george mackay

The End (2024)

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When questioned on why the lighting & color grading of Wicked: Part 1 was so muted & chalky when compared to the Technicolor wonders of the classic MGM adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, director Jon M. Chu explained that he wanted to “immerse people into Oz, to make it a real place […] Because if it was a fake place, if it was a dream in someone’s mind, then the real relationships and stakes that [the characters] are going through wouldn’t feel real.”  Given the immense popularity of the film, I have to assume that most audiences understand the appeal of that desaturated, “real stakes” take on the movie musical and are hungry for more reality-bound singalongs just like it.  Luckily, they do not have to wait an entire year for the arrival of Wicked: Part 2 to scratch that itch.  Joshua Oppenheimer’s climate-change musical The End has arrived to immediately supply what the people demand: a drab, real-world movie musical with grim, real-world stakes.  Set entirely in a single, secluded bunker after our impending global environmental collapse, The End is as grounded in reality as any musical has been since the semi-documentary London Road.  The stakes are the continued survival of human life on planet Earth.  The relationships are strictly parental or economic.  Oppenheimer even has the good sense to luxuriate in a near three-hour runtime, just like the first half of Wicked.  With an immersive approach like that, it’s sure to be a hit.

George MacKay stars as a twentysomething brat who’s spent his entire life sheltered from the apocalypse in his family’s luxurious bunker, located inside a salt mine.  His only social interaction has been confined to his erudite parents and their small staff: a cook, a doctor, and a butler.  Playing the mother, Tilda Swinton frets nervously with her fine-art home decor with the same sense of existential dread that she brought to Memoria.  Playing the father, Michael Shannon maintains order & civility while grappling with his first-hand contributions to the environmental disaster as a vaguely defined executive in The Energy Business.  The domestic fantasy of their life underground is disrupted by the arrival of a starving, haunted survivor of the world outside, played by Moses Ingram.  The newcomer’s only potential place in the house is as a mate for McKay’s poorly socialized, brainwashed rich boy, which is not verbally acknowledged but weighs heavily on her every decision.  Helpfully, every character confesses their internal emotional conflicts to the audience in song, which never escalates from patter to barnburner but at least adds a minor note of escapism to an otherwise grim, limited setting.  The musical numbers are conversational, recalling the sung-through movie musical style of films like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (or, more recently, Annette), except they’re much more sparingly deployed among the more traditional, reserved dialogue.

With The End, Oppenheimer has leapt from documentary to the deep end of narrative filmmaking: the movie musical.  Or, at least, that’s what the movie musical should be.  Jon M. Chu’s quotes about making Oz “a real place” where audiences can “feel the dirt” is entirely antithetical to the pleasures of movie musical filmmaking, a fundamental misunderstanding of the artform.  By contrast, Oppenheimer appears to understand the artform but actively seeks to subvert it to make a political point.  The End is a movie musical about the economics of surviving climate change; it only cares about the “real relationships” between the ultra-wealthy and their small staff within the terms of economic power & control.  It speaks in Old Hollywood musical language but limits its setting to what would traditionally account for one isolated set-piece song & dance, contrasting the grandeur of the salt mine to the smallness of its characters’ hermetic world.  I can’t say that he fully manages the discordance between movie magic & political doomsaying with anything near the success of his breakthrough triumph The Act of Killing, but The End is at least occasionally uncanny in an interesting, provocative way, as opposed to uncanny in a cowardly way.  Anyone who’s praising Wicked for its political allegories about fascism & repression will surely find their next favorite musical in the new Oppenheimer film . . . unless everyone’s just needlessly making excuses for enjoying assembly-line Hollywood spectacle.  Its current state requires many such excuses.

-Brandon Ledet

The Beast (2024)

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There’s something warmly familiar about the premise of two destined-to-be-together characters cyclically falling in love across past & future lives through reincarnation, but I can’t immediately name many concrete examples.  There’s a somber melodrama version of it in The Fountain, a cartoony alternate-universe version in Everything Everywhere All At Once, and a bodice-ripping romance version in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but I’m certain there’s a much longer list of titles I’m forgetting.  However, I’m also certain that I’ve never seen that dramatic template distorted in the way Bertrand Bonello distorts it in The Beast, the same way he distorts the terrorism thriller template in Nocturama and the zombie outbreak template in Zombi Child.  The Beast is a sci-fi fantasy horror about a woman who falls for the same entitled fuckboy over & over again in each of her past & future lives, and all that changes across them is the temporal context in which he sucks.  During the Great Paris Flood of 1910, she is seduced out of a loving marriage by the horny, handsome pest.  In the 2010s, he stalks her as a creepy incel with a low-follower-count YouTube Channel, planning to make an example out of her as revenge on all the women who’ve sexually rejected him despite being a Nice Guy.  In the 2040s, the specifics of how he sucks are mysterious until the final moments, as the doomed couple are estranged by an isolating, unemotional society dominated by A.I.  She does fall for it again, though, and the cycle continues.  Usually, when you say a couple was “meant for each other,” you don’t mean it in a Roadrunner & Wile E. Coyote kind of way, but there’s something darkly, humorously true to life about that romantic dynamic that makes for a refreshingly novel use of a familiar story template.

Léa Seydoux stars as the Wile E. Coyote of the relationship, helpless to find her puppy-eyes suitor attractive in every timeline even though he consistently destroys each of her lives.  George MacKay is her Roadrunner tempter: an arrogant nerd who pursues her across centuries even though he’s cursed to “only have sex in his dreams.”  Their centuries-spanning relationships qualify both as science fiction and as fantasy.  The 2040s timeline is used as a framing device in which our future A.I. overlords offer to “cleanse our DNA” of residual trauma to make us more efficient, emotionless workers; it’s through this cleansing procedure that Seydoux relives her past flings with MacKay and learns no lessons through the process.  The crossover between timelines is also confirmed by multiple psychics, though, both of whom warn Seydoux to steer clear of the fuckboy loser to no avail.  They also explain that their mystic practices are only considered supernatural because science has not yet caught up with the real-world logic behind their effectiveness – a gap that has presumably been closed by the A.I. machines of the 2040s.  In every version of her life, Seydoux is plagued by an overbearing sense of dread that something catastrophically awful is going to happen (in an allusion to the Henry James novel The Beast in the Jungle), and she is always right.  After all, in order to live multiple lives you have to die multiple deaths.  Whether that premonition is related to the natural disasters that coincide with MacKay re-entering her lives or simply to MacKay himself is up for interpretation, but either way he’s physically attractive enough that she never learns the lesson that his physical presence is bad news.  It’s like a cosmic joke about how someone always falls for the same loser guys despite knowing better, taken literally.

The Beast is one of those purposefully cold, inscrutable Euro provocations that you’re not sure is intended to be taken entirely seriously until the second act, when Bonello tips his hand by making you watch clips from Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers in a brilliant throwaway gag.  Its closest reference points are crowd-displeaser genre exercises from esteemed film festival alumni: Assayas’s Demonlover, Petzold’s Undine, Wong’s 2046, Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, etc.  It builds its own micro mythology through visual motifs of pigeons, babydolls, and seances that can feel meaningful & sinister in the moment but read like generative A.I. Mad Libs screenwriting when considered as a whole.  Bonello is clearly genuine in the ambition of his scale, crafting a story that requires him to convincingly pull off costume drama, home invasion, and sci-fi genre markers all in the same picture, depending on the timeline.  He’s also constantly poking fun at his own project, though, something that’s indicated as soon as the film opens in a chroma-key green screen environment as if he were directing a superhero film in the MCU.  Sometimes the dolls are creepy; sometimes they’re M3GAN-style jokes about uncanny robotics.  The pigeons foretell the immediate arrival of Death, but it’s also hard not to laugh when one attacking Seydoux is scored as if it were a flying hellbeast.  Like all of Bonello’s previous provocations, The Beast was designed to split opinions, but I thought it was a hoot.  It can be funny, scary, sexy, or alienating depending on the filmmaker’s momentary moods; the only constant is the male entitlement of the central fuckboy villain, which is only effective because he’s such a handsome devil.

-Brandon Ledet

Pride (2014)

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Sometimes political action looks like putting a brick through a window or spitting in the face of abusive cops who could (gladly) do much worse to you in return. We’re currently living through such urgent times, where the public execution of George Floyd has incited mass #BlackLivesMatter protests around the globe, which have been needlessly escalated by police. This is coincidentally happening at the start of Pride month, when political protest annually takes the form of parades & parties, a celebration of communities whose mere existence is in opposition to oppressors who’d rather see them dead. Both of these grandly conspicuous forms of political action are valid – vital, even. That’s a point that’s worth remembering in a time when major media outlets & self-appointed pundits at home will actively attempt to discredit them for demonstrating in “the wrong way.”

The 2014 film Pride opens with depictions of similarly conspicuous political action: a mass of ruthless bobbies beating down a crowd of working-class joe-schmoes for daring to stand up for themselves during the 1980s U.K. miners’ strike, followed by a dramatic recreation of a 1980s London Pride march. To its credit, though, the film doesn’t fully glamorize political organization & protest as romantic, action-packed heroism for the majority of its runtime. It instead paints an honest picture of what the bulk of political action looks like on a daily, boots-on-the-ground basis: it’s tedious, thankless, and mostly uneventful. Pride is realistic about how unglamorous the daily mechanisms of year-round protest are. It focuses more on the distribution of pamphlets, the repetitive collection of small donations, and the under-the-breath verbal mockery from passersby that make up the majority of political organization, rather than extraordinary moments like now, where more drastic actions are necessary. And it manages to make these well-intentioned but mundane routines feel just as radical & punk-as-fuck as smashing in a cop car window. It proudly blares Pete Seger’s union organizing anthem “Solidarity Forever” in the background as a rousing call to arms for a life decorated with chump-change collection buckets & hand-out leaflets that are immediately tossed to the ground.

Where Pride is incredibly honest about how mundane most political organization is, it’s shamelessly artificial & schmaltzy about the messy lives & passions of the human beings behind those collective actions. This is a feel-good historical drama about gay & lesbian activists in 1980s London who stuck out their necks to show solidarity with striking coal miners in Wales, modeled after the real-life organizational efforts of the Gays and Lesbians Support the Miners alliance. It’s basically an improved revision of Kinky Boots that genuinely strives for authentic, meaningful political observations about the overlapping struggles of queer urban youths and the working-class townies who are socialized to bully them instead of recognizing them as comrades. The only hiccup is that it’s ultimately just as safe (and weirdly sexless) as feel-good queer stories like Kinky Boots that erase the personal quirks & humanistic faults of its gay characters to smooth them out into inspiring, inhuman archetypes. There is no sex, nor sweat, nor unhinged fury in this film – just politics. And it remarkably gets just by fine on those politics alone because it actually has something to say about class solidarity & grassroots political organization, especially in the face of stubborn institutions who’d rather die than acknowledge your comradery.

Part of what makes this vision of community organization in sexless, tedious action somehow riveting is the collective charms of its cast, which is brimming with recognizable Brits. Dominic West is the closest the film comes to allowing a character to fully run wild, as an elder statesman of his queer political circle who’s prone to partying himself into a mad state of debauchery. Bill Nighy is his polar opposite, playing a bookishly reserved small-towner who’s so shaken up by the political yoots who invade his union hall that he comes just short of stammering “Wh-wh-what’s all this gaiety then?” Andrew “Hot Priest” Scott carries the cross as the film’s Gay Misery cipher—suffering small-town PTSD in the return to his childhood stomping grounds in Wales—but he gives such an excellent performance in the role that it somehow lands with genuine emotional impact. A baby-faced George MacKay is deployed as the bland, fictional, fresh-out-of-the-closet protagonist who makes gay culture feel safe & unalienating to outsiders who might be turned off by someone less “accessible”, but he somehow manages to mostly stay out of the way. We check in to watch him gay-up his record collection with Human League LPs and experience his first (and the film’s only) same-gender makeout at a Bronski Beat concert, but he’s mostly relegated to the background. The film’s class solidarity politics are always allowed to stand front & center as the main attraction, and the cast is only there to be charming enough to make standing on the sidewalk with a small-donations bucket seem like a cool & worthwhile way to spend your youth, for the betterment of your comrades.

A lot of Pride‘s historical setting dissociates its political messaging from our current moment. George Floyd-inspired protests aside, gay pride marches meant something completely different at the height of 1980s AIDS-epidemic homophobia than they do now, and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative tyranny has since become more of a political symbol than an active threat. The mundane day-to-day mechanics of community organization have largely remained the same over the decades, however, so the film chose a fairly sturdy basket to store all its eggs in. It’s difficult to make the daily routines of political organization seem sexy & cool, because the truth of it is so draining & unglamorous (until it’s time to throw a brick). Pride doesn’t bother with the sexy part, but it’s got plenty of energizing, inspiring cool to spare, which is at the very least a more useful achievement than what you’ll find in most feel-good gay dramas of its ilk.

-Brandon Ledet

Marrowbone (2018)

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It’s difficult to gauge how wide of an appeal the straight-to-VOD sleeper Marrowbone might hold for a contemporary audience. As an obedient participation in the tropes of the Gothic horror genre as a cinematic tradition, the film starts off with a slight disadvantage in its aesthetic’s commercial appeal. As demonstrated by del Toro’s Crimson Peak, the modern Gothic horror is often dismissed & unacknowledged even when it’s done exactly right, so a much cheaper, small-scale production like Marrowbone doesn’t have much of a chance to make an impression. To make things harder on itself, the film also adopts a distinctly literary, romantic tone that invites more cynical audiences to not take its emotional core seriously, the exact same way the tragically undervalued Never Let Me Go undercut its own potential commercial appeal as a sci-fi genre picture. For fans of the Gothic horror as an onscreen tradition, Marrowbone offers a wonderful corrective to the year’s other major offering in that genre, Winchester (which I’m saying as the only person in the world who got a kick out of Winchester). It’s an oddly romantic, admirably deranged entry into the modern ghost story canon. It’s frustrating for the already-converted to know that the film’s unhinged charms will be met with more shrugs than enthusiasm on the contemporary pop culture landscape, but its choice of genre at least lends it to feeling somewhat timeless, even if not an instant modern hit.

Although it’s set in 1960s small-town America, it’d be understandable to mistake much of Marrowbone for 19th Century Europe. Its haunted house narrative and feral children aesthetic feels like the lore of 1800s peasants, which makes the occasional intrusion of recognizable modernity almost surreal. The most frequent representation of this modernity is a girl-next-door sweetheart played by Anya Taylor-Joy. In her introduction she’s teased to be a kind of woodland witch (appropriately enough), but it turns out she’s just a darling small-town librarian with an A+ 1960s wardrobe. Her calm provincial life is upturned by the arrival of a small English emigrant family (including familiar faces Charlie Heaton, George MacKay, and Mia Goth) who are obviously in the process of escaping a troubled past. This is one of those immigrant stories where American is framed as a cure-all reset button meant to heals old wounds in a battered family’s identity. The past continues to haunt them, though—at first figuratively, then literally in the form of a ghost that stalks the attic of their new home. As the hauntings worsen, the family becomes more reclusive, never leaving the house to venture into town. Only the sweetheart librarian and her petty, jealous suitor have any interest in the goings-on of the cursed home, the family’s mysterious past, and the well-being of the four children who’re left to face their demons alone within that insular space. It does not go well.

Because Marrowbone is so obedient to the tropes & rhythms of a long-familiar genre, most audiences will clue into the answers to its central mysteries long before they’re revealed. However, the details of those mysteries’ circumstances and the effect of their in-the-moment dread carry the movie through a consistently compelling continuation of a Gothic horror tradition. Creepy dolls, cursed money, miniatures, bricked-over doorways, a covered mirror, a menacing ghost, a pet raccoon named Scoundrel: Marrowbone excels in the odd specificity of its individual details and the deranged paths its story pushes to once the protective bubble of its central mystery is loudly popped. There’s also a delicately tragic sense of romance that guides the picture’s overall tone, both in the librarian’s love life and in the children-fending-for-themselves literary imagination. If you’re not especially in love with the atmospheric feel of the Gothic horror genre, these aesthetic details and the film’s bonkers third act might not be enough to carry you beyond the sense that we’ve seen this story told onscreen many times before. The tempered response to both Crimson Peak & Winchester suggest that will be the case for many viewers. More forgiving Gothic horror fans should find plenty of admirable specificity to this particular story, though, the kind of tangible detailing that allows the best ghost stories to stick to the memory despite their decades (if not centuries) of cultural familiarity. It’s a shame that tradition isn’t currently profitable, but we’ll eventually come back around to it as a culture and Marrowbone will still be oddly, wonderfully unhinged in its menacing details.

-Brandon Ledet