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KPop Demon Hunters (2025)

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At the beginning of the recent Merchant Ivory discussion episode of the main podcast, most of the crew expressed great admiration for the recent Netflix original KPop Demon Hunters, and I must now add my own voice to that chorus. I resisted for as long as I could, but after the overwhelming number of Halloween costumes I saw and heard about this year, I was finally curious enough to give it a shot, and it’s quite cute. 

HUNTR/X is an all-girl K-pop trio who also happen to be demon slayers, with their musical talent being an integral part of their spirit-busting arsenal. For generations, different trios of women have spent their lives fighting the infernal forces while also building and reinforcing the “Hanmoon,” a kind of psychic forcefield that keeps the armies of evil from entering our world. The most recent incarnation is set to complete/permanently reinforce the Hanmoon, visually represented by it turning golden, which will permanently sever the demon ruler Gwi-Ma (Lee Byung-hun) and his minions from our realm and prevent his influence from spreading. HUNTR/X’s lead singer is Rumi (Arden Cho!), an orphan whose mother was a demon hunter/musical idol and who was raised by her mother’s bandmate/co-slayer Celine (Yunjin Kim). Rounding out the trio are Mira, the snarky dancer who is the black sheep of her wealthy family, and Zoey, a Korean-American lyricist and rapper from Burbank; both were also trained by Celine in demon slaying/pop idol branding. 

In the underworld, Gwi-Ma accepts the proposal of an underling named Jinu (Ahn Hyo-seop) to think outside the box and, instead of sending wave after wave of minions against HUNTR/X, interfere with the psychic power that they get from their fans to weaken the Hanmoon instead. To that end, Juni appears in our realm, accompanied by four other disguised demons, as the newest boy band, Saja. Like any perfectly crafted group of that genre, each member is designed to appeal to a certain demographic: there’s the innocent and adorable Baby Saja; the pink-haired pretty boy Romance Saja; the aptly named Mystery Saja whose hair obscures almost his entire face; and Abby, whose personality is … having abs (he’s my favorite). Just as HUNTR/X is poised to release their new single, “Golden,” which will solidify their idol status and let them turn the Hanmoon gold, Saja immediately starts to overtake HUNTR/X in popularity, undermining the power needed to complete the ritual. Worse still, unbeknownst to her bandmates, Rumi is finding it increasingly difficult to hide her “patterns,” the telltale markings that betray her heritage as the child of a demon and a hunter, which Celine has forced her to keep hidden for her entire life. Jinu notices this in their first fight, and with a budding potential romance between them, now she has two secrets to keep. And she’s losing her voice! 

KPop Demon Hunters has been an enormous success, and is currently sitting at the top of Netflix’s most viewed original film list. It’s easy to see why; this is an easily-digestible animated musical with a distinctive style and catchy music. It’s clearly for children but is a bit of a throwback among kiddoe media in that it understands that its target demographic is not going to be its only audience, and thus makes the effort to include humor that appeals to the whole family, not just its smallest members who need to be babysat by a screen for 90 minutes. Other than this summer’s Freakier Friday (which was also PG), I’m hard pressed to remember the last time a movie that was made for a primarily young audience bothered to create something that older siblings and parents might enjoy, rather than merely tolerate. This kind of pop music has never really been my thing, I’m afraid, and I don’t really see that changing; the film’s Big Song “Golden” recently played at my gym and I would not have known it from any of the other pop music that passes by me in the stream if it hadn’t been pointed out to me. That’s not a mark against the film at all, just an observation that I’m a tertiary demographic here, and the music was consistently good throughout, even if my comparatively elderly ears couldn’t quite discern what I was hearing some of the time. (I first heard the lyric “Now I’m shinin’ like I’m born to be” as “Now I’m shining like a butterbean,” which I knew could not be correct but got stuck in my head.) Even more than that, I really appreciated that the film allowed itself to go a little hard on the violence and horror elements, and this is a movie that I could see being an effective introduction to the thrill of cinematic fright for a younger audience, of the kind that I was fortunate enough to benefit from.

An urban fantasy musical is a great idea, and I can’t imagine a better execution of it than this film, especially in its ineffable lightheartedness that manages to keep the film in the family-friendly realm despite some of the more challenging subject matter. As someone with no expertise in this genre, my two main points of comparison are admittedly very Western™, but I kept thinking of Josie and the Pussycats and Buffy. The similarities between HUNTR/X and the Pussycats are mostly visual, with them being a musical trio whose lounging around in their Avengers-style penthouse mirrors the royal treatment that the ‘Cats get in their film. When it comes to Buffy, I can’t help but think about that first season storyline—Buffy/Rumi falls for a much older demon with a soul (Angel/Jinu) and has to keep this from her excitable, borderline autistic-coded (Willow/Zoey) and snarky (Xander/Mira, although Mira is way cooler) friends, all while keeping secrets from her mother/mentor. There’s also the sixth season, where a resurrected Buffy fears that she’s “come back wrong” and is now part demon, and she covertly starts seeing Spike while keeping both her relationship and her condition from her friends. If you’re starting to worry that I’m going to say something negative about this, fret not; a comparison to Buffy is a high honor in my home, and I loved seeing the echoes. I was also delighted to hear Arden Cho’s voice, as I’ve been a fan of hers since her Teen Wolf days and I’m excited for the career possibilities that this success will bring her.

I didn’t touch much on the themes of the piece, but suffice it to say that they’re a bit deeper than the standard fare. It’s not a recent trend for animated and otherwise child-oriented film to be about self-acceptance, but even something like the recent Nimona (which I quite liked) has a tendency to have a slight twinge of the performative, while the complexities of self-identity and prejudices are handled with a little more nuance here. The exhilarating action sequences and the peppy music break the film up so much that it feels like you’re at a concert even when the film is giving you something to chew on, narratively, and I appreciate that. It’s not going to be for everyone, but it’s not a bad choice for a fun movie night.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

DEVO (2025)

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A frequent lament you’ll hear from Millennial cineastes is that we, as a generation, deeply miss the Directors Label DVDs from the early 2000s. Collecting the music-video catalogs of then-young auteurs like Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, and Jonathan Glazer, the series wasn’t just fun background texture for dorm-room hangouts; it was also a crash course in surrealistic filmmaking techniques, finding some of that era’s most expressionistic directors taking their biggest creative swings in the only commercially viable medium that would support that kind of experimentation. Since the music-licensing deals that made those DVD collections possible have become too convoluted & expensive to justify a reissue, those long out-of-print DVDs now resell for exorbitant sums, effectively rendering them extinct (unless you were able to protect your personal copies from scratches and friendly-fire splashes of beer & bong water). However, there is an equally vital DVD collection of music videos from that early-aughts era that’s still affordable on resale: The Complete Truth About De-Evolution. A DVD reprint of a music video anthology originally published on Laserdisc in the 1990s, The Complete Truth About De-Evolution collects all of the music videos produced by the American rock band DEVO from their proto-punk days in 1970s Akron, Ohio to their commercial-product days in 1990s Los Angeles, California. It documents the gradual mutation of the music video format from art-film experimentation to the crass commercialism of MTV, positioning the band as a sarcastic Prometheus of the medium. I watched those videos obsessively in college, inferring the creative & professional trajectory of what became my favorite band by studying how their cinematic output evolves across the disc, never fully understanding how all the pieces fit.

The new Netflix documentary DEVO is a wonderful addendum to that music video collection, reinforcing the band’s legitimacy as an intrinsically cinematic project. Director Chris Smith (of American Movie notoriety) has a lot of fun playing around with the pop-art iconography DEVO satirized in their music videos and graphic art, charting the intellectual & cultural decline of post-WWII America through a constant montage of its most absurdly inane commercial imagery. He also invites the band to discuss the ideology behind their songs & videos at length in the kinds of talking-head interviews standard to the straight-to-streaming infotainment doc. The main project of DEVO the film is to explain the political messaging of DEVO the band to a worldwide audience of Netflix subscribers who only remember them as the one-hit-wonder dweebs responsible for “Whip It.” The interviews mostly reinforce the intellectual seriousness of the project, explaining the band’s early history as a response to the Kent State Massacre and its career-high sarcastic mockery of the pop music industry that paid their bills. As a result, it goes out of its way to downplay the more ribald sex jokes of tracks like “Jerkin’ Back ‘n’ Forth”, “Penetration in the Centerfold,” and “Don’t You Know” (the “rocket in my pocket” song) in order to convey the overall sense that they were a highbrow political act that was merely satirizing the ape-brain sexuality of fellow MTV-era pop groups. The narrowness of that argument doesn’t fully capture what makes the band so fun to listen to on full-volume repeat, but it allows Smith to deploy them as a soundtrack to America’s cultural decline in the 20th Century, which flashes in nonstop montage like a feature-length version of their video for “Beautiful World.”

There are plenty of vintage DEVO clips included here that I’ve never seen before, scattered among the more familiar lore of the band’s career highlights: their violent relationship with the factory workers of Ohio barrooms, their significance to the CBGB punk scene, their early brushes with David Bowie & SNL, their political-pamphlet arguments that humans evolved from “insane mutant apes”, etc. My biggest thrill, however, was seeing clips from the music videos on The Complete Truth About De-Evolution restored in HD for the first time, since I’ve been watching them on the same ancient DVD for the past two decades. Formally, there isn’t much variation on the typical straight-to-Netflix pop doc template that points to Smith as an especially significant filmmaker; it’s more in line with his recent, anonymous docs on Fyre Festival, Wham!, and Vince McMahon than his career-making doc on the production of the regional horror film Coven. If there’s any one choice that makes the film stand out among other infotainment docs of its ilk, it’s the narrowness of scope. Of DEVO’s nine studio albums, Smith only covers the first five — their most artistically significant (and each an all-timer). There’s no obligatory reunion & redemption footage in the third act after the band’s initial break-up, either, because the film is not about DEVO as a rock ‘n’ roll act; it’s about DEVO as a political act. It juxtaposes their most overtly political lyrics with the most overtly asinine cultural detritus of their era in order to convincingly argue that their music was more subversive than it was cynically mercenary. That’s something you can gather by directly engaging with the work yourself in The Complete Truth of De-Evolution, but it doesn’t hurt that the truth about DEVO is now even more complete.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #201: King Creole (1958) & Elvis vs Priscilla

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Welcome to Episode #201 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, James and Brandon discuss cinematic representations of Elvis Presley, from his youth-culture acting chops in Michael Curtiz’s New Orleans noir King Creole (1958) to his recent post-mortem biopic depictions in Baz Luhrman’s Elvis (2022) & Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla (2023).

00:00 Welcome

02:40 Master Gardener (2023)
07:00 The Taste of Things (2024)

13:05 King Creole (1958)
27:30 Elvis (2022) vs. Priscilla (2023)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, or by following the links below.

– The Podcast Crew

Thunivu (2023)

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One of the biggest adjustments in my life recently has been getting used to getting around without a car.  It’s been fine.  Between bikes, buses, streetcars, and long walks, I’ve been able to access pretty much everything I want or need within New Orleans city limits . . . with one major exception.  The weekly screenings of Indian action movies I used to catch at AMC Elmwood are now prohibitively far away, so I’m a lot less likely to make that expensive trek out to the suburban multiplex unless it’s for a major hit, like the recent high-octane spy thriller Pathaan.  Despite the ongoing pop culture phenomenon of RRR, the two lone theaters in Orleans Parish (The Broad & The Prytania) have yet to take a chance on programming the Indian action blockbusters I love & miss. Even the recent EncoRRRe “fan favorite” screenings of that breakout hit were all held at AMC Elmwood, the exact venue where I first saw it a full year ago.  And so, I’m now relying on at-home streaming services to provide access to Indian action content, which isn’t quite the same as being obliterated by their explosive sound & spectacle on the big screen, but at least they’re sometimes quick to the punch.  The Tamil-language bank heist thriller Thunivu popped up on Netflix only one month after it screened at AMC Elmwood this January, so if I had any lingering FOMO from the missed opportunity it didn’t last very long.  And hey, I’m pretty used to watching these obnoxiously loud action flicks in empty theaters anyway, so there really wasn’t all that much difference in watching it on my couch.

In Thunivu, middle-aged action star Ajith Kumar plays a mysterious bank robber who pulls off a heist of a smaller, scrappier heist that’s already in motion.  Through a never-ending supply of preposterous flashbacks & plot twists it turns out that that heist was also sub-heist under a much grander, more complex theft being pulled off by the real criminals of the modern world: investment bankers.  So, Kumar’s anonymous Dark Devil persona is hijacking two different groups of thieves—gangster & corporate—by lumping them in with the usual crowd of everyday hostages typical to a bank-heist plot.  It takes a long time for him to assert dominance over this convoluted triple-heist, quieting the room with a relentless storm of machine gun bullets until no one dares stand against him.  He feels laidback & in control the entire time, though, cracking wise and impersonating Michael Jackson dance moves to win over the common people watching news coverage at home.  And then, when he has the world’s attention, he narrates a lengthy flashback that explains in great detail how the bank itself is the biggest thief of all, scamming working-class customers out of their hard-earned money without any legal consequence.  Thunivu starts as a standard bank heist thriller (complete with a “Here’s the plan” montage for the scrappier bank robbery that never comes to fruition), but eventually evolves into the DTV action equivalent of The Big Short.  It’s trashy, brutal, earnest excess featuring an action hero lead with self-declared “charismatic presence” and a healthy disgust for banking as an industry.

If that heist-within-a-heist-within-a-heist plot description was kind of a mess, it’s because the movie is too.  It’s at least a stylish, entertaining mess, though – one that remains excitingly volatile even when it defaults to infotainment monologues about the evils of modern banking.  There are some wonderfully explosive action scenes, some childish cornball humor, and a jolty, hyperactive editing style that plays like the modern CG equivalent of an overcranked nickelodeon projector.  If Thunivu starred Liam Neeson and was directed by Neveldine & Taylor it would be celebrated as a cult classic for decades to come by action movie nerds everywhere.  Instead, it’s mainly a victory lap celebration for Ajith Kumar’s adoring fans in India, now over 60 titles deep into his career as an action star & a “charismatic presence”.  As with all the leads of the Kollywood & Tollywood actioners I’ve been seeking out in recent years, Kumar’s Dark Devil persona is celebrated in Thunivu as the coolest dude to ever walk the earth.  He’s constantly adorned with sunglasses, a wind machine, and a hip-hop theme song declaring him “the gangsta”, living the full music video fantasy as a rock star bankrobber while everyone on the other side of his machine gun is blown to bits.  The movie goes out of its way to modernize this populist action hero archetype with CG graphics of cybertheft & corporate thuggery and with the Dark Devil taking on a masked Anonymous avatar when dealing with the press, but it’s all pretty basic, classic action hero machismo. He’s a hero of the people, fighting back against the villainous slimeballs in suits who hold us down.

I don’t want to complain too much here about the programming at The Broad & The Prytania, which between them offer just about every new release I’d want to see on the big screen.  Just about.  Even when explosively over-the-top Indian action blockbusters like Thunivu play out at the suburban multiplex (which has 20 screens under one roof to play around with), they often play to near-empty rooms.  I guess what I’m most lamenting is that the recent successes of films like RRR & Pathaan have yet to drum up much of an appetite for other Bollywood, Kollywood, and Tollywood action epics, despite their routine delivery of the most exciting populist entertainment on the market, Hollywood be damned.  These crowdpleasing genre pictures are still treated like a niche interest in America, an esoteric cultural novelty that you can only access via a 90-minute bus ride or, if you’re patient enough, a subscription to Netflix. 

-Brandon Ledet

White Noise (2022)

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I know that I read Don DeLillo’s post-modern novel White Noise in high school (along with his Lee Harvey Oswald fan fiction Libra) because I still see my beat-up copy on a friend’s bookshelf every time I drop by for a visit.  I just could not recall anything that happens or is said in that book if asked, while similar works from authors like Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, and Barry Hannah have remained vivid in my memory.  That’s okay, though, because Noah Baumbach is on-hand to transcribe DeLillo’s novel word-for-word to jog my memory.  Baumbach’s live-action illustration of White Noise gives DeLillo’s words the Shakespeare in the Park treatment, parroting without edit or interpretation.  It’s the worst kind of literary adaptation, the kind that runs itself ragged trying to encapsulate everything touched on in its source material instead of reducing it to core essentials.  It’s aggressive in that approach, too, as its inhuman archetype characters recite dialogue directly off pages of the novel in a deliberately alienating, absurdist exercise that has no business leaving the art school context of a fiction-writing workshop or a black box theatre.  All Baumbach has accomplished here, really, is issuing an $80mil reminder to audiences that White Noise is worth a read (which, to be fair, is a more noble waste of Netflix’s money than most).

The second half of this 136min existential epic is almost worth the exercise.  White Noise starts off as a sweaty, distinctly Netflixy disaster thriller in which an academic couple (Adam Driver & Greta Gerwig) bungle their family’s escape from an “Airborne Toxic Event” that threatens to damage the health of the entire college town where they live.  Between the Altmanesque overlapping dialogue, the Spielbergian wonders-stares at the sky, and the academia in-jokes about the overlap between Hitler Studies & Elvis Scholarship, there is plenty enough movie in that first half alone to justify a standalone feature.  It’s just a movie without much of a point, nor many successful jokes.  In the second half, Driver & Gerwig really get into the selfish secrecy and personal struggles with existential dread that threaten to melt down their seemingly perfect marriage, and the purpose of adapting the novel in the first place starts to become clear.  If Baumbach wanted to make a movie about the crushing fear of death that keeps these characters from truly connecting with each other, I don’t know why he’d waste time running rampant making a disaster epic first, instead of either editing those events out of the picture entirely or summarizing them in flashback.  Adapting a novel does not mean you have to adapt all of the novel since, you know, cinema & fiction are two different artforms with drastically different qualities & necessities.

White Noise occasionally lands on some striking imagery by leaning into the intense artificiality of “The Netflix Look,” especially in scenes set at an overlit A&P grocery store (a setting it milks for all its worth in its concluding LCD Soundsystem music video).  More often, it’s just a baffling waste of talented performers’ time & energy.  Gerwig delivers an emotionally gutting monologue mid-film that’s a welcome reminder how talented she is on both sides of the camera.  Driver’s goofball physicality is naturally funny throughout, even when the words he’s reciting are too stiff to land a punchline.  If this were a shrewdly edited-down domestic drama about their crushing, isolating fears of death in the aftermath of a bizarre “Airborne Toxic Event,” the movie might have achieved the intellectual transcendence it’s straining for.  Instead, the event itself is given equal weight, exhausting the audience before the core story even takes shape.  I have no doubt this adaptation will have a dedicated cult, though.  Diehard fans of Charlie Kaufmann, Under the Silver Lake, and getting cornered at parties by chatty academics will find plenty to love here.  Personally, all I saw was a reminder that the things I love in creative writing are not the same qualities I value in cinema, as well as an ominous vision of what will inevitably happen when some misguided fool “adapts” Infinite Jest. 

-Brandon Ledet

Love and Leashes (2022)

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The two genres I’ve noticed thriving exclusively on Netflix in recent years have been cutesy romcoms and steamy erotica.  The erotic thriller heyday of the Verhoeven 80s and the romcom heyday of the Meg Ryan 90s have long been absent from theatrical marquees, so Netflix has stepped in to, um, fill those gaps, so to speak.  Somewhere between the quiet success of titles like 365 Days (erotic), To All the Boys I’ve Love Before (romantic), Deadly Illusions (erotic), and Always Be My Maybe (romantic), the streaming behemoth has gotten its algorithmic wires crossed and decided to split the difference with an erotic romcom set in the Korean kink scene, Love and Leashes.  Not since Gary Marshall’s Exit to Eden has kink play been treated with such a fluffy, mainstream, sexless touch (unless, of course, you include other recent Netflix properties like the kink-themed sitcom Bonding or the kink-themed home improvement show How to Build a Sex Room).  And since Netflix does not share verifiable data about their streaming numbers, we’ll never know how much demand there is for such an unlikely mix of theme & tone . . . unless they start commissioning more romcom erotica to fill out their splash page in the next couple years.  All I can say for now is that Love and Leashes is as adorable as its existence is absurd.

This is a cutesy, formulaic comedy about an unexpected BDSM office romance, essentially Secretary re-imagined as a femdom romcom.  When a new hire at a media marketing firm risks having his human dog collar shipped to work, his vanilla (but kink-curious) coworker accidentally receives the package instead. In their struggle for possession, the seedy Amazon order flies in the air as they both fall to the ground, flustered.  It’s a kinky re-imagining of the standard dog walking meet-cute of two destined-to-fuck strangers getting tangled up in leashes while trying not to spill their Starbucks orders.  Only, the rope bondage comes much later in the plot.  The man is sensitive and turned on by masochistic play; the woman is naturally bossy but uninitiated to the scene.  She finds a genuine thrill in transgressing the assumed submissiveness of her gender roles, though. She also uses the excuse of learning more about her new co-worker’s fetishes to attempt dating him in a more traditional, romantic dynamic.  Sometimes they play at work, charged by the thrill of potentially getting caught.  More often, they test the uneasy waters of their new mistress/sub dynamic in hotel rooms and in public, both pretending they’re only into the kink activities, not each other (for reasons that can only be explained as Romcom Brain).  It’s the kind of nothing conflict that could be solved by a single, honest conversation, but that’s true of most romcoms, with or without the leather gear.

Of course, there’s an inherent incompatibility in attempting a romcom/erotica genre mashup; most traditional romcoms are excessively chaste.  As a result, Love and Leashes is strangely sexless, considering all the butt plugs, harnesses, and ball gags that hang in the background as set decoration.  In terms of actual, onscreen sexual activity, the most we get is some flogging, hair-pulling, foot worship, rope bondage, and the same dripped-wax fantasy as the “Livin’ La Vida Loca” music video.  We can hear sex in the next hotel room over, but we’re in the room where a man is wearing a leash and yipping like a dog for comic effect – no insertions necessary.  This might have bothered me more if the pup’s mistress-in-training didn’t ask (in Sex and the City-style narration) “Is it weird to play this hard without having sex?”, noting the absurdity of their chaste dynamic.  She spends a lot of time online researching the standard dynamics of domme-sub relationships and chatting up anonymous kink veterans on message boards for newbie tips (setting up an obligatory, last-minute Gossip Girl reveal), totally unaware of how much sex she should be having with the sub under her “control.”  A lot of the central conflict is in the weirdly out-of-sync couple finding a way to enjoy transgressive kink play and start up a traditional, adorable romance on vanilla dates – the same conflict the movie has in its own dueling tones.

This is both my first K-drama and the first movie I’ve seen adapted from a “webtoon” (originally titled Moral Sense), so I can’t speak to how well Love and Leashes translates its source material to a new medium.  I’m an expert in scouring Netflix for low-level horny novelties, though, and it’s one of the better attempts at harmless erotica I’ve seen on the platform.  It’s a little sexually timid & cruelly overlong, but it’s a decent throwback romcom with just enough naughtiness to make the genre’s stalest tropes feel freshly amusing & cute.  The obvious next step for the platform is to get into the business of romcom softcore, but we’ll have to see how well this mashup does before they take that risk.

-Brandon Ledet

Incantation (2022)

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There are a lot (a lot) of ways in which Netflix is one of the most frustrating, underwhelming streaming behemoths in the game, but I will give them this: they’re a useful conduit for international genre cinema.  Most of the American-market content that floods that platform’s splash page is dull, overlit, purposefully disposable dreck, but if you know what you’re looking for, there’s plenty international genre gems lurking in the search pages – Indian action epics like RRR, Korean sci-fi adventures like Space Sweepers, Indonesian martial-arts romances like Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, and now the Taiwanese found-footage horror Incantation.  Just three months after Incantation premiered to great commercial success in Taiwanese theaters, it was available to stream globally on Netflix . . . as long as you knew to look for it.  That’s a remarkable turnaround when you think back to the video store days of the aughts, when horror nerds would spend years waiting to track down bootleg copies of then-obscure J & K-horror titles that fell through the cracks of American distribution (i.e. weren’t backed by Tartan Extreme).  I don’t want to give the money-torching, art-minimizing, transphobe-enabling corporate chuds at Netflix HQ too much credit, but they can be a good resource when it comes to international genre pictures.

I honestly don’t know much about the general history of Taiwanese horror (which is partly why it’s cool to have it beamed directly into my living room like this), but it is easy to see why Incantation was such a runaway success – the biggest Taiwanese box office earner of 2022 so far and the highest-grossing Taiwanese horror film of all time.  It’s spooky as hell.  The movie does little to overcome the decades of post-Blair Witch found footage fatigue in its mood, look, or story, but it does craft some genuinely terrifying images that will soon be making guest appearances in the audience’s nightmares.  Its writhing bugs, rotting flesh, flaming demons, dental mutations, and cursed Buddhist statues should shock even the most jaded viewers.  There isn’t much to the central story of a single mother who “violated a religious taboo” in a sacred tunnel, then spent the next six years fearfully protecting her daughter from the evil “deity” that seeks revenge for the transgression.  If anything, the movie deliberately obscures the rules & specifics of its mythmaking, explaining that “the more you know about it, the more it plagues you”.  That makes watching Incantation feel like a dangerous risk in itself (à la Ringu), but it also frees it from having to fully sketch out the shape & boundaries of its central threat.  There’s just a general curse hanging over our anti-heroine in distress, represented by a wide range of fucked up, bone-chilling images that linger in your mind way longer than the narrative that justifies them.

In theory, I’m all for Incantation using a bare-bones Evil Curse premise as a broad excuse for a loose collection of ghouls & scare gags.  In practice, I was a little disappointed by how much it cheats on its own found-footage conceit, muddying its believability & narrative immersion with non-linear editing of dual timelines and preposterous camera placements that violate the basic rules of the format.  The movie isn’t interested in working within the found-footage medium, so I’m not sure why it bothered, other than camcorder, smartphone, and CCTV security footage being cheap to replicate.  At the very least, it could have shot the flashbacks to the inciting religious transgression in a found-footage format, while shooting the present-day fallout of that blunder like a Regular Movie, since it wanted to use multiple camera set-ups & professional editing techniques in those sequences so badly.  Of course, this an embarrassingly nerdy thing to complain about, since the movie is spooky enough to (mostly) get away with ignoring its own premise.  It’s just that I’m usually very forgiving to that kind of rule-bending, and even I thought it cheated a little too much to get by unnoticed.

Pedantic nitpicking aside, Incantation joins a lot of the better over-the-plate horror freak-outs of the past couple years, titles like The Medium, The Empty Man, and The Queen of Black Magic.  It’s just as cool to be spooked by its tangential scare gags as it is to watch that strand of modern horror reach into a new cultural context most international audiences don’t often see onscreen.  And those other titles were not nearly as substantial of cultural hits in their own countries (Thailand, America, and Indonesia, respectfully), while Incantation measurably resonated with its domestic audience.  In its most ambitious moments, it asks its audience to participate in Buddhist prayer, actively getting further involved in a curse that gets exponentially worse the more you learn about it.  I’ll never understand the full cultural significance of those prayers, but it’s the kind of big, abstract idea that cuts through the petty scene-to-scene concerns of its found-footage cheats.  The eeriness of those audience participation prompts combines with the shock of its individual scares to make the film worth a look for any horror audience no matter where they live on the globe, and thanks to Netflix’s international genre acquisitions the entire globe has access to it while it’s still fresh.

-Brandon Ledet

Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (2022)

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In the time-honored tradition of Netflix underpromoting their film festival acquisitions in favor of front-paging their in-house Television Fad of The Week #content, we now have Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash — which premiered to positive reviews at last year’s TIFF & Locarno before being quietly dumped onto the global streaming platform this April.  I understand the difficulty in marketing this low-budget Indonesian curio; it is incredibly elusive in its genre & tone.  Vengeance is Mine is a sentimental indie romcom dressed up in the closed fists & stiff kicks of a retro martial arts bone-cruncher.  It mixes the understated, quietly morbid humor of a Kaurismäki film with the full-throttle fight choreography of vintage Hong Kong action schlock and the slowly simmering romance of a 90s festival-circuit slacker pic, topping it all off with a matter-of-fact ghost story & flashes of political satire.  In order to properly promote their product, Netflix would have to first be able to define what that product is, which is an exceedingly difficult task in this instance.  Still, it would have been worth it for them to give it a shot; they bought a very good movie, even if it’s a puzzling one.

In Vengeance is Mine, a small town fists-for-hire mercenary (Marthino Lio) starts as many bare-knuckled brawls as he can to broadcast & reinforce his masculinity, as it’s an open secret he’s been sexually impotent his entire adult life.  He meets his match in an adorable bodyguard (Ladya Cheryl), who beats him into submission and wins his bruised heart in the process.  It’s cute to watch them flirt through traded blows, sweetly smiling while kicking each other’s teeth in.  A years-spanning romance develops between the two lonely brutes, complicated of course by their inability to copulate in a traditional sense.  The film fully sidesteps the potential machismo of its street-brawl backdrop by building its central romance around male impotence & female sexual pleasure.  Ex-lovers, corrupt politicians, and meddling ghosts keep the story novel & unpredictable, even as it feels like not much is happening from scene to scene.  Director Edwin also underlines his female lead’s ties to the Cynthia Rothrock era of martial arts cinema by dialing the clock back to a late-80s setting—complete with windbreakers, dirt bikes, and rat tails—affording it a vintage cool on top of all its messy modern melodrama.

On the one hand, it’s wonderful that a movie this strange & low-key is available to a global audience on a platform as mainstream as Netflix.  It’s not enough for modern indie movies to be accessible, though.  They need to be marketed into existence, especially if they’re going to populate on streamers months after their initial festival buzz fades.  Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash might appear to be an especially difficult product to market but, I dunno, Drive My Car was a 3-hour drama about rehearsals for a staging of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya, and Janus Films managed to draw a lot of eyes to the screen for that one after it premiered at Cannes.  Netflix apparently does not care about promoting their own festival acquisitions unless they have potential Oscar Buzz™, which this bitter martial arts romcom very much does not.  I’m starting to wonder why they bother buying low-budget festival movies in the first place, even though I am enjoying the benefits.

-Brandon Ledet

Bigbug (2022)

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One of the more delightful side effects of Netflix spending ungodly amounts of money producing in-house Originals is that they often fund dream projects for established auteurs who’re struggling to adapt to a post-MCU movie industry, where every single production has to be either a multi-billion-dollar tentpole or an Oscars prestige magnet to be deemed worthwhile.  There’s something wonderful about the likes of Scorsese, Fincher, and Cuarón finally enjoying total creative freedom and unrestrained access to a corporate checkbook, all for a profit-loss streaming giant that has no tangible plans to make short-term returns on those investments.  It’s wonderful in concept, anyway.  Despite sidestepping the creative & budgetary restrictions of the traditional Hollywood production process, none of these legendary directors have been doing their best work on Netflix.  Mank, Roma, and The Irishman are all perfectly cromulent Awards Season dramas, but none can claim to match their respective auteurs’ creative heights in previous works made under more constrictive conditions.  Netflix should be an auteur’s paradise, but somehow the work they’re platforming from cinema’s most distinct artists is coming out bland & sanded down in the process.

What I cannot tell about Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s first Netflix project is how much of its blandness is intentional.  The basic premise of his sci-fi comedy Bigbug feels like classic Jeunet in that it’s a collection of oddball characters competing to out-quirk each other in a retro-futuristic fantasy realm.  However, Jeunet abandons the lived-in grime of his usual schtick to instead try out an eerily crisp, overlit production design that recalls the Spy Kids franchise more than it does anything he’s directed before.  It almost feels as if Jeunet is making fun of the Netflix house style with this cheap, plastic playhouse aesthetic, as it resembles the bright colors & bleached teeth of other Netflix Originals more than it does the sooty, antiqued worlds of films like Amélie, Delicatessen, or City of Lost Children.  I don’t know how much credit you can give Jeunet for making a film that’s bland on purpose, especially since plenty of Bigbug‘s slapstick gags & shrill one-liners are 100% intended to be funny and land with a miserable thud instead.  At the same time, Jeunet breaks up this single-location farce with totally unnecessary fade-to-black commercial breaks, reinforcing its production values as a TV-movie in an act of self-deprecation.  Questions of how good, how self-aware, and how critical of its own straight-to-streaming format Bigbug is persist throughout its entire runtime.  It’s undeniably the least idiosyncratic film in Jeunet’s catalog to date; the question is how much of its familiar, off-putting artificiality was the intention of the artist.

The truth is likely that Bigbug‘s plastic, sanitized production values were a circumstance of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and not a metatextual joke at the expense of the Netflix house style (a likelihood reinforced by a dire one-liner about a COVID-50 outbreak in the distant future).  In the film, several mismatched couples are locked inside a futuristic automated home to wait out an A.I. revolution that’s raging outside.  The humans in the house are all desperate to find privacy in lockdown so they can have sex.  The home-appliance robots they share the space with are desperate to be respected as fellow autonomous beings, mimicking the humans’ shrill, erratic behavior in idolization.  Both factions—the robots and the humans—must join forces to outsmart the fascistic A.I. supersoldiers that inevitably invade their prison-home, but the movie doesn’t feel all that invested in the terror of that threat.  Instead, it works more as a brochure for fictional automated-home technology, like the retro-future kitsch of 1950s World’s Fair reels promoting far-out kitchen appliances.  Treating this trapped-inside surveillance state premise as a thin metaphor for the limbo of COVID-19 lockdowns, Jeunet doesn’t stress himself out too much in pursuit of a plot.  The setting is mostly an excuse for a series of one-off gags involving navel-gazing vacuum cleaners, short-circuiting dildo bots, and the ritualistic humiliations of Reality TV.  It’s all extremely frivolous & silly, and some of it is even halfway funny.

At its best, Bigbug plays like The Exterminating Angel reprised on the set of the live-action Cat in the Hat.  At its worst, it plays like excruciatingly dull deleted scenes from the live-action Cat in the Hat.  I honestly don’t know what to make of that cursed imbalance, but I do know that it is at least a huge creative departure for Jeunet as a visual stylist.  All Netflix-spotlighted auteurs have done their blandest, most overly sanitized work for the streaming behemoth, but only Jeunet has leaned so far into that quality downgrade that it feels at least semi-intentional.  No one makes a movie this bizarrely artificial by accident – least of all someone whose work usually looks like it was filmed at the bottom of an antique ashtray.

-Brandon Ledet

The House (2022)

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Netflix has a habit of quietly dropping substantial, worthwhile art onto its streaming platform without any promotion or fanfare, but I’m not sure I’ve ever been as surprised by one of its dead quiet in-house releases as I was by The House.  The only reason this stop-motion anthology caught my eye is that one of its three segments was directed by the animators of This Magnificent Cake! (Emma De Swaef & Marc James Roels), and I recognized the visual trademarks of their work on the thumbnail poster.  Otherwise, I haven’t seen much official promotion or social media hoopla signaling the film’s uneventful release this month, at least not without looking for it directly.  And when I search for reviews & press releases covering The House, different sites appear to be in conflict about what it even is.  Netflix lists it as a one-time “special”.  IMDb & Rotten Tomatoes list it as a three-episode season of a supposedly ongoing “series” (likely because its three segments are credited to three different sets of animators).  Meanwhile, review sites like AV Club & RogerEbert.com are treating it as a standalone feature film.  That’s the category that registers as correct to me, given that it’s contained in one 97min presentation with no rigid episode breaks.  Still, I do think the general confusion about its format is indicative of Netflix’s constant, apathetic flood of #content with no attention paid to the promotion or artistic value of anything that’s not going to earn the company Oscars or Emmys.

A large part of the reason The House holds together as a standalone feature film is that all three of its segments were penned by a single screenwriter, Enda Walsh.  As the tones & visual styles shift between each segment’s separate animation teams (De Swaef & Roels, Niki Lindroth von Bahr, Paloma Baeza), Walsh maintains a strong narrative core throughout as the central authorial voice.  The House is a darkly funny stop-motion anthology about a cursed house’s journey through different eras of doomed owners.  Divided between the past, the present, and the future of the ornate structure, each set of its owners are working class rubes who are mesmerized by its opulence & grandeur, convinced that it will bring wealth & social status into their lives with just a little hard work & determination.  Each segment ends with the lesson-learned punchline of a centuries-old ghost story or fairy tale, with the owners’ obsession with the house inevitably absorbing them into its walls & bones.  It all amounts to a pretty relatable horror story about how “owning” a house basically means a house owns you – something that debt-saddled Millennials should be able to recognize as a real-world truth, anyway. 

As with all horror anthologies, The House varies in quality from segment to segment.  De Swaef & Roels open the film on its strongest, eeriest footing, while the hopeful note Baeza concludes with feels like its weakest step.  Between those bookends, there’s a great wealth of gorgeous animation, dark humor, and melancholy.  De Swaef & Roels have the most distinct visual style of the batch (working with the same textured felts & beading that distinguished This Magnificent Cake!), while von Bahr & Baeza both play with the taxidermy-in-motion style of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox.  Overall, it’s Walsh’s consistency in theme & tone that holds the film’s structure together as a convincing, satisfying whole.  I found this film just as visually & narratively impressive as any animation project I’ve seen in the past couple years, and yet its release has been so barebones that professional media critics can’t even decide whether it’s a Film at all.  Maybe I’ll be embarrassed next year when a Season 2 of The House is released on Netflix and my miscategorization is confirmed, but in all likelihood I wouldn’t even be aware a follow-up exists at all.

-Brandon Ledet