since their respective 1930s & 50s origins.  There’s an unexplored angle in telling a story from their perspective instead of framing it through outsiders’ eyes, an approach already forged by the recent Predator prequel Prey. Of course, despite including the word “new” in its title, The New Empire isn’t much interested in new ideas or in unexplored angles on old ones.  It’s content to repeat what’s worked previously for another easy payout, whether repeating the cartoonish CGI smash-em-ups of Godzilla vs Kong or repeating the crossover superhero team-ups of the Avengers films.  There isn’t much awe or novelty in that approach to sure-thing, big-budget filmmaking, but there is some joy to be found in its familiarity – however minor.

-Brandon Ledet

I’m Your Man (2021)

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I’m not convinced that Dan Stevens ever fully achieved the movie star dream career he abruptly left Downton Abbey to pursue.  Between his career-defining run on that glorified soap opera and the Disney Prince paycheck he cashed after the live-action Beauty and the Beast remake, he’s probably financially set for life.  I get the sense that he’s still not creatively fulfilled, though.  After a strong start in the weirdo action thrillers The Guest and Legion, he’s mostly been doing anonymous, supporting work that doesn’t draw much attention to his movie-star potential as a leading man.  The German sci-fi romcom I’m Your Man is a welcome corrective step in that treadmill career trajectory.  In the film, Stevens stars as a perfectly calibrated robot boyfriend, a role that emphasizes both his generic handsomeness and his eerie, inhuman coldness.  Instead of running away from his default perception as a dime-a-dozen Ken Doll hunk (the exact reason Stevens fled from Downton Abbey as soon as he could), I’m Your Man leans hard into that quality, pressing both on its charms and its limitations.  It’s a perfect encapsulation of what makes him unique as a screen presence, which is something he doesn’t always get to showcase.

In I’m Your Man, robo-Dan Stevens is beta-tested by a recently divorced research scientist (Maren Eggert), who is reluctant to treat him like a potential A.I. life partner instead of a household appliance.  She reluctantly agrees to the study in a bargain that will land her own academic research future funding opportunities but finds the implication that a robot boyfriend would fulfill an emotional need in her life insulting.  Initially annoyed by his machinelike perfection and his servantile attention to her every need, she gradually learns to love the walking, talking dildo despite herself.  Their dynamic feels like a broadcast from a slightly brighter world where heartfelt romcoms get to tackle heady subjects usually reserved for eerie sci-fi chillers like Ex Machina.  It’s a very familiar Turing Test story structure that’s not usually played with such a lightness in its doomed human-robot romance.  It balances its romcom cuteness with just enough melancholy & heartbreak to feel sophisticated, but not enough to match the dramatic despair of much drearier sci-fi romances like Her and Never Let Me Go.  Like robo-Dan Stevens, it’s perfectly calibrated for what it is, with all the charms & limitations implied.

If there’s some larger topical or philosophical statement I’m Your Man is trying to make about humanity’s evolving relationship with technology, I’m not able to fully pinpoint it.  It romanticizes the shortcomings & imperfections that distinguish humans from machinery (most starkly in a slow-motion montage of “Epic Fail” YouTube clips).  At the same time, it’s also honest about how comforting & safe it feels to interact with machines instead of our fellow fuck-ups (maybe as subtle commentary on the distinctly modern isolation of smartphone addiction).  I don’t know that it makes any grand, definitive statements about human nature or technological comforts, though.  It instead gently pokes at the boundaries between the natural & the artificial, finding odd moments of peace & romance in their overlap.  For me, the movie’s clearest purpose is in highlighting the eerie charms of Dan Stevens as a screen presence, finding his exact sweet spot as a potential leading man.  Otherwise, it’s just an above-average romcom with a fun sci-fi spin.

-Brandon Ledet

The Rental (2020)

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When staying at an Airbnb, I always go through this period of unease in the beginning. Being in a stranger’s home/private room always feels a little strange at first, but I always get over it after about like 15 minutes. That’s of course after I check in the closets, under the beds, and behind all the corners to make sure there’s not a psycho waiting to slit my throat. Dave Franco’s directorial debut, The Rental, really taps into that 15 minutes of initial Airbnb fear to the point that it feels disturbingly personal.

The Rental is definitely one of the best horror/thriller films to come out this year. It follows a group of two couples and their short getaway in a fabulous Airbnb rental home. One couple is made up of Charlie (Dan Stevens) and his wife, Michelle (Alison Brie), and the other couple is made up of Charlie’s brother Josh (Jeremy Allen White) and his girlfriend, Mina (Sheila Vand). Once they arrive to the Airbnb, the owner, Taylor (Toby Huss) meets them to hand over the key and go over the house’s amenities. There’s something off about him that everyone seems to pick up on. Mina, who is Muslim, initially requested the booking, and her request was denied by Taylor. Charlie then requested the same rental and was accepted immediately. Mina’s suspicion of Taylor’s racism is confirmed when he makes some racially motivated comments towards her during their arrival. It’s more than obvious that he is not a good guy, but the group tries to ignore that fact since they won’t have to deal with him for too long as he won’t be at the rental for the weekend. As the couples enjoy some recreational drugs and cut loose at the rental, a horrible mistake is made that could ruin the relationships of both couples. It’s soon discovered that this incident was filmed by a camera hidden in a showerhead. This is the point in the film where things go downhill for the group and everything spirals out of control.

I love movies that make me feel like I have everything figured out until some wild plot twist at the very end throws me completely off track. That’s exactly what The Rental does. Who wants to watch a movie that is predictable anyway? There’s just something so unique about the film’s ending that really kept me thinking about it. It annoyed me at first because it left a lot of questions unanswered, but it also gave me the space to make my own assumptions. The ending both makes total sense and doesn’t make sense at all, so prepare yourself for that. Franco has mentioned that he left it intentionally ambiguous because he wants to eventually film a sequel, and I am so down for that.

We are officially in spooky season (and apparently still in an active hurricane season), so The Rental is definitely a good pick if you’re interested in exploring a new horror/thriller film to get yourself in the Halloween spirit.

-Britnee Lombas

Apostle (2018)

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Netflix has been cranking out phenomenal original horror series and movies this year, most notably The Ritual, which is easily one of the greatest horror films to come out in 2018. Just this past Friday, Netflix also released the period horror film Apostle just in time for Halloween, and it did not disappoint. The first half of Apostle is very tame and mysterious, and the latter half spirals into blood-soaked insanity. I absolutely loved it.

It’s sometime in the early 20th century, and Thomas Richardson (Dan Stevens), is on a mission to save his sister from a pagan cult that kidnapped her for ransom. He travels to a remote island populated only by cult members and goes incognito as a follower. The cult elements in Apostle are a slight nod to The Wicker Man, as the cult members are seemingly average folk inhabiting an isolated island, but the cult in question is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before in a horror movie. They worship a Goddess that inhabits the island, and they essentially keep her prisoner and feed her human blood to give her enough energy to produce crops from the islands tainted soil. The cult leader, Malcolm (Michael Sheen), discovered her and claims to be her prophet, and just like any narcissistic douchebag that gets a taste of power, he starts to lose his grip on reality. Everything essentially goes to hell in a handbasket when Prophet Malcolm is overthrown by a psychotic cult member, and Thomas is caught up in the brutal carnage while trying to get his sister off of the crazy cult island.

What I loved most about Apostle, other than the badass bloodthirsty Goddess, is that there is a tragic Romeo and Juliet type love story between two young cult members in the midst of all the madness. Honestly, Romeo and Juliet had it easy compared to what happens to these two. There’s just something about forbidden love within a cult that really holds my attention.

Apostle is visually stunning and just so damn unique. I truly hope it gets the recognition it so rightly deserves from the horror community and goes down in genre movie history as a “cult” classic.

-Britnee Lombas

Colossal (2017)

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With his intricately-constructed time travel thriller Timecrimes, director Nacho Vigalondo found dark humor in the depths of selfishness in human self-preservation, exposing the ugliness of humanity as a species through the mechanism of a sci-fi fantasy plot. His American language debut, the kaiju-themed black comedy Colossal, shifts its genre & intended targets just slightly, but mostly repeats the trick. Through an outlandish genre film scenario, Colossal gradually strips away the veneer of polite smiles & social niceties that makes human beings appear to be kind, empathetic creatures to reveal the giant monsters lurking underneath. The destructive behavior of alcoholism & pretty selfishness in particular is giving a measurable, kaiju-scale impact of real-world damage. Much like in Timecrimes, the inner lives of Vigalondo’s characters aren’t given nearly as much attention as the implications of their actions within the larger, metaphor-heavy sci-fi plot, but the mystery of how that premise works & what it implies about the ugliness of humanity is enough to leave a lasting emotional bruise on the audience.

Anne Hathaway stars as a New York City socialite whose alcoholism finally crosses the threshold from “fun drunk” to full-on dysfunction, a conscious departure from the A-type personas she’s been saddled with since The Princess Diaries. Kicked out of the apartment she shares with an uptight boyfriend (Dan Stevens in full Matthew Crowley mode), she finds herself with few options but to move back to her small-town childhood home. She’s employed as a barkeep by an egotistically sensitive childhood friend (Jason Sudeikis), which affords her way easier access to a steady stream of working-class staples Jack Daniels & PBR than is likely healthy for her. The nightly blackouts that her addiction downturn sparks start to branch out from pure self-destruction to negatively affecting millions of people: namely, the city of Seoul, South Korea. Whenever our drunken anti-hero finds herself wasted in the playground near her childhood home at the crack of dawn, a corresponding kaiju appears in Seoul and mimics her exact, stumbling movements, blindly killing anyone in its path. Once these repeating scenarios become undeniably linked, she must face hungover epiphanies like, “I killed a shitload of people because I was acting like a drunk idiot again.” Getting sober & improving herself isn’t enough to solve the problem entirely, though. As soon as she starts to get her life back together, a second monster appears in Seoul, challenging her sense of control in an increasingly ugly situation.

What’s most fun about the metaphorical sci-fi plots of Vigalondo’s work is that they continue to develop & complicate after their initial reveal. It’s not enough that the connection between the protagonist’s alcoholism and the giant monster terrorizing Seoul is made explicit. The film also pushes through to explore why the playground location & time of day correspond with its appearance, why Seoul in particular is connected to her in the first place, and what is implied by the appearance of the kaiju’s robot challenger. The answers to this mystery are lazily revealed through the device of a decreasingly cloudy repressed memory, but are satisfying enough in their impact to justify the transgression. Complicating the kaiju metaphor detracts tremendously from the energy spent on potential inner conflict & emotional depth, but also expands the film’s themes beyond the selfish destruction of addiction to include crippling jealousy, the cycles of physical abuse, and a myriad of other forms of destructive behavior. By the end of Colossal you have to ask if the bigger monster is the protagonist’s addiction or the poisonous group of self-serving men that populate her life. It’s a testament to how strong the mystery & provoked themes of the central metaphor are that it doesn’t at all matter that the characters remain surface level deep. Vigalondo’s ideas are intricate, plentiful, and mercilessly cruel to the virtues of humanity enough to carry this small-scale kaiju narrative on their own.

-Brandon Ledet

Vamps (2012)

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Amy Heckerling directed two of the most iconic teen comedies of all time, Clueless & Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and yet she hasn’t been afforded much leeway as a filmmaker. Outside her work on television there’s a dispiritingly low number of titles to her name and while I’m not willing to fully go to bat for either Look Who’s Talking or Johnny Dangerously, I will say Heckerling does have at least one credit to her name that’s criminally overlooked: Vamps. A madcap romcom about two party girl vampires trying to survive the afterlife in the big scity, Vamps is wildly fun & immediately endearing, recalling Herckerling’s best work to date in the high school satire Clueless. The two films’ connection runs much deeper than the directer reuniting with actors Alicia Silverstone & Wallace Shawn, however. They both have a genuine empathy for all of their characters, even the high school mean girls & bloodsucking undead (as well as their respective “enemies”), and they both find plenty of room for personality & biting wit within the rigid romcom formula. Vamps is Heckerling at the top of her endearing-but-satirical game and every time I revisit it I become more  baffled that it has yet to cultivate a solid cult audience.

An ultra-feminine precursor to What We Do in the Shadows, Vamps follows two NYC roommates as they navigate big city nightlife & supplant their thirst for blood (held at bay by feeding on rats) with an endless eternity of clubbing & casual sex. Silverstone more or less reprises her role as an all-growed-up Cher “Clueless” Horowitz & her bestie is played by Krysten Ritter, who’s essentially a much-less vicious version of her Don’t Trust the B character Tall Slut No Panties, uhh, I mean Chloe. Except, you know, they’re vampires. Injecting a little horror movie fantasy into this Sex and the City worldscape of trying to find the right guy by sleeping with all the wrong ones livens up the format a great deal. It’s amusing to watch these women lie about their age by hundreds of years, attend Sanguines Anonymous meetings, find work modeling clothes for other vampires who can’t use a mirror, and check out hot guys’ jugulars as they, in turn, check out their cleavage. That’s not where Vamps gets the most mileage out of its vampire genre gimmick, though. Its combination of sisterly camaraderie with old world nostalgia is its true undead heart. Silverstone’s character in particular struggles with memory of a world before cellphone addiction & cancer-causing sugar substitutes and it’s her combination of Luddite philosophy & aggressive femininity that affords this film it’s own unique voice.

Vamps feels a little like an entire sitcom’s run conveniently contained at a romcom’s length. It’s by no means breaking any molds in terms of genre or humor, especially recalling other feminine horror comedy genre mashups like Hocus Pocus, Death Becomes Her, and Sabrina The Teenage Witch. Its playful mix of bloodlust, fashion, cute guys, and immortality might not feel entirely fresh in the 2010s, but Heckerling keeps the mood consistently light, endearing, and bizarre. Besides, the movie delights in feeling outdated in a modern world it has little reverence for. Big time supporting players like Sigourney Weaver, Maclolm McDowell, and Dan Stevens are all just as charming & effective as the main cast and a few inspired gags like a rat blood spit take & a vampire’s hideous spray-on tan find some unexpected, as-yet unexplored territory in a genre that’s been mined beyond death. It’s Heckerling’s specific, unmistakable comedic voice that makes Vamps feel remarkable despite what you’d expect from it’s genre trappings & modern age griping. Unfortunately, because that voice is so rarely heard these days it’s a sound for sore ears.If Herckerling has any other projects cooking that are half as charming as Vamps we’d be lucky to have them in our grotesque modern world. I’m afraid they’d also go noticed & unappreciated, though. There’s little evidence in the last twenty years of her work’s public reception that would make me think otherwise.

-Brandon Ledet