margaret qualley

The Substance (2024)

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What is The Substance? It’s 5% Barbie, 5% Carrie, 5% Requiem for a Dream, 5% The Fly, 10% Akira, 10% just the old lady from Room 237 in The Shining, 25% Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me” music video, 10% Jane Fonda workout tape, 5% Architectural Digest, and 20% sour lemon candy, and it’s all 100% fresh, new, and exciting. Demi Moore is Elisabeth Sparkle, who bears some resemblance to Moore; both found commercial and critical success (including an Oscar) in the early parts of their career, but their star has faded somewhat in the intervening years. Elisabeth now hosts a morning workout program for an unidentified major network, or at least she did until her birthday, when executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid)—wink, wink—unceremoniously lets her go from the show, essentially simply for having turned fifty. A hurt and shocked Elisabeth is distracted while driving by the sight of a billboard of her being taken down and ends up in a horrific collision. Although she’s remarkably unharmed, she’s shaken by the experience, and an almost inhumanly attractive nurse slips something into her coat pocket: a thumb drive printed with a phone number on one side and “The Substance” on the other, along with a note stating simply “It changed my life.” She watches the surreal advertising campaign/pharmaceutical pitch on the drive—a promise that The Substance will create a younger, more idealized version of yourself—and tosses it in the trash, before ultimately caving in on both her curiosity and her wounded self-image and giving it a shot (literally, and it’s for single use and you really, really should dispose of it after). 

Everyone has been talking about how much this movie is a return to form for body horror, but it’s more than just that. Sure, there’s mutating flesh, necrotic digits, and self surgery, but this is a movie that’s gross from the jump, long before people start erupting from each like molting salamanders. It’s mostly the most disgusting images you can imagine intercut with the occasional too-sterile environment or softcore aerobics so chock full of lingering shots of gyrating youthful glutes that they stop looking like flesh altogether. The first shot of the film, which gives us a demonstration of what The Substance does by showing it being injected into the yolk of an egg as it sits in its white on a countertop, before the yolk suddenly duplicates. Not long after, we are treated to an intense, almost fisheye closeup of Harvey’s face while he goes on a screaming, chauvinistic phone tirade while using a urinal before we cut to him grossly and messily slathering prawns in a yellow sauce and stuffing them messily in his face while he gives Elisabeth a series of backhanded compliments while performing the world’s worst exit interview; and we in the audience know he didn’t wash his hands. As Elisabeth leaves the hospital after her accident, an old classmate from before she was a star gives her his number on a piece of paper that’s then dropped into a puddle of some unknown liquid that’s murky and features a couple of floating cigarette butts. By the time the youthful version of Elisabeth, who names herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), is stitching up the wound on Elisabeth’s back from which she just emerged like a hot bloody Pop-Tart, you’re already so full of bile from the general nastiness that the gore is almost a reprieve. Of course, that’s before Sue starts taking more time than the rules of The Substance allow, with her selfishness morphing Elisabeth slowly (and then very quickly) into a witch of the Roald Dahl variety. 

That general grossness, as a departure from pure body horror, is also represented in the film’s use of yellows throughout, rather than (or at least in addition to) the reds that most flicks of this genre use. It’s omnipresent and I loved it, from the aforementioned yolks to the goldenrod color of Elisabeth’s coat to the neon yellow of The Substance itself and the fluids you may vomit as a result of its use. A ball of yellow clay is halved and reformed into two shapes in the demonstration video for The Substance to represent the “other” being formed from the “matrix.” The eggs reappear later when Elisabeth, in a fit of pique over Sue beginning to push the limits of their connection, starts cooking a large number of disgusting French dishes, which includes combining an ungodly number of eggs in a bowl and then beating them, splashing the yolks all over her. And, in the film’s final moments, a dandelion yellow sidewalk cleaner passes over Elisabeth’s Walk of Fame star, scrubbing up … well, that would be a spoiler. It’s a fun way to add a different kind of a splash of color; I’d go so far as to say yellow is used as effectively here as, say, red in Suspiria, and if you’ve been around here a while you know what high praise that is from me. 

Moore is revelatory here, and it’s great to see her on screen again, especially after such a long absence. She grounds a lot of the more surreal elements that become a larger and larger part of the story as reality becomes more and more detached from what we’re watching. She looks amazing here, which further underlines just how depraved the culture in which she resides is. While Elisabeth is fifty, Moore is a little over a decade older than that, and her body is, pardon my French, fucking phenomenal. That this makes Elisabeth the perfect person for her ongoing aspirational position as the host of Sparkle Your Life is completely lost on Harvey and the vapid executives and shareholders of the network, who salivate like Tex Avery hounds over Sue and the befeathered dancers who are set to perform on a show that Sue is set to host. Moore plays her with a quiet dignity that’s clearly covering a deep loneliness, which is itself exacerbated by the blow to her ego and her self-worth that come as the result of losing her job solely because of ageism. Qualley is also fun here. So far, she has been in one of the worst movies I have seen this year as well as one of the best, but even in the latter she was not among the moving pieces that garnered my esteem. Although a lot of what she’s tasked with here is more about how she looks than about her acting abilities, when she’s called on to perform, she delivers a solid performance that endeared her to me more than anything else I’ve seen her in before. 

Overall, this is one of the most fun movies I’ve seen all year. Gross when it needs to be, surreal when the narrative calls for it, and funny all the way through. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Kinds of Kindness (2024)

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Kinds of Kindness is a dense text. A triptych of stories from director Yorgos Lanthimos that are only loosely connected by the appearance of a single minor character (with each of the major billed actors appearing as different characters in each segment), they are nonetheless in conversation with one another, as they are all about the way that kindness can be many things — sincere as well as selfish, sacrificial as well as superficial. The segments, titled “The Death of R.M.F.,” “R.M.F. is Flying,” and “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” each relay a fable in which a character is “kind,” with consequences. 

In “The Death,” we first see a man with the initials “R.M.F.” (Yorgos Stefanakos) embroidered on his shirt pocket as he accepts an envelope of cash from a woman we later learn is named Vivian (Margaret Qualley), and watch as a man named Robert Fletcher (Jesse Plemmons) works up the nerve to run a red light and smash his Bronco into R.M.F.’s car, although neither man is seriously injured. The next morning, Robert tells his wife Sarah (Hong Chau) about the incident while she fawns over a piece of sports memorabilia—a broken John McEnroe racquet—that was received that morning from Robert’s employer, Raymond (Willem Dafoe), calling it Raymond’s best gift yet. Once he arrives at the office, we get a better picture of Robert and Raymond’s relationship; Robert is more of a pet or a toy for Raymond than an employee. Every aspect of Robert’s life is dictated by the older man: what clothes he wears, what drinks he orders at the bar, what he eats for every meal, when he sleeps and wakes and has sex with his wife. He even engineered Sarah and Robert’s marriage by having Robert fake an injury at a bar in order to gain her sympathy. But Robert can’t bring himself to kill a stranger in a car “accident,” which leads Raymond to ice him out, setting off a chain of events in which Sarah leaves him and a chance encounter—or is it?—with a woman named Rita Fanning (Emma Stone) make him more and more desperate to get back into Raymond’s good graces. 

In “Flying,” Denham Springs police officer Daniel (Plemmons) is dealing with the recent disappearance of his wife, Liz (Emma Stone), along with some other researchers on a ship that went missing, presumably in the gulf. While his partner Neil (Mamoudou Athie) and Neil’s wife Martha (Qualley) attempt to assuage his fears while also remaining realistic about the chances that Liz will be found, Daniel’s erratic behavior, which includes intimately and romantically brushing the hair of a suspect behind their ear, causes concern within the DSPD. When Liz and another survivor are found (flown back in a rescue copter piloted by R.M.F., giving the segment its title), she comes back … different. It was well established that Liz’s hatred of chocolate meant that it was banned from the house, but this newly returned woman devours chocolate cake with gusto. She smokes a cigarette for the first time, feels unconfident in her favorite outfit, and none of her shoes fit her anymore. Daniel becomes more and more suspicious that she is an impostor, but his attempts to explain to others that he thinks his wife is no longer his wife because she doesn’t remember his favorite song make him seem even more unstable than when she was missing. Liz, if this is Liz, seems to live only to please him, and after shooting a man in the hand during a routine traffic stop, he’s placed on suspension, where the two have nothing but time together, and he tests the limits of her emotional and physical generosity. 

In “Sandwich,” Andrew (Plemmons) and Emily (Stone) are two members of a cult, run by Omi (Dafoe) and Aka (Chau), that is seeking a woman with the power to heal and even reanimate the dead. Their search is specific; the woman will be about five foot nine, weigh about 130 pounds, and will be the survivor of a pair of twins. Their search brings them close enough to her old home that Emily sneaks away one morning to the house where her husband and daughter are still living and leaves a gift for her, which Andrew notices but promises to keep a secret, although she admits nothing. After a trip back to the commune compound, in which we get to see the cult’s grounds, practices, and yacht (specially designed for the awaited messiah), Andrew and Emily are sent on another expedition to the same town, where a woman named Rebecca approaches them and tells them that her twin sister Ruth (both Qualley) is the woman that they are looking for, but Andrew brushes her off. When another visit to her old house results in Emily being caught by her husband and daughter, he convinces her to have a drink with him, surreptitiously drugging and then sexually assaulting her. When she awakes the next morning, Omi and Aka are waiting for her outside, and for her “contamination” is exiled from the cult, although she hopes that finding Ruth will be her ticket back in. 

The first segment is a lot of fun, and there’s a lot of playfulness going on to toy with the audience and their expectations. Although the man with the embroidered initials “R.M.F.” is the first person that we see, this could be a misdirect, as we never learn Raymond’s last name, nor the middle names of Robert Fletcher or Rita Fanning, so any one of them could turn out to be the character who has a date with destiny and death. It also introduces several of the film’s recurring motifs. When a desperate Robert is trying to sell all of the sports memorabilia that he has accumulated as a result of Raymond’s gifts over the years, he’s unable to get a fair deal for it. Even as he repeats what must be Raymond’s words (notably calling out that yellow represented youthfulness on the helmet of a driver who died tragically while wearing it, just before he exchanges his aubergine turtleneck for a mustard one and sets out to try and win back Raymond’s affection), it’s clear that every bit of the older man’s largesse, his “kindness,” was all about control, and that even the gifts thereof are ultimately cheaper than they seem. 

That discussion of color symbolism cuts directly to an extreme close up of the yolk of an egg being fried, although Robert finds himself unable to eat it and tosses it out. That ties into a larger motif of appetite that runs throughout all three films. In “Flying,” the first thing that Daniel offers to do for the returned Liz is make her an omelet, which she declines, and the cult in “Sandwich” is particularly averse to eating fish, while Aka and (presumably) Omi’s son’s food intake is monitored, and he’s given conflicting directions from each of his parents. It’s most present in “Flying,” however. Throughout all of the film’s constituent segments, flashbacks and dreams are represented in black-and-white footage, and “Flying” features one such sequence in which Liz is seen resorting to cannibalism while deserted and awaiting rescue. It’s unclear if this is a real memory, a delusion, or even a projection of Daniel’s fears, especially since he seems to be the one most consumed with a desire for flesh; the beef he serves to Neil and Martha wouldn’t even be considered “rare” by most standards, he impulsively licks the wound of the man he shoots on Tulane Ave, and when he starts to test what lengths this “Liz” will go to in order to ingratiate herself to him, he asks her to excise and cook first her thumb and then her liver for him, as a test of her “kindness.” 

There’s also an interesting throughline about foot injuries, which I interpret to mean something along the lines of “kindness can shoot you in the foot,” but which also seems to have an undercurrent of dishonesty. In “Death,” Robert first attempts to recreate his meet cute with Sarah by pretending to injure his hand again, but is unsuccessful. Instead, he deliberately injures his foot in the bar bathroom by kicking the wall and breaking a couple of bones, which leads him to meeting Rita, who shows him sympathy and, well, kindness (although an air of mystery is retained regarding how altruistic this is and if it’s yet another one of Raymond’s manipulations). In “Flying,” it’s mentioned that the only other survivor from Liz’s ship has a leg infection that will likely result in the need for amputation, and it happens twice in “Sandwich,” as Emily’s husband lures her back to their old house to drug and assault her by spinning a lie about their daughter having hurt her ankle at ballet class and Emily herself injures a dog’s leg in order to have an excuse to meet with the veterinarian she believes is the savior. Notably, all of these injuries are used manipulatively; whether it’s a self-inflicted wound to get attention, a lie about an injury to get an ex to come over, or a recitation of something bad that happened to someone, they are all used to elicit “kindness.” 

Speaking of dogs, they’re present, in one form or another, in every segment. In “Flying,” Liz tells Daniel about a dream that she had when she was on the island (or which was about the island, it’s unclear to her and to us), where she was in a world where people were pets and dogs were the dominant species, and we get to see that world in the credits sequence of that segment. There is the aforementioned dog in “Sandwich,” whom Emily finds on the street and uses as a ticket to see Ruth. There are no animals in “Death,” however, unless one considers that Robert is Raymond’s dog. He fetches, he rolls over, he begs, and he performs for Raymond. Robert is his pet, his doll, he dresses him up and he picks out his food and he controls Robert’s entire environment. At one point, he directs him to go to a specific bar and order a non-alcoholic drink; Robert attempts to order bourbon, but the bartender asks him if he’s sure, and when he orders a Virgin Mary, it’s handed to him in seconds, having been waiting for him, just as a demonstration of just how far and wide the net of power Raymond controls is. It’s even telling that one of the scenes from Liz’s dreamworld of dogs-as-humans involves a dog driving an SUV who swerves to avoid a piece of human roadkill, which ties back thematically to the end of “Death,” which I won’t spoil. There’s a narrative present in all of them about the power that people have over animals; we all love our pets and we all are kind to them, but that kindness doesn’t change the fact that power flows only one way in that relationship, and that this may be true of all relationships. 

Before closing out, I want to talk about one particular scene in “Death,” wherein Robert confronts Raymond at his home to tell him that he can’t go through with his vehicular manslaughter plan. Initially, he has Vivian show Robert in, but the “scene” doesn’t feel right, so he has him do it again after sitting down in a chair, then has him take it from the top again and enter to deliver his news standing. When watching a film like this, in which a person takes on the role of “director” in their personal life, one can’t help but assume that the film’s director is also telling us something about themselves, or about the nature of control. I’m not sure that I’ve cracked what that is yet, or what Lanthimos is saying here. I have a feeling that this is one of those texts that only really reveals itself on multiple viewings, and with time. Both of my viewing companions for this screening were much more mixed in their opinions, but I’m feeling positive, and looking forward to what the next screening will reveal.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Drive-Away Dolls (2024)

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We’re coming up on nearly two years since I first started my “Summer of the Coen Brothers” marathon, where I intended to watch every one of the familial pair’s films over the course of Summer 2022. And to be fair, I almost made it! Starting with Blood Simple in May and going in mostly chronological order until I skipped over The Big Lebowski (on account of having seen it at least a hundred times already – although I circled back, don’t worry), I was moving at a pretty good clip. Then we skipped over a rewatch of No Country for Old Men to accommodate one of my friends’ schedules, and other than that one, we finished up in December of 2022, with the only outstanding unseen film in their oeuvre being 2021’s Tragedy of Macbeth. “But wait!” I hear you say. “That was a solo project for Joel! That doesn’t count!” And you might be right, but with my screening of that one still pending, I can’t speak for how much of the Coens-ness of the duo is present in it. I can say that it’s present in Ethan’s new project Drive-Away Dolls, although there is an air of … incompleteness about it. 

It’s 1999, almost 2000, and you can tell by the fact that lesbian bars still exist. Our two leads are Texas gal Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and her friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), both of whom are of the sapphic persuasion. Like most classic Coen-penned duos, they are a study in reflections and symmetries; Jamie is the drawling, energetic, oversexed libertine to Marian’s frumpily-dressed, hasn’t-been-laid-in-years bookworm. When Jamie gets kicked out for cheating by her girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), Marian puts her up, but only briefly, as she herself is traveling to Florida to visit an elderly relative and do some birding. Jamie convinces Marian to let her come along, noting that they can get a free car via a “drive away” service. I’ve never heard of this, but it apparently involves delivering an assigned vehicle to an assigned destination. I’m not sure if this service still exists or if it ever did; it’s hard to believe it would, but I imagine people who only know AirBnB learning about Couchsurfing would be similarly incredulous, so I’ll keep an open mind. Unbeknownst to them, as a result of a mix-up at the office of a surly man named Curlie (Bill Camp), the car that they are selected to transport was supposed to deliver certain extralegal goods. And, since duos are a Coen specialty, we get another one whose role is to pursue the other: two “heavies,” one a brutish, monosyllabic goon named Flint (C.J. Wilson) and the other a self-assured wannabe smooth-talker called Arliss (Joey Slotnick). They report up to a man known only as “The Chief” (Colman Domingo), who finds himself in deep trouble with a disembodied voice demanding better from the other end of the phone. 

I didn’t love this one, I’m afraid. I liked it; I liked it plenty, in fact. But there is something that’s just not quite whole about it. There are a lot of images and concepts that line up in an unexpected way at the end, which I always enjoy in a Coen production, the way the puzzle falls into place perfectly. For instance, there are several faux-80mm “groovy” psychedelic sequences that initially seem to serve as out-of-place scene transitions, but which ultimately relate to the overall plot since (spoilers), the Macguffin that the women are carrying turns out to be a case full of dildos molded by a hippie woman named Tiffany Plastercaster (Miley Cyrus) from her lovers, several of which have risen to positions of prominence and power in the intervening time. My favorite of these moments, however, comes in the form of a few dreams Marian has about her childhood, in which she had a crush on the woman next door who sunbathed in the nude, and the focus that her memories have on the neighbor’s footwear: cowboy boots, like Jamie’s. This folding back upon itself that the film does, which creates a new interpretation of what we’ve already seen and functionally bookends the plot, is complete in itself as a sum of its parts, but is still somehow lacking in transcending that arithmetic. 

I enjoyed the many references to Henry James. Throughout, Marian is seen reading The Europeans, which leads into a discussion between her and Jamie about The Portrait of a Lady, which Jamie cites as the English class assignment that turned her off of reading forever. Still later, The Chief is also reading a James novel (although I missed which one it was), and the film reveals its true title, Henry James’s Drive-Away Dykes, right before the end credits. In truth, however, the author that I couldn’t stop thinking about was Tom Robbins. There’s a real kinetic energy to Dolls at certain points, verging on the positively zany. A similar zaniness is a recurring element in Robbins’s work, and there’s just something about lesbian cowboys in the 1970s that makes it almost entirely impossible to put up a barrier in your mind between this work and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. 

“But wait!” I hear you say—how do you keep doing that?—“But wait, did you say ‘1970s?’ I thought you said it was 1999.” And you’re right! I did say that! But the overall aesthetic of Dolls is very aligned with the 70s, and it’s apparent that the film would be set in that decade were it not for the need for our very out, very lesbian leads to be able to walk around with almost no overt bigotry (they deal with less than they would have in the real world in 1999, or now, for that matter), and because the film wants to take a few namby-pamby, weak-fisted potshots at “traditionalist” reactionaries. Jamie looks like she stepped out of the past, while Marian’s work outfit features the kind of ribbon tie you see in office photos of yesteryear. When the two of them go to a “basement party” with a team of lesbian college athletes, their group rotating makeout session is not only timed out based on the A- and B-sides of a vinyl record, but the album in question is Linda Ronstadt’s Hasten Down the Wind, released in 1976. I think this movie would be more fun if it ripped off the band-aid and went full 1970s period piece. Although that wouldn’t line up with the timeline of the film’s villain having his dick duplicated during the lava lamp days, I don’t think that’s what really stopped them. 

It’s mostly a set-up so that the film can end with a newspaper headline that reveals that a Republican senator was shot outside of a lesbian bar carrying a suitcase full of dildos—haw haw—more than it is any kind of insightful or thoughtful satire. The scene in the trailer in which Marian and Jamie are asked what kind of people they are and proudly respond “We’re Democrats!” is just as awkward in the film proper. That neoliberal wishy-washiness is what makes Dolls feel like an artifact of the past, more than the near-Y2K setting, the 1970s aesthetic, or anything else. There are moments when the cartooniness works, like when Jamie and Marian start screaming when Flint and Arliss finally catch up to them, complete with zooms around the room that call to mind Raising Arizona and Crimewave, but then there are nearly as many others where that tone feels awkward and out of date. For instance, the scene where Sukie is tearfully struggling with an electric screwdriver while attempting to unmount a wall-mounted dildo, so sloppily that it’s stripping the screws, flip-flopping between rage and regret? Funny. Her punching Jamie in the face in front of a bar full of people the first time that she sees her after finding out she cheated? Not funny, and it’s made even less so by the fact that Sukie is a cop, one we’re supposed to find funny for abusing her power (a scene in which she “comedically” refuses to let an inmate see his lawyer is particularly unamusing), and whose trigger-happiness saves the day at the end. Some of it is as funny as it possibly can be, with her easy handling of Arliss and Flint when they come to her place looking for Jamie being a real standout of physical comedy, but that’s on Feldstein and her performance, and not the character as written on the page. In contrast, the character of Curlie is perfectly funny all the way through, from his insistence that Jamie not call him by his name because it’s “too familiar” to the scene where he is unable to call for help and muses aloud, “Who will save Curlie?” He’s used just enough to not become tiresome, and is a real example of the kind of richly funny “regular fellers” that permeate the landscape of the Coen tapestry, and is one of the characters that the movie is doing just right. 
The others, however, often feel flat, and there’s a real “Democrats-kneeling-in-kente-cloth / Ruthkanda forever” energy to it that undercuts what could otherwise be a more radical piece of queer art. Like Desert Hearts, it’s unusually satisfying to see WLW sexual activity as both (a) fun and (b) not for the straight male gaze. However, I’m torn about the treatment of the “Black church lady in a big hat” archetype at the end, as we finally meet Mairan’s aunt and Jamie gloats to her that the two of them are going to Massachusetts because women can get married there. On the one hand, in part, liberation means not having to pussyfoot (sorry) around one’s sexuality and identity to appease another person’s bigotry; on the other, that the filmmakers chose to end the movie on this scene specifically so we can all (presumably) laugh at a white lesbian woman making an older Black church lady uncomfortable is a choice that calls to mind the poor handling of race in The Ladykillers. I’m less torn about the scene in which the soccer team sends Flint and Arliss on a wild goose chase that ends with them in an Alabama juke joint, where the joke of the scene is that the two goons are unable to interpret the supposedly unintelligible dialogue of an older Black man. It’s got a real Trump-era SNL liberalism to it, is what I’m saying, and it clearly wants to be more radical than it is but is hampered by—to put it frankly—an older generation’s idea of liberation, and that seventeen-year idea-to-release window certainly isn’t doing it any favors. There’s a lot to enjoy and enough laughs to make it worthwhile, but it won’t be anybody’s favorite Coen project, as it feels primed to age like mayo in the sun.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Quick Takes: Summer Flings

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

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

Rye Lane

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

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

Emily

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

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

Sanctuary

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

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

-Brandon Ledet