luca guadagnino

After the Hunt (2025)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Back when I saw Anatomy of a Fall in theaters a couple of years ago, I was struck by the strangeness of the prestige picture having an advertised URL that encouraged audience members to vote on whether the main character was guilty of killing her husband or not. At the time, about two-thirds of viewers believed in her innocence, which has increased slightly to 70% innocent/30% guilty in the two years since release. That film, as well as Tár, was at the forefront of my mind for most of the runtime of After the Hunt, the newest film from director Luca Guadagnino (and a freshman writing effort from Nora Garrett, heretofore a mostly unknown actress). I’m surprised to see that this one has been faring so poorly critically at this juncture (as of this writing, the Google review aggregator is showing a 2.1 rating out of 5 — admittedly only out of 110 reviews. More damningly, both the critical and audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are hovering in the range between 35 and 40%), and I can’t help but think that some large portion of this critical laceration comes from the fact that the modern audience has lost the ability to appreciate ambiguity, let alone accept it or see its value in the context of a piece of art. That, or some are simply too turned off by its approach to its sexpolitik.

After the Hunt is a character study of Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), a professor of ethics and philosophy at Yale, detailing the relationships she has with three primary players in her life. There’s her queer grad student and PhD candidate Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), a young Black woman who nonetheless comes from a wealthy, privileged background; alongside Alma in the department is fellow professor Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), a flirtatious libertine who’s poorly hiding his attraction to Alma; and finally, Alma’s husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a psychiatrist with a tendency toward dramatic flair and culinary spectacle, who is the only one aware that she’s suffering in silence over a painful physical ailment. After a party at the Imhoffs’ one night, Alma watches as Hank and Maggie depart together so that he can walk her home. The following day, she arrives to campus to find Maggie absent and unresponsive. After a quick drink with Hank during which he demonstrates himself to clearly be horny for her, she returns home to find Maggie on her doorstep, where she tells Alma that Hank sexually assaulted her the previous evening. By the next morning, Hank has already set up a lunch with her at a local Indian restaurant where he explains his side to Alma: that he had caught Maggie plagiarizing some of her work a couple of weeks prior and found her doing it again in her PhD dissertation, and that he had wanted to give her the chance to explain herself and offer her the opportunity to come clean before he was forced to rat her out to Alma. In all of this, Frederik tries to support Alma as best as he can, but she keeps him both at arm’s length and uninformed (he learns about the allegations against Hank in the newspaper), possibly because she unconsciously recognizes that he sees all the sides more clearly than she can. 

The performances here are stunning. Edebiri in particular stands out, as the overall complex ambiguity of her performance is an absolute stunner. When Maggie meets Alma to tell her about what happened with Hank the night before, there’s an imprecision to her language that seems to be deliberate, but it’s unclear if the ambiguity is deliberate on the part of Maggie or the screenplay. When Alma asks for concrete details, Maggie talks around the events of the previous night, with vague statements like “He crossed a line” and “When he left, I took a shower,” then lashing out when asked for more details. Is this a natural, understandable reaction to being asked to recount details of a traumatic experience when one is attempting to navigate describing that event without reliving its every moment, or is Maggie trying to compartmentalize a deliberate misrepresentation of the situation for some future leverage without overtly “lying”? Before Hank is fired, there’s a scene in which Maggie and Alma meet each other in the foyer of a rectory/lecture hall, when Alma asks Maggie if she went to a clinic after the incident so that any forensic evidence could be collected, and Maggie tells her that she walked to an off-campus clinic but never made it inside because she felt threatened by some men who were hanging around the place, but that she did see that there was a security camera that would have shown footage of her approaching, and that this, in combination with the fact that she went there immediately after seeing Alma, should be enough to establish a timeline of sorts that would indicate her intention to seek medical services even if she couldn’t go through with it. The statement veers between being completely understandable, as it’s become increasingly popular for men to hang around outside of women’s clinics to harass them, but also seems almost too-practiced, as Maggie “realizes” that she can put together some “evidence.” Edebiri’s ability to straddle this line, to where a reading that she’s a manipulative nepo baby playing on what Hank calls “a shallow cultural moment” is just as valid as a reading that she is telling the whole and complete truth from the beginning. There’s certainly the implication that Maggie was already getting some amount of special treatment before; when she doesn’t come to campus the morning following the Imhoffs’ party, Alma says something offhand about having already given her “too much rope.” 

Garfield is quite good at playing against type here as well, and the extent to which we can believe anything about his version of events is circumspect but also plausible. Even when he’s admitting (or “admitting”) to the singular error (or “singular error”) of going to a student’s home alone in the evening, he never slows down in devouring his lunch, which lends itself to an interpretation that the accusation is trivial. When he loses his job, he goes on a ranting tirade about having had to work three jobs to put himself through school and now that he’s on the precipice of tenure, he may lose everything because of an unverifiable accusation. It’s here that we hit on what is likely the greatest stumbling block about the movie, in that we live in a world in which any text that treats a false accusation of rape is problematic due to the negligible instances of this in reality, in comparison to the ocean of sexual assaults that remain unreported (and, when reported, handled indelicately, incorrectly, and with greater deference to the accused than the accuser). We live in a sexually violent society, and anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that is lying or living in denial, and there’s an argument to be made that predicating a piece of media on something which does not happen, especially when the characters stand to benefit from a false accusation in just the way that detractors of the reality of rape culture often claim they do, is dangerous. I can’t say that this is an unreasonable reason to take a stand against this film, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for taking the same issues with After the Hunt that many took with last year’s Strange Darling, even if the potential to infer misogyny is less textual here. Regardless, we never find out if Hank did it, or if he did how far things went, or if he did just enough to leave himself open to accusation. For my viewing companion, what clinched his guilt was a later scene in which Alma goes to a spare waterfront apartment she keeps as an academic retreat and finds Hank there, hiding out and using a spare key she forgot he had. He makes a move on her, and although it’s clear that a mutual attraction exists, Alma doesn’t give in, and it takes several declarations of “no” and a final violent shove before Hank leaves (exiting the film altogether, in fact). 

For Alma, all of this is colored by her own experience. This is a bit of a spoiler so skip ahead to the next paragraph if you would prefer not to know . . . We learn late in the film that Alma was herself a statutory victim when she was only fifteen years old. Her recollection of the “relationship” is itself warped, as she recalls the youthful crush that she had on a friend of her father’s, one that culminated in an ongoing sexual relationship that she recalls as having been sought and initiated by her, not the older man. She protests to her husband, who rightly points out that she was a child and that it is the responsibility of any adult who finds themselves pursued by a minor to—at a minimum—not acquiesce, that she threw herself at the man until he “relented,” and that she exposed him out of vengeance and spite when he entered a relationship with a woman his own age, and that this scandal led him to commit suicide three years later. She recanted her story publicly, but the guilt of his death is still something that she carries with her, and which over time has metamorphosed into a kind of emotional cancer, no doubt contributing to the perforated ulcers with which she struggles throughout the film. Regardless of whether Maggie is telling the truth or not, Alma’s statement to her that although what Maggie tells herself she’s seeking is restorative justice, what she’s actually attempting is revenge is about Alma, not Maggie; Maggie’s honesty about what happened the night of Alma’s party is immaterial because Alma perceives Maggie as repeating her own mistake, which has itself compounded and been sanitized and mythologized into a Herculan burden for Alma to bear alone to the point where it doesn’t reflect reality. 

Beyond the performances, the camera work and editing here are magnificent. There’s a lot of hand work, as Guadagnino frequently allows the camera to drift from close-ups (most in some kind of profile but frequently with direct-to-camera delivery, which created a kind of intimate space as if we in the audience were in conversation directly with Alma or Maggie) to focusing on the characters’ hands. It’s almost a joke, but it would take an Italian director to not only recognize the intrinsic value of talking with one’s hands but also to invoke the way that the eye tends to naturally drift away from eye contact during difficult conversations. It’s good stuff, and although I can see how it would easily get tiresome for a lot of moviegoers, this is a slow cinema allowance that I’m more than willing to make. The sound design is spectacular, with particular attention to a scene in which Frederik is catty to his wife because of how much he perceives that Maggie is using her, as he is as-yet unaware of the plot-driving accusation. He first interrogates Maggie about her primary PhD interest and, when she becomes defensive, he passive aggressively leaves the room and starts to play loud music from another part of the apartment, with the muffling of the sound provided by the swinging kitchen door intermittently allowing for blasts of electronica to interrupt the proceedings as he wordlessly enters and exits multiple times. It’s another scene that’s multi-layered, as we’re once again led to believe that Hank was telling some part of the truth, as Maggie can’t offer up a single reason why she’s so interested in her particular field of study or even an interesting fact for conversation. Is this because she’s still too traumatized and has come to Alma for comfort and understanding and can’t process Frederik’s question, or is she a mediocre student coasting on privilege and plagiarism? 

There’s extensive discussion of intergenerational practices of ethical philosophy here, and I’m not sure that all of the heady ideas land, but it’s a fascinating conversation that the film has with you. Chloë Sevigny is also present, as Dr. Kim Sayers, Alma’s friend and a practicing psychiatrist. Although Kim vocally objects to a man at Alma’s party saying that if the university decides to hand out only one tenureship between Hank and Alma, it will go to the latter because of “the current moment” regardless of either professor’s individual accolades or achievements, she also agrees with Hank’s sentiments that the current generation of students are too coddled and soft. Elsewhere, that relationship between the two different generations is manifested in Alma’s acceptance of Maggie’s “lesbianism” (Maggie never calls herself that and is in a relationship with a transmasc nonbinary person) but has to be continuously reminded that Maggie’s partner uses they/them pronouns; Alma’s accusation that Maggie’s relationship is more about gaining clout in the current political environment than love clearly hits close to home. This shows that Alma agrees with Hank and Kim to an extent, as when she confronts Maggie late in the film, she criticizes the younger woman for faking her way through academia, crossing a line when she says that Maggie’s phoniness (including her relationship) is what makes it so easy for people to think that women are crying wolf in these situations. It’s a sweeping generalization about an entire generation, but more to the point, it’s once again Alma projecting all of her own trauma onto Maggie, as Alma, at least in the narrative of her life that she tells herself, did in fact “cry wolf,” and it’s those words from the German newspaper article Maggie found in Alma’s home that are the first to be translated for us on screen. 

I’m not surprised that this one is divisive, and I can’t pretend that I’m all-in on this particular narrative device given its real-world ramifications, but this is a marvelous work from a directorial maestro. Challengers left me pretty cold, and I completely missed Queer so I can’t speak to it, but this one has me back on board. I have no doubt that we will soon be inundated with think pieces about how Guadagnino’s usage of Stuhlbarg to deliver a monologue about how what happened to Alma in her youth was not her fault and that she was used by an older man regardless of whether she initiated it or not is a commentary on the changing cultural reception and perception of Call Me By Your Name in the intervening years since the film was released. I’m not particularly looking forward to those days, and the derisive reaction from most of the general public to this one means that we won’t see it become as memetic as Challengers was (not to mention that the subject matter does not lend itself to that here), so this may simply sink without much attention. I think that would be a shame. I’ve already sung Edebiri and Garfield’s praises, but this is a terrific and nuanced performance from Roberts, at turns inhuman and too human, often unsure of herself but with a mask of confidence, projecting confusion when she’s certain of herself. She’s terrific, and so is the film. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #240: Naked Lunch (1991) & Adapting Burroughs

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Welcome to Episode #240 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Hanna discuss the few films that have been adapted from William S. Burroughs’s prose, starting with David Cronenberg’s 1991 adaptation of Naked Lunch.

00:00 Welcome

01:20 Friendship (2025)
03:10 Bring Her Back (2025)
09:34 Premonition (2007)
13:37 Mulan (1998)
16:53 Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)
20:02 Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966)

23:08 Naked Lunch (1991)
41:30 Burroughs – The Movie (1983)
55:41 The Junky’s Christmas (1993)
59:56 Ah Pook is Here (1994)
1:03:21 Queer (2024)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Challengers (2024)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

I don’t really understand sports. I’m not talking about the rules of various games or what have you, but the appeal—Wait! Don’t go! I promise this isn’t just another one of those “guy who tries to be funny on the internet does a tired ‘I think I’m better than people who like sports’ thing to be relatable to other disaffected millennials” thing. This has nothing to do with in/out-group mentality or sport/anti-sport tribalism. I’m confessing something here. See, I understand competitiveness, as anyone who has ever had the misfortune of seeing me at trivia can attest. I personally hate sweating, and I don’t understand the appeal of feats of athleticism that are specific to “sport” as an inscribing factor; I’m never interested enough to watch some kind of strong man competition where an overrepresented number of kilt-wearers (for some reason) chop down trees and haul them up an incline, but I do understand that as a thing that would be of interest, as a viewer or a participant. People who find meaning in devoting their life to the pursuit of athletic achievement are so different in the way that their minds work that they are as inscrutable to me as an alien would be. 

Obsession, on the other hand, is something that I do understand, and that, more than tennis, is what’s at the heart of Challengers. The film opens and closes in 2019, during a “challenger” match between Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) in New Rochelle, observed by Art’s wife, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). It’s clear that there’s more than just this win on the line, and we learn about the complicated relationships between these three through a series of flashbacks. Thirteen years earlier, Tashi Duncan was the hottest thing in tennis – Adidas sponsorships, scholarship to Stanford, nothing on the horizon but bigger and better things. After successfully trouncing her sore-loser opponent at the Junior U.S. Open, she meets Patrick and Art, “Fire and Ice,” who had their own big win playing doubles that same day, at a party in her honor. They both come from some amount of wealth while she does not; we don’t know the extent of the Donaldson family’s finances other than that both boys have attended a tennis-focused boarding school together since age twelve, while the Zweig’s money is implied when the shoreside mansion at which the party is held is noted to be smaller than Patrick’s family home. Later, back at the hotel, the trio drink and things get steamy, with Tashi making out with both boys at once and then pulling back to watch them make out with each other. She agrees to give her number to whichever boy wins against the other the following day. 

In the intervening time between 2006 and 2019, the three of them grow closer and then further apart at different intervals. Patrick and Tashi date long distance while she’s at Stanford, as is Art, while Patrick attempts to go straight into the pros. When he comes to visit and see one of Tashi’s matches, she gives him unsolicited advice about his tennis playing beforehand, and he storms off on her and doesn’t come to see her play; Tashi ends up with a career-ending injury, possibly because Patrick’s absence got in her head. This drives a wedge between Patrick and not only Tashi, but Art, too. In 2019, Tashi and Art are a coach-and-player power couple, but the line between their time together at Stanford and the reunion with Patrick at the challenger match in New Rochelle isn’t a straight one. The frenetic energy of tennis is deliberately evoked in the way that the narrative frenziedly moves around in the timeline and pings back and forth between different characters’ perspectives, showing us secrets being created, kept, and discovered, all while the soundtrack jumps from utter silence to pulsing house music and back again. 

I’m not quite sure what to make of this one. Before going to the theater, some of the critique I read was about the film’s length, which is a complaint that I, eternal champion of The Tree of Wooden Clogs, practically never agree with. I did feel the length of this one (I feel the need to say “no pun intended” here given the homoerotic nature of the text) though, and when I walked out, I wasn’t sure if I had seen a good movie or a very stylishly crafted but shallow erotic sports fantasy. In the intervening time, I think my ruminations on it led me to give it more credit than I initially did. For one thing, and not to knock any of these performers, but this is a movie where the characterization comes through more in the editing than in the performance. O’Connor’s character is one that lets him emote more, his devil-may-care attitude letting him get away with smirking and scheming, while Tashi (and Art as he spends more time with her) spending her whole life stoically, as serious as a heart attack. As a result, Zendaya is called upon to be stone-faced for a lot of this, especially in the framing narrative. We get more about her character in the opening when she is watching the match, her head following the ball in tandem with everyone else in the stands, until she stops watching the game and starts watching the men, and then focuses in on one of them, than we do in many of her more dialogue-heavy scenes later in the film. Tashi is driven throughout, but there’s a stark contrast between her playfulness prior to her injury and the way that she’s eternally guarded for the rest of her story. She’s effective at compartmentalizing and disguising her bitterness, and while the narrative affords her few opportunities to drop that wall, Zendaya is able to do it with a subtlety that seems effortless. 

I’m a big fan of both Call Me By Your Name and director Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake, despite my extensive reservations about the latter. I don’t know that this one is really in the same league as those two films, both of which could arguably be named one of the greatest pictures in their respective genres. It does feel of a piece with them, though, even if I can’t say that this one has the same immediately apparent artistic merit that they do. It’s not bad; not at all. That the non-linear narrative is so clear and easy to follow is praiseworthy, and it cleverly mimics the spontaneity of moving between memories that, for whatever reason, are linked in our personal histories. It’s fun, but the things that make it interesting and exciting are the same things that capture my attention in music videos or this video edit. On the night that I saw it, I texted Brandon to say it felt like an elevated David DeCoteau movie in large swathes, but I’ve come around on it a little and can see that an artistic decision was made here: to make a sexy drama about hot people, and use that basis to play around with some cool drone footage and go into the tennis ball’s POV and make people feel like they’re at the club. It’s not a bad impulse.

I’m reminded of something that Brandon wrote about last year, when we were talking about how directors who have had the mixed fortunes to start their directing careers with what would be the magnum opus of any of their peers: Jordan Peele, Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, and I would add Guadagnino to this list and stand ready to nominate Julia Ducornau the next time she puts something out. I’m probably the biggest proponent of his work around these parts, but I’m not ashamed to fly this flag. In the link above, Brandon talks about how far into his career Hitchcock was able to get before he started making what we think of as the biggest hits of his canon, but I’m reminded of a bit of trivia about Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Psycho, perhaps the most enduring of the auteur’s work in the public consciousness, was a project that he actually made on the cheap and with a large portion of the crew carried over from the weekly series. There are several episodes in the seasons leading up to the filming of Psycho where you can see a few trial runs for things that Hitch would do in later films. The episode “One More Mile to Go” is the most obvious as it gave the old man, who directed the entry, the opportunity to try out some of the camera tricks that he would use to build tension when Marion Crane is pulled over in Psycho’s first reel. Challengers feels like an episode (or several) of a theoretical Luca Guadagnino Presents, where he’s given a couple of new techniques a shot so that he can use that skill to make the best possible version of a story that, unlike this one, is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon (sorry, I’ve been making a lot of ice cream lately). Challengers may be one of the things that helps him crack the code of how to make the filmmaking equivalent of overlaying audio onto satisfying kinetic sand or Subway Surfers footage, while making it cinematic art. That’s something to see, even if it wasn’t really for me. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Bones and All (2022)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

The timing of Bones and All’s theatrical run is indicative of how slight signifiers in a film’s marketing strategy can greatly change its public perception.  Released a month earlier, this young-cannibals-in-love road trip story would’ve been treated as a major studio Horror Film, falling somewhere between the somber-epic mythmaking of Doctor Sleep and the teen heartthrob pop-horror of The Twilight Saga.  By holding it off until November, MGM was able to position the film as a prestigious Awards Contender instead – something that loses money in the short-term, then hopefully buys the studio a couple golden statues months down the line.  As a result, I’ve been seeing a lot of grossed-out responses from audiences who were expecting Bones and All to be more of a straightforward road trip love story, repulsed by its most shocking moments of blood-guzzling, flesh-chewing violence.  As someone who twiddles their thumbs for most of the stretch between Halloween & January Dumping Season on the film release calendar, I’m coming from the opposite direction, wishing Bones and All weren’t so tenderly underplayed & remorseful about its hunger pangs for gore.  It’s kinda nice to have something that drifts between those two magnetic pulls, though, especially since it’s so unusual to see a Near Dark-style genre blender treated as a genuine threat to Award Season’s more traditional biopics & historical weepies.  The exact same cut of this movie would not have had that fighting chance if released in October instead of November, which is exactly how silly & arbitrary this entire “Best of the Year” selection process is on an industry-wide scale.

I was amused to see Bones and All‘s dual nature as a somber, awardsy drama and a viciously violent cannibal movie reflected in the casting of its two leads.  Certainly, the Oscar nominated Tiger Beat heartthrob Timothée Chalamet is the film’s biggest draw, as it relies heavily on his twinky dirtbag charms as history’s scrawniest leading man.  As a genre-trash connoisseur, though, I was most excited to see Escape Room‘s Taylor Russell get her due as the film’s front-and-center protagonist, as she’s a far more powerful emotional anchor than that high-concept, low-execution horror franchise likely deserves.  Here, Russell headlines a coming-of-age story for a teen girl in rural 1980s America who’s going through an unexpected Raw phase: channeling her newfound adult instincts & urges into sudden acts of cannibalism.  Abandoned by her family, she seeks a home & a self-assured identity on the road, where her natural scent as “an eater” is frequently clocked by fellow cannibals.  Against the odds, she hooks up with Chalamet’s fellow loner eater and makes a small, manageable place for herself in the world where she can live without pain & guilt.  Only, no matter how much she personally heals from her traumatic past, it has a way of creeping back in to ruin her progress – mostly through the villainous presence of Mark Rylance as an old-timey hobo (doing his best Rose the Hat).  Bones and All is equally balanced as an understated road trip drama about pained personal healing and an eerie supernatural horror about the wounded souls & vicious monsters at the fringes of American rot.  Which version of the film you see in that Rorschach test-in-motion is a matter of personal disposition and might even change from scene to scene.

I reacted to this movie the same way I’ve reacted to every Luca Guadagnino picture I’ve seen: sustained appreciation without total elation.  Guadagnino consistently makes good movies—never great ones—precisely because of his tendency for dramatic restraint.  With his two outright horror films (the other being his 2018 Suspriria “remake”), you can feel him actively fighting that impulse, reaching into the depths of Hell for transcendence & catharsis instead of his usual grounded frustrations & melancholy.  Bones and All digs as far down as it can into the mud, blood, bone shards, buzzing flies, and ash of its underground-cannibal America, but it still feels self-consciously reserved & tethered to reality – recalling the authenticity-obsessed docudrama of American Honey more than the horned-up ferocity of Trouble Every Day.  The doomed lovers of Bones and All never fully give in to the transcendent pleasures of their grotesque hunger.  The hellish pool party of A Bigger Splash never fully devolves into the blood-soaked, poolside orgy it threatens to be.  Armie Hammer never bites into that cum-filled peach.  For a lot of audiences, that restrained approach to over-the-top genre tropes is what makes Guadagnino great; it’s what makes Bones and All a sincere Awards Contender, unlike other artfully grotesque horrors of the year like Mad God, Flux Gourmet, and Men.  For me, it’s what keeps his work from ever fully accessing the cathartic release those tropes tap into, an approach that feels more timid than admirable.  It’s apparently what gets you in the door to compete with The Fabelmans instead of Barbarian, though, so what do I know?

-Brandon Ledet

Further into the Inferno: The Follies of Deepening Suspiria’s Mythology

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

I love Dario Argento’s Suspira. It’s very high among my favorite titles from the Italian genre film legend, matched only by the likes of Opera & Tenebre. At the same time, I could not care less about the story Suspiria tells if I tried. Like the murder mystery gialli Argento cut his teeth directing, this is explicitly a style-over-substance endeavor, one that pays much more careful attention to the lighting of a kill & the menace of the soundtrack than the logic or structure of its mythology. Suspiria is a gorgeous, gore-coated object that overwhelms in its sensual pleasures, but does little to develop its central story beyond the elevator-pitch premise of “A ballet school run by witches.” Argento doesn’t even save the revelation of that premise for a mysterious reveal; one of the earliest scenes features a track from prog band Goblin where whispers of “Witch, witch-witch-witch” overwhelm the soundtrack. It’s such a weird impulse, then, for each of Suspiria’s later follow-ups to lean so heavily into the witchy dance school’s background mythology as if that was something the original film was missing. No Suspriria descendent follows this trivial pursuit as thoroughly as Luca Gaudagnino’s 2018 eponymous remake. Guadagningo’s Suspriria sprawls into almost a full extra hour of runtime to make room for exploring the political struggles of the coven who run the dammed dance academy, the childhood background of their latest victim Susie Banion, the cultural climate of the country outside the academy’s walls, and any number of other lore concerns that were not on Argento’s mind as much as staging witchy, ballet-themed kills. The truth is, though, that Argento himself was just as guilty of needlessly fleshing out Suspiria’s mythology; he just saved that indulgence for his own sequels to the original film. It’s also true that no mythology-minded Suspiria follow-up—whether from Guadagningo or Argento—has been especially bad, even though every single one is remarkably goofy.

Argento himself wasted zero time diving into Suspiria’s unexplored mythology in his own sequels to the film. The second title in what would eventually be know as The Three Mothers Trilogy, 1980’s Inferno, opens with characters reading large blocks of text out of a fictional book titled The Three Mothers that details lore only casually referenced in the previous film. While Suspiria briefly mentions that its German setting is just one of three connected, international covens – the others located in Rome & NYC – it doesn’t waste much time wondering what’s going on with the witches who run those other houses. Inferno, by contrast, explains in plain academic dialogue how the Mother of Sighs, the Mother of Tears, and the Mother of Darkness divvy up their geographically disparate power structure—connecting its tale of NYC witchcraft to the German events of the previous film. Still, the actual narrative of Inferno has little to do with this suddenly complex lore until the final showdown staged with the Mother of Darkness witch who resides in New York. Mostly, Argento slips back into the sensory indulgences of complexly constructed kills that guided the overall trajectory of the first film, even joking with the supposed seriousness of its mythology when a character mistakes “The Three Sisters” for an R&B vocal group. It wasn’t until the much-delayed conclusion to the trilogy, 2007’s Mother of Tears: The Third Mother, that he really committed to pretending Suspiria’s lore actually meant something, now having spent decades fleshing out its legacy. In the film, his real-life daughter Asia Argento reopens the same The Three Mothers book to kickstart her fated path to confront the titular third Mother in Rome; only this time the pursuit of that mystery & confrontation are made to be the main thrust of the text, so that the brutal gore (and shoddy CGI scares) that interrupt the mythology are more a distraction than they are the entire point. It’s no coincidence that the most mythology-obsessed entry in the Three Mothers Trilogy is also the weakest picture, artistically. Its Roman Catholic mysticism & ancient texts mysteries approximate a mid-00s horror version of The Da Vinci Code, except its guidance under the Dimension Extreme label makes it way cheaper & meaner than that may sound.

As Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake is a shameless indulgence in pure excess, it can’t help but eat up all of the lore stretched out across the entire Three Mothers Trilogy in a single sitting. Gaudagnino goes beyond the establishment of there being a coven of witches in three major cities to ask who these witches are, what political climates they have to deal with, how they delegate power, and how they select their victims. He also picks up the idea of their being a book explaining the mechanics of these covens and their respective houses by filling entire notebooks with handwritten, geometrically diagrammed explanations of how witchcraft works in this universe on a practical, if not mathematical level. This elaboration of core mythology may seem philosophically opposed to the barebones, imagery-distracted lore of the original Suspiria, but it does touch on the most core aspect of Dario Argento’s work: excess. The giallo legend may have poured more of his excessive, obsessive detail into the lighting & staging of a kill than establishing a sense of logic in the witchcraft behind it, but Guadagnino’s overly-detailed attention to the lore is still in the same sprit of unbridled, maybe even ill-advised excess. Oddly, that over-commitment to mythology ultimately has the same effect on the audience that the disregard for it achieved in Argento’s original version. There’s so much going on in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria that it’s difficult to pay attention to or emotionally invest in any one narrative thread, so that what mostly remains is the film’s sense of style. Suspiria (’77) & Inferno recognize this effect outright and fully commit to Argento’s witchcraft giallo aesthetic once they establish the basic tenants of the lore that drives their conflict. Mother of Tears & Suspiria (’18) are much more frantic in their relationship with mythology, chasing a sense of meaning so desperately in their embellishment of witchcraft lore that an overindulgence in backstory & narrative itself becomes part of the filmmaking style.

Whether keeping the mythology as thinly sketched out as it was in the original film or over-explaining superfluous new wrinkles to the lore, the overall strength of a Suspiria follow-up still lies in the pleasures of its sense of style. Inferno may be the most underrated in this regard– mixing the neon witchcraft aesthetic from its predecessor with the gloved-hand giallo kills of other Argento works & Fulci-level shameless gags singular to its own vision (there are a couple cat & rat-themed eco-horror kills I find especially pleasurable) to achieve something truly special. Suspiria (2018) is similarly pleasurable in its stylistic deviations (ultimately landing somewhere between Possession & Society, but nowhere near Argento), even if its attention to lore often feels like wasted energy. Mother of Tears is the clear weak link in the chain, but even the cheap & cheesy violence of its large-scale horror mystery has a kind of charm to it, like an especially gory episode of Masters of Horror or an expired box of Easy Mac. There are no bad Suspiria movies, but there are certainly ones that try way too hard to pretend the series’ core mythology means something; it very much doesn’t.

-Brandon Ledet

The Big Deal About Call Me by Your Name (2017) is That It Isn’t a Big Deal at All

/ swampflix / 11 Comments

While I wasn’t quite as knocked on my ass by the Academy Award-nominee Call Me by Your Name as Britnee seemed to be in her review, I do share in her appreciation of its merits as an intoxicating sensory experience. She writes, “I could taste the fresh apricot juice as it was flowing down Oliver’s throat. I could feel the warmth of the sun as it was beaming down on Elio’s face. Even the use of the music in the film was phenomenal.” Like with Luca Guadagnino’s previous directorial effort A Bigger Splash, this is a film that often compensates for its most glaring narrative shortcomings by simply shining as a gorgeous object, a portrait of life “somewhere in Northern Italy” that appeals to all five of the senses. I can’t recall a work of art that’s served as a better advertisement for an Italian life of leisure since the wonderfully-penned Gabrielle Hamilton memoir Blood, Bones, and Butter. I wasn’t 100% convinced by the passion shared between Elio (Timothée Chalamet) & Oliver (Armie Hammer) in this gorgeous backdrop the way Britnee was, but in a way, the soft, casual edge to their summertime romance is a huge part of the film’s appeal. Much like the ease of drinking fresh-squeezed juice, going for a swim on a whim, or plucking a book to read from the endless towers of them stacked about the open-windowed house, the same-sex romantic tryst at the center of Call Me by Your Name is a casual indulgence in an ancient pleasure. The only air of tragedy to their extended hook-up in this sun-drenched Eden is that it’s doomed to be temporary. That casual approach to same-sex romance & sensuality is extremely rare in cinema’s coming of age narratives about queer self-discovery, especially the ones set in the AIDS-paranoid, legally malevolent days of the early 1980s. It’s wonderful to see that the Big Deal about Call Me by Your Name isn’t made to be a big deal at all.

Something that caught my eye in Britnee’s review was that she made a point to note that Elio confesses his desire to (the older, more confident) Oliver “without stating that he is homosexual or bisexual.” This may be a result of the film’s less identity politics-obsessed 1983 setting, but it’s very much important to its overall appeal. I’ve been taken aback by a few critical takes on the film that posit Elio & Oliver as closeted homosexual men, when my experience with their shared arc was explicitly framed as a bisexual awakening. In a typical cinematic version of this story, these two young men would only be flirting & sleeping with women as a cover for their true passion, a dangerous romance that would inevitably end in tragedy (think of titles like Brokeback Mountain or Boys Don’t Cry for context). Here I never question that the leads enjoy sleeping with women any more than I question them enjoying fresh fruit or afternoon swims. Their own connection may be more passionately intense & more of a social taboo (due to their significant age gap just as much as their shared gender), but that feels like it has more to do with their mutual compatibility than any external factors. A more convincing case could be made that Elio’s academic father (the consistently magnificent Michel Stuhlbarg) is a closeted homosexual man, but his hints about his own sexual orientation are left ambiguous at best. The most you can surmise from the fatherly advice carefully doled out throughout the film is that he believes what Elio & Oliver have is a rare, beautiful thing. Again, I don’t buy that the summertime fling the two leads share is as rare or as special as it’s ultimately framed to be, but I do find a lot to admire in this mode of subtle parental encouragement. In a more typical work, Elio’s parents would have found out about their tryst and made a huge dramatic gesture out of shutting it down. Instead, they quietly allow it to blossom & wither in its own time, as if it were the most natural thing in the world (which it kind of is).

The exchange that best solidifies the connection between the ease of Oliver & Elio’s romance and the general idyllic ease of a life on a Northern Italian villa is the one involving The Peach. Between his bored, restless indulgences in reading, drinking, swimming, sleeping, playing music, and having sex (what a life!), Elio often finds himself alone & sexually frustrated in the few private spaces he can find in his parents’ expansive summer home. In the most pivotal of these moments, he finds himself masturbating into a fresh peach, only to awake embarrassed when Oliver discovers him sleeping next to the evidence. To Elio’s horror, Oliver licks & threatens to eat the defiled, oozing peach. It’s a jarring exchange, but one that’s played as casually as the glazed petit four scene in Toni Erdmann, rather than for the shock value humor of similar scenes in Wetlands, Pink Flamingos, or American Pie. Elio is too embarrassed & ashamed to see it, but Oliver’s instinct to Eat The Peach in that scene is a natural extension of the indulgent, leisurely life they’ve been living all summer. Oliver is an overconfident, lumbering bro with a voracious appetite for Experience. The way he downs whole glasses of juice, dances with wild abandon, and smashes into even the daintiest of breakfasts is almost beastly, but it’s an appetite for life that makes the most out of the many sensory pleasures that enrich the Northern Italy countryside. Elio could use some of that unearned confidence himself, which is why it’s wonderful to see him indulge in more pleasures outside the shade of his bedroom as the film progresses. Eating The Peach is such a great summation of the careful, delicate hedonism of the summer the two young men share together over the course of the film. It’s kind of a shame the movie ultimately chickens out on fully depicting it (which I understand was not the case in the André Aciman source material).

Not everything in Call Me by Your Name worked for me. The Oscar-nominated Sufjan Stevens songs were more of a distraction than an enhancement. For all the film’s confident comfort in bisexuality, I found it a little odd that its onscreen nudity was all boobs and no peen. Less superficially, I never fully bought into the once-in-a-lifetime significance of the central romance, nor into Oliver’s transformation from “impolite, arrogant” bro to sensitive soul. Again, though, Guadagnino’s eye for gorgeous, natural imagery and all-encompassing sensory pleasures more than compensate for any narrative missteps (the intensely-lit Psychedelic Furs dance sequence was the most I’ve been excited for his upcoming Suspiria remake to date). Overall, this is a tenderly beautiful & surprisingly humorous delight. Speaking more culturally than personally, I believe the film’s greatest achievement is in not pushing to be more than that. It’s so encouraging to see between films like Call Me by Your Name & Princess Cyd that there are bisexual coming of age stories finally being told onscreen where the awakening & the romance are The Big Deal instead of the sexuality itself. There’s too many kinds of queer stories yet to be told onscreen for every major non-hetero release to be a coming-out misery narrative, as feels like has been the case for decades. Elio & Oliver believe their summertime romance to be a bombshell secret, a fear contextually informed by the film’s early 80s temporal setting, but nearly everyone around them perceives what they’re up to and does nothing to obstruct it with disapproval. The movie is ultimately casual & delicate in its depiction of an extended same sex hook-up, leaving only a young man’s broken heart behind in its inevitable conclusion (a wound that always heals with time, no matter how traumatic it feels in the moment). Elio & Oliver’s brief, passionate fling is presented as just one Northern Italy delight among many, no different than a good book, an afternoon swim, or a freshly squeezed glass of juice. The only way for that messaging to be clearer would be for Oliver to Eat The Peach and shrug at the camera, but I suppose that would have been making a Big Deal out of nothing at all.

-Brandon Ledet

Call Me by Your Name (2017)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

Luca Guadagnino’s latest film, Call Me by Your Name (based on the André Aciman novel of the same name), has earned loads of critical acclaim since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival last January and subsequent Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture. After watching the film for the first time last night, I can truly say that it lives up to the hype. Here I am, an entire day later, still thinking about all the beautiful scenes shot on 35mm film. In addition to the movie’s vibrant beauty, its ability to pull the audience in emotionally is incredible. The entire theater was silent (minus a few sniffles for those heartbreaking moments) as everyone was wide-eyed and open-mouthed.  It felt like we were part of a virtual reality experiment.

The film is set in northern Italy during the summer of 1983. Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and his parents (Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar) are spending time at their Italian villa. Elio’s father is a professor of archaeology and invites a handsome young research assistant, Oliver (Armie Hammer), to stay with them during the summer. Elio is a seventeen year old with wit and talent beyond his age, and Oliver, while extremely intelligent, falls a little into the frat boy stereotype. At first, the two develop a friendship that involves intellectual conversation, daily swims in gorgeous Italian waters, and going out to local night clubs. Slowly, Elio begins to develop more of a sexual interest in Oliver. Without stating that he is homosexual or bisexual, he approaches Oliver and makes his desires known. Oliver, while hesitant at first, indulges in these desires as he feels the same for Elio. The two then engage in a very brief, yet passionate affair over the summer.

What I love the most about Call Me by Your Name is the film’s pace. It doesn’t move too fast or too slow; it’s just the right speed. There’s a gradual build-up before Elio and Oliver consummate their relationship, but the film doesn’t come to an abrupt end after this occurs. Instead, the audience is able to watch their relationship blossom into something beautiful. This kind of intimacy was responsible for getting me so emotionally invested in the film. Understanding Elio’s feelings before he approached Oliver and watching the passion between them grow more and more each time they were together was absolutely magical.

This is the first Guadagnino film I’ve seen, and I am immensely impressed by his ability to create an atmosphere that is so appealing to all the senses. I could taste the fresh apricot juice as it was flowing down Oliver’s throat. I could feel the warmth of the sun as it was beaming down on Elio’s face. Even the use of music in the film was phenomenal. From the memorable sequence of Oliver dancing in his high socks and Converse shoes to The Psychedelic Furs hit, “Love My Way” to Sufjan Stevens’ “Mystery of Love” (nominated for Best Original Song) during Elio’s heartfelt moment of self-reflection, all of the film’s musical components add emphasis to these little moments.

While the performances from Chalamet and Hammer were above par, the most pivotal exchange in the film is Stuhlbarg’s monologue during a father/son discussion that goes beyond a father telling his son that he’s supportive of his sexuality. Chalamet showed up and showed out during this scene, and it had everyone in the theater in tears. In film, these conversations usually occur between mother and son because the father is usually too “macho” to understand anything about homosexuality. I was thrilled that this memorable moment was shared between Elio and his dad rather than Elio and his mom.

Call Me by Your Name is a coming of age love story that has left me with nothing but fond memories. I’m looking forward to watching this one a few more times once it’s released on DVD.

-Britnee Lombas

A Bigger Splash (2016)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

Chalk up A Bigger Splash as yet another fine example of one of my favorite dramatic subgenres: The Party Out of Bounds. A wealthy, white music industry couple get away from it all on a Sicilian island only to be rudely interrupted by a loud mouth producer/ex-lover and his hungry-for-trouble daughter. At first the couple tolerates the boisterous presence of their old friend but as he continually overstays his welcome the situation turns violently sour & then breaks in half. I love bottled up dramas when folks sickened by each other feel compelled (usually by a dangerous combination of lust & alcohol) to verbally duke it out in a cramped space instead of calling off the party & sending everyone on their not-so merry way. In A Bigger Splash‘s best moments it’s a wonderfully sadistic drama in this way, cramming four stage play-ready characters into a tight space & turning their cautious love for one another into murderous hatred.

Tilda Swinton stars as David Bowie’s less ethereal stand-in, an on-hiatus rock star recovering from a vocal surgery in romantic bliss with her recovering alcoholic husband. Their serene getaway is short-lived as the party’s crashed by the hopelessly crass, self-absorbed social terrorist music producer who haunts their past. Ralph Fiennes does a fantastic job as this obnoxious catalyst, turning the pathetic sadness of reliving your glory days into a mission statement & a battle cry. Dakota Johnson rounds out the cast as the producer’s hot-to-trot daughter, a literal siren on the rocks intending to seduce the blissful couple into annihilation from the other end. This is a huge step up for Johnson, who’s coming off a hot streak of stinkers like 50 Shades of Grey & How to Be Single to put in a well-measured performance that proves she can (emotively) duke it out with the best of them. Swinton is as consistently magnetic here as always, even with the power of speech mostly removed from her arsenal. It’s Fiennes who’s given free reign to chew scenery, though, and he does a wonderfully maniacal job driving the party as far out of bounds as he can, at times recalling Ben Kingsley’s dastardly crass performance in (the far superior work) Sexy Beast.

Unfortunately, A Bigger Splash has an occasional tendency to release steam from the dramatic pressure cooker in a way that relieves the central tension a little too easily. I’m thinking particularly of the flashbacks to Swinton’s & Fiennes’s glory days as a coked-up power couple on top of the rock & roll world. There’s too much escapism in those moments, distracting from the cramped discomfort of the the mounting resentment at hand even when they refer to past conflicts. That might be a personal bias, though, as it was the exact same problem I had with Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs film last year. I also thought showing Swinton performing her rock act in these flashbacks was a mistake. The film puts so much pressure on her voice/the music to be amazing that there’s no possible way for the reality to live up to it.

Still, director Luca Guadagnino does a great job here of turning a small cast drama into an intense visual display and a powder keg of lust & hurt feelings. Every body involved is a target for sexual leering. Unusually sharp focus of food, drink, and spinning records intensifies the sensual bacchanal of the central conflict. Up-close, direct to the camera line delivery recalls the discomfort of a great Bergman monologue. Even though he makes a few missteps in turning down the heat when it should be blasted, Gudagnino gleefully searches for the Devil in the details & employs an especially game Fiennes as a romance monster hellbent on tearing the whole world down so he can start from scratch (or dry hump the ruins). Although A Bigger Splash isn’t wholly successful, it is a remarkable experience that refuses to shy away from the violent urges of romantic jealousy & party-out-of-bounds societal unraveling. It’s impressive even when it stumbles and easily could’ve been much less memorable in less capable hands.

-Brandon Ledet