suicide

Play It as It Lays (1972)

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Eight summers ago, I attended nearly every screening of the Alamo Drafthouse’s summer series in my favorite genre, “Women on the Verge.” Two of those films, An Unmarried Woman and Puzzle of a Downfall Child, were such instant favorites of mine that they ended up as Movies of the Month the following year. I missed a screening of the difficult-to-find Joan Didion adaptation Play It as It Lays and have spent the intervening years cursing myself for the loss of this opportunity and eagerly anticipating another chance to check it out. Maybe it’s all that self-hype that left me cold upon finally getting the opportunity, or maybe it’s really not that great of a film, but I was not as captivated by this one as I was by the films alongside which it was initially brought to my attention. 

The film version of Play It as It Lays was directed by Frank Perry, who also helmed a couple of previous Movies of the Month, having directed 1968’s The Swimmer (a Brandon pick) and Britnee’s pick Hello Again (1987), and the film’s failures may have something to do with his vision, but not with his style. Play It as It Lays is a film that can charitably be described as incoherent, and while that incoherence is, as it was in the aforementioned Puzzle, a filmic tool used to demonstrate the internal life and fractured psyche of the film’s point of view character, it ends up making the film a bit too messy to fully understand. When reading the film’s summary on its Wikipedia page, the plot seems relatively straightforward, but it also seems like it’s relying on extratextual information (in this case, the plot of the novel on which it is based) to contextualize the narrative into something comprehensible; that’s cheating a bit, in my opinion. 

Tuesday Weld plays Maria Lang (nee Wyeth), an actress in her early thirties who narrates the film while walking the gardens of the institution in which she currently resides. In the flashbacks, she describes her early life, in which her parents moved from Las Vegas to a former mining town in rural Nevada that her father had won via gambling, a tiny nothing with a population of 28 which, by the time of the present narrative, no longer exists. She fell in love with and married Carter Lang (Adam Roarke), a respected independent director who cast her in his first film; he’s described as “a cult director with an eye for commerce” by one of his peers, and by the time the film’s proper narrative begins in the flashback, he and Maria are separated. There’s some implication that their falling out revolved around the decision to institutionalize their young daughter Kate, whose behavioral issues are on display when Maria visits her boarding school and witnesses her attack another child, which appears to be habitual. Maria’s only real friend is B.Z. Mendenhall (Anthony Perkins), a film industry friend of her husband’s with a family history of suicide and mental illness. Even if he weren’t already predisposed toward depression, his life situation, which sees him forced into a beard marriage to Helene (Tammy Grimes) at the behest of his controlling mother Carlotta (Ruth Ford), would make him miserable. Maria, who hasn’t acted in a while after damaging her career by walking off of a set a few years earlier, is convinced that Carter is having an affair with his new actress muse, Susannah (Diana Ewing), and she pursues a few lovers of her own, including a long term fling with widowed actor Les Goodwin (Richard Anderson) that results in a pregnancy, a brief affair with mob lawyer Larry Kulik (Paul Lambert) that ends unceremoniously, and an afternoon hook-up with TV actor Johnny Waters (Tony Young) that highlights just how self-destructive her behavior has become. 

Again, this all probably sounds fairly coherent, and not all that dissimilar from movies like Puzzle and other “Women on the Verge” pictures. Like those, where this does succeed most is in the strong performances from its leads. Maria isn’t inherently unlikable, but her generally nihilistic outlook makes it hard to root for her, since it’s all but impossible to imagine a better world or life for her; even her dream of living somewhere quiet and pastoral with Kate is clearly delusional. That Weld is able to imbue Maria with a sense of the personality-that-was when current Maria is disempowered and passive to the point of lethargy is a testament to the malleability of her talent, and when this film works it’s because she and Perkins make their characters feel like real, tangible people. Perkins’s B.Z. is an even more tragic figure than Maria, even if the film spends less time on his personal life. Of all of the men on screen, only B.Z. sees Maria for who she really is and the situation in which she finds herself because their dual alienation makes them kindred spirits. For Carter, Maria is a burden; for Kulik she’s just some good-looking company while he spreads money around Las Vegas; for Goodwin she’s the stand-in for the wife who committed suicide; for Johnny Waters she’s just a receptacle for his expression of sexual egotism. B.Z.’s relationship with her could be seen as just as selfish, as he sees her as a mirror for his own demons, but that projection isn’t incorrect and they really are birds of a feather. When he finally decides to end his life, as his father and grandfather did before him, he offers Maria the chance to follow him into the dark, holding out the pills he intends to consume to share with her, and although she declines, she holds his hand as he slips away. This the final straw that ends with her being institutionalized by Helene and Carter, but it’s also the purest expression of love that any two people show each other here. 

I have little love for the late film critic John Simon (to quote Roger Ebert, “I feel repugnance for [him]”), but he wasn’t wrong when he called Play It “a very bad movie.” Ebert himself gave the film his highest possible rating, but even he criticized the film’s material as thin in comparison to its smart direction and entrancing performances. That seems to be the consistent criticism of the film in reviews that I have found: praise for Weld and Perkins as performers and Perry for his directorial eye, with failures across every other metric. I won’t be breaking free of that paradigm, personally, since I feel the same way. This one might pair well with any of other films mentioned above as a foil or a conversation piece, but its narrative scaffolding wouldn’t hold up to a breeze, and it won’t stand up on its own. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Vulcanizadora (2025)

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Are there still Godsmack fans in 2025? What kind of weirdo buries porno mags in the woods? Is it important to enjoy the company of the other person in your suicide pact? There’s lots to ponder in the latest feel-bad slacker comedy from director Joel Potrykus. Continuing his career-long collaboration with actor Joshua Burge, Vulcanizadora is yet another aimless indulgence in stasis & rot along the same lines as their previous breakouts Buzzard & Relaxer. The deep well of sadness beneath that surface layer of rot has never been as complexly layered, though, and Potrykus is almost starting to give off the impression that he actually cares about what he’s saying with his proudly low-effort art. The message he’s communicating has not evolved beyond “Life sucks shit, dude,” but there’s no reason that it has to. It’s worth repeating, because it’s true.

The real evolution in Potrykus & Burge’s collaboration here is that it has moved from behind the camera to the screen. The actor-director duo star in Vulcanizadora as two nu-metal wastoids on a camping trip in the Michigan woods, seemingly working towards opposite purposes. For his part, Potrykus’s Derek is hell-bent on making lifelong bro-trip memories with his camcorder & a small arsenal of fireworks, filming an amateur video he models after Faces of Death (but registers more as a 12-year-old’s backyard homage to Jackass). Meanwhile, Burge’s Marty has brought along some homemade fireworks of his own, and he is visibly annoyed by every one of Derek’s stunts that delays their ultimate purpose: exploding the two dirtbags’ skulls in a beachside double suicide. As with all of their work together, however, it’s ultimately a trip to nowhere, and the second half of the film drops all plot momentum to instead sit in the personal & familial disappointments that inspired the suicide pact in the first place. The laughs gradually fade, and all that’s left is the depression, isolation, and impotent aggression.

If Potrykus’s darkly comic portrayals of leftover late-90s metalhead machismo have dulled over the years, it’s because he now has more competition in similar comedic voices like Tim Robinson, Conner O’Malley, and Kyle Mooney. Still, there’s an attention to detail here in the collected paraphernalia of the archetype that feels freshly observed: gas station snack piles, vintage porno mags, broken glow sticks, ditch weed, Audioslave karaoke, etc. Like the Freddy Krueger Power Glove prop in Buzzard, he also creates a uniquely upsetting object of his own design here: a piece of BDSM head gear designed to house the suicide-mission explosives in the wearers’ mouths. He also finds some novelty in airing his metalhead slacker routine out in the sunshine, leaving the Relaxer couch behind for a stroll in the woods. His creative dynamic with Burge otherwise hasn’t changed much, and that personal stasis is somewhat the point. Their pointlessly destructive pranks are even less becoming now that they’re the age when fatherhood & male pattern baldness have made their adult responsibilities more immediately apparent. Now their corrosive aimlessness has actual consequences, each remarkably bleak.

– Brandon Ledet 

Smile 2 (2024)

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I wanted to see a new-release horror on the big screen in the lead-up to Halloween, and the offerings are desperately thin.  There are no original horror films in wide release this week (give or take the last few remaining screenings of The Substance, which premiered over a month ago).  Everything on offer is reboots & sequels, continuing this summer’s trend of name-brand horror properties filling in the gaps left by the usual action/superhero fare that’s nowhere to be seen this year.  Among the few horror franchise extenders that did make it to theaters in time for Halloween, it was difficult to find one worth leaving the house to see. Besides being a novelty-Christmas slasher, Terrifier 3 simply looks too mean.  By contrast, Beetlejuice 2 & Venom 3 both look too goofy, to the point where they barely converge with horror at all.  Smile 2 was the obvious choice, then, since it falls somewhere between those tonal extremes.  I remember the first Smile movie being cruel in its messaging that the suicidally depressed should self-isolate to avoid scarring or infecting loved ones with their mental illness, but at least it wasn’t as violently, grotesquely misogynistic as the first Terrifier film.  I also remember Smile being silly in concept, never overcoming the initial cheese of building its horror around an evil Snapchat filter, but at least its sequel isn’t going to indulge in the self-aware schtick of a Beetlejuice or Venom sequel: echoes of you-had-to-be-there comedic properties that would’ve been better off abandoned as one-off novelties.  So, Smile 2 reigns supreme this Halloween, entirely by default.

I suppose Smile 2 is also superior to the first Smile film entirely by default, given that it finally comes up with a reason for The Smile gimmick besides it looking off-putting.  In the first film, the titular Smile is a body-hopping demonic curse that possesses the minds of the mentally unwell, driving them to suicide within a week, then transferring to a new host through the miracle of Trauma. It’s represented onscreen as the hallucinated smiling face of everyone the possessed victim meets, creeping the doomed soul out with a harsh face-altering digital filter that exaggerates their features (a gimmick borrowed from Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare, from which Smile 2 also borrows its ending).  You could meet Smile halfway by mentally reaching for some thematic connection in how it’s isolating to suffer a mental episode while everyone around you is seemingly, sinisterly cheery, but there really isn’t much to it beyond it looking creepy.  However, Smile 2 does justify The Smile visual gimmick in its narrative, this time following demonically possessed popstar Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) as she prepares for a career-comeback tour after rock-bottoming as a drug addict.  Skye is outfitted to look like Lady Gaga in her onstage costuming, but her offstage struggle to please fans, staff, press, record label execs, and her micro-momager while maintaining a cutesy smile read as Chappell Roan.  Being grinned at by strangers & sycophants all day really does seem like a tough part of the popstar gig.  Usually, the millions of dollars in monetary compensation help make that discomfort worthwhile, but I can see how being stalked by a suicide-encouraging demon might tip that scale in the wrong direction.

Not that it’s easy to know exactly what poor Skye Riley is going through.  The demon’s main method of attack is to cause its hosts to hallucinate, confirming their fears that nobody cares about them, and they deserve to die alone (soon!).  As a result, roughly 90% of Skye’s onscreen journey happens entirely in her head, and the movie constantly pulls the rug from under her to reveal that she’s imagining things, often while humiliating herself in public.  It’s the kind of social cringe that makes you cover your eyes in embarrassment while watching a hack sitcom more often that it is the kind of unnerving horror that makes you cover your eyes in dread.  There are plenty of genuine scares, though.  This being a mainstream studio horror means that things get real quiet every time Skye is alone, only for a loud soundtrack stinger to startle the audience with an out-of-nowhere jump scare (punctuated by a creepy smile, of course).  Her luxury apartment is also invaded by a hallucination of her backup dancers doing a body contortionist routine straight out of Climax, revealing anxieties around how she’s passed around like a doll during her stage act.  Thankfully, no one stops the plot dead to recite search engine results for the word “trauma” like in the first Smile film, but there’s still plenty of brooding over topics like addiction, survivor’s guilt, and suicidal ideation, establishing a visual device where Skye chugs bottled water every time she’s triggered.  Just when you think all of this could be solved by the popstar-in-crisis admitting herself to a “health clinic” for “exhaustion,” though, the film reminds the audience that, yes, there is an actual, physical demon at work here – not just a metaphorical one.

In popstar-crisis terms, Smile 2 is about on par with Trap but oceans behind Vox Lux.  It makes good use of the inherently exaggerated music-video aesthetics of its setting but just as often strays from that world to dwell in the same drab, grey spaces most mainstream horrors occupy.  It’s clear that writer-director Parker Finn was funded for more creative freedom to play around as a visual stylist here than in the first film, and he uses the opportunity to make a name for himself as a formidable auteur before tackling his next ill-advised project: a modern remake of Żuławski’s Possession.  The results are mixed.  The high-gloss pop music aesthetic and sprawling 127min runtime suggest an ambitious filmmaker who’s eager to leave his mark on the modern-horror landscape, but by the third or fifth time he frames that landscape through an upside-down drone shot you have to wonder if he has enough original ideas in his playbook to pull off a name-brand career.  I’m not yet fully invested in Parker Finn as an artist, but I am grateful that he delivered a moderately stylish mainstream horror with a few effective jump scares during such an otherwise abysmal Halloween Season drought.  Smile 2 might not have meant much to me as cinema, but as a commercial product it supplied exactly what I demanded.

-Brandon Ledet

Dead Man on Campus (1998)

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TW: Suicide, throughout

When recently writing about middling campus thriller The Curve, several people commented that they thought that film was called Dead Man on Campus; in fact, The Curve was previously titled Dead Man’s Curve and its title was changed to avoid just that confusion. Both came out in 1998, both feature a serious scholarship student paired with a perpetually manic roommate, and both feature plots that are predicated on the urban legend that the roommate(s) of any college student who commits suicide automatically passes their classes that semester. Whereas The Curve was rarely intentionally funny and attempted a kind of campus noir that fails to be compelling, Dead Man on Campus is an outright comedy, from the creative team that would four years later release a personal favorite, Pumpkin. Pumpkin director Anthony Abrams is on the writing side this time, co-penning this one with future Pumpkin co-writer Adam Larson Broder and Michael Traeger. This one errs a little broader than Pumpkin‘s melodrama satire but has a lot of the same semi-sequitur one-liners, slapstick treated with unblinking stoicism, and invoked tonal whiplash. 

Josh (Tom Everett Scott) is an incoming student attending a prestigious northeastern university on a scholarship, on a pre-med track with a heavy, difficult course load. In the dorms, he’s placed into a suite with non-stop party machine Cooper (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and hair-trigger Catholic rage jock Kyle (Jason Segel). Kyle pairs off with a girl he meets at a party (Linda Cardellini) and moves in with her, leaving Josh and Cooper with a spare room. Josh loses some of his academic focus when Cooper introduces him to Rachel (Poppy Montgomery), a creative writing student with whom he hits it off, and Cooper’s lackadaisical attitude rubs off on Josh a little too hard. By midterms, both are failing, with doomed prospects on the horizon: Josh will lose his scholarship and drop out of school, and Cooper’s father will stop paying his tuition and force him to start at an entry level position in the family custodial business. Cooper, upon hearing the urban legend about automatic A grades for the roommates of students who take their own life, forces Josh to accompany him to break into the library and review the school charter to see if this rule actually exists, and, upon learning that it does, hatches a scheme to use Josh’s student job at the housing office to file paperwork to move a suicidal person into the vacant room and wait things out, possibly even pushing over a domino or two. Josh is initially horrified, but is ultimately convinced to join in, and they set their sights on a few prospects: untameable frat moron Cliff (Lochlyn Munro), paranoid Unabomber-esque Buckley (Randy Pearlstein), and depressed British goth rocker Matt (Corey Page). 

Like Pumpkin, Dead Man on Campus is a tasteless movie, but I have an appetite for tasteless movies, especially ones that are as willing to go all in like this one does. Through a modern lens, it’s insensitive (and may even have been so for the time), but its insensitivity reads more as irreverence than edginess, and at times it verges on prescience … for the most part. The film’s weakest link is the first contender that the boys select; he’s loud, brash, oversexed, dim-witted, and within the already wacky reality of the film, he stands out as a particularly poorly placed element, like he dropped in from National Lampoon’s Van Wilder. It’s a pretty small role, but Alyson Hannigan is here as one of Rachel’s roommates, and Cliff immediately asks “Which one is for [him]?” from among the women, getting so amped up to share a bong with her that he lights her hair on fire (Hannigan has her longer ‘do from Buffy seasons 1 and 2 here), and it feels like it’s presaging some of the indignities that she’ll experience over the course of the American Pie movies, but less funny (or that she’ll find herself in in Date Movie, but funnier). In a film that’s mostly raucous and only occasionally raunchy, Cliff’s scenes are the weakest. Gosselaar toes the line with Cooper; he’s also obnoxious, but it’s more moderate. It’s as if Gosselaar is aping the title character of Parker Lewis Can’t Lose but can’t quite break free from Saved by the Bell‘s Zack and ends up annoying, but there’s a certain Bugs Bunny-esque playfulness to his frenetic energy that keeps him from crossing the line into being too annoying. 

The second and third contenders that the boys select are much better suited to the film’s tone. Conspiracy theorist Buckley is a lot of fun, down to the choices in set dressing (his dorm room is adorned with black and white posters of … himself). Even though this film is from the pre-9/11 time when conspiracy theories were just some nonsense that your older stoner friend would prattle on about and not matters of legislation in a crumbling empire, Buckley manages to spout some ideas that wouldn’t be unreasonable to hear (from morons) in this day and age; notably, he believes that he is being stalked by Bill Gates, who wants to steal the rest of his brain (having already stolen half of it when Buckley fell asleep in a Gateway store). The way that Josh and Cooper convince him to move in with them, which includes Josh dressing up in a hazmat suit and spraying water on the plants outside of Buckley’s first dorm building, hits the right level of absurdity, and it’s a welcome change after suffering through the Cliff portions. All of the boys’ interactions with third contender Matt are even funnier once it’s revealed that his suicidal ideology is all an act to seem more mysterious as a tragic musician, and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of making fun of self-flagellating college-aged artists. Some sample lyrics for Kiss My Ass, Matt’s band, include the utterly self-satisfied lines “My words are my sperm/Spewing forth my tragic germ/I’m dying to kiss you/I soil the tissue.” That’s art, baby. 

The movie is not without other weaknesses outside of Cliff. Things get a little saccharine at the climax, and it’s not handled as deftly as it would be later in Pumpkin; just compare any of the maudlin-to-the-point-of-ridicule scenes that make up that film’s finale with the mostly-played-straight conclusion to this one. The romance between Josh and Rachel also feels a bit tacked-on, and Poppy Montgomery is largely wasted in a shallow role. That Josh could fall into drinking and partying without the temptation to spend time with her makes it so that she could largely be excised from the plot, especially as her later actions—giving Josh a copy of her short story to read and then being disappointed that he didn’t—do nothing to put more pressure on Josh than he is already under. It’s ridiculous that she’s third billed and is less memorable than Hannigan, who at least has a later role in the film when she arrives at a party in a ridiculous wig. Still, if you saw The Curve and thought it would work better as an irreverent comedy, or if you’re itching for something in the vein of Pumpkin and are willing to accept the diet cola version, this one’s out there waiting for you. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Curve (1998)

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CW/TW: Suicide, throughout

On a recent episode of the Lagniappe podcast, I mentioned that I had recently watched the abysmal 2000 Cersei Lannister/Norman Reedus vehicle Gossip, which couldn’t even be saved by an appearance from Edward James Olmos and starrings role by two of my sweetest baboos, James Marsden and Joshua Jackson. Luckily, it wasn’t long before I found a more entertaining (if not technically better) tonal analog that fit the bill for trashy-chic urban-legend dark comedy in 1998’s The Curve, playing on a Tubi near you! 

Chris (Michael Vartan) is the token scholarship kid among his friends at a prestigious Ivy League feeder college. He’s working harder with less while his two upper class roommates—utter asshole Rand (Randall Batinkoff) and unmedicated manic pixie nightmare twink Tim (Matthew Lillard)—are able to largely skate by in their courses. Chris needs a 4.0 to qualify not just for entry to Harvard Med but the funding needed to attend, and there’s a B+ in one of his classes that might be the deciding factor in whether or not he moves on to his next academic waypoint for levelling up or faces an unknown fate. When he’s unable to change his grade through cheating or hacking, Tim comes up with a way to make sure that Chris gets the grade; as it turns out, it’s university policy to offer any student whose roommate commits suicide a 4.0 for the semester. Chris balks at this idea at first, but when he witnesses some truly awful behavior from Rand, including verbally abusing and embarrassing his girlfriend Nicole (Tamara Craig Thomas) at a party in front of dozens of people when she was just trying to get him alone to tell him that she was pregnant, he commits. After all, at this point, they’ve already laid the groundwork by gathering material that would lead investigators to no other conclusion than suicide, including Joy Division CDs, Poe novels, and a copy of The Bell Jar, and by planting the idea that he’s been acting differently lately in the mind of Chris’s girlfriend Emma (Keri Russell). Things get more complicated, however, when Rand’s body can’t be found, but Natalie’s is discovered, leading everyone involved to question who they trust, who they believe, and whether they can escape the tangled web they’ve woven alive and free. 

This one was not well received in its time, but I am once again here to tell you that I’ve unearthed another latter day 90s gem that deserves critical re-evaluation. For one thing, the soundtrack is a lot of fun, with original score composition by Shark and rounded out by The Smiths and a catalog of oh-so-1998-tracks by the likes of Unwritten Law, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Aimee Mann, Bauhaus, and, perfectly enough, The Belljars. The number of twists that unveil themselves as the film goes along are successively less believable but exponentially more fun, as the litany of who’s scamming whom, who’s in cahoots with whom, and who really hates whom layers upon itself to the point of absurdity. The real magic here, as it often is, is Lillard, who is absolutely devouring the scenery. Playing on his Stu Macher screwball energy, he’s using it to a much more malicious effect, and not only is it more threatening than one would expect, it’s also hornier, which contributes a lot to the fun factor for me. In one scene, Lillard’s Tim tricks another character into seeing him getting intimate with said character’s girlfriend, and as his body glistens in the candlelight and the camera dollies in on his smug, red-lit face, it’s truly both menacing and magnetic. The other actors are all competent here; Batinkoff isn’t asked to stretch his acting muscles much, nor is Thomas asked to do more than cry and complain, and Russell is, uncharacteristically, a virtual non-entity, phoning it in. Vartan could stand to loosen up a little on camera; he should be the Robert Redford type, a man caught in a conspiracy and trying to get out of it with an everyman charm instead of a James Bondian wit, but instead he’s very stiff and wooden, especially against Lillard’s lithe serpentine business. 

This isn’t a great movie, but it is a fun one, and the perfect thing to put on in the background while you pack for your summer vacation, while visions of Lillard’s threatening abs dance in your dreams.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond 

Podcast #178: On the Count of Three & 2022’s Honorable Mentions

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Welcome to Episode #178 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna continue our discussion of the Top Films of 2022 with some honorable mentions, starting with the Jerrod Carmichael suicide comedy On the Count of Three.

00:00 Welcome

02:00 M3GAN (2023)
03:20 Shin Ultraman (2023)
05:25 Sick (2023)
07:25 Skinamarink (2023)

16:05 On the Count of Three (2022)
35:53 Aline (2022)
55:40 Lux Æterna (2022)
1:10:13 We Met in Virtual Reality (2022)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew

The Night House (2021)

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The movie is just alright, but Rebecca Hall is great: a tale as old as time.  I always hear that Hall is a powerhouse performer, but I’m used to seeing her play low-key, anonymous roles in genre movies like The Gift, Transcendence, and Godzilla vs Kong, where she tends to support instead of outshine the ooky-spooky monsters & ghouls at centerstage.  That likely says more about me than it says about Hall, though, since her fan-favorite performance as the titular role in the 2016 biopic Christine is widely available and I’ve yet to make time for it.  Luckily, The Night House is willing to meet me halfway by casting Rebecca Hall as the dramatic lead in a straight-forward horror film about a haunted house, wherein she’s the central focus of every single scene.  The movie itself is just okay, but her performance is fantastic, so I at least appreciated that it dragged me kicking and screaming into the Rebecca Hall fan club.

Viewed purely as a haunted-house movie, The Night House is only so-so.  It’s overloaded with exciting ideas, teasing tangents of Lovecraftian blueprints for a dark-magic home, silhouettes of ghosts formed by the negative space in architectural details, erotic foreplay with said negative-space ghosts, and a cursed netherworld that can only be accessed through lucid dreams.  Unfortunately, it’s frustratingly restrained in its execution of its most out-there concepts, only indulging in each for mere seconds before dragging the audience back to the dramatic reality they disrupt.  That dramatic core is yet another It’s Actually About Grief metaphor that has become so standard in modern horror, with Rebecca Hall being both physically & emotionally haunted by her recent suicide-victim husband.  In a decade, academics will have something smart & concise to say about why so many of our contemporary horror films are so fixated on the subject of grief, just as we’ve since explained away the early-aughts’ obsession with onscreen torture as a way to process American war crimes during the War on Terror.  In the meantime, there’s very little room for individual entries in the Grief Horror canon to have anything novel to say on the subject, so all The Night House can really do is create a spooky mood while repeating images & concepts you’ve already been exposed to many times before.  It is spooky, but I question if that’s enough of a draw considering how familiar its themes are.

The Night House is much more impressive as a showcase for Rebecca Hall’s screen presence, encouraging to flex her acting muscles in the same way the Grief Horror genre has already spotlighted Toni Collette in Hereditary, Elizabeth Moss in The Invisible Man, and Essie Davis in The Babadook.  Hall plays a wonderfully prickly, sardonic widow who refuses to wallow in the aftermath of her husband’s suicide, instead choosing to prod at who he was and why he decided to stop being.  She’s haunted both by the gun violence that ended his life—often finding herself hearing, touching, and Googling guns whenever her mind drifts—and by a spiritual presence in her now empty home, seemingly rekindling their doomed romance from beyond the grave.  Weirdly, the movie often excels most when it’s not indulging in supernatural phenomena at all, chronicling Hall’s investigation into her husband’s secretive life outside their marriage and her wonderfully icy responses to the polite but condescending rituals of communal consolation that accompany all funerals.  She’s hurt, she’s hurtful, and she’s fiercely opposed to the idea of fading away quietly after her marriage’s violent end, despite that feeling like the only path offered in her empty, cursed home.  The movie asks a lot of Rebecca Hall as its emotional anchor, and she holds it all down with ease.  It’s just a shame the movie around her couldn’t quite match her virtuoso performance with something memorable enough to make it a must-see entry in its genre.

-Brandon Ledet

The Virgin Suicides (1999)

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I remember being incredibly skeptical of the sudden consensus a couple years back that 1999 was the pinnacle of modern cinema, as solidified by critic Brian Raftery’s book Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen.  As I already rambled on about in my review of The Talented Mr. Ripley when that book was still a hot topic, I believe every Movie Year is practically the same.  Most movies are bad, but a lot of them are great, and it takes time to sift through the deluge to single out the gems.  All we’re experiencing now is the inevitability of critics who were young enough to first start discovering a passion for film in the late-90s now aging into a role as legitimized tastemakers, so that they’re able to collectively repeat inane phrases like “1999: Best Movie Year Ever!!!” loud & often enough that they sound halfway legit. 

I am also guilty of that exact nostalgia bias myself, no matter how skeptical I am of its validity.  While the critical reappraisal of 1999 as the Best Movie Year Ever wasn’t entirely convincing to me in a broad sense, it did highlight a particular facet of that era that does stand out as exceptional to me: its immaculate collection of high school-set comedies.  I will never fully be able to tell if the exquisite run of high school movies from 1998-2001 really was exceptionally great or if I’m just nostalgic for the era because I was entering high school around the time.  Either way, this list of titles just from 1999 seems like a staggering canon of all-time classics to my biased eye: Drop Dead Gorgeous, But I’m a Cheerleader!, 10 Things I Hate About You, Jawbreaker, Election, Cruel Intentions, Drive Me Crazy, She’s All That, etc.  And then there’s the one eerie, troublesome outlier from that 1999 High School Classics canon that feels like it drifted in from another place & time altogether – the debut feature from director Sofia Coppola.

The Virgin Suicides is less the social hierarchy satire that most post-Heathers high school comedies strive for than it is a modernized, American update to the eerie Peter Weir whatsit Picnic at Hanging Rock.  Unlike most 1999 High School Classics, it’s not a comedy at all, but rather a melancholy drama about Big Teenage Feelings and the uncanny nature of nostalgia.  Still, the film indulges in a bemused humor at the expense of the awkwardness of teenage dating rituals in the 1970s Michigan suburbs, often conveying the domestic imprisonment of its titular teenage virgins through a tight-lipped smirk.  Under the severely over-protective eye of their parents, the five young sisters become isolated and lonely to the point of suicidal depression, and the movie sincerely engages with the impact of that tragedy (as opposed to, say, the way teen deaths are handled in Drop Dead Gorgeous, the other Kirsten Dunst classic from that year).  Its amusement with that tragedy is mostly centered on how the girls are perceived by their clueless, infatuated peers.

While The Virgin Suicides is technically about the suicidal sisters, the girls’ story is told through the eyes of their romantically starved neighbors – a group of inexperienced young boys who saw them mostly as a window into the supposed enigma of femininity.  All the Picnic at Hanging Rock supernatural mystery surrounding the girls is an extension of their distanced male admirers’ POV, who try to solve their lives and deaths as if they were a curious puzzle and not simply victims of a neurotically repressive parenting style.  By tapping into that nostalgia-tinged teenage longing, Coppola evokes something intensely powerful untouched by any other high school movie of its era.  She stated in an interview, “I really didn’t know I wanted to be a director until I read The Virgin Suicides and saw so clearly how it had to be done.  I immediately saw the central story about what distance and time and memory do to you, and about the extraordinary power of the unfathomable.”  You’re not going to find that kind of shit in 10 Things I Hate About You, as fun as it is as a more typical literary “adaptation” from that era.

I love The Virgin Suicides.  It feels more complexly funny, dreamlike, and femme every time I watch it, especially since I was a clueless, romance-starved teenage boy myself when I first rented it from a Blockbuster in the early-2000s New Orleans suburbs.  There was a spoil of Teen Movie riches flooding video store shelves in that era, but none of them hit the exact dazed, Hanging Rock tone Coppola’s film did.  I won’t cosign the broader 1999: Best Movie Year ever discourse (which really doesn’t matter, since I appear to be the only person still hung up on it), but if can we narrow that claim down to 1999: Best High School Movie Year Ever the argument is much, much more compelling – and this inclusion in that canon is one of the most impeccable standouts.

-Brandon Ledet

Seven Stages to Achieve Eternal Bliss by Passing Through the Gateway Chosen by the Holy Storsh (2020)

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When I traveled to California for the first time last year, I was low-key worried that I might be inducted into a cult during my brief visit and be trapped there forever. I was already on the mailing list of a California-based U.F.O. cult at the time, and most of the cults I’ve become familiar with while researching movies over the past few years have originated in the state: The Church of Satan, Scientology, The Buddhafield, etc. There’s just something about the California temperament and its invitation for transplants to remake & remarket themselves in the state’s robust pop culture industry that makes its citizens uniquely susceptible to cult-leader predation.

Given how abusive most of those cult leaders become with enough time & unchecked power, that topic is a questionable foundation for a kooky, twee comedy. Seven Stages to Achieve Eternal Bliss by Passing Through the Gateway Chosen by the Holy Storsh is about a young couple of Middle America transplants who move to Los Angeles in an effort to reinvent themselves, only to immediately become involved in the treacherous, routine bloodshed of a suicide cult. It’s a lot cuter than it sounds, considering the real-life abuses that it parodies, but it might ultimately be too cute to resonate with any significance at all. Seven Stages is an overwhelmingly harmless, breezy movie about ritualistic suicide – which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it were funny enough to distract from that tonal discrepancy.

Kate Micucci and Sam Huntington costar as recent L.A. transplants who are horrified to discover that their new apartment is only cheap because it’s the preferred “worshiping” grounds of a suicide cult. Taika Waititi plays the cult leader—the titular Holy Storsh—which is excellent casting considering his magnetic charisma as a real-life Personality. Thanks to Storsh’s teachings, intruders repeatedly break into the newly arrived couple’s shithole apartment for the privelege to commit suicide in their bathtub – a ritual aimed to achieve the bliss of “instantaneous eternity.”

This seems like an extreme practice at first, but the more the couple digs into Storsh’s vague self-help mumbo jumbo the more they warm up to their uninvited, self-harming visitors. They gradually transform their apartment into a Luxury Assisted-Suicide B&B to accommodate the ritual, then inevitably become indoctrinated into the cult as active participants themselves. It’s a tale as old as California, although in real life it tends to end in devastated & befuddled relatives back home rather than light chuckles & a wasted afternoon. I don’t know that I expected the movie to operate with the same Traumatizing Apartment Cult intensity as Rosemary’s Baby or anything, but it certainly could have benefited from taking the violence that drives its light-hearted jokes more seriously, at least so that there would be some tension for the punchlines to relieve.

There’s a sitcom-style repetition to the visits from the guest-start suicide cultists as they take turns breaking into the apartment, which allows the movie to pack in a ton of familiar, always-welcome faces who’d please any comedy nerd with an affinity for the L.A. scene: Maria Bamford, Mark McKinney, Brian Posehn, Dan Harmon, etc. These tangential guest-star spotlights don’t register with any staying power outside their momentary gags, though, so all that really matters is the unraveling of the central couple who rent the doomed apartment.

Some signs of the couple’s mental unraveling are absolutely inspired, especially the loopy improv-style backstory of why they had to leave Ohio and the gradual escalation of their birdhouse-building home business that transforms the apartment itself into a Lynchian otherworld. Mostly, though, the only memorable details from the picture are Micucci’s natural adorability and the catchy bathtub-themed suicide jingle Taika Waititi’s enigmatic cult leader sings over the opening credits.

The rest of the movie just gently flows down the drain as a pleasant-but-forgettable amusement – decent enough for lazy-afternoon viewing, but not worth going out of your way for despite the impressive cast list on the poster. Given the ultraviolent premise’s connection to real-life California cult culture and the talent involved, I think it’s reasonable to expect more than that.

-Brandon Ledet

The Esoteric Suicide-Epidemic Media of Bridgend (2016) & Suicide Club (2002)

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It was bound to happen sooner or later: Brandon picked a flick for Movie of the Month that I simply didn’t care for. It’s not the first time we weren’t all in agreement on the MotM; Black Moon was a slog for me personally (although it’s one that I admit I might have enjoyed more if I had been in a different mood), as was Hearts of Fire, and I’ve picked a clunker or two (like My Demon Lover) or something that simply didn’t appeal to everyone (Alli hated Head Over Heels), but usually Brandon and I are pretty much on the same page. Not this time, however. It’s not an issue of subject matter, either, as teen suicides (well, staged suicides) are an integral part of my favorite movie of all time, Heathers; nor is it an issue of cultural differences, as I love the work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa like Charisma and Cure, both of which are obvious influences on this film. But, boy, was this one a hard one for me to stay awake through.

So, too, was Bridgend, a more recent film about a rash of teen suicides in the small Welsh town for which the film was named. Starring Hannah Murray of Skins and God Help the Girl fame (or Game of Thrones, I suppose), Bridgend is directed by Danish documentarian Jeppe Rønde and focuses on the real town of Bridgend, where nearly eighty people hanged themselves in the years leading up to 2012, most of them teenagers. Sarah (Murray) and her father Dave (Steven Waddington) have moved back to the area so that he, as the new leader of local law enforcement, intends to get to the bottom of this seeming madness. A lonely girl, Sarah is immediately recognized as having attended school with the local hooligan teens upon her return, and falls in with them, much to her father’s violent and overwrought consternation.

I originally discovered this film after binging on the Amazon Prime series Fortitude, an absolutely stunning Nordic-Brit co-production set in Svalbard. I wanted to find more Danish media and Bridgend appeared in a Netflix search. My roommate and I started the film, but he was so bored by it that we turned it off, even though I’m always at least a little bit invested in a movie that features a lot of attractive people going skinny dipping. After watching Suicide Club, I went back to the film to restart and finish it, but absence did not make the heart grow fonder. This is still a dreary film, and not just because of the subject matter. The direction and cinematography has been praised for its realism, with most reviewers noting the director’s background as a documentary filmmaker as the reason for Bridgend‘s lingering shots and invested depth of field. And while that’s likely true, the film’s similarity to non-fiction film-making is also its greatest failing.

At times throughout the film, we’re shown short glimpses of the teens’ interactions with their respective parents that paint them in an unfavorable light. Jamie (Josh O’Connor)’s interactions with his father (Adrian Rawlins), the town vicar, are strained, and there is one line that even seems to imply that there is sexual abuse at play in their relationship. This seems to be borne out in the way that the teens’ apparent leader Danny (Aled Thomas) embarrasses Jamie sexually when he discovers that Jamie and Sarah intend to run away together, but it’s never made explicit. There’s also the fact that Thomas (Scott Arthur) kills himself after a raging party in which his own mother sleeps with his mate Angus (Jamie Burch). And Sarah’s relationship with her father grows from notably cold and distant to outright abusive over the course of the film with little provocation and no explanation. There’s no insight into any of these relationships provided by the editing or any other filmic language; it’s all just presented as a series of vignettes with no thematic connection. That’s a great tack to take when you’re making a documentary, but not when making a narrative fiction film, as it leads to an overall sense of frustration and difficulty in investment.

I can see why this seemed like a good idea. No one knows why the kids in Bridgend keep hanging themselves, and to make a movie with a definitive statement that the cause is poor parental relationships or peer pressure is insulting and in poor taste at best. But if that’s going to be the case, why insert potential issues at all? Why make this film about Bridgend’s suicide trend, instead of creating a fictional town in which similar events take place and set your broody, somber, bathetic melodrama there? Suicide Club did much the same, and even though I was left unfulfilled by it, at least it didn’t pretend that it had something deeper on its mind.

What Bridgend does have over Suicide Club is a greater sense of visual cohesion, even if its narrative cohesion is only slightly higher. For one thing, it benefits from focusing on one character and her admittedly unclear journey, instead of being a series of scenes that are only barely connected thematically before introducing a police procedural element deep in the first act, and then moving to a woman who is (I guess?) our protagonist somewhere around the third hour of the film halfway through the second act. Bridgend, at least, maintains a consistent color temperature and depth of field and focus throughout. You’re not going to get whiplash as you move from a comically scored group suicide to an atmospheric creepy hospital at night to a genuinely eerie school rooftop mass suicidal leap to a parody J-pop music video. There’s going to be a lot of sighing, some head shaking, and you may even shout “Yes, but why?!” when Sarah frees her horse in order to avoid being sent to a riding school (not only is it completely lacking in subtlety as a metaphor, but it also is the only metaphorical moment in the movie, highlighting its absurdity and lack of imagination).

Neither film works for me, but one or both might for you. We can’t all agree about everything. Bridgend is on Netflix.

For more on March’s Movie of the Month, Sion Sono’s technophobic freak-out Suicide Club, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and last week’s comparison with its goofy American counterpart, FearDotCom (2002).

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond