mark boomer redmond

Boomer’s Top 20 Films of 2025

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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.

Honorable mentions

20. Companion

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 Barbarian from 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 Midnight here.

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. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Rabbit Trap (2025)

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“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. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Powell & Pressburger’s Technicolor opera The Tales of Hoffmann (1951).

00:00 Welcome

01:15 The Suspect (1944)
06:18 The King of Comedy (1982)
15:38 Marty Supreme (2025)
22:31 For Your Consideration (2006)
29:00 Abigail (2024)
37:12 Rabbit Trap (2025)
44:00 The Headless Woman (2008)
48:36 The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
52:24 America – Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of (1973)
56:51 Black Narcissus (1947)

59:50 The Tales of Hoffmann (1951)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

My Christmas Wish: Treat Yourself to All That Heaven Allows (1955) This Year

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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?

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Suspect (1944)

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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. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #253: Oldboy (2003) & Old Movies, New Directors

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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).

00:00 The year in review
39:18 The Colors Within (2025)
50:14 Resurrection (2025)
55:38 Hamnet (2025)

1:03:05 Oldboy (2003)
1:31:00 The Twentieth Century (2019)
1:49:00 Straight Up (2019)
2:13:33 Liz and the Blue Bird (2018)

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

– The Podcast Crew

Angel’s Egg (1985)

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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.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

No Other Choice (2025)

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“No other choice,” the new, American corporate overlords of Solar Paper say to Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) when he attempts to confront them about their mass lay-offs at the company where he has worked for decades. “No other choice,” Goo Beom-mo (Lee Sung-min) says to his wife when she asks why he can’t get a job in another industry; “Paper has fed me for 25 years, honey. It’s how I’m meant to be.” “No other choice,” say Man Su’s interviewers at Moon Paper as they describe their company’s movement to more automation and the removal of all human labor from their process. “No other choice,” Man Su murmurs to himself over and over again, taking the mantra-repeating practice taught in his lay-off exit group counseling session and applying it not to positive affirmations but to reassurances that his increasingly violent actions are justifiable. It’s the refrain of the past as it overshadows the present, a soundbite of self-flagellation about the impossibility of changing the future while actively creating that future in the same moment. 

If you’ve seen the trailers for No Other Choice, then you probably think you know what the film will be about, and to an extent, you’re going to get some of what you’re expecting. That’s the Park Chan-Wook special! I’ve still never seen Oldboy, the film he’s probably best known for, but I have seen (and loved) The Handmaiden, Lady Vengeance, Decision to Leave, and Stoker, and No Other Choice can now be added to that list of Park’s great achievements. If you’ve seen any of those films, you’ll also likely remember that they all feature a major upheaval right around the middle of the runtime to the expectations regarding all the ways that the plot could branch and pivot, based on what you’ve become accustomed to from other films in the same genre. No Other Choice presents itself as a film about a man who loses his job and, desperate to cling to the status and lifestyle that his former position offered, turns to murderous ends to eliminate his competitors for a position with a paper company that has “cracked the Japanese market.” That’s true, but in classic Park style, the director manages to take unexpected but plausible turns, with that mid-film sharp turn taking things in entirely unexpected directions. 

In narratives of this type, the protagonist’s family is often left on the margins of the story, treated as merely branches upon which some extensions of the male lead’s drama can hang. Most often, the wife leaves, taking the kids with her, if there are any. Sometimes, she leaves with blackmail material so that her husband must keep his distance. Other films that have a superficially happy ending, as this one does, see the family shunted to the side until the final moments reunite them before the credits roll. Man Su, his wife, stepson, and daughter are all once again ensconced in their home again at the end of the film, but the victory feels temporary. For one, Man Su’s wife Miri (Son Ye-Jin) doesn’t know the width and breadth of her husband’s activities, but she knows enough to know that he’s killed, and she not only keeps this secret, but also lies to her son about her husband’s nocturnal adventures to cover for him, so as to prevent him from fearing Man Su. For the rest of her life (or at least the rest of her marriage), she will be forced to maintain a facade of normalcy while compartmentalizing her deception of her son and of her husband, from whom she keeps the knowledge that she had seen one of the bodies he buried. Miri and Man Su have also kept the fact that their boy is not his son, acknowledging between themselves that they promised to tell him once he was old enough to shave, but they decide to maintain that lie as well. For Man Su, it’s also clear to the audience that although he may have wormed his way back into the world of paper manufacturing, this position is even less solid than the one he had before, and it’s likely only a matter of time before he’s laid off again, and then this whole violent cycle may begin anew. 

If I had to treat this review like a middle school book report and identify its theme, I would highlight that this film is about the fickle nature of independence. Man Su and Miri’s daughter is a nonverbal cello prodigy who refuses to play for the family, and even when the characters forego a lot of their costlier possessions—selling both of the family’s luxury cars and consolidating to a singular utilitarian sedan, giving their beloved dogs to Miri’s parents to care for, cancelling their tennis lessons and Netflix subscriptions, and even slowly selling off their furniture and electronics—the one thing that they ensure continues to be paid for are her cello lessons. When she reaches a point when her tutor is no longer able to teach her anything and refers the family to a music professor, the parents replay a conversation that they had earlier in which they talked about how the most important thing that they could do for their daughter would be to ensure that she is able to be independent, which they only see being possible if she becomes a musician. Their son also attempts to attain his own minor financial independence, in a poorly thought out cell phone reselling scheme that almost ends in tragedy, but offers Man Su the opportunity to show off his new, tough attitude in front of Miri when facing off against the owner of the shop, whose son is their son’s best friend and co-conspirator. 

Independence is good for one but not the other, and it’s unclear where Miri lies in all of this. Strangely, almost all of the wives of the four men in competition with one another are unemployed women of leisure; Miri’s life consists of ferrying her children about between their academic and extracurricular activities between tennis bouts, Beom-mo’s wife is an actress who can’t seem to get a part and has so much free time she still manages to carry on an affair in a house with a laid-off husband, second victim Ko Si-jo (Cha Seung-won)’s wife is unmentioned, and his final victim Choi Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon) is recently divorced and seems to still be supporting his ex. All of them are literally dependent, and what independence they do achieve undermines their respective husbands’ masculinity, through adultery, the perception of infidelity, or something completely different. Man Su’s suspicions about his wife are unfounded, with his overall hypocrisy highlighted by the fact that what he’s done is much, much worse than being unfaithful. Every man here tells himself that he has no other choice, and they’re all wrong, to their respective downfalls. 

This is a beautifully shot film, with fantastic and imaginative use of color. That’s never been something that Park has been afraid of, but it makes this combination of his uniquely unforgiving style and a (new to me) almost slapstick sense of comedy synthesize into something unique, and the almost Technicolor landscape makes it all the more special. The film is also full of seeming mundanities that might be metaphors for us to puzzle out over multiple viewings. A great deal is made out of Man Su’s tooth pain, as he has a molar that’s rotting away but he can’t do anything about it, until he finally pries the thing out in a primal rage in the film’s final half hour. There’s also time spent on the backstory of the house, that it was the house he grew up in and it stood on the edge of his father’s pig farm, but the farm went bust when a couple hundred pigs had to be put down due to a disease and were buried in a mass grave that still exists under part of the property. It’s grim stuff, and I’m looking forward to reading other critics’ analyses and interpretations in the coming months just as much as I’m looking forward to a rewatch. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)

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“His flock has not only begun to shrink, but to calcify,” Bishop Langstron (Jeffrey Wright) warns young Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) about his reassignment to serve under Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude in upstate New York. Jud has just faced a committee of three upper-level members of the church for punching a fellow priest in the face, and he recounts the story of his turn to Christ, one of redemption not achieved but ongoing. Jud was a boxer in his youth before he found salvation, and for large parts of the film, the driving conflict is between Jud’s willingness to sacrifice, his sincere desire to bring others closer to Christ, and his testament to Christ’s love, versus Wicks’s egotistical self-martyrdom, his drive to consolidate his power at the expense of eroding his flock’s faith, and his heretical performance of his own prejudices as if they were God’s words. If Glass Onion could be (rightly) criticized for being a little too on-the-nose with its depiction of an Elon Musk-like richer-than-sin weenie loser villain, Wake Up Dead Man instead goes for a less specific target with the same ostentation by taking on all of the sins of modern right wing nationalism that cloak their evil under a banner of faith, and those who put darkness for light. Like me, director Rian Johnson had a profoundly religious upbringing, and although we both have left the churches in which we were raised, this film demonstrates a deep and abiding admiration for and fondness of true believers who practice God’s love, and I both respect and was moved by the approach. Johnson may have, intentionally or unintentionally, created one of the best pieces of Christian propaganda since Chronicles of Narnia or “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and he did it showing the apotheosis of contemporary American Christian Nationalism tending to a church that was literally without Christ. 

When I was young, one of the oft-repeated sermons that I witnessed (through countless Thursday chapel sessions at the fundamentalist Christian school that I attended, Sunday School sermons, Children’s Church ministries, and Wednesday Youth Pastor recitations) was one about the Christ-shaped hole in everyone’s being. Sometimes the hole was in your soul, and sometimes it was in your heart; if it was in your latter, they would occasionally use a piece of wood cut into a heart, with a lower-case-t-shaped void in the middle, into which a conveniently sized cross could slot as a visual representation. (Presumably, the more ambiguous nature of the soul prevented it from being carved out of scrap wood for these performances). I get the feeling that Johnson likely sat through some of these same services, and he transposes that metaphor in this film to a literal void in the shape of a crucifix on the walls of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. We learn the reason for this in a story related by Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), who witnessed the destruction of the temple as a child; the monsignor’s grandfather Prentice was a widower with a daughter, Grace, when he became the shepherd of the town’s flock, and the daughter was a girl of “loose morals” who ended up a pregnant teen. Prentice promised her his fortune if she remained under his roof and didn’t embarrass him by going into the town, and she honored her end of the bargain until his dying day, watching as Prentice poisoned her own son against her and groomed him into becoming the next in a line of men who disguise their hatred behind their vestments. She found his bank accounts empty, and destroyed much of the church, supposedly out of rage, before dying while pounding on the outside of his “Lazarus tomb,” which can only be opened from the outside by construction equipment but which can be opened from within with only a light push. Ever since, Grace has been characterized as “The Harlot Whore,” and has become a key figure in Monsignor Jefferson’s fiery sermons.

It’s to this lost flock, not only shrinking but calcifying, that Jud arrives. That sounds like a coldly analytical way to describe it, but it’s with that same clinicality that Jud diagnoses the rot at the heart of Perpetual Fortitude, metaphorically calling it a cancer that must be cut out. This raises suspicions, of course, when Jefferson Wicks dies, seemingly impossibly. He entered a small cubby near the pulpit with no apparent exit, in full view of all witnesses, and collapsed before a knife was found in his back. Those in attendance that day other than Jud were a select few extremely devoted followers, who form our cast of suspects and witnesses. Martha was there, as was her husband Samson (Thomas Haden Church), the church groundskeeper who has found the strength to maintain his own sobriety because of his respect for the Monsignor’s own dubious overcoming of his addictions. Town doctor Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), whose wife recently left him for someone she met on a Phish message board and took the kids with him, is present, as is concert cellist Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), who is currently funneling all of her savings into Perpetual Fortitude in the hopes that the Monsignor will be able to cure her of her painful, disabling neuropathy. The town has also become home to Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), a former pulp sci-fi novelist of some (niche) renown whose pivot into libertarianism has made him an outcast in the elite literary circles he envies and left him with only a small but devoted fandom of survivalists who, in his words, “all look like John Goodman in The Big Lebowski.” Ross hopes to make his way back into polite society by publishing a book of Wicks’s sermons and his own accompanying essays and commentary, and as such is one of the Monsignor’s sycophants. Rounding out the group is Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), who is carrying on the family tradition of acting as the Wicks family’s lawyer, following in her father’s footsteps, as well as Cy (Daryl McCormack), the son her father forced her to adopt when she was still a student and the boy was already old enough to be in school. Cy has returned to Perpetual Fortitude, tail between his legs, after a failed attempt at breaking into politics. 

Most of the film’s political satire revolves around Cy. I mentioned before that the satire in this one is less about mocking a specific individual than about painting a broader picture, but Cy seems like a deliberate invocation of Christian Walker, at least if I’m reading Cy as being as closeted (which I am). When Cy complains to Jud that he failed to make his political ambitions come true, it was in spite of the fact that he hit every single right-wing talking point, listing them one by one in a screed that lasts for over a minute of the film’s runtime. He describes his playbook as, to paraphrase, “making people think about something that they hate and then make them afraid it will take away something that they love,” which is an encapsulation of the go-to method of reactionary appeals to perceived attacks on normalcy. Wicks is clearly not a technically adept person, a member of an older generation, but Cy’s incessant need to constantly curate his existence for his online following means that Wicks’s ideas work their way out to Cy’s followers, a genealogy of intolerance. It works thematically while also justifying why there’s footage of a very important meeting that reveals every participant’s motivation. 

We’ve gotten pretty far into this without ever mentioning Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), the gentleman detective who is ostensibly the star of this series. He enters the film fairly late as well, but it’s a damned good entrance, as he finds himself inside Perpetual Fortitude and face to face with Jud, who has provided the narration to this point, and finds it difficult to find something nice to say about the church and can only bring himself to compliment the architecture. Blanc has been brought in by the local sheriff (Mila Kunis), and he’s fascinated by the opportunity to solve what is, despite the lack of a door, a locked-room mystery. It turns out that the church reading group has all read multiple examples of the genre, including The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Hollow Man, which means that any one of them could have drawn inspiration from them. It was here that I first suspected that we were being led to the inevitable conclusion that Jud had committed the crime and was merely an unreliable narrator, as is the case in Roger Ackroyd (um, spoiler alert for a book that turns one hundred next year, I suppose); after all, his name sounds like someone trying to say the word “duplicity” after too many drinks. As it turns out, the presence of Roger Ackroyd is a clue, but not the one that I thought. 

Blanc, despite a slightly smaller presence here, is nonetheless excellent when he’s on screen. As with the previous two installments in this series, there’s much to laugh at and be puzzled by here, and the audience for my screening had a delightful time. You will too. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Sister Midnight (2025)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the deadpan arranged-marriage horror comedy Sister Midnight (2025).

00:00 New Orleans Bookfair
02:40 Star Trek
06:06 Went the Day Well? (1942)
09:00 Black Angel (1946)
11:04 Angel’s Egg (1985)
15:00 Universal Language (2025)
23:00 Wicked: For Good (2025)
29:45 Friendship (2025)
34:11 The Running Man (2025)
40:30 Boys Go to Jupiter (2025)
46:06 Die My Love (2025)
50:35 Wake Up Dead Man (2025)
58:17 No Other Choice (2025)
1:08:22 Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (2025)
1:10:51 Keeper (2025)
1:15:27 Sentimental Value (2025)
1:19:10 Alpha (2025)
1:24:46 Dracula (2025)
1:28:20 Arco (2025)
1:32:07 Lurker (2025)
1:38:48 If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025)

1:44:22 Sister Midnight (2025)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew