reviews

Family Portrait (2024)

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Boredom is a funny thing. I recently attended a screening of Family Portrait, a domestic drama that runs just under eighty minutes. In truth, I call it a “drama” because I’m not really sure what else it could be, even though the word drama implies a level of action that’s not really present here. I don’t want to come down too hard on this film, as it was made by a local filmmaker and shot in the hill country near me, with help from a grant from the film society to which I belong. When asked about it by friends after the show, I admitted that although I wasn’t bored by it (I am, after all, that insufferable film person archetype who loves The Tree of Wooden Clogs and whom the internet loves to hate), it was boring. Intentionally so, I think, but nonetheless, a successful experiment in generating the sensation of being the guest at someone else’s family get-together and having nothing to do there is going to be, well, that. Director Lucy Kerr could not be present at the screening that I attended, but she shot an introduction for the film that looked like she was being forced to do it at gunpoint, and that set a certain tone for the whole thing.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around Katy (Deragh Campbell), who has returned to her family’s humongous estate, which lies on the Guadalupe River, so that her assembled sisters, brothers-in-law, and nieces and nephews can take their Christmas card photo. Also present is her boyfriend Olek (Chris Galust), a Polish immigrant, who is to be the photographer and who is excused from the photograph as he has not married into the family yet. After the film opens with a dialogue-free scene in which these as-yet-unknown-to-us characters cross a large yard and gather beneath a tree in slightly slowed footage, the soundtrack droning as we see a few small interactions between characters that imply we’ll be learning more about them later, we start the day with Katy, who wakes up later than the rest of the family. She asks Olek why he reacted the way he did to one of the other near-dozen adults the previous night; he didn’t like the way that they were talking about his accent (which they misidentify as Russian despite knowing he’s Polish), and she reminds him that these are simple Texas people. Her mother prepares breakfast (with the help of a “domestic”), her father tells a meandering story about how one of the family’s photos (that we don’t get to see) is a famous one that was long-misidentified as being from the Vietnam War rather than from WWII. The family gets word that an uncle’s stepdaughter has died after a recent hospital visit; Katy’s father expresses that he thinks that she died because she went to the hospital (and in this case he appears to be right, as the implication is that she was an early COVID-19 victim before the virus was acknowledged), which leads to a light argument with his daughters about hospital safety and mandatory (meningitis) vaccines (for public university students). 

Most of the film follows Katy as she tries to find her mother so that they can take their card photo and she and Olek can catch their flight, while everyone else just kind of shrugs off her concerns and says that the matriarch has to be around somewhere. Most of the interactions that take place do so around her as she wanders the property, finally going into first the woods and then the river before coming back to the house, and the film ending. Two of her brothers in law lounge on lawn chairs as one recounts to the other at hypnotic length about how the office that he worked at in the early nineties became obsessed with watching a streaming video of a university coffee pot. Her sisters have a brief talk about dreams in the most literal way possible; one of them admits that she literally has no ability to imagine things, that she can’t create an image in her mind, and that she doesn’t really know if she dreams. Recounting it as a topic here makes it sound thoughtful, and I want to clarify here that this is not the case. It’s more like being privy to a discussion between three adults with no real inner lives to speak of as they while away a lunch date in the next booth over at Bennigan’s. In fact, every conversation that every character has is so insubstantial that, in comparison to how little seemed to happen, I’m surprised I was able to get this much text onto the page describing these vignettes. 

They only constitute about a fifth of the film, however, as the rest of it consists mostly of long shots of leaves blowing in the wind, water flowing in a stream, minutes-long extreme close-ups of jawlines and partial profiles, and long pans around what can only be described as a compound rather than a yard as Katy languidly looks for her mother. One of my first interpretations, which I must admit is not too charitable to Kerr, was that this was a poor attempt at imitating European art films. You know when you’re watching something like King of the Hill or Arrested Development or The Simpsons and there’s a gag about a film in the vein of, say, Tree of Wooden Clogs, and they parody it as plotless, static, and boring? Family Portrait, in some ways, feels like someone who’s never seen a European film but who has seen the parodies of it trying to make an earnest attempt at that kind of art. That’s boring, but like I said, that doesn’t bore me. I’ve seen a lot of this kind of grasping for artistic merit over the years, and this one is far and away one of the prettiest examples, if nothing else. From there, though, I thought, perhaps that is the point. After all, we’ve all had that feeling of the midday doldrums, the feeling you get when you’ve been around family for too long (or spent some time with someone else’s huge family) and you’ve got nothing but time to kill until the appointed hour of dinner or to leave (or take a family picture). Adding a layer of that element of anxiety that’s moderately surreal and ephemeral but not quite nightmarish; it’s a stress dream about getting everything together in time to make it to the airport and trying to get help from the people around you, but they’re all completely apathetic about it. It evokes that fine line between boredom and panic, and if I had come to rest on that as my final reading of the text, I would have concluded that the movie was a bit pretentious but harmless and sufficiently pleasant in terms of its technical composition, and I’d add that I was glad I had seen it in the theater as I don’t think I would have been able to stay engaged at home. 

But in the composition of this review, I’ve decided to try and go very generous with regards to Kerr, and say that maybe Family Portrait isn’t about that at all. You see, this isn’t at all what I was expecting when I first saw this on the film society’s calendar, with a blurb that summarized the film as “Gathering at the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic, a Texas clan’s attempts to sit for a photograph are foiled by a missing matriarch and her disturbed daughter,” and which promised “a study of cracked family dynamics into a series of chiaroscuro contrasts.” You read that and you think “Oh, maybe it’s about a family that doesn’t get along very well but who are able to put things aside once a year for this picture, and then they end up trapped together for an extended period of time.” That sounds fun. Or “Maybe it’s about the conflict between this rich family and their servants as they’re all forced together.” I loved Triangle of Sadness, that sounds great! But this film is none of those things. The novel coronavirus is largely a background detail in Family Portrait, and I couldn’t stop wondering why such a minor narrative element was so vital to the narrative of the marketing. The sudden disappearance of Katy’s mother isn’t because she got infected; that’s not how it works. 

The only conclusion I could reach was that, perhaps, this is a film about the banality of evil, in a similar vein as Zone of Interest. If that’s the case, it’s also an oddly confessional one, as Kerr shot the film entirely in and around her family home, which she notes in the introduction is called “Kerplunk” in a presumed play on the family name (and in fact, a plaque with Kerplunk written on it appears in one of the many common rooms in the house, where the men of the family are watching football). If I were a first-time filmmaker and the recipient of a grant, I wouldn’t cop to the fact that I grew up in that level of decadent comfort, in a gigantic home of countless rooms on an estate that meets a lazy flowing river and encompasses various other buildings as well as separate tennis and basketball courts. It’s like advertising to the whole world that you had the privilege of a spacious home and plenty of outdoor space while the rest of us were squirreled away in our little apartment hovels sanitizing apples and cereal boxes. This family, which we’ll call “the Kerrs” for the sake of simplicity, are completely insulated from the reality of the pandemic at their gates, with their servants still at hand and where the most stressful thing in life is trying to take a photograph. The banality of every conversation, then, contributes to the larger examination of aristocratic separation from common suffering, and that’s a brave thing to bring to the table for dissection as a filmmaker. 

Is this a confession? A pretension? An experiment in boredom? In the end, I’m not sure. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

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I saw I Saw the TV Glow at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, a five-day horror marathon that’s held in New Orleans every Spring.  In an attempt to put my festival pass to full use, I crammed my schedule with new releases, spending noon to midnight at a downtown shopping mall for a four-day stretch of the fest.  I skipped sleep, meals, and parties so I could disappear into The Movies, only seeing friends in passing if they happened to catch me in line for a screening.  It’s likely no coincidence, then, that the Overlook title that has stuck with me most was the one about the self-destructive distraction of niche media obsession.  Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to the isolation-of-the-internet drama We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is about the corrosive isolation of obsessively watching television instead of living a real, authentic life.  It felt absurd to immediately get in line for another movie right after its credits rolled, but I found myself doing it anyway, refusing to wake up from my self-induced screen rot stupor.  It didn’t exactly change my life, but it did make me sincerely question some things about how I’m living it.

Justice Smith stars as a socially petrified suburban nerd who’s afraid to fully express himself to anyone, including himself.  The closest he gets to breaking out of his shell is in watching The Pink Opaque, a 90s kids’ fantasy show about two psychically linked summer camp friends who are geographically separated but still fight supernatural evil as a team.  Styled after retro Nickelodeon programming like Are You Afraid of the Dark? and The Adventures of Pete & Pete, The Pink Opaque is the kind of deceptively complex children’s programming that roots itself in a young audience’s brains for a lifetime, immediately triggering dormant memories & feelings with just a couple still images or a few notes of a theme song.  It’s also a show specifically marketed to girls, so our timid protagonist is afraid to be caught watching it, both out of fear of his homophobic brute father (an unrecognizable, terrifying Fred Durst) and out of fear of what it might awaken in his own psychology.  He finds refuge in an older, lesbian student at his school (Brigette Lundy-Paine) who sneaks taped episodes of The Pink Opaque into his possession, so that their real-life relationship mirrors the psychic link between the distanced besties of their favorite show.  When his only friend asks him to join her in breaking out of the oppressive social & familial ruts of the suburbs, he’s too scared to go.  The show is then abruptly cancelled, reality breaks, and the parts of himself he refuses to confront devour his soul while he suffocates in isolation.

I Saw the TV Glow is the melancholy dark side of the Brigsby Bear moon.  It’s specifically targeted at Millennial nostalgia for vintage, tape-warped 90s media, but like Brigsby Bear it’s clear-eyed in its messaging that disappearing into that media is not a healthy substitute for a real-world social life.  It’s impossible not to read this particular version of that story as a cautionary tale for would-be transgender people who are too afraid to come out to themselves, to the point where Shoenbrun practically reaches through the screen to shake that specific audience awake with the handwritten message “There is still time.”  Even if you don’t need to be encouraged to embrace your true, hidden gender identity, the movie still hits home for anyone who’s ever avoided authentically engaging with their life, body, or community by disappearing into niche media consumption instead.  Like World’s Fair, it’s an emotionally heavy film that touches on themes of suicide, loneliness, and parental abuse.  No amount of Pete & Pete visual references or prop Fruitopia vending machines can ease the pain weighing on its heart.  If anything, its nostalgia for vintage 90s media only gets more sinister the more it’s used as an emotional crutch; the Trip to the Moon-styled villain of The Pink Opaque becomes a stand-in for suicidal depression and his on-the-ground moon minions become gender dysphoria demons who go away if you stop thinking about them but never die if you never confront them. 

The most frequent complaint about We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was that it was mismarketed as a horror film when really it’s just a melancholy drama about a terminally-online teenager who’s so lonely she deliberately loses her grip on reality.  It was bold of Overlook to screen Schoenbrun’s next film alongside the program’s more recognizable ghouls, ghosts, and ballerina vampires, then, since their customer base can be vocally opinionated about what does or does not count as Horror; I can still hear echoes of bros in black t-shirts grumbling after their 2019 screening of Jennifer Reader’s Knives & Skin.  I Saw the TV Glow has a much stronger case for being programmed in a horror genre context than World’s Fair, though, since it depicts a full supernatural breakdown of reality after the cancellation of The Pink Opaque.  Tape warp TV static and monster-of-the-week villains invade the real world of our emotionally-closed-off protagonist with escalating violence the longer he ignores who he really is.  The static even invades his body, literalizing the dysphoric sensation he describes of having his insides dug out with a shovel.  Maybe it’s more of a nightmare drama in the way Ari Aster pitched Beau is Afraid as “a nightmare comedy,” but it’s a goddamned nightmare either way – one that the volatile combination of rigid social norms and insurmountable personal anxiety make countless people suffer every day.   It made me so sad I felt physically ill, and then I immediately disappeared into another horror movie so I didn’t have to think about it for too long.

-Brandon Ledet

Problemista (2024)

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I’ve been a fan of Julio Torres’s for years, ever since a friend introduced me to the joys of Patti Harrison and I got into that whole crew. Los Espookys was a lot of fun, and I was excited to hear about his directorial debut when it originally premiered at SXSW last year, in 2023. It took some time for it to make it to my local theater, but I was excited to see that not only did it hit the mainstream multiplex nearest me, but that there was a surprisingly dense group of people in attendance at my Tuesday night screening, and it got a response from everyone there. 

Alejandro (Torres) is the son of a Salvadoran artist, and many of her designs for public art features came from his imagination, made manifest by her. As an adult, he’s living in a nightmare NY apartment situation and attempting to break into his dream job, as a toy designer for Hasbro. Unfortunately, despite his application to their “talent incubator program,” which included such designs as Cabbage Patch Dolls that have smartphones and the attendant anxiety that comes with such devices, slinkies that simply refuse to go down stairs, and a Barbie with her fingers crossed behind her back (instant drama in the dream house), he has not been selected. Instead, he makes a meager living at a cryogenic facility, where he is assigned to a particular corpse, Bobby (RZA), a painter who was focused on one particular subject: eggs. Bobby’s been frozen for over twenty years, and his art critic wife Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton) is fed up with the ever-increasing cost of his “care.” When Alejandro is fired for a workplace accident—one with zero consequences—at roughly the same time that Bobby is to be moved to a smaller, less expensive part of the facility that does not accommodate his paintings, he latches onto the idea of helping her put together a show of Bobby’s work, as she needs the help and he needs an employee sponsorship in order to remain in the U.S. She agrees, but Ale quickly realizes that he’s bitten off more than he bargained for. Elizabeth is, it turns out, an erratic, defensive, bitter, verbally abusive narcissist, perhaps the exact evil monster his mother foresaw him encountering in a dream. 

Swinton’s performance here is utterly phenomenal, and Torres’s directorial and narrative choices that make her alternatively demonic, sympathetic, and delusional are pitch perfect. There are countless tiny details about Elizabeth that build a portrait of a very particular kind of person, one whom all of us have encountered at some point. When she’s sold on something, she’s devoted to it to the point of nearly psychotic loyalty, as evidenced by her obsession with using FileMaker Pro, a three decade old computer program, in order to maintain continuity across all of her databases. She’s hit a point of technological arrested development, and her frustration is made the problem of everyone else around her: Apple phone service agents for whom explaining how to find her photos on her phone is a daily occurrence, Ale for having to learn software that might be older than he is, and everyone who crosses her path and is blinded by her smartphone’s flashlight, which is always at full blast. She’s a classic evader, as she deflects any and all attempts to rationalize with her by changing the subject to one of her other countless complaints, and she has no appreciation for how her apathy toward signing his sponsorship documentation keeps him in a perpetual state not just of anxiety but of danger as well. 

Alejandro is her perfect foil in addition to being her assistant and, in some ways, both her student and her teacher. The details are best left discovered through a viewing rather than recited here, but the plan to be saved from deportation via Elizabeth’s sponsorship fails … but not before she empowers him to achieve not just his short-term goal of staying in the country, but his larger goals of sharing his ideas with the world through his toy creation. When he was a boy, Alejandro’s mother never limited his dreams in the slightest, and instead of that making him a selfish, demanding adult, it’s made him a soft-spoken sweetheart, and through learning to stand up to Elizabeth and break through the barrier she’s built between her reality and the world at large, he grows. And, having witnessed (and received) countless rants and diatribes from Elizabeth, he learns that this is rarely the best way to resolve a situation; there are instances in which it’s the only way to resolve it, though, and he uses this new wisdom to not only make sure that he receives credit for his ideas, but to secure a future for himself. The film has already provided an alternative happy ending by creating a path for him to stay in the U.S., and in a more realistic movie, we would likely have seen Ale accepting the job as a translator from his immigration lawyer and we would end the film with his next year’s submission to the Hasbro incubator program. Instead, Alejandro goes for broke and so does Problemista, to my delight. 

If you haven’t seen the movie or any of its advertising, then this probably sounds like a fairly straightforward plot description, since I’ve mentioned absolutely nothing about the film’s touches of magical realism, other than a brief mention of Ale’s mother’s dreams about his future. In the dream, she sees her son approaching a darkened cave, the depths of which are completely occluded other than two glowing red eyes. Elizabeth becomes that monster, dragon-like, but when Alejandro breaks through her self-deception forcefield and gets her to take an opportunity to show Bobby’s paintings despite it being “beneath” her, he appears in that imagined cave wearing a child’s toylike idea of a chivalric knight’s armor, besting her. Alejandro imagines the thirty day grace period he has to find sponsorship for his employment visa as an upturned hourglass, set amongst hundreds of other such devices, and he sees a woman fade from existence in front of him at the lawyer’s office when her time runs out. And, when he is forced into a series of degrading, quick, for-cash Craigslist jobs, the website is personified as a living being (Larry Owens) that presents him with opportunities for food delivery, handing out hair care product advertisements, and, ever present as a last resort, “Cleaning Boy (kink).” 

There are a myriad of effusively captured smaller roles here as well. Torres’s partner James Scully, of You and Fire Island fame, is ironically cast as Ale’s nemesis. The perfectly named Bingham is a white, New England landed gentry layabout whom Elizabeth is asked by a friend to take on as a secondary assistant, and whose effortless WASPy sycophantism charms her. There are hints throughout that Elizabeth may owe what meager success she had in her critical career to her aggressiveness and self-delusion more than to her eye for art, and although I don’t know that this makes her “shallow” necessarily, she’s positively wooed by Bingham’s surface level blaséness and taken in by him, to the degradation of her working relationship with Ale. One couldn’t ask for a more perfect narrator for all of this than Isabella Rosselini, whose soft enunciation of Torres’s script creates just as much magic as the visuals, and as a fan of Killjoys, it’s always exciting to see Kelly McCormack out and about in the world, even if her appearance is brief (but memorable!). My favorite appearance, however, was from Greta Lee, who appears briefly as Dalia, a former protegee (and more) of Bobby, who is in possession of Blue Egg on Yellow Satin, the final painting needed to complete his posthumous(?) show. She’s an utter delight to see here, and she makes a big impression despite her relatively short screen time. 

This is my favorite movie that I’ve seen so far this year, and I couldn’t have been happier that I ended up in a less-than-ideal seat at the theater because there were so many other people already there. There was a constant undercurrent of pure joy that rippled throughout, and it proved that it had something for everyone as groups of various ages released giggles, laughs, and even the occasional chuckle, all over different bits and jokes. (One thing that we could all agree on: Torres’s eccentric running style never got old.) I loved this one, and if you have enough joy in your heart, I think you’ll love it too. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Azrael (2024)

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Do you think becoming known as a scream queen is a blessing or a curse?  Both?  Australian actress Samara Weaving is only a household name among horror nerds, but she’s been a must-see performer for that tattoos-and-black-t-shirts contingent since she starred in Ready or Not & The Babysitter a half-decade ago.  Watching her latest star vehicle Azrael at Overlook Film Festival this weekend, I wondered whether her career was stalling there rather than starting.  Watching Weaving go on another one-woman revenge mission that soaks her gorgeous face & blonde hair in buckets of her enemies’ blood & viscera made me question how satisfying it is for her as an actor to return to the exact same beats that have already made her horror-convention-famous.  It’s likely comforting to know she can always fall back on consistent paychecks by starring gimmicky, gory horror flicks, but she shows just enough talent in them that you have to wonder why no one is sending her scripts for anything else (give or take a metatextual gag in Babylon that jokes about her striking resemblance to Margot Robbie).

At least Azrael offers Weaving an acting challenge to maintain her scream queen status in a role where she’s technically not allowed to scream at all.  Set in an apocalyptic future where Rapture cults have renounced the sin of Speech (whatever that means), Weaving’s mute protagonist attempts to live a quiet, domestic life in the woods outside society with her doting romantic partner.  The nearby cult has other ideas, kidnapping those lovers with plans to feed them to the charred-flesh Rapture zombies who hunt left-behind humans whenever the wind blows the wrong way.  There are vague gestures towards explaining the mythology behind this convoluted set up, mostly spelled out in the cult’s crude finger paintings and in the rhythmic breathing rituals that summon the woodland demons.  However, writer Simon Barrett (You’re Next, The Guest, Blair Witch) has said in interviews that the idea for the film came to him in a recurring dream, so let’s just assume you’re supposed to feel it more than understand it.  It’s all just background dressing for an adorable Samara Weaving to descend into hideous, cathartic violence, something she’s now proven she can do credibly while not uttering a sound. Next time, she’ll do it with her eyes closed, and then backwards in heels.

Between this film, last year’s No One Will Save You, and the ongoing Quiet Place series, it appears horror filmmakers are now actively combating the second-screen viewing habits of the streaming era, stubbornly making sure the audience watching along at home has to put down their phones to fully follow the plot.  Azrael director E.L. Katz doesn’t bring much new to the table within that burgeoning Hey Pay Attention horror subgenre, except maybe in the extremity of the scene-to-scene violence (something he already proved cruel enough to deliver in the pitch-black comedy Cheap Thrills).  Elderly and pregnant women are vulnerable targets; Weaving’s final showdown with the evil cult leader is a machete vs. meat cleaver fight; and the camera is always willing to linger on the painful aftermath of a fresh wound.  Still, there’s nothing especially novel about the doomsday-survival cult setting or the burn-victim zombies who lurk at its edges.  The movie’s main hook is for horror nerds who want to watch Weaving go through it one more time in their own perverse cult ritual.  Admittedly, I am one of those nerds, but I’m still hopeful that she’ll soon break free from our captivity.

-Brandon Ledet

Arcadian (2024)

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Like most hopeless, depraved movie nerds, I’ll watch pretty much anything with Nicolas Cage in it, since he’s a reliably entertaining performer no mattery the quality of the project signing that week’s paycheck.  That means I’ve seen a lot of mediocre DTV action movies over the years, often ones where Cage’s prominence on the poster is outright dishonest about his prominence in the picture advertised.  I had somehow deluded myself into believing this slumming-it phase of Cage’s career was coming to a close, though, since recent projects like Mandy, Pig, and Dream Scenario were starting to reveal a light at the end of that particular sewer tunnel.  Cage’s latest made-for-streaming action horror Arcadian—which locally premiered at Overlook Film Festival last weekend—was a reality check on that delusion.  Between its post-apocalyptic setting, its grim-grey lighting, and Nicolas Cage dutifully showing up just along enough to earn a sizeable payment to the IRS, Arcadian feels as if it’s about five to ten years behind the times, even when it’s trying its hardest to show you something new.

Cage stars as a single, grieving father who moves his surviving family to remote farmland at the start of The Apocalypse.  His twin boys get increasingly difficult to manage when they age into teenage grumps, which makes it even more difficult to survive the nightly attacks of the mutant creatures who ended modern civilization in the first place.  Since there is no shortage of reference points for this kind of doomsday prepper action-horror, Arcadian doesn’t put much effort into explaining the details of the world Cage & his boys are fighting to survive.  Whether it’s the artsy abstraction of It Comes at Night or the weekly soap opera of The Walking Dead, you’ve seen this exact setup before.  What you haven’t seen is the peculiar biological details of these exact monsters: hairy ostrich-wolves who clap their jaws like chattering-teeth novelty toys and travel as a pack in a rolling Ferris wheel formation.  There’s plenty of intrigue there for anyone drawn in by Cage’s name & face on the poster, which does a lot to make up for him spending half of the runtime offscreen, comatose.  When he suddenly perks up for the climactic fight against the impossible wolf-beasts, you can practically see him flipping on his It Factor movie star presence like a light switch.  It’s only a few seconds of screentime, but it’s exactly what you paid to see.

Arcadian is decently entertaining for a Shudder-brand creature feature, by which I mean its monsters’ design is inventive & upsetting enough to hold your attention despite the banality of their surroundings.  Director Benjamin Brewer’s most prominent IMDb credit to date is as the lead visual effects artist for Everything Everywhere All at Once, which shows here in the ambition & absurdity of the wolf-beasts’ hideous biology.  The dark, muddled color palette and handheld cinematography style are more befitting of a war drama than a creature feature, but again it’s worth pushing through that tedium to get a better look at the monsters.  And hey, there’s still making popular, big-budget Quiet Place sequels long after that series has maintained any purpose or novelty, so I can’t say this film is entirely out of date.  Brewer leveraged Cage’s image on a poster and piggybacked off a familiar mainstream horror template to show off his prowess for inventive, impressive visual effects.  I can’t be mad at that kind of Roger Corman marketing hustle, especially since Cage has lent this likeness to far, far worse.

-Brandon Ledet

Cuckoo (2024)

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Tilman Singer has quickly become the most exciting new voice in cosmic horror.  His debut feature Luz started as a film school thesis project but was so strangely, psychically powerful that it broke out into wide release as one of the very best films of 2019 (according to me, anyway).  I watched Luz as a quietly buzzy horror curio that reached my living room via VOD rental, and I was blown away by the volatile imbalance between its cosmic-scale ambitions and its dirt-cheap budget.  His follow-up sophomore feature Cuckoo arrived in New Orleans with much louder fanfare.  Backed by Neon’s hip-cred marketing machine and starring one of the few non-influencer celebrities that teens care about (Hunter Schafer, of Euphoria fame), Cuckoo is a much hotter ticket than Luz was just a few years ago.  Its recent local premiere at Overlook Film Fest was packed to the walls with horror-hungry eyeballs, and although the enthusiasm in the room sounded mixed, anyone familiar with Luz knew exactly what kind of a surreal mindfuck we were in for.  Cuckoo escalates the verbal psychedelia of Luz to something more traditionally thrilling, hopping genres from demonic possession to creepy asylum horror but maintaining the same screenwriting ambitions of pulling brain-melting ideas out of simple, stripped-down tools.

Hunter Schafer stars as a grieving teen who joins her estranged, emotionally distant, German father’s new family after her mother’s death.  That new, uneasy family unit moves into a seasonally unoccupied resort in the Alps so the father & stepmother can work for the site’s enigmatic owner, played by a cartoonishly evil Dan Stevens.  Of course, the resort doubles as a mad scientist laboratory for Stevens’s Dr. Caligari-style medical experiments, which somehow involve strange shrieking sounds in the woods outside the cabins and the strange woman who makes them.  The movie explains exactly what’s going on in due time, but it’s the kind of explanation that only further twists your brain in knots with every new detail.  What’s important is that Singer effectively squeezes unnerving scares out of simple, straightforward methods, somehow crafting one of modern cinema’s creepiest cryptids by dressing one of his actresses in a trench coat, wig, and sunglasses.  I suppose it’s also important that Schafer’s teen brattiness is what ultimately saves the day, since her resolve to drown out the world with comically large, loud headphones until she’s old enough to move out on her own is exactly what protects her from the wigged cryptid’s aural violence.  She also eventually learns how to love at least one member of her new family, but it’s a perilous road getting there, one with many pitstops on hospital beds.

Cuckoo slowly builds its own unique mythology instead of leaning on traditional creature-feature or mad scientist payoffs.  It’s an impressive mix of sly humor & unnerving psychedelia, one that gets genuinely nightmarish in its forced pregnancy threats but also allows Dan Stevens to goof off with an exaggerated German accent & a magical flute, as if he were a recurring SNL character instead of a villainous fascist.  It’s a great theatrical experience, less so for its visual eccentricities (which mostly amount to time-loop editing & a vibrating frame) than for its aural ones (constant shrieks & gunshots that are best heard loud). I get the sense that all the central collaborators are getting away with something here.  Schafer recently said in a GQ interview that she’s no longer interested in playing roles that center her transgender identity, and this movie doesn’t care about that at all; it just cares how cool she looks wielding a butterfly knife: very.  Stevens also gets plenty of room to go big as an absolute maniac, something it feels like he hasn’t gotten to do on this scale since The Guest a full decade ago.  Then there’s Singer, who’s now found a much bigger canvas and a much bigger audience for his cosmic horror oddities.  I hope his work continues to escalate this way, since he has a lot of potential to become one of the all-time greats in the genre, if not only in his power to bewilder.

-Brandon Ledet

Riddle of Fire (2024)

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It’s going to sound like an insult to immediately focus on its background details, but the low-budget kids’ adventure Riddle of Fire has some of the best set decoration artistry I’ve seen in any modern picture not directed by Wes Anderson.  A large portion of the film is set in the woods, which comes with its own ready-made production value, but the interiors of characters’ living spaces are intensely, wonderfully over-curated.  Whether cataloging a curio cabinet of one witchy mother’s taxidermy projects & Pagan relics or scanning over another, normier mother’s sickbed full of used tissues & plastic medicine bottles, the adult world at the outskirts of Riddle of Fire is crammed with tactile visual information.  It’s a fascinating collection of weird little talismans and the weird little dirtbags who cherish them, conjuring up childhood memories of a time when mundane objects held immense power.  It’s the feeling of bringing home a vintage t-shirt, a futuristic video game, a cool-looking rock; it’s magic practiced through obsessive, personal collection.

This practical magic of collecting just the right assemblage of seemingly mundane objects is central to the text.  The story is set in modern, suburban Wyoming, but it’s structured as a fairy tale quest to acquire a specific list of impossible-to-secure items, achieving legendary hero status once complete.  A small gang of children shoot paintballs & ride dirt bikes around their unimpressive suburb without much outside attention.  Their petty crime spree escalates when they steal a futuristic video game counsel from a poorly guarded warehouse, and they plan to waste away what’s left of their summer eating snacks and smashing controller buttons on the couch.  Only, their mother figure has locked the TV with a parental control to ensure they’ll spend some quality time outside.  They convince her to hand over the password if they bring home a blueberry pie to ease her flu symptoms, which leads them to doing a similar favor for the local baker, then seeking out a speckled egg to bake the pie recipe themselves, and so on.  The list of items gradually leads them astray to the point where they go to war with a Cottage Core death cult in the woods outside town, shooting paintballs at violent felons who pack real guns with real bullets – all in a fairy tale video game quest to bake an epic blueberry pie.

There’s an understated but over-verbalized magic to this film, which is mined for low-key absurdist humor.  The central trio of neighborhood brats announce themselves as The Three Immortal Reptiles, distinguished by the taxidermized reptile feet they wear on novelty necklaces as gang insignia.  When they make unlikely friends with the adult gang’s young daughter figure, she’s announced as Petal Hollyhock, The Princess of the Enchanted Blade, not simply as Petal.  The forest outside town is located at the edge of Faery Castle Mountain, described in-dialogue as “a wolf land of magic & dreams.”  Everything in the script is overly verbose in this way, so that when the kids collect a creepy babydoll to aid in their quest it is consistently described as “a rather chilling, ghastly doll” with no variation.  It’s like watching the rascals from The Florida Project get dropped off on the shores of Roan Inish, with their dialogue getting stuck somewhere between those two worlds.  Between its artful collection of strange objects and the shot-on-film textures of its visual aesthetic, there’s something familiarly magical in every frame of Riddle of Fire, and the dialogue underlines that magic every chance it gets.  Whether the humor of its dissonance between old-world magic and mundane modernity hits you in the right way is all personal bias, but you can’t deny that the magic is right there on the screen; the movie never lets you forget it.

-Brandon Ledet

Immaculate (2024)

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There’s an emerging form of mainstream horror movie that appears to be generic & mediocre for most of its runtime, then springs a bonkers third act on its audience that retroactively makes it a Must-See Event Film through last-minute chutzpah.  Let’s call it Grower-Not-Shower Horror, a genre that’s typified by titles like Malignant, The Boy, Orphan, Barbarian, The Empty Man, etc.  Let’s also throw the recent Sydney Sweeney vehicle Immaculate on that list, as it’s a seemingly typical, unremarkable horror film set at a spooky convent that eventually becomes uniquely, explosively entertaining through the sheer audacity of its conclusion.  It may be the least remarkable of the Grower-Not-Shower titles that I’ve listed, but it’s still bonkers enough in its third-act resolution to make the cut, and that accomplishment is entirely owed to Sweeney’s performance.

In the story’s grim-grey, mediocre beginnings, Sweeney arrives at the remote Italian convent Our Lady of Sorrows mumbling like a socially inept teenager, totally unsure of herself.  There’s a plug-and-play spooky atmosphere to any Catholic setting in a horror film, as The Church is essentially just a well-funded cult with a bottomless supply of haunted fetish objects – in this case particularly obsessing over a rusty nail said to have been pried from Jesus’s cross.  All of the conspiratorial whispering, jump-scare nightmares, and crucifix-shaped blood stains that rattle Sweeney in the early stretch could just as easily have been recycled footage from the Conjuring spin-off The Nun without anyone really taking notice.  It isn’t until she starts fighting back against the Catholic cult in the back half that the movie comes alive.  That’s when her performance finally kicks into the melodramatic overdrive of Cassie from Season 2 of Euphoria, rather than recalling the sleepwalking-for-a-paycheck mumblings of her more recent role in Madame Web.

As the setting & title indicate, this is the story of an “immaculate” conception of child, meaning Sweeney’s nun-in-training unexpectedly finds herself a pregnant virgin.  The religious superiors around her declare the pregnancy a miracle, but both the reluctant mother and the genre-savvy audience immediately know better.  Segmented into three Trimester chapter breaks, the rest of the movie from there is all about the lengths she must go to escape her convent-prison before she gives birth to the antichrist abomination that’s been planted inside her body.  It’s in the third trimester where the movie earns the audience’s attention, but there’s nothing especially surprising about the particular events or character details that are saved for that gruesome finale.  Mostly, it’s just surprising how far Sweeney is willing to push her craft into extreme, bloody mania – reaching for a cathartically violent release for all of the ready-made, cookie-cutter tension of the first couple chapters.

There’s been some quibbling debate about whether Immaculate should be classified as nunsploitation, given that it does not lean into the seedier, sexier hallmarks of the subgenre.  There’s enough communal bathing & intimate touching between the nuns to at least count as acknowledgement of the subgenre’s sexploitative past, but it does appear to be much more interested in the bodily violation of unwanted pregnancy than it is interested in the bodily sacrilege of lesbian sex behind convent walls.  In a way, that topic is a perfect metatextual fit for Sweeney, whose body has been a constant, baffling source of culture-war discourse in recent months.  It makes sense to me, then, that she believed enough in the project to ensure its completion as a producer, bringing in former collaborator Michael Mohan (The Voyeurs) to direct.  When the Catholic pregnancy cult refers to the poor nun’s body as “the perfect fertile vessel” it doesn’t sound any more unhinged than Conservative internet pundits firing off think pieces about the political significance of her large breasts.  It’s just that here she gets to violently fight back, with surprising gusto.

If I had to speculate about why Grower-Not-Shower Horror has become a popular narrative template for mainstream studios in recent years, it’s that they’re afraid of losing audiences in the opening act.  There’s no reason why Malignant could not have been a nonstop bonkers action horror from start to end in throwback Hong Kong filmmaking tradition, except that it would’ve immediately lost the audience who were looking for more typical horror payoffs.  By pretending to be a much more normal, forgettable horror for most of its runtime, it holds onto its respectability just long enough to hook a wide audience, and then it’s allowed to let loose what’s actually on its mind.  Immaculate likewise gets by as a generic Catholic-setting horror for as long as possible before it unleashes Sweeney to seek bloody catharsis against the men who treat her like breeding cattle.  Personally, I’d rather watch a movie that feels unrestrained from start to end, but Showers-Not-Growers are much harder to come by these days, so I’ll take what I can get.

-Brandon Ledet

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)

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The current run of American Godzilla movies so badly, nakedly want what Marvel Studios had in its Avengers era that they’re often referred to as The MonsterVerse, named of course after the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  We’re now at a point where the MCU’s glory days are quickly fading in the rearview, but the Marvelification of Godzilla has just been completed.  After a few standalone stylistic experiments that mired Godzilla in grim-grey CGI drudgery and drafted his longtime frenemy King Kong into the Vietnam War, the two towering kaiju have been teamed up by their own Avengers Initiative in a couple dumb-fun action blockbusters designed to sell some opening-weekend popcorn and to tease the next popcorn-seller down the line, whenever another one inevitably arrives.  2021’s Godzilla vs Kong at least maintained some of the colorful cartoon spectacle of classic kaiju battles like 1963’s King Kong vs. Godzilla, arriving as a much-needed return to grand-scale filmmaking in those early years of COVID precautions.  In their second shared title, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, that classic Toho spirit has instead been completely replaced by the quippy, zippy action comedy of a Guardians of the Galaxy sequel.  Immensely talented actors Rebecca Hall, Dan Stevens, and Brian Tyree Henry stand around spewing exposition and inane “Well, that just happened” punchlines while CGI gods fight to start or stop the apocalypse in the sky above.  1980s pop tunes loop continuously on old school tape decks as contrast to the rest of the film’s future tech (including a giant mechanical arm built to enhance King Kong’s already mighty super-strength).  All that’s missing, really, is a talking raccoon, but hey you gotta leave something on the table for the next one.

The New Empire is much more flattering as a King Kong sequel than it is as a Godzilla one, mostly because that series has so many fewer, lower points of comparison.  Godzilla currently has 38 films to his name, while Kong only has 12 – most of which are not tied to the 1933 original.  Within that lineage, The New Empire works best as a stealth remake of 1933’s rushed-to-market Son of Kong.  Most of the best scenes involve Kong taking a young, violent, childlike ape under his tutelage as a mentor.  In an early fight, Kong uses him as a weapon, beating back other, meaner apes with the bitey little bastard’s limp body.  Later, they fully team up as a makeshift father-son duo to take down a Richard III-style mad king and free the enslaved apes who live in the even hollower Earth beneath Kong’s Hollow Earth stomping grounds.  By contrast, Godzilla doesn’t get nearly as much to do.  He mostly just swims to an underwater gender clinic to charge up from blue to pink, emerges to join the fight against the mad king in the final act, and then takes an angry cat nap once everything calms down.  Other surprise kaiju combatants join the battle in the back half, but none are as surprising as the Mechagodzilla reveal in the previous picture.  Mostly, the monsters just follow the same patterns of CGI superheroics we’ve already seen countless times in the past decade, just scaled up to skyscraper size for a false sense of escalation.  Meanwhile, the humans on the ground hang out in CSI-style tech labs, narrating the action like WWE announcers.  Director Adam Wingard does his best to add some style & personality to the proceedings, flinging fluorescent goop at the non-existent camera’s “lens” every time a monster is defeated, but style & personality is mostly just window-dressing when it comes to this kind of four-quadrant blockbuster filmmaking.

If there’s any clear artistic path forward for the American Godzilla picture, it might be in more sincerely tackling the POV of the fictional Indigenous tribes who worship & manage the kaiju of Hollow Earth.  So far in the MonsterVerse, the Indigenous peoples associated with each creature have been exoticized with the same old-school Indiana Jones adventurism that’s persisted in both the King Kong & Godzilla series since their respective 1930s & 50s origins.  There’s an unexplored angle in telling a story from their perspective instead of framing it through outsiders’ eyes, an approach already forged by the recent Predator prequel Prey. Of course, despite including the word “new” in its title, The New Empire isn’t much interested in new ideas or in unexplored angles on old ones.  It’s content to repeat what’s worked previously for another easy payout, whether repeating the cartoonish CGI smash-em-ups of Godzilla vs Kong or repeating the crossover superhero team-ups of the Avengers films.  There isn’t much awe or novelty in that approach to sure-thing, big-budget filmmaking, but there is some joy to be found in its familiarity – however minor.

-Brandon Ledet

The Exiles (1961)

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Every movie is documentary.  Whether or not the scene-to-scene narrative of a picture is a record of True Events (manipulated, as they all are, by the filmmakers’ selective curation), the picture itself is a record, a document of the past.  This becomes more apparent the older the picture has aged, as its performers, locations, and cultural context are cyclically replaced in the real world but remain intact onscreen.  That’s why it’s best not to get too hung up on genre boundaries when watching a picture like 1961’s The Exiles, which is presented as a documentary but is obviously driven by a semi-scripted narrative.  Documenting one drunken night in the lives of the Indigenous rock n roll greasers of 1950s Los Angeles, it’s a record of a time, a place, a people, and a moment in pop culture that have since been replaced and would otherwise be forgotten.  Which elements of the film qualify as documentary by definition of artistic medium are up for interpretation, but over time that distinction has mattered less & less.

Personally, I mostly receive the films’ clothes, locations, and voiceover narration as purely documentary in the genre sense.  Everything else onscreen plays as a recognition of and participation in the inherent artifice of cinema.  I believe the performers in the film are actual residents of the since-gentrified-into-oblivion neighborhood of Bunker Hill where they’re shown drinking, dancing, shouting, fighting, and just generally cutting up.  They appear to typify a genuine subculture of Indigenous youth who left the rural isolation of their government-assigned reservations to live out a hedonistic rock ‘n roll fantasy lifestyle in the big city, passing around the same little scraps of money amongst themselves for shared swigs of booze.  Their voiceover confessions about the never-ending cycle of getting drunk every single night with no particular plan or purpose feel bleakly sincere, while the onscreen illustration of that hedonism often feels more like reenactment in pantomime.  It has a very similar approach to narrative as its recent docufiction successor Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, except it’s shot as if it were a high-style Poverty Row noir.

The Exiles is factual but not exactly educational.  Its aimless, loosely scripted drunkenness might read as a kind of road-to-ruin moral lesson about alcoholism, but there’s no clear momentum or consequence to drive that point home.  Mostly, it’s just a slice-of-life document of one very specific community living out the Boomer rock ‘n roller fantasy of American Graffiti in real time, which to the sober eye can appear fashionably cool or hideously grotesque depending on the momentary vibes of the nonstop party.  I most appreciated it as a low-budget D.I.Y. project that couldn’t afford luxuries like color film or on-set sync sound recordings but still had a keen eye for aesthetic & cultural detail, most strikingly in scenes where the Native American stereotypes of the Westerns playing on background TV & movie screens clashed with the matter-of-fact representation of the real-life youth centered here.  At the same time, the way British filmmaker Kent Mackenzie opens the picture with historical photographs of Indigenous elders and never thinks to include mention of any specific tribe or nation now feels just as dusty as those Westerns did then.  It’s very much a picture of its time, as all pictures are.

Confession: I periodically fell asleep during a recent theatrical screening of this film, and I had to rewatch the final 20 minutes at home to piece together what I had missed during a few long blinks.  I’m not proud of this response to such a unique work.  I’m only mentioning it to note that as cool as the cultural documentation & vintage rock ‘n roll aesthetics are, the presentation can be a little dry.  I would usually apologize to anyone else who happened to be in that theater in case I snored during those mid-film disco naps, but I feel like after that guy got arrested for jacking it & nodding off during Love Lies Bleeding, the bar has been lowered enough for me to get away with it; at least I didn’t wake up with my peener out.  There are ways in which The Exiles‘s hands-off aimlessness decreases its value as filmic entertainment, but that approach is also exactly what makes it useful as an archival document, so I’m noting its patience-testing dryness less as a complaint than as an honest acknowledgement.

-Brandon Ledet