naomi ackie

Clayface (2026)

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As we were walking to the car after our viewing of Clayface last night, my viewing companions and I were discussing the movie, and I mentioned how much it reminded me of Sam Raimi’s Darkman. As I described the 1990 film—a scientist experimenting with generating synthetic skin for burn victims is brutalized and left for dead by some mobsters, then enacts his revenge by using his experimental discoveries to get close to his victims by disguising himself as other people—my companion said, “Oh, so it’s the exact same.” And yeah, kind of. Clayface doesn’t have the same dark sense of humor, the lead character’s descent into madness is neither as successful or excitingly depicted, and it’s also a distractingly ugly movie. Darkman doesn’t have a poorly considered element of the protagonist being falsely accused of sexual assault, and the love interest in Clayface is the scientist this time around while the disfigured antivillain is an actor, but otherwise the changes are, if you’ll forgive the term, mostly cosmetic.

Matt Hagen (Thom Rhys Harries) is an actor on the rise, having come from humble beginnings in the Gotham City neighborhood known as The Narrows and risen to Hollywood stardom. On the day that he learns that he’s been nominated for an Oscar, he goes out clubbing with childhood friend Corey (Joshua James), who tries to warn him that he’s dancing with a mobster’s girlfriend. Matt ignores this and spends the night with the woman, only to wake up and get his face sliced to pieces by Markos Szabo (David Dencik)’s goons. Several costly and ineffective reconstruction surgeries later, not only has Szabo’s untouchable made man status and smear campaign (including having his moll claim that Matt drugged her) resulted in Gotham failing to prosecute criminally but also ensured Matt’s civil case is likewise dismissed. Bled dry by some bad investments on the part of his business manager Frank (Eddie Marsan), to whom Matt gave power of attorney, Matt crawls back to the roach-infested hole from which he thought he had escaped. Hope comes in the form of Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), whose research into nanotechnology may hold the key to fixing Matt’s facial scarring and help him get his life back. All the while, her fiancé John Borelli (Max Minghella), the one good cop in all of Gotham City, continues to investigate Matt’s disfigurement.

There are moments in Clayface that sing. The sequence near the end in which Matt manages to get inside of Szabo’s club and then proceeds to wipe the floor with his men because of his shapeshifting abilities is genuinely fun and exciting. It’s not a big CGI extravaganza where he overcomes with brute strength but is in a seemingly real environment full of actors and extras, and the shapeshifting cost-saving measure of having Matt transform as some object passes between him and the camera gives the whole thing a Twilight Zone flair that’s rather effective. This has been touted as a body horror film, and there’s enough of that to go around as well. The actual attack on Matt is harrowing, the goopification of his face is successful even when it’s computer generated, and the ways that he murders the recipients of his vengeance through various different applications of his newfound abilities is sufficiently gross and never gets boring. When prosthetics are in use, they’re also quite good; the scene of Matt having to cut through his own flesh during a bumpy plane ride to prevent his eyes from sealing shut has been in every preview, but it’s still effective in the final cut. It’s quite reminiscent of the Fringe episode “Ability,” which makes me wonder if screenwriter Mike Flanagan is as big a fan of that show as he is of Battlestar Galactica, as his recent casting of several BSG alums on Carrie demonstrated. There’s also a bizarre and erotically charged scene in which Caitlyn is studying Matt while he sleeps, only for him to partially morph into her and touch himself-as-her with his still-masculine hands. If nothing else, this one is at least a little “for the freaks.”

There are also moments that fall flat. The narrative choice to have Mia (Joana Ribeiro) accuse Matt of drugging and assaulting her is a strange one; the only excuse for it is that, once Matt’s face seems to have healed, he’s welcomed back onto the red carpet with nary a moment’s hesitation, which may have been intended as a commentary on how quick the media machine is to forgive men who are credibly accused (or convicted) of abuse. If that was the intent, it’s barely legible. The narrative journey of Matt’s supposed best friend Corey reads as an attempt at deepening the sense of betrayal that Matt feels when he realizes just how few people could actually rely upon and drive him further into an obsessive dependency upon Caitlyn to be friend, physician, confidante, and more. Unfortunately, the overall flat characterization of Corey and his glossed-over unlikely path to success in the wake of Matt’s fall means that everything having to do with this character feels forced and unnatural.

Having highlighted the good and the questionable, all that’s left to us is what doesn’t work, and there is, unfortunately, quite a bit of that. First and foremost, this is an ugly movie. I don’t want to keep comparing Clayface to Darkman, but there’s a quality to the grime and the gritty noir feeling in Raimi’s film that is not even attempted in James Watkins’s vision for Clayface. The interior sets range from decent (Matt’s awful Narrows apartment) to great (Szabo’s club), but every single outdoor shot looks like hot garbage. The presumably CGI backdrops look like something straight out of an early 2010s Syfy Channel show, and even if you try to ignore that your attention is constantly being drawn back to them by an overabundance of lens flare activity that makes JJ Abrams seem restrained. I rewatched the trailer for Darkman and although it has its fair share of special effect failure, you can tell that some thought and planning went into, for instance, the helicopter crash sequence. In night shots, Gotham City looks like Megalopolis, and it’s just awful. The romance here is also nothing to really write home about; Caitlyn’s fiancé is less a character and more of an afterthought. I did appreciate that the film had her be very resistant to Matt’s charms, but given where the narrative goes, it ends up having no real stakes.

I was not impressed with director Watkins’ Eden Lake, albeit for different reasons than my ultimately lukewarm feelings about Clayface, and I was subjected to the trailer for Speak No Evil for so many months that I refused to see it on principle. This is both a better and worse film than Eden Lake; that was an extended exercise in misery that was very much a product of its time: reactionary paranoia-mongering about dangerous youths as an excuse for extended misery with nothing substantive to say. This film is different; it’s at least trying to break out of the “low-budget movie about a B-list comic book villain” box by showcasing gross body horror and giving us no one to really root for. But the next time I feel a hankering for something like this, I’ll probably just watch Darkman instead.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

I Love Boosters (2026)

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I Love Boosters is many things. It’s a heist movie that takes a sharp left turn into science fiction territory. It’s a jeremiad about the life-destroying conditions of the sweat shops in which most of our clothing is manufactured. It’s a meditation on the material conditions of entry level retail work, and it’s a barely exaggerated take on C-suite self-aggrandization, and it’s a satire that takes the concept of “crisis actors” to an absurd extreme. It’s a parable about the way that consent is manufactured across multiple social tiers, and a slumber party movie for fashion girlies, and a call for unionization and collective action. It’s also a Scooby Doo cartoon where Keke Palmer peels out, legs cycling, as she tries to get her footing in a slanted room. What a delight! 

Corvette (Palmer) is the ringleader of a group of Bay Area “boosters,” people who steal merchandise, specifically quasi-high end retail fashion in this case, and resell it. She and friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) have been dubbed “The Velvet Gang” by the media, and their primary target is Metro Designers, a chain of shops owned and operated by fashion “genius” Christie Smith (Demi Moore), whom Corvette admires and despises in equal measure. Corvette has dreams of becoming a designer herself, and they’re not hampered by the fact that her current living conditions find her squatting in a defunct fast-food restaurant, although she’s beginning to lose hope. While casually fending off the flirtatious advances of an unnamed bargain fashion model (LaKeith Stanfield), Corvette also finds herself plagued with visions about a giant rolling ball of trash. When Corvette finds herself offered a job at Metro Designs by authoritarian store manager Grayson (Will Poulter) during an interview that’s only meant to be a distraction, the trio decides to infiltrate the store and clean it out completely. Then things go really sideways. 

Most of us can only wish we had half the imagination and vision that Boots Riley does. This movie is as vibrantly beautiful as it is chaotic and bizarre. At times, the entire frame is completely dominated by a single color, either through the use of saturation from red lights or because each Metro Designers location is monochromatic (as Christie says on the in-store displays, “If you want it in a different color, go to another location!”) on a monthly rotating basis. At other times, through their coordinated-to-clash outfits, the frame is filled with so many candy colors that once can’t help but be lost in the fantasia of it all. There is stop motion animation and there are car chases that appear to be done in Number Seventeen-esque miniature, alongside low-tech old school cinematic techniques like having a character shapeshift by having one performer sink out of frame while the other rises into it and having an entire set built at an angle to emulate a crooked building. The film is a feast for the eyes and an utter delight. 

Lest you think that the director of Sorry to Bother You has decided to make a film that’s all style and no substance, let me allay your fears. The film is entirely about the methods by which every individual is kept disenfranchised exist at every level, and it’s insidious everywhere it goes. Workers die from unsafe working conditions and CEOs respond to collective action with violence and retribution. Local “guru” Dr. Jack (Don Cheadle) is the head of a very successful “friends being friendly” con that is a literal pyramid scheme. Metro Designers employee Violeta (Eiza González)’s paycheck is less than $40, with Christie’s rotating monochromatic color scheme forcing the store clerks to update their workwear every month with the cost of their new outfits deducted from their pay. Christie’s office features a photo of her with Barack Obama next to the awards documenting her involvement with “Democracy Forge,” which sounds like the handle of blue check Twitter Lib and is just as sinister; this ultimately connects with the “man on the street” style interviews we see throughout the film with chyron-identified characters like Based Young Dude, Crying Black Mother, and Upstanding Community Member, but I won’t spoil the surprise of how. 

Just do yourself a favor, and see this one on the biggest screen you can. You won’t be disappointed.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Sorry, Baby (2025)

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The Sundance Film Festival is soon to move locations to Boulder, Colorado within the next couple years, after decades of staying put in the smaller town of Park City, Utah. The move has been announced as a major shakeup for the festival, but from where I’m sitting halfway across the country, it’s at best the second biggest move the fest has made this decade. The biggest culture shift for Sundance in the 2020s has been moving a significant portion of its program online, launching a Virtual Cinema component in 2021 to compensate for the social distancing restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic. The shift from a purely in-person festival to a semi-virtual one has had some hiccups, especially since it’s invited opportunistic piracy among fanatics who’ve leaked steamier scenes of their favorite actors out of context to social media for momentary clout, jeopardizing this new resource. It has also opened the festival up to a wider range of audiences & critics who can’t afford (either fiscally or physically) to attend in-person, calling into question the value of film-festival exclusivity. I have not yet personally “attended” Virtual Sundance in any direct way, but the experience does sound like a more condensed version of how I interact with the festival anyway. Staged in January, months before the previous year’s awards cycle concludes at The Oscars, Sundance is always the first major event on the annual cinematic calendar. Intentionally or not, I spend my entire year catching up with the buzzier titles that premiere there, as they trickle down the distribution tributaries until they find their way to Louisiana. Let’s take this year for example. Swampflix has already covered ten feature films that premiered at Sundance this January — some great, some so-so: Twinless, Lurker, Dead Lover, Predators, The Ugly Stepsister, Zodiac Killer Project, Move Ya Body, Mad Bills to Pay, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and The Legend of Ochi. This was not an intentional project, just something that happened naturally by keeping up with the more significant releases of the year. And we’re still anticipating a few 2025 Sundance titles that won’t hit wide distribution until after Sundance 2026 has concluded: Obex, By Design, and Endless Cookie, to name a few. In that way, most film-nerd audiences who aren’t firmly established in The Industry are constantly attending some form of Virtual Sundance just by going to the movies week to week, so it’s been exciting to see the festival condense that slow rollout process a little bit by offering some more immediate access to their program online during the festival proper.

My unintentional Virtual Sundance experience has continued into the 11th month of the year with the recent addition of the festival standout Sorry, Baby to the streaming platform HBO Max. The positive critical reception of the film at the festival (along with a jury prize for screenwriting) positioned Sorry, Baby as one of the first Great, Must-See movies of the year, months before it would be available for wide-audience exhibition. I mention all of this not to claim the film has become overhyped or outdated in the months since, but to register my surprise at how Sundance-typical it is in practice. There are a lot of ways that Sorry, Baby‘s tone & tenor are specific to the creative voice of its writer-director-lead Eva Victor, but its storytelling structure is also unmistakably Sundancy. Here we have a story about a smart twentysomething academic navigating their way through a personally traumatic event with the help of quirky side characters played by widely respected indie-scene actors (most notably in this case, Naomi Ackie, Lucas Hedges, and John Carroll Lynch). The themes are heavy but the overall mood is defiantly light, with constant self-deprecating character humor undercutting the soul-crushing facts of modern life. Also, there’s a kitten hanging around, providing the homely comfort of the obligatory cat that lounges in every decent used bookstore. With the exception of a couple showy framing choices that consciously distance us from the protagonist’s trauma (one in physical distance, one in chronology), the filmmaking side of Sorry, Baby is secondary to the writing and the performances, which are as smartly crafted as they are grounded to reality. Victor shines brightest as a writer and a screen presence rather than as a director, with the darkness & fearlessness of the dialogue often cutting through the more restrictive, routine form of the images. They land some tricky laughs and the real-life hurt of the drama weighs heavy on the heart, but there’s not much to the film that can linger past the end credits beyond recognition that it was written by a smart person. In fact, Victor seems intent to constantly establish their mouthpiece character as the smartest person in every room, often as a way to vent about the institutional failures that compound personal trauma. Legal, medical, and academic bureaucrats play strawman to the mightier-than-the-sword screenwriter’s pen, while only the protagonist’s inner circle of supportive friends are afforded any humanistic grace notes. It’s a writer’s project first & foremost, to the point where it’s literally about the writing of a master’s thesis.

I suppose I should be more specific here and note that this is a film about the personal & professional fallout following a sexual assault. Victor plays a master’s student who is assaulted in her advising professor’s home, derailing any personal or professional development past the most traumatic event of her life. This assault is revealed to the audience indirectly. It is obscured from view behind the closed door of the professor’s home, which is framed in an extreme wide shot of rapid time elapse, chilling the audience instead of inviting us into the violence of the act. We are also kept at a distance from this violent act by the screenplay’s scrambling of the dramatic timeline, with chapter titles like “The Year with the Baby,” “The Year with the Bad Thing,” “The Year with the Questions,” and “The Year with the Good Sandwich” confusing the chronology of her trauma & recovery. At first, all we know is that she’s been stuck in time since “The Bad Thing” happened, living in the same grad-school house and working in the same dusty university offices for an eternal limbo as she puzzles her way through how to move past that moment without allowing her entire life to be defined by it. Quietly hostile interactions with doctors, lawyers, colleagues, and clueless neighbors offer Victor an opportunity to vent about how ill-equipped institutions are to address personal trauma with any empathy or humanity. The most striking thing about the movie is when Victor cuts through those broader observations about the culture of rape to rattle the audience with more personal observations. After the assault is obscured from an extreme wide-shot distance, Victor is then shown recounting minor details from the event to a roommate in intimate close-up, crouched in her bathtub. That intimacy is later echoed in a second bathtub scene in which she attempts to physically connect with her sex-buddy neighbor, who spoils the moment in much subtler, underplayed ways than the doctors & lawyers who press her for invasive details about the worst moment of her life. Whether broad or intimate, it’s all smartly observed and it’s all couched within a deadpan-humorist writing style that lessens the miserabilist potential of the topic. The question is whether having something smart to say fully justifies making a movie—as opposed to writing an essay or a stage play—beyond the form’s ability to get Victor’s words in front of as many people as possible. Sorry, Baby‘s chosen form is a useful delivery system for Victor’s writing, but I don’t know that it ever fully registers as cinematic beyond its recognizability as routine Sundance fare, to be slowly doled to the masses throughout the year.

-Brandon Ledet

Mickey 17 (2025)

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When we recently did our podcast episode about The Big Sleep, Brandon mentioned that he had already seen Mickey 17 and briefly shared his thoughts about it. One of the things that he noted was that when Bong Joon Ho makes a movie that is primarily for a Western audience, he foregoes a lot of the subtlety that is maintained in the films that he makes with his homeland in mind. Which is to say that I think he thinks we’re all a little stupid over here (and he’s not wrong). Memories of Murder and Parasite are films with lots of subtext and subtlety (although the latter doesn’t hold back with its themes), while Snowpiercer and Okja are—and I mean this in the most affectionate and respectful way possible—a little obvious. When I think about Bong’s body of work, the scene that comes to my mind most often and the one that stands out most clearly is the sequence from Snowpiercer in which Tilda Swinton’s androgynous Minister Mason delivers a speech to disruptive back-of-train passengers. “A hat belongs on the head,” they say, “And the shoe belongs on the foot. I am a hat; you are a shoe.” Mason’s voice drips with disdain and hatred. Theirs is a demonstration of not just their slavish, religious devotion to class distinction, but just how furiously angry power can be when it reinforces itself, how the veil of civility (barely) conceals a snarling dog. 

So when you hear mixed things about Mickey 17, and people talking about how the film is obvious, well, they’re not lying to you. Mickey 17 is an obvious movie. It lacks subtlety, and I can see how people may feel that they’re being talked down to, or how the film’s lack of nuance in its themes could make it feel like a Disney Channel Original version of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, if you’re feeling extremely uncharitable. I would never go that far, but I will say that my expectations were not exceeded. 

Three decades from now, dimwitted Mickey (Robert Pattinson) has run into some trouble with a mafia-connected loan shark, alongside his friend Timo (Steven Yeun). The two decide the best solution to their problem would be to escape the dying planet aboard a corporate ship bound for worlds that humans seek to colonize. Timo is able to talk himself into a pilot position immediately, while Mickey signs up to be an “expendable,” a person whose primary role is to take on dangerous jobs during the long spaceflight. Sometime between the present and the not-too-distant future, scientists figured out how to 3-D print cloned human bodies and how to transfer memories between them, allowing for people to essentially create backup versions of themselves in case of death. When the technology was virtually immediately used for criminal (and homicidal) purposes, its use was banned on earth, but due to the dangerous nature of starfaring, one “expendable” is allowed per starship. Aboard, Mickey meets and falls into immediately reciprocated love with Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a security officer. The ship on which they are travelling is commanded not by a seasoned space veteran but by manchild former (read: failed) politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a character who exists to be an amalgamation of celebrities cum “leaders” but whose details make him a very (read: not at all) thinly veiled parody of the current U.S. president. Along for the ride is his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), whose rather thin characterization—she’s obsessed with sauce—goes largely unnoticed as Collette gives another fantastically over the top performance. 

Over the course of their journey, Mickey isn’t just given dangerous jobs to do, he becomes the subject of outright inhumane laboratory tests. His brain gets backed up onto a hard drive every week and then he gets printed out again when he dies. He’s put outside in a spacesuit in order to be exposed to cosmic radiation; he’s used to collect spores from the new planet’s atmosphere so that a vaccination to the diseases present on the planet can be created; he’s exposed to an ongoing series of nerve gas exposures in order to develop new biological weapons. One would also have to assume that, as his rations keep being halved over and over again, one of the Mickeys must have starved to death. It’s not a charmed life, but Mickey is so in love with Nasha that he doesn’t mind dying over and over again as long as they are together. Things go sideways, however, when he’s left to die after falling into a crevasse. He’s rescued by the tardigrade-like aliens that are native to the planet and brought back to the surface, and when he manages to get back aboard the ship, he learns that his replacement, Mickey 18, has already been printed. If anyone learns that there are two of them, they’ll both be killed and the brain backup deleted in accordance with law, and Sen. and Mrs. Marshal are all too happy to kill both Mickey and the tardigrade aliens (whom they dub “Creepers”) despite the indigenous life form’s apparent sentience. 

It’s a small detail, but one of the things that I liked at the beginning was that we see Mickey and Timo wearing the shirts for their failed macaron business, which features the slogan “macarons are not a sin.” It’s an unusual slogan but one that makes some modicum of sense since desserts and sweets are often considered an indulgence. However, we later learn in the film that “multiples are not a sin” was a rallying cry for a certain perspective on the question of the legality of the human backup-and-restore program. This all leads us to see how short-sighted Mickey is, as he clearly would have to know enough about the cloning process to see this as a reasonable macaron peddling tagline, but he also isn’t paying enough attention to know what he’s signing up for when he first enlists as an Expendable. Further, his taking inspiration (or willingness to go along with Timo’s inspiration) from a complicated legal and social issue for a myopic macaron business is more insight into Mickey’s doofiness. There is a charm in that, though, and the way that Nasha is instantly smitten with this dumb, lost puppy is endearing, as is her ongoing devotion to him despite the personality changes—some almost imperceptible, some quite obvious—that come with each rebirth. 

Shortly after Mickey 17 returns to the ship and discovers that Mickey 18 is already up and about, Mickey 18 takes it upon himself to assassinate Marshall. 17 is able to stop him in time, but this action reveals their existence as multiples and also ends in the death of one of two baby Creepers who came aboard the ship inside of a rock sample. There’s some slapstick, Ruffalo bellows as Marshall, the little cat-sized alien beings run around, then one of them is gunned to pieces. My viewing companion leaned over to me and said “I hated that,” the moment that the sequence ended. I didn’t agree, but I also understand that Mickey 17 isn’t going to win over as many people as Bong’s previous works have; it’s a familiar theme of his in a new environment and with different sci-fi trappings, but for some, it just doesn’t have that same “wow” factor. Unfortunately, I find myself completely sympathizing with the underwhelmed.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond