After another stellar outing for Benoit Blanc in Wake Up Dead Man, I found myself realizing that there were still parts of Rian Johnson’s filmography that, despite our coverage of Brick (and Poker Face), The Last Jedi, Knives Out, and Glass Onion, were still untapped. I didn’t see Looper when it first came out, but I remember its production well, as it was shot in New Orleans (one of the best places to go to capture images of dystopian poverty in the immediate and long-term aftermath of Katrina) while I was in grad school there. In fact, my roommate at the time of filming was an extra; he was the piercer at the tattoo parlor that we lived in the back rooms of, and there was a casting call for “weird looking people” for a group scene. Having now seen the film and having scoured the big party scenes that I would have assumed he would have been in, I’m sorry to say that I couldn’t find him, alas. That’s not the kind of close watching that this film necessarily relies upon, but as with all of Johnson’s films, you better be paying attention if you want to get the maximum amount of satisfaction.
Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a hitman living in Slumsville, USA in 2044. Addicted to an unnamed drug administered via eye dropper, Joe funds his habit as a “looper,” a specialized killer working for a crime syndicate that’s three decades in his future, where surveillance technology alerts law enforcement anytime someone dies. The mobsters of the 2070s skirt this by sending their victims into the past (the police apparently not being alerted if someone simply disappears), where Joe and the other loopers kill the doomed future victims and dispose of their bodies in exchange for silver. The loopers are themselves damned as well; all of them know that, sooner or later, they will have to “close their own loop,” meaning killing their own future selves (and getting one last big payday) and retiring, with the knowledge that they have only thirty years to live. When Joe’s buddy Seth (Paul Dano) fails to close his loop and allows his older self to escape, we get to see the lengths that temporally local crime boss Abe (Jeff Daniels) to make sure that Seth stays just alive enough not to destabilize the loop while also ensuring maximum suffering.
When one of Joe’s victims does not appear on schedule, he’s sufficiently distracted that the man, who turns out to be his own older self (Bruce Willis) is able to escape. As it turns out, Old!Joe is on a mission to answer the age old question of “Would you be able to go back in time and kill baby Hitler?” with a resounding “Yes, and anyone else born that same day at that same hospital, just to be safe,” which turns out to be less morally straightforward than he expected. In the future, there’s an underworld figure toppling and absorbing various criminal enterprises into one evil force, the “Rainmaker,” and Old!Joe eventually fell in love with a woman who died at the hands of the Rainmaker’s goons. With Abe’s organization after both of them, Young!Joe and Old!Joe find that they can’t trust one another despite being one person. Meanwhile elsewhere, Sara (Emily Blunt) is raising her young telekinetic son on a farm; he’s not the only one, as about 10% of people have barroom card trick level telekinesis at this point, but he has potential to become much more.
The performances here are fantastic. This was probably Willis’s last great outing (and I say that as a Moonlighting fan, so you know I’m always rooting for him), and he brings a lot of gravitas to the screen. There’s a moment where Young!Joe demands to see the photo of Old!Joe’s wife, saying that he can avoid ever speaking to her and thus ensure that she’s safe from being killed by the Rainmaker’s gunmen in 2074, but Old!Joe refuses; it’s not enough that he keeps her safe, but he wants his life back, specifically, no matter what he has to do. There’s a moment where Old!Joe realizes this about himself, that his decision is much less selfless and much more self-serving than he had convinced himself, and Willis conveys every moment of it with conviction. Gordon-Levitt, despite acting through prosthetics that are intended to make him look more like a young Willis, is nuanced in his interpretation of Willis’s body language, intonations, and idiosyncrasies, without it ever feeling like he’s doing an impression. Despite his small role, Dano makes his usual meaty meal out of a cowardly sleazeball, and it’s always a delight to see. Particularly impressive is the amount of menace that playing-against-type Jeff Daniels is bringing to the table. Perhaps glaringly, the person I haven’t mentioned yet here is Blunt, which is in some part due to her relative lack of screen time, as she doesn’t really appear until the midpoint of the film. But it’s also that she’s not given as much to do, as she’s relegated to a role that’s not really all that demanding, although there’s a scene where her son starts to pull a Carrie that shows her pull out some fierce chops.
The sci-fi conceits of the plot are fun. The introduction of the idea that telekinesis has been discovered and is widespread but is limited to what amounts to little more than parlor tricks feels like a weird tangent given that it disappears from the plot for a while, but when it comes back, it’s relevant and feels like a piece falling into place. That’s always been one of Johnson’s strengths as a screenwriter, and one that feels very satisfying to me as a bit of a systems thinker myself. The film doesn’t spend any time faffing about with trying to justify its time travel conventions, as Old!Joe gestures to a bunch of drinking straws on the table between them and says that they could give themselves headaches making diagrams with them or just get on with things, and that’s what they (and the film) do. One gets the sense that Johnson was the kind of person who may have made just those kinds of diagrams in his younger days and knows exactly what complaints to expect and how to make them irrelevant.
I still have yet to see The Brothers Bloom, but I do know that it’s a bit of a departure from the serious noir-at-a-high-school vibes of Brick and the techno noir of Looper, which is a bit of a bummer. I don’t foresee myself growing tired of Benoit Blanc (or Poker Face, although its fate hangs in the balance as of this writing), but I wish there were more noir reinventions from Johnson to watch now. Since it’s been over a decade since Looper and he hasn’t gone back to that well, I don’t know if we’ll see him release another one soon, if ever. I’d like to see him try his hand at one of these again, as it’s always a pleasure to see.
In 2026, the Star Trek franchise will celebrate its sixtieth anniversary, and this upcoming summer will mark thirty years since the thirtieth anniversary marketing push coincided with my being babysat by a family of Trek fans who introduced me to what has become a lifelong obsession. That 1996 anniversary was marked by a huge jump in merchandising of toys, knick-knacks, and fan publications, and since the franchise had two shows airing at the time (Deep Space Nine and Voyager) and that November saw the first solo feature outing of the Next Generation crew in First Contact, it had significant cultural visibility. Ten years later, the fortieth anniversary in 2006 found the franchise dead, as the end of Enterprise in 2005 meant that ‘06 was the first year since 1985 that the franchise hadn’t produced either a film or a season of television. The first show to air post-Enterprise, prequel (at least at first) series Star Trek: Discovery, would miss the fifty-year anniversary by a year and premiere in 2017, where it proved … divisive. Nevertheless, Discovery ushered in a glut of Trek content, having now concluded its fifth and final season, Picard had a three-season run, animated sitcom Lower Decks aired five seasons, and kids’ cartoon Prodigy ran for two seasons. With all of these having concluded, that unwieldy number of series has come to an end. As of the sixtieth anniversary, Strange New Worlds is the only continuing series, with even that having already wrapped its final two (yet to be broadcast) seasons, with a new series, Starfleet Academy, launching in January.
Both of the then-running series produced episodes for the thirtieth anniversary. DS9 aired “Trials and Tribble-ations,” which used state-of-the-art compositing to insert characters from the series into one of the original show’s most memorable episodes; Voyager less successfully produced “Flashback,” which relayed the untold story of what Sulu was up to during the events of Undiscovered Country. One would think that, having missed doing anything special (other than releasing Beyond to very little fanfare) for the fiftieth anniversary, the franchise’s current helmers might have considered doing something special for the sixtieth, but instead, we got a surprise “feature film” dumped directly onto streaming a year early, sometime after it was first announced as another series in Paramount’s massive streaming library. To explain, I’ll have to build you a timeline because, just like this movie, this review has to dump a lot of exposition on you multiple times in order for any of this to make sense.
On October 6, 1967, Star Trek airs “Mirror, Mirror,” the first of what will be far too many trips to the so-called “mirror universe,” where the peaceful Federation is replaced by the brutal and totalitarian Terran Empire. In April of 1998, Deep Space Nine airs the first episode of the series to reference “Section 31,” a covert operations unit acting within Starfleet against its declared principles of egalitarianism, democracy, and peace. On the 24th of September 2017, Star Trek: Discovery, a new series starring Sonequa Martin-Green as Michael Burnham, debuts; Burnham is introduced as the first officer of Captain Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), who dies during the two-part feature length premiere. Later in that same season, Discovery takes its own adventure into the mirror universe, where Yeoh returns as the evil version of Georgiou, the emperor, who returns to “our” timeline at the end of this galavant for a redemption arc that was, at best, misguided from its inception. Georgiou is eventually recruited into Section 31 as part of the second season’s story arc, and the news was released that Paramount was developing this as a spin-off to star Yeoh. This was put on hold due to COVID, and then in March of 2023, Yeoh won an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once, meaning that she didn’t really have as much time for all this Star Trek nonsense as she had before. I assumed that the project had simply been cancelled, but it was suddenly re-announced as a one-off non-theatrical feature and hastily dumped into everyone’s home screens, where it managed to be hated by just about everyone. I kept this one in my back pocket for a while because I knew our well of Star Trek annual podcast discussion topics was starting to run a little low. After covering First Contact in 2023, we talked about the documentary Trekkies in 2024 and the even more tenuously Trek-related Please Stand By in 2025; I figured this one would do for our 2026 topic. In those malaise-filled days during the holidays, however, I decided to give this one a pre-screen watch, and I could not in good conscience subject Brandon to it.
After a pre-credits sequence that establishes Georgiou ascended to the throne after killing her own family before scarring and enslaving her last competitor (and lover) for control of the empire, we’re in the primary narrative dimension of the 23rd Century, where a ragtag group of mercenary specialists has converged at a space station outside of Federation territory to prevent the sale of an omnicidal weapon. Coincidentally, the sale is set to take place in a bar/hotel/space station operated by the fugitive Georgiou. She catches on rather quickly and the leader of this group, Alok (Omari Hardwick) explains the situation and introduces his team: shapeshifter Quasi (Sam Richardson), psionic “honeypot” Melle (Humberly González), exoskeleton-bound Zeph (Robert Kazinsky), and Starfleet liaison Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl), the only character here with a canon precedent. Also on the team is Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok), who appears to be Vulcan but is actually a microscopic life form operating a humanoid mech suit. Georgiou teases them about their ho-hum plan and then introduces a new, more exciting one that predictably goes awry, allowing for her to discover that the weapon is of her design from her previous life as Terran Empress before it’s taken by a masked man. A “now it’s up to these unlikely heroes to save the galaxy” plot ensues.
To this movie’s credit, it certainly looks expensive. That’s not the same thing as looking good, mind you, but it is worth noting. A hefty chunk of change was clearly invested in the Section 31 series, which is probably why this exists in the first place. This “film” is so clearly cobbled together from the ideas of an unproduced TV series that it’s actually divided into episodes, I mean “transmissions,” with individual titles. Even without them, the episodic narrative beats of cliffhanger and resolution at forty-minute intervals would telegraph this structure. This makes for narrative chaos, since instead of three distinct acts we’re dealing with a film divided into thirds which are then subdivided into their own rhythms of rising and falling action; it’s muddled, to say the least. The writing likewise leaves a great deal to be desired. Screenwriter Craig Sweeny’s background largely lies in mystery procedurals, as he was an executive producer on Elementary, of which he wrote sixteen episodes, and has since gone on to create and serve as exec producer for Watson. Section 31 tries to have some mysteries, but if there’s anyone who didn’t assume that the masked villain was Georgiou’s presumed dead lover/enemy from the moment they appeared on screen, then that person has probably never seen a movie before. The mole—there is, inevitably, a mole—likewise is the person you’d most suspect based on simply having seen any movie of this kind before.
This might have worked better if there had been some breathing room. If the audience had a week between the installment where we introduce the fact that Fuzz can fly out of his Vulcan mech suit and into other cybernetics to futz with them and the next episode where said mech suit seems to be operating on autopilot while Zeph’s exoskeleton is acting up, then maybe it would have felt like more of an “ah-ha” moment. As it is in the text itself, it feels like more of the script’s tendency to overexplain the new elements that it introduces while also showing the frayed edges where character arcs are whittled down. This is most obvious with Quasi, who was presumably so named because his shapeshifting would have been a metaphor for being unsure of himself in the version of this that went to series. The characterization for this is thin throughout before becoming unusually pivotal to the climax when he has to trust his instincts and push one of two buttons. It’s all very surface level and rote.
Worst of all, however, are the film’s shuddering attempts at comedy. Sam Richardson is primarily a comedic actor, but the lines he’s given to deliver here are all absolute duds. The joke about whether the galaxy-threatening MacGuffin is called “godsend” or “god’s end” must have lasted less than thirty seconds but felt like it went on forever. Fuzz’s constant leaps to anger over perceived microaggressions about his size or species are, as comedy, dead on arrival. This film forced Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh to use the phrase “mecha boom boom” as a reference to sex with a person with cybernetics. Overall, however, the person I felt the most sympathy for throughout was poor Kacey Rohl, a Vancouver-based actress who’s one of those performers who’s always giving a quietly powerful performance, whether as budding sociopath Abigail Hobbs on Hannibal or in (my favorite) her recurring role as tough-as-nails hedge witch Marina on The Magicians. Yeoh is capable of making every stupid line given to her in this work on at least some level, but Rohl is tasked with some lifting that made me embarrassed on her behalf, like when she has to give herself a pep talk about how she’s a science officer and “science is just controlled chaos” in a scene that sees her skedaddling out of frame repeating “chaos, chaos, chaos!” She’s also the one given the most jarring instances of modern slang, like “whatevs” and calling Georgiou a “bad bitch.” Not a single comedic moment lands, which means that if you’re not going to be surprised by any of the film’s twists, you’re not going to find satisfaction in good character arcs or the humor, meaning that there’s nothing of value here to make the investment of the studio’s money or the audience’s time worthwhile, a film truly for no one.
If we wanted to think of this one as something close to an anniversary special, it’s worth noting that virtually every member of this by-the-numbers ragtag group seems to be functioning as a reference to a previous Star Trek film. As mentioned above, Melle is a Deltan, an alien species introduced in The Motion Picture, and Alok is a genetically augmented human left over from the Eugenics Wars like Khan while the “godsend” device also functions very similarly to the Genesis Device from that film. Fuzz is introduced as a Vulcan who laughs uncharacteristically, as was Sybok in the cold open of Final Frontier, and Quasi is identified as a Chameloid, a species only ever heretofore mentioned in Undiscovered Country. The use of future Enterprise-C captain Rachel Garrett references the launch of the Enterprise-B in Generations, while Zeph’s cybernetic exoskeleton deliberately evokes the image of First Contact’s villainous Borg. These allusions are relatively subtle in comparison to the more overt bits of fanservice that Trek fans are presumably supposed to gawk at, which I won’t bother to get into. The truth of the matter is that Section 31 is not only a bad Star Trek movie, it’s also a bad film in general. Despite the film angling for a continuation in its final moments, I hope we never get another one.
00:00 SEFCA’s Top 10 Films of 2025 15:30 The Secret Agent (2025) 43:35 Best Actor 57:33 Best Actress 1:10:13 Best Supporting Actor 1:16:52 Best Supporting Actress 1:25:06 Best Ensemble 1:29:41 Best Director 1:35:54 Best Original Screenplay 1:42:27 Best Adapted Screenplay 1:50:26 Best Animated Film 1:56:53 Best Documentary 2:13:46 Best Foreign-Language Film 2:23:00 Best Cinematography 2:34:45 Best Score 2:39:52 Best Editing 2:45:07 Best Costuming 2:49:34 Best Young Performer
It’s that time of year again! This is the tenth time I’ve made one of these and I finally got started at a reasonable time.
I’m not including documentaries in the main list of best films of the year this year, since I’m not even sure how one would compartmentalize ranking some of this year’s most serious topics in a countdown alongside something like The Naked Gun, so I won’t try. The best documentaries that I saw this year, in no particular order:
Secret Mall Apartment – A surprisingly moving story about a cadre of art students whose statement about the need for gentrifying forces to occupy all public space turned into something more. Finding a void in the facade of a shopping mall, these young RISD co-eds and their mentor install an almost functional apartment within it, documenting the entire process on 2000s era video tech. It’s about ephemerality in art and in life, and works surprisingly well. Read my review here.
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found – This film is many things: an international mystery, an epistolary elegy, a warning that the past and the present are always the same. Last but not least, it is a portrait. From my review: “This documentary is deeply felt, wonderfully composed, and unfortunately timely. The portrait of Cole that is created is a warm but not overly sentimental one. The narrative choice to use only Cole’s words is one that means that the voiceover informs but does not contextualize and, thus, requires you to build the story yourself from the juxtaposition and editing rather than having your hand held about what you should be thinking or how you should feel.”
No Other Land – You already know why. Read my review here.
Although Hereditary was my number one in 2018, Midsommar my number nine in 2019, and Beau is Afraid my number four in 2023, Eddington, despite being another stellar entry from him, didn’t crack the top twenty (hell, it didn’t crack the top twenty-five). Read my review here.
It feels like it’s been ages since Companion was being advertised based on its connection to Zach Cregger (via his production credit), given that the rest of the year was dominated by Weapons, his follow up to Barbarianfrom a few years ago. This film finds Sophie Thatcher’s Iris in what seems at first to be the enviable position of Josh (Jack Quaid)’s girlfriend, but we learn fairly quickly that this is not a place anyone would want to be. The two of them join his friends at a remote lakehouse, and when she kills the host in self-defense after he attempts to force himself on her, she learns that there’s more to herself and to her situation than meets the eye. If you managed to avoid the marketing for this film that spoiled the first act twist, just trust me on this one and go in with as little foreknowledge as possible. If you’ve already seen it or already been spoiled, read my review here.
19. Sister Midnight
A not-quite-vampire story about a woman in an arranged marriage who slowly loses her sanity and seems to take on a curse when she kills an insect at a wedding. Is she mad? Is she a goddess reborn? Is she both? Listen to Brandon and I discuss Sister Midnighthere.
18. 28 Years Later
The long awaited sequel to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s iconoclastic early aughts zombie film, 28 Years Later follows the life of a young boy named Spike coming of age in a small community that is insulated from the effects of the Rage virus and those contaminated by it due to its inaccessibility other than a land bridge that emerges at low time and is easily defensible. He accompanies his father to the larger islands on a foraging expedition and faces off against the Rage mutants living there; he returns changed and is further disillusioned about adults and their lies, enough so that he secrets his mother across the land bridge in the middle of the night in the hopes of finding her medical assistance from a supposed doctor on the “mainland.” A breakout performance for young actor Alfie Williams and a stellar turn from Killing Eve star Jodie Comer, who plays his mother. Read my review here.
17. The Long Walk
Fifty boys, one from each state, participate in a televised competition in which they must maintain a speed of three miles per hour or die, with the understanding that there will only be one victor, who gets whatever they want. Based on a Stephen King novel inspired by nightly newscasts about the Vietnam War, The Long Walk as a text both preceded (and possibly inspired) many dystopian YA franchises and pre-emptively deconstructed them, showing the real, brutal effects of the regime without ever making our protagonists feel heroically defiant in the face of all odds. Not fun, but quite good. Read my review here.
16. Rabbit Trap
In the future, I may chalk this one up to little more than recency bias, but I’ve meditated on this one every day since I first saw it. A movie that evokes an otherworld through electronic distortion of natural sounds, Rabbit Trap is more about evoking a sonic, psychedelic experience than delivering a narrative that ties up all of its loose ends, and is all the better for it. Read my review here.
15. Boys Go to Jupiter
A very cute, very fun movie that captures both the listless ennui of unoccupied time between school sessions and the grueling machinery of gig-economy desperation. Read Brandon’s review here.
14. Lurker
“What’s the difference between love and obsession?” Oliver sings in one of the film’s breathy, whispery, but catchy (I’ll admit it) tracks. “I don’t know but I know I want you.” It’s a pretty explicit recitation of the question that drives the film. Oliver is a pop musician, Matthew is an obsessed fan. Or he might just be in love with Oliver. Or is he in love with the idea of Oliver? Perhaps he’s obsessed with the idea of what attaching himself to Oliver’s rising star can do for him, and love’s not even part of the equation, with Oliver himself only a means to an end. Lurker never comes right out and says which, if any, of these things are true; my interpretation is that Matthew is in love with Oliver, and his obsession builds from his overinvestment in Oliver’s casual intimacy and the fear of “losing” him, with all of his contributions to Oliver’s career merely the means by which he secures a place for himself in Oliver’s life. To me, Lurker is a love story, albeit one that’s also a cautionary tale for both the yearner and the object of adoration, while also being a story about what it’s like when the person who knows you best is the one you hate the most. Read my review here.
13. Wake Up Dead Man
Rian Johnson once again delivers a pitch-perfect presentation of our favorite gentleman detective, Benoit Blanc, even if he takes the back seat more here than in either of his previous two outings. The man we spend the most time with is young Reverend Jud, a former boxer who found an ongoing path to redemption in faith after killing a man in the ring, and whose quasi-punishment for an altercation in his home parish is reassignment to a church that is literally, metaphorically, and in every meaningful way without Christ. Alongside my number five, this is one of the only pieces of Christian propaganda (even if only accidentally) to feel genuine and alive in recent (and even not-so-recent) memory. Read my review here.
12. No Other Choice
Park Chan-Wook returns with another genre-bending spectacle about someone driven too far. Park is a director who knows how to navigate a revenge story, whether it be Oldboy, Lady Vengeance, and even Decision to Leave, but unlike the mysterious but ultimately human characters upon whom Park’s protagonists (and sometimes antagonists) enact their vengeance, lead character Man Su of No Other Choice can’t fight the thing that has wronged him. You can’t take your revenge on a system; you can’t push capitalism off a cliff, you can’t lure lay-offs out to an abandoned school to be tortured, and you can’t force commercialism to cut out its tongue. Bereft of a valid vessel into which he can pour all of his failures and furies, Man Su finds a man who convinces himself that he has no other choice than to kill his fellow applicants, who are not really his enemies. In the weeks since I wrote my review, I’ve been thinking a lot about the metaphorical relevance of Man Su’s tooth, an ailment that he ultimately remedies by pulling out the damned thing, taking the healthy parts of the tooth out with the rot, and how that relates to his “removal” of his obstacles, both innocent and not. Good stuff; read my review here.
11. Eephus
In his review, Brandon told what felt like a universally familiar story about a grandfather whose frequent (or even constant) viewership of televised broadcasts of America’s pastime makes it feel like one long baseball game playing out over decades. Eephus effectively captures that feeling, but my connection to baseball is a little different, as the first thing that comes to mind are the multiple summers in which I, miserable, was forced to play little league. Baseball is a forgiving sport, by which I mean that it’s not terribly fast paced, making it an acceptable sport for me, a boy with asthma, to play. What this also means is that it’s also a very boring sport, and every Saturday of my childhood and adolescence that I didn’t have to get up early and do yard labor, I was being dragged out of bed to go stand in an outfield in a BREC park somewhere, all of which in the mid-nineties looked like the field in which the entirety of this film takes place. Here, that slowness is the point; the film takes its title from a curveball that supposedly floats through the air in a way that makes it seem as if it’s standing still. The game that we see played out takes an impossibly long time, nine innings stretched out from the dewy dawn hours until so late in the night that the players have to pull their cars onto the field and use their headlamps to play, the eephus hovering in the air as no one really wants this last game to end. Truly special stuff, and funny as hell.
10. Twinless
Director/writer/star James Sweeney’s sophomore feature, a film about two very different men with distinct backgrounds, incompatible sexualities, and contrasting personalities who meet in a support group because of the one thing that they share: the loss of a twin. Dylan O’Brien is fantastic as both Roman and Rocky in one of the best performances of the year, and Sweeney is effectively sympathetic even as his behavior becomes unjustifiable and his secrets reveal a deeply unwell man. Read my review here.
9. Bugonia
Perhaps the greatest and most worthwhile example of a Western remake of an Asian film. The differences from the South Korean original range from significant to almost imperceptible, but the film more than justifies its existence, and features another stellar turn from director Yorgos Lanthimos at the helm. Superb. Read my review here.
8. The Naked Gun
This is the funniest movie I’ve seen all year, and one that I’ve revisited (as well as its inspiration) in the months since, despite my annual personal Q4 goal of cramming in as many unwatched new releases as I can gorge myself on. Liam Neeson is the perfect person to take on the role of Frank Derbin, Jr., and pairing him with nineties heartthrob Pamela Anderson feels almost like a no-brainer. Featuring more sight gags than all the comedies I saw in 2024 combined and a scene in which Anderson scats for her life, by far the funniest film sequence of the entire year was Frank and his new girlfriend going on a wintry romantic vacation that involves bringing a snowman to life (and then ending that life when their creation becomes unmanageable). It’s no surprise that I love this one, given that it was directed by Akiva Schaffer, and I’ve long been a vocal defender of Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, and co-written by Dan Gregor, who did fine work on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. To whomever decided to make the villain’s defeat just like Jonathan’s in the sixth season of Buffy and deliberately stated earlier in the film that knowledge of the slayer and her pals was important to get all the references, my great thanks. Read Brandon’s review here.
7. Reflection in a Dead Diamond
I’ve been remiss in not checking out previous films from the married writing/directing duo of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, other than a screening of Amer that I attended years ago that was filled with distractions that kept me from fully engaging with the experience. Reflection in a Dead Diamond is one of the best films I’ve seen in years, a phantasmagorical journey into the psyche of elderly John Diman (Fabio Testi). The film finds Diman staying at a coastal hotel in an area that he visited years before, although it’s unclear if he did so as a James Bond-esque superspy or merely as an actor who played one. The film opens on a scene that virtually recreates the end of For Your Eyes Only, and we’re given no reason to believe that Diman’s recollections of his days in espionage are meant to be anything other than his memories, but ambiguity enters the picture around the midpoint. Diman’s enemies include a group of opposing agents with themed names: Atomik (who glows), Amphibik (whose gag is scuba diving), and of course the sexy love interest Serpentik, who mostly does Catwoman-esque violence but has a ring that she can use to poison her foes like a cobra. One of these is Hypnotik, whose schtick is that he can make you believe that you’re in a film; in his present day, Diman is repeatedly given clues that his recollected misadventures are nothing more than a misrememberance of a role he once played, but it’s unclear if this is the degradation of a man’s mind in old age or all part of Hypnotik’s suggestion. Stylized, beautifully shot, frequently quite violent, and unforgiving, Reflection in a Dead Diamond is the best Bond film of the twenty-first century. Read Brandon’s review here.
6. Sinners
What else is there to say about Sinners? The initial advertising for the film left me cold, but Brandon texted me and let me know that this would be very much up my alley. And he was right! The film has been covered to hell and back by much more interesting and well-read writers than I am, but if you’re looking for something interesting to fill your time, I highly recommend this YouTuber’s video essay about the relationship between Irish folk and Black American music; it’s good stuff. Hear the primary podcast crew discuss the film here.
5. The Colors Within
Ever since I caught this one so that we could engage with it in conversation with the director’s earlier film Liz and the Blue Bird for one of our recent podcasts, I haven’t been able to stop singing its praises, recommending it to everyone that I’ve talked to about my favorite films of the year. Maybe there’s some recency bias there, but there’s also a recurring theme this year that a lot of my favorite movies; this one, my number one, Eephus, Sister Midnight, and Boys Go to Jupiter are films that have no real antagonist. Even within those, however, there is an external force that has created the situation in which our characters find themselves, respectively inconvenient construction, arranged marriages, and capitalism-inscribed gig economy woes. The Colors Within doesn’t even have those kinds of systemic threats at play; it’s just the story of a lonely girl with such pronounced synesthesia that she can see music and perceive people’s auras, who then makes friends with a cool upperclassman who plays guitar and forms a band with another lonely kid. Brandon sold this one to me as being similar to Linda Linda Linda, a film that I loved, and while there’s no doubt in my mind that the earlier live action film was an influence on this one, Linda featured our main characters under a time crunch to learn and play three songs by the end of the week for their school festival. In Colors, the kids in this band are just kind of puttering around and getting to know each other for most of the runtime; by the time one of the nuns at the girls’ school recommends that their band play the Valentine’s festival, you’re ready to simply accept that as where the story was always going, and it’s nice that the film gives the audience and the characters so much room to breathe and let the characters do the work rather than have them driven toward a goal from the start. An animated film that justifies its medium with its psychedelic sequences, this is a (soft, quiet, cozy) blast. Read Brandon’s review here.
4. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
This year, while visiting with family in the Carolinas, one of my relatives mentioned that it wouldn’t be long before my maternal grandmother passed away, and that they would be going back to Louisiana when this happened. At present, my father and I are not on speaking terms, and I don’t expect that to change in this lifetime, and I knew this conversation would come up because I don’t intend to return to the homestead for the rest of my life, and I had a discussion with my therapist about it prior to my travels. I told her that I had spent my entire miserable, abusive childhood crying for help into a void, and that there was no laying bare of the scars on my body, mind, heart, or soul that had ever given anyone in my family pause. I asked her how much worse it would have had to be for any of them to care, to even listen, to stop repeating useless platitudes about forgiveness and the harm that holding onto hatred causes and think about just how monstrous things must have been for a child of eight years old to start having suicidal ideation. I asked her if it would have even made a difference if he had molested me, if that would have been evil enough for them to understand just how deep the damage goes … and she said “No.” In fact, she said, most of the time when that does happen, the family just covers it up and blames the victim for rocking the boat; and as soon as she said it, I knew she was right. I had heard this before from many victims, but never has it been so visceral, so infuriating, so frustrating, as it was when depicted on screen in Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. In the film’s opening moments, we see Shula (Susan Chardy) observe the dead body of her uncle in the road, and as she turns, we see a young Shula likewise stare impassively at his corpse. Thus begin the rites of the dead and the rituals of mourning, both of which attempt to sanitize the life of Uncle Fred, a lifelong and unrepentant pedophile, whose family has kept his danger a secret for so long that the trauma he has caused is intergenerational. Even in death, his sisters, who have a seven-year-old nephew via Fred’s currently still teenaged wife (she’s such a child that her smartphone case has sequined Mickey Mouse ears), blame the girl for failing to keep Fred fed and happy. “No family wants to admit that it’s dysfunctional,” my therapist told me months ago. “And more often than not they turn on the victim for complaining and protect the abuser. We don’t know why.” Every elder in Shula’s family has maintained a lie about Fred’s faith, fidelity, and goodness for so long that he never had to pay for his sins or his crimes in life, and even in death his victims aren’t free. A very, very strong showing that left me burning with righteous fury. Read Brandon’s review here.
3. Bring Her Back
My overall apathetic reaction to Danny and Michael Philippou’s freshman feature Talk to Me (which I mentioned at the top of my review for Bring Her Back) meant that I was interested but not overly invested in their sophomore outing. I wasn’t prepared for the emotional ride that this film took me on, with such palpable and almost unwatchable violence (it’s got the worst tooth/mouth gore I’ve seen all year, topping even the borderline nauseating tooth removal in No Other Choice). Sally Hawkins gives a star turn as a monstrously abusive foster mother hiding a secret agenda, one that we can empathize with even as we are stricken ill by the lengths that she will go to in order to try and bring back the daughter that she has lost. Not to be missed.
2. The Phoenician Scheme
To allay any confusion, let it be known that although we are very pro-Wes Anderson around here, we are not shills. I still haven’t gotten around to seeing Isle of Dogs, and I was lukewarm at best about The French Dispatch (Brandon responded quite well to it). I was all in on Asteroid City, though, and I find myself once again delighted by Mr. Anderson’s most recent release. Read my review here.
1. Universal Language
I was a latecomer to Universal Language, only managing to see it within the last month of the year, but it skyrocketed to being my top film of the year within just a few minutes. In trying to come up with a comparison point, I found myself reaching for some of the same touchstones that Brandon did in his review, including some of the visual stylings of Wes Anderson, the playful specialness of True Stories, and the sense of humor and historical revisionism (as well as the utter Candadianity) of Guy Maddin. Because of the various ways that the interconnected narratives wove together and then separated before colliding with another character’s storyline, I would best describe this as Maddin’s Magnolia. Just like P.T. Anderson’s film, it stays within the realm of the plausible (if quirky) until it goes for broke in its final moments; for Magnolia, that meant a one-off musical number and a rain of frogs, but for Universal Language, there’s a full-on personality crisis (get it while it’s hot!) and identity confusion, which makes for a somber and provocative ending to a movie that I couldn’t stop laughing with for most of its run time. Fantastic.
“Listen,” speak-sings Daphne Davenport (Rosy McEwen) into her microphone over ambient nature sounds that she and her husband Darcy (Dev Patel) have been recording. “Noise … the oldest of gods. Before language, before flesh, before name, she was here.” It’s 1976, and the two of them have moved from London to the Welsh countryside with reel to reel recorders and state of the art microphones, which they traipse around the forest with, capturing the sounds of squelching marshes, nightbirds chirping as they move through the air in bloblike flocks, skittering feet of bugs across leaves, and the distant song of unseen fauna, or at least one hopes it’s something so natural. Later, the couple meets a mysterious androgynous child (actress Jade Croot, although The Child is only ever referred to as “he”), and when the boy asks if he can sing Daphne a lullaby that his mother used to sing him as a child, she records him as well. Listening back to it later, Darcy says it “sounds like a spell.” Rabbit Trap traffics in this idea, of sound as song, noise as god, voice as spellcraft, in a beautiful little folk horror from director Bryn Chainey, who has heretofore mostly worked in short film.
There are points of comparison that it would be easy to go to when describing the film’s atmosphere. The sudden presence of a creepy child who brings with him portents of folkloric truth calls The Killing of a Sacred Deer to mind, and although this is set in Wales rather than on the Cornish coast, the atmosphere of isolation, hallucination, and lost time invokes Enys Men. There’s a sequence in which The Child leads Daphne to a series of tunnels and trenches that seem neither manmade nor natural and lures her through them by whistling a tune that she whistles back to him, and for a moment I felt I was watching Jessie Buckley harmonize with her own echo in Men. Despite these intentional homages or simple similarities, Rabbit Trap feels fresh despite being familiar. Even the way that this film goes to horror media’s most frequently visited well of late (grief and trauma are the real monsters) doesn’t feel like the cliché that it is. For one thing, the film never feels the need to dwell on what’s causing Darcy’s sleep paralysis. We see him experiencing strange dreams of the windows of the house being covered in goop and a spectral figure that may represent his father, with Daphne being quick to record his sleeptalking in the hopes that it might help him remember something when he wakes. Later, those dreams recur after he has broken a fairy circle, and in the end of the film, we find him standing in a beautiful vista recording his truth so that he can play it for Daphne later, since it’s too hard for him to say to her face. We can really only speculate what it is that’s caused Darcy to see himself as the source of an emotional “rot,” because it’s important only in its implications, not in its specifics.
The plot kicks off when Darcy accidentally wanders into a ring of mushrooms, which folklore calls a “fairy ring,” and to break one invites the wrath of the Tylwyth Teg, fae from another world. Shortly thereafter, The Child appears outside of their cabin. Playing off Darcy’s concerns that he might be a burglar, he instead calls himself a hunter, taking Darcy to see the traps that he lays out for rabbits, taking special care to note that the bait has to be offered with honest and meaningful intention in order for the trap to work. The Child grows closer to both of them, taking an active interest in Daphne’s previous musical work (he asks if she’s famous, to which Darcy replies “You can’t really be famous with her kind of music. She’s more… influential”) and enjoying his and Darcy’s excursions into the marshes to record nature noise. As he becomes more and more of a surrogate child to the couple, his affection for Daphne grows to the point that he asks her to pretend to be his mother, as he claims his died long ago. Darcy, with his unspoken and only vaguely defined issues surrounding fatherhood, starts to get a little creeped out by this, and The Child’s behavior becomes more invasive and presumptuous. What little we do know about Darcy’s past is revealed to us not explicitly but in the way that he talks about sound—that god, that ghost, calling it a “Vibration of an event, an energy shadow, memory carved into the air, a scared lost creature desperate for somewhere to hide before it fades away. When you hear a sound,” he says, “you become its home, and your body is the house it haunts.” Darcy’s body is keeping an unknown score, and The Child has come to find a new family, one way or another.
Much is left up to interpretation here. My personal reading is that the story The Child tells early in the story, about a baby brother that wandered into the Tylwyth Teg circle and disappeared, is actually about him, and that he grew up parentless in the fae realm, or that he was otherwise a kind of inverse changeling. Now that the ring has been disturbed again, he has the opportunity to go back out into our world and try to reestablish some kind of family, which would explain his quiet (and later loud) desperation on this front. This would also make his introduction of himself as a “hunter,” rather than the more accurate descriptor of “trapper,” a bit of foreshadowing despite the metaphorical, psychedelic rabbit trap that Daphne and Darcy must pass through at the end. Of course, this is a film that leaves a great deal up to your imagination, one that is more a visual and sonic experience than it is a narrative one. Its brisk runtime, coming in at under 90 minutes, means that this tone over text ethos never wears out its welcome. It’s unlikely that, at this late date, many people are still considering new entries onto their end of the year lists, and although this one was stellar, it’s one that will be waiting for you when you’re ready for it, but it’s an inexpensive rental if you’re still doing your 2025 end of the year cramming.
Last year, Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows made it to number 24 on Swampflix’s Top 100 films, so naturally I spent the evening of last Christmas Eve closing that blind spot. If you’re a weirdo like I/we am/are (and if you’re on this site, that’s probably the case), you’ll likely find yourself recognizing the plot from its contours, because what Star Wars is to Spaceballs, this movie is to John Waters’s Polyester. Since Brandon had already written a review years earlier, I repurposed the review I couldn’t stop myself from writing to save for this year as an earnest recommendation to spend some part of your Christmas season with Sirk too, on the 70th anniversary of Heaven’s release.
Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) is a well-off widow in New England. Her life is quiet, with visits from her two college-aged children Kay (Gloria Talbott) and Ned (William Reynolds) growing fewer and further between. Her best friend, Sara Warren (Agnes Moorhead), takes her out socially; attempts to get her to pair off with older widowers in their social circle are unsuccessful, as she feels no spark with any of them. One day, she realizes that some new hunk is tending to her landscaping, and he introduces himself as Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), the son of the late Mr. Kirby who was previously engaged as the Scott family’s arborist. When she visits him at his home, she learns that he sleeps on a cot in a room attached to the greenhouse, and when he mentions planning to tear down the old mill on the property, she cajoles him into giving her a tour of the long-abandoned building, and she encourages him to convert it into a livable home instead. As their romance burgeons, their love is represented in ongoing changes to the mill house, which comes to resemble a livable home more and more. Ron takes Cary to meet some of his friends, a couple who have given up on the lifestyle of trying to keep up with the Joneses in New York and now instead tend a tree farm. As the night goes on, a party erupts, and the couple introduces Cary to their bohemian friends: birdwatchers, beekeepers/artists, cornbread masters, and lobster-catchers.
Cary has a wonderful, uninhibited time, but there’s trouble around the corner; her high society friends are rather snooty about her relationship, as are her children. When she mentions selling the house and moving in with Ron (post nuptials, of course), Ned becomes quite upset about his mother selling his childhood home and tells her that the “scandal” she’s bringing upon the family by dating someone who’s merely (upper) middle class could jeopardize his career options. The local gossip hound starts a rumor that Cary and Ron had been an item since before her husband died, which deeply upsets Kay, as she begs her mother to break things off with Ron. Everyone also seems to be utterly scandalized by their dramatically different ages. (Hudson was 30 and Wyman 38 at the time, and those are the ages that they appear to be to me, but the film may be trying to imply a greater disparity.) She acquiesces to the demands of her fairweather socialite friends and her ungrateful children, only to learn some months later that her sacrifice was in vain. Both of her children delay their Christmastime return to their hometown, and when they arrive, they reveal their own new life plans; Kay will be getting married to her beau in February when he graduates, and Ned will be leaving straight from his own graduation to take a position in Europe that will last, at minimum, a year. They present her with a Christmas gift that she doesn’t want (more on that in a minute), and Ned even suggests that they sell the house, since the kids won’t be needing it as their “home” any longer. Via a simple misunderstanding, Cary comes to believe that Ron is getting married to another woman, and the melodrama only unfolds further from there.
Sirk is a Technicolor artist, and this is a gorgeous movie, and a very funny one at that. One of the things that I really loved about this cast was the opportunity to see Agnes Moorhead play a kinder, more sympathetic role. Just a couple days after watching this one I caught her name in the opening credits of Dark Passage and thought to myself, aloud, “That woman was working.” And, wouldn’t you know it, I tuned into the New Year’s Twilight Zone marathon on H&I just in time to catch her episode of that:
Moorhead’s Sara Warren is the only real friend that Cary has, as she’s the one who encourages her to get back together with Ron when she sees just how heartbroken her friend is. We learn this in a scene that’s perfectly framed and is one of many pointed social critiques that the film makes. We cut to a shot of a housekeeper vacuuming a carpet, as the camera dollies backward through the doorway to the room in which Sara and Cary are talking, and Sara closes the door to shut out the noise so that the two women can converse. It’s a neat gag, but it plays into the overall social critique of the movie, in which even the most sympathetic member of the bourgeoisie is still an aristocrat shutting out her social inferiors, despite her softening her heart towards her friend’s desire to date a blue collar business owner. There’s also a great contrast between the country club cocktail party that Cary attends near the film’s opening scene and the lobsterfest that happens at Ron’s friends’ house, where the upper class is presented undesirably. A married man makes a pass at Cary, kissing her; a potential romantic interest tells her that there’s little need for passion at their age, to which she (rightfully) takes some offense; the town gossip queen is there to do her thing. Ron’s group’s party is a lively place, where he plays the piano and sings boisterously, and people dance with great fervor. It’s never commented upon, but it is present throughout.
Another fun little tidbit about this one is its distaste for television. Early on in the film, Sara suggests that Cary get a television to keep her company now that the house is empty, which Cary finds to be a contemptible suggestion. When a television salesman sent by Sara calls upon the Scott household, Cary shoos him away in a huff. In the final insult, however, Cary receives a television set as a gift from her children for Christmas. Ned even reiterates that Cary will be lonely and unfulfilled without her children and should have something in the house to distract her from her pitiful solitude, as if he and his sister hadn’t done everything in their power to sabotage her relationship with Ron. After the children have gone off to do their own things, their mother is left alone in the house, lit only by the lights of the Christmas tree and a duplicate fire: one in the hearth and its mirror in the flat TV screen — the giver of warmth and its cold reflected image. It’s striking and memorable, and the relatively tiny window that the TV might give of the world is visually contrasted with the vivid Technicolor world just on the other side of the panoramic windows that Ron has installed into the home he built to share with Cary. It’s good stuff.
The film doesn’t demand a winter or Christmas time frame to be viewed, but I think it works best in that context. I’m getting the word out now so you can put it on the calendar before we all get Christmas brained. And, while you’re at it, when was the last time you watched Polyester?
After finally seeing The Spiral Staircase earlier this year, I’ve been working on watching as many other films from director Robert Siodmak as I can get my hands on, having since also seen and quite enjoyed both The Dark Mirror and Phantom Lady. The calendar year 1944 was a big one for Siodmak releases, as Phantom Lady premiered in late January before being followed by adventure film Cobra Woman in May, Christmas Holiday at (bizarrely) the end of July, and closing out the year with the West Coast premiere of The Suspect on December 22. It’s unclear to me why Universal would release a picture with “Christmas” in the title in the dog days of summer, but The Suspect does fit nicely into the winter holiday season, as the inciting death that occurs in the film happens on Christmas Eve. If you’re looking for a little noir with your eggnog, this one is a breezy, memorable watch that also happens to include the kindly image of Charles Laughton decorating a Christmas tree.
The film opens with on-screen text announcing the film’s time and place as London in 1902. After a long day as manager of Frazer & Nicholson, a tobacconist’s shop that proudly announces on their windowfront that they are the supplier of tobacco to the British royal family, Philip Marshall (Laughton) returns home to find his wife Cora (Rosalind Ivan) in a tizzy. It seems that Cora has finally gone too far with her continuous torment of their only child, son John (Dean Harens), nagging him to fix the kitchen sink and, when he failed to do so because he was doing overtime work in hopes of a promotion, threw a week’s worth of his calculations into the fire. With John out of the house, Philip announces his intention to move into the boy’s vacated room, telling Cora that there’s no longer a need to keep up their pretense of marital satisfaction now that their captive audience has departed. Cora is incensed, but powerless.
Thus enters the lovely young Mary Gray (Ella Raines) into Philip’s life. Although he rejects her application to work as a stenographer for Frazer & Nicholson as they are fully staffed, she is nonetheless charmed by his firm-but-gentle remonstrations of the shop’s errand boy, Merridew, for his pilfering of pennies for sweets and to give to the organ grinder’s monkey. When Philip finds her crying on a park bench later, he takes her out for dinner to cheer her up. After a montage of the two of them growing closer over learning to use chopsticks, attending circuses and plays, and generally getting along pleasantly, we learn that he has helped her find a job. Their non-physical love affair must come to an end, however, as Cora refuses to give him a divorce despite their mutual unhappiness, and she extorts him into remaining with her by promising to ruin him socially if he does, and he breaks things off with Mary before going home and putting up a Christmas tree. His hopes that they might be able to find some peace during the holidays even if they have come to hate each other are dashed when Cora announces that she’s discovered Mary’s identity and plans to tell Philip’s employers and friends of his (dubious) infidelity, and that he’ll destroy Mary and leave her penniless and ruined as well. After she heads to bed, we see Philip lift his walking cane from its place beside the entry door, feeling the heft of it in his hands, and we fade to black.
Ivan’s Cora is admirably loathsome, a truly horrid person with no redeeming qualities. This is made clear in no uncertain terms the moment that she first appears on screen, as her husband can barely make it inside before she starts to hassle him about his work hours and his light-handed treatment of their son, just before we learn about her jeopardization of the boy’s career over a minor household chore. She’s cruel, miserly, and brings nothing but misery to everyone around her, a sociopathically bitter person who manipulates every kind word and attempt at compromise and twists them into something that she can take offense to and escalate through overreaction to perceived slights. It’s frankly a relief when she dies, and virtually everyone is better off for her absence. Her sudden departure from the narrative necessitates the introduction of additional antagonists, who take the form of Scotland Yard Inspector Huxley (Stanley Ridges), who is investigating Cora’s death despite the coroner’s rule that her fatal tumble down the stairs was an accident, and the Marshalls’ slimy neighbor Gilbert (Henry Daniell). Gilbert is established in his first appearances as a perpetually inebriated snob, scion to a formerly wealthy British family of no current notability, who looks down upon his middle class neighbors with great disdain; further, he mistreats his wife from the start and we later even see her bruised from his abuse. It’s based on the activities of the first, Huxley, that the latter, Gilbert, decides to threaten to make up a story about having heard Philip and Cora fighting the night of her death, announcing his attention to blackmail Philip and to go on extorting him for more money in the future. With Philip once again in an untenable position, what can he do?
With the Hays Code at the front of my mind, I was distracted as the film started to wind down, as The Suspect seemed to fly in the face of its strictures in both spirit and text. According to IMDb, the film was passed by the National Board of Review (certificate #10564, although I have no way of verifying that), but the poster on the film’s Wikipedia page has a “not suitable for general exhibition” notation, so it was definitely reviewed and released. The film was headed for what seemed like a happy ending with scant few minutes left to pull the old Code-accommodating switcheroo that sees our criminal protagonist find himself clapped in irons and sent off to pay for his misdeeds (or dead). John gets that promotion despite his mother’s petulant sabotage and is being sent to the Canadian office, and Philip proposes to Mary (by this time his wife) that they join him, and he makes it all the way onboard their departing ship and even has a final conversation with Huxley that absolves him of all of his (legal) guilt. Of course, it doesn’t absolve him of his (moral) guilt, as he learns that Gilbert’s widow is to be tried for her husband’s apparent murder. Alas, despite being a killer, Philip would never let his kind neighbor go to the gallows for a crime that she didn’t commit, but we still never see him delivered into police custody; he disembarks the ship as Huxley watches, confirming his suspicions. “He’s getting away,” Huxley’s partner says, to which he replies:
“No, he isn’t. He thinks he’s done a pretty big thing. Let’s leave him alone; he’ll come to us when he’s ready. Just keep an eye on him in the meantime.”
And there we leave Philip, standing in the fog, still a free man. This flew in the face of conventional wisdom, or at least what I thought I know, about the Hays Code. Didn’t it require the death or arrest of the killer, no matter how sympathetic he or she was, in order to be approved for screening? Is that not why James Cagney gets gunned down at the end of The Roaring Twenties? Is that not why Carolyn Jones kills Mickey Rooney at the end of Baby Face Nelson, and why Jean Simmons drives herself and Robert Mitchum over a cliff in Angel Face? Isn’t that why Rebecca’s dramatic reveal is different in Hitchcock’s film from the du Maurier novel? If Hitch couldn’t skirt it when adapting a literary text, then how did Siodmak get away with leaving this film so ambiguous? So I went and re-read the code, for probably the first time in over a decade, and there’s nothing explicit in its guidelines that says a film must show the guilty face consequences. Instead, it states under “Principles of Plot” that “no plot theme should definitively side with evil against good” or “throw the sympathy of the audience with sin, crime, wrong-doing, or evil,” and that “the question of right or wrong [should never be] in doubt or fogged.”
As such, The Suspect doesn’t break any of the rules by letting Philip walk away to (presumably eventually) turn himself over to Scotland Yard, but it is rather successful in subverting the spirit of the Hays Code. Specifically, when it comes to the treatment of murder, the code states that “technique[s] of murder must be presented in a way that will not inspire imitation” and that criminals must not seem justified. As to the first case, we don’t see Philip kill Cora. In fact, that the act is not depicted is enough to inject reasonable doubt on the part of the audience, and although we get a pretty good idea of how he did it since Huxley acts out, in detail, what he believes Philip did that night, it skirts the “inspire imitation” language by presenting it this way. Regarding whether or not the killing of Cora is justified, that’s left to the determination of the audience, but we’re certainly never treated to a drop of humanity in her that might make us consider the sanctity of her life. Overall, however, the impression that the code gives is one of complete and utter moral absolutism; the law can never be seen as unjust, adultery can never be justified, obscenity of word or gesture is forbidden, the law is good and everything else is evil. The Suspect makes its moral relativism clear in the scene in which we find Gilbert and Philip at odds with one another, as we find ourselves, like Philip, repulsed by the man who “merely” abuses his wife, while we empathize with Philip, who murdered his (probably). It’s not a very flashy picture, but its subtle undermining of blanket moralizing of the time seems almost radical in retrospect.
I’ve already cited Ivan’s performance as Cora as a standout, but I was also rather taken with Molly Lamont as Gilbert’s unfortunate wife. She brings a lot of warmth and light into a role that could easily be underserved in another feature. Ella Raines, who had been the protagonist of Phantom Lady earlier that year, is lovely here, even if she’s not given much to do other than fawn over Philip; her chemistry with both Laughton and Harens makes up for the relative lack of development. Laughton is himself in quite fine form here, playing a kind, gentle man pushed to the edge and forced to take matters into his own hands. His deftness is shown in the early scene with the errand boy to establish that his interest in cheering up Mary, aside from one slightly leering glance that comes later, is on the up-and-up. By the film’s end, we’re excited for him to start his new life in Canada, far away from all of his bad memories, but his conscience stops him from finding that freedom. It’s poignant, the perfect film to add to your Christmas watchlist if you like your holiday season a little bittersweet.
Welcome to Episode #253 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon & Boomer catch up with older movies from some of this year’s best directors, starting with Park Chan-wook’s infamous gross-out revenge thriller Oldboy(2003).
Angel’s Egg, a 1985 film from director Mamoru Oshii of Ghost in the Shell fame, is currently screening in limited runs with a 4K remaster, and I was lucky enough to catch it at my local arthouse. It’s stunning. A beautifully rendered monochrome world with only two living beings within it, the film is one that resists most attempts to interpret its metaphors, with Oshii himself admitting that there are parts of it that he does not understand. As such, it feels like a long, strange dream, full of images that feel pregnant with symbolism but too ephemeral to achieve any truly coherent exegesis.
In a waterlogged and abandoned city, an unnamed girl protects a large egg, while she forages for canned food and collects jugs of water. A giant machine rolls through the town, and an unnamed man bearing a cross-shaped weapon clambers down from it. They resemble one another, both being porcelain pale with platinum hair, but the girl flees from the man initially, and when he asks her for her name, it’s unclear if she fears him, can’t remember her name, or if she perhaps never even had one in the first place. The man briefly steals the egg and then returns it to her, retelling the story of Noah’s Ark but changing the ending so that the dove never returned, and that everyone on the ark simply forgot about their pasts. This leads the girl to take the man to a sort of sanctuary where she has been bringing her collected jugs of water, numbering in the thousands, and placed them all around the fossilized skeleton of an angel. The man, who has said that the only way to know what is inside of an egg is to break it, does so one night while the girl sleeps, and her screams the following morning when she discovers the bits of shell are heartbreaking. She runs and falls into the churning sea, where she drowns.
That’s a very rough sketch of what barely constitutes the “plot” of the film. This isn’t a story so much as it is a series of surreal images strung together as flimsily as the sluggish narrative of a dream in which you’re exploring a seemingly endless, empty city beneath a gray sky. (These are positive qualities that the film possesses despite “flimsy” and “sluggish” having derogatory connotations.) None of it really seems to mean much of anything. My favorite images from the film are completely tertiary to the above synopsis. The city seems to be filled with statues of fishermen, which the girl is startled by and avoids the presence of. Later, the city suddenly becomes filled with shadows of giant fish, silhouettes cast upon the streets and the sides of buildings, and the fishermen spring into action in an attempt to catch them, firing harpoons into the road and through streetlamps and into windows and empty houses. When I was still trying to understand the film and not simply experience it, I thought of them as automatons from the derelict city’s ancient past, left running in order to catch fish which had been hunted to death. That didn’t at all explain where the shadows came from, and now I see the sequence as two different kinds of ghosts, memories of two extinct parties that are both now long gone, physical husks that hunt long-dead prey, and the shadows of the flesh long since transcended. Is that accurate? Does any of it mean anything? I’m not sure, but it definitely doesn’t really matter.
Angel’s Egg is filled with Biblical imagery, with occasional glimpses of what appears to be the (or an) actual ark, sitting on a cliff as rain falls. Noah’s Ark is thematically central, and the film’s final image implies that all of what we have seen transpire occurred on the upturned hull of a giant ark-style vessel. The man’s use of a weapon in the shape of a cross is likewise open to many interpretations, but I remain convinced that attempting to puzzle all of that out is utterly the wrong way to engage with the film. There’s a giant mechanical sun that’s also an eyeball, and it’s covered in statues. What does it mean? Who cares? Enjoy the ride.
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