thriller

Spellbound (1945)

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Alfred Hitchcock’s fascination with psychoanalysis and the complex workings of the human mind inarguably peaked with Psycho, but fifteen years earlier, he made an initial foray into the inner lives of psychotherapists and the patients that they analyze with 1945’s Spellbound, starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. Spellbound finds Dr. Constance Petersen (Bergman, in the first of three collaborations with the director) in residence at the Green Manors psychiatric facility, where she is the only woman on the staff, and as such often finds herself having to fend off the unwanted advances of her insufferable colleagues. The hospital is in the process of being handed over from long term head of staff Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carrol, in his third of four collaborations with Hitchcock) to the incoming Dr. Anthony Edwardes, following an event in which Murchison was found to be negligible, possibly as the result of the early stages of senility. Dr. Edwardes (Peck) arrives, and a romance blossoms between him and Constance almost immediately, although their early interactions are fraught with tension when he seems to change into a different kind of man altogether whenever he sees images of parallel lines against a white background: the tracing of fork tines in linen, the pinstripes in Constance’s white dressing gown, train tracks, etc. In short order, it becomes clear that “Edwardes” is an impostor, and he reveals to Constance that he is an amnesiac with the initials J.B., and he flees to New York from Green Manors just before the arrival of the police, who confirm that the real Dr. Edwardes is missing and his unknown travelling companion is suspected of killing him. 

Spellbound decidedly falls into the realm of Hitchcock’s domestic crime thrillers, as opposed to his espionage-oriented ones, but it’s also an example of one of his lesser-considered genre films: melodrama. One needs to look no further than the film’s opening to see this, as this is, to my knowledge, the director’s only film in which there is an overture. It’s certainly a much more successful one than a certain later Hitchcock/Bergman collaboration, however, as the film never quite loses its thriller edge. Although the picture occasionally flirts with going for a full-on soap opera plot, there are enough touches of malice and menace to carry it to the finish line, and the thrills of the second half more than make up for some of the occasionally plodding romance scenes in the first. Although the contemporary audience may not have been primed to view Peck as an actor who was consistently known for portraying characters of high moral fiber (To Kill A Mockingbird was still seventeen years away) to the same extent that a modern audience would be, they certainly would have been able to see the vulnerability, confusion, and occasional hints of danger in his handsome face. We trust that Constance knows the inner workings of the human mind but are less convinced that she’s a strong judge of character, especially as she falls in love for the first time in her life, blinding her to the pieces of evidence that J.B. may, in fact, be exactly the dangerous criminal that the police think him to be. He’s certainly capable of turning malicious in an instant, and when he begins to stalk about the home of Dr. Brulov (Michael Chekhov), in which they’ve found shelter, with a straight razor, we’re not certain that either Constance or Brulov is safe. As such, the film’s narrative structure is superficially similar to that of Suspicion, although Spellbound is a much stronger film. 

Often, when a Hitchcock film becomes hard to find or is somehow neglected, it’s because it contains some problematic element that has caused it to fall out of favor. Secret Agent, which sees Peter Lorre doing a racist caricature in brownface, seems to only exist on bargain bin DVDs with transfers that look like they were remastered by being thrown down the stairs. Even on the Criterion app, no one attempted to quality check the subtitles for Young and Innocent, and one can only conclude that it’s because whoever was working on captioning the thing saw the grotesque Blackface at the end and threw their hands in the air. Spellbound has fallen out of print and isn’t streaming online anywhere, and I wondered over the course of the film if this had anything to do with what could be perceived as pervasive sexism throughout the narrative, although I would argue that the prejudice is on the part of the characters, not the text, since all of the people who underestimate Constance are proven wrong. Her male colleagues at Green Manors all consider her frosty, cold, and unwomanly. When she makes her way to the Empire State Hotel, she is first harassed by a drunken man who propositions her before he’s turned away by the hotel’s staff detective, who incorrectly diagnoses Constance as either a schoolteacher or a librarian and credits himself as being “a bit of a psychologist.” Constance, who actually is, is able to prey on his hubris and play the part of the repentant wife looking for her husband, thus tricking him into revealing what room J.B. is staying in. Among her peers at Green Manors, she’s also the only one to spot the thread that reveals that someone there knew the real Edwardes and thus knew J.B. was an impostor all along, eventually resulting in the downfall of the true culprit and the liberation of J.B. from prison. It’s another example of Hitchcock’s messy relationship with women and feminism. He may have been a terror to women who worked on his sets, but he also never passed up an opportunity to show a woman’s mind was more than capable of matching wits with a man. I’m not sure why this one isn’t more easily accessible or well-remembered; I only managed to catch it the first time on TCM years ago, and was only able to rewatch it on the VHS tape that I used to record it, lo these many years ago now. 

Visually, this is also one of Hitchcock’s finest. The slow establishment of J.B.’s fugue states when he sees parallel lines leads to an utterly fantastic two-minute dream sequence that includes images that were created by Salvador Dalí, and they are utterly beautiful and surreal. When Dr. Brulov tricks J.B. into drinking drugged milk, we see the image from his point of view as he raises the glass and drinks from it, the creation of a pure white horizon foreshadowing the revelation that the traumatic incident that caused his amnesia took place on a ski slope. The entire film is in black and white, save for two frames of red when the camera takes on the point of view of the end of the barrel of a gun as it fires. It’s great stuff, and given that Hitch was feuding with Harry O. Selznick at the time and wasn’t as invested in this as he was in films he was more passionate about, it’s a great insight to just how good the man could be even when he was only half-assing it, at least at this point in his career (his half-assery in his later works does not compare). I’m not sure where you might be able to find this, dear reader, other than perhaps through your library or browsing the thrift stores, but when you do, you’re going to enjoy it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Rope (1948)

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I was a little concerned that returning to Rope after not having seen it since I was a teenager would be a disappointing experience. The Jimmy Stewart version of The Man Who Knew Too Much was a dull, plodding slog, especially in comparison to Alfred Hitchcock’s earlier version starring Peter Lorre, and a recent viewing of Hitchcock’s other experiment in crafting an entire film out of long takes, Under Capricorn, was a similarly dour, unengaging experience. I was pleasantly delighted to find that not only does Rope hold up, it was even better than I remembered in many ways. 

The film opens with a murder. Brandon Shaw (John Dall) and his meeker “roommate” Phillip Morgan (Farley Granger) strangle their old prep school chum David Kentley as the ultimate expression of their Nietzschean philosophy that there are Übermensch and underlings, and that they are solidly members of the former. After they hide the body in a chest, Phillip seems to immediately regret their actions, but Brandon can hardly contain himself, and sets about reorganizing their prepared table, already set for that evening’s dinner party, to the top of the chest. One by one, their guests arrive: Kenneth Lawrence (Douglas Dick), the fourth member of their school days quintet; Janet Walker (Joan Chandler), Kenneth’s former girlfriend and current fiancée of the now-deceased David; David’s father Mr. Kentley (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), who has come to look over a set of books that Brandon and Phillip have set out for him and is accompanied by his sister-in-law Mrs. Atwater (Constance Collier), attending in place of her ill sister, David’s mother. The final guest, whom neither of the two boys is certain will actually appear until he does, is Rupert Cadell (Stewart), an eccentric philosopher and the former housemaster of the prep school that Brandon, Phillip, Kenneth, and David attended. 

Stewart is the nominal star here, and although he claimed in later years that this was his weakest performance in his Hitchcock collaborations (although I would disagree; see above about The Man Who Knew Too Much), it may be because he failed to fully understand Rupert, a character whose hypocrisy and high-handedness makes him more detestable than the actual murderers with whom he shares dinner. Brandon and Phillip’s belief that their membership in an intellectual elite class gives them the right to dole out death to their “inferiors” is entirely born out of being groomed to believe this by Rupert when he was an adult and they were children under his care. Despite the fact that everything the two younger men do is merely the ultimate enactment of Rupert’s own professed beliefs, which we see him expound upon at length during the dinner party, when he realizes what they have done, he accuses them of “twisting” his words. I can see how this would be a difficult thing for an actor to parse, because it’s not terribly believable, and it’s also the film’s primary weakness. In the present, we would call Rupert an “edgelord” who realizes too late that his rhetorical exercises have resulted in the death of a human being, but there was no real roadmap for that kind of character in 1948, and Stewart seems much more comfortable playing the amateur detective element of the Rupert character while struggling to play that opposite side.  

This also makes Rope one of Hitchcock’s more class conscious thrillers, if not the most class-aware. His thriller films generally fall into one of two categories: his domestic thrillers (like The Lodger, Rebecca, Suspicion, I Confess!, and, if one is being generous, Under Capricorn) and his espionage pictures (which are too numerous to name, but include Saboteur, The 39 Steps, Foreign Correspondent, and The Lady Vanishes), with some, like Sabotage and Notorious, straddling the line. All of them have some political statements to make, especially with regards to Hitch’s lifelong antipathy towards the police, his morally correct hatred of fascism, and the occasional jingoism of his wartime features, but he rarely bothers to tackle the inherent violence of a society that is divided into different economic classes. Although there are clear exceptions, like the middle-class focused Shadow of a Doubt, his domestic thrillers usually default to focusing on characters of wealth and status. I don’t think it was necessarily a conscious decision; rich people simply have large houses and estates that come with inherent, built-in gravitas and atmosphere. In Rope, however, the core of the film is about some rich boys thinking that they have the right to choose who lives and who dies, and although there’s much discussion of this being a reserved right of individuals whose intelligence raises them above the cattle of most of mankind, it’s very clear that this is purely a matter of wealth and social station. 

When Janet gets Brandon alone so that she can dress him down for inviting both her ex and her fiance, he teases her (incorrectly) that she had left Kenneth for David because the latter’s family was richer, but this is really only a matter of degrees of wealth. Neither Brandon nor Phillip is employed, but they occupy a multi-bedroom apartment, employ a domestic servant, Mrs. Wilson (Edith Evanson), and they’re all very young adults, given that David is (or rather was) an undergrad at Harvard and that all of the boys went to school together. Thus, we’re talking about a group of rich men, Rupert included, who were born into wealth and perceive themselves as elite because of their supposed brilliance, when in fact this is simply a case of the idle rich justifying their fantasies about having the freedom to murder the poor. It’s incisive stuff, and it’s all played subtextually, making the film all the richer. At the end of the day, Brandon is no more than a bully who kills a lifelong friend less for the thrill of the act itself and more so that he can delight in the positive attention he presumes he will receive for how “clever” he was, despite the fact that he’s not really that smart at all; even with all of his preening and innuendo, the duo would still likely have gotten away with it if he hadn’t forgotten about David’s hat. Phillip is a pushover who can’t hold his liquor and allows himself too many outbursts that arouse Rupert’s suspicions in the first place. As for Rupert himself, he’s quite insistent that he believes in his moral certainty that the brilliant elite should be allowed to commit murder (of the working class, of course — hotel clerks, waiters, and others who are all identified solely by their servile role in society), even when it upsets others, only to be shocked and appalled when the victim is someone he knows personally; he’s almost utterly lacking in empathy, and is no less monstrous than his former pupils. 

All of this discussion probably makes the film sound heady and dour, but it’s quite the opposite; it’s electric, and often very funny. The innuendoes I mentioned Brandon delivering above are often smirk-worthy, but the screen really comes to life the moment that Janet appears. Rope may be one of the shorter films in Hitchcock’s sound career, but that doesn’t mean that the beginning doesn’t sag a little under the weight of the exposition of both Phillip and Brandon’s motivations and their relationships with the dinner guests; as soon as Janet steps through the door and into the apartment, she’s delivering her own witty remarks, even as she pretends that she’s only funny when she’s not trying to be. She’s a breath of fresh air, and it’s a disappointment that the actress had such a brief career. Equally delightful is Mrs. Atwater, who would be an utterly exhausting visitor but is quite fun to watch. Watching her try to remember the names of movies and plays that she’s seen or reciting the astrological signs of the era’s biggest marquee names is very entertaining. It’s less engaging to Rupert than it is to me, but one of the better subtle jokes is the way that he steers this conversation into a topic of his own interest, which happens to be inventing The Purge out of whole cloth, as if her frivolity about Ingrid Bergman’s horoscope is more vacuous that his pomposity about killing for better theater tickets. It’s also fun to see the way that Hitchcock gets around the censors’ insistence on making the two killers seem less gay. One nice bit is that when Mrs. Wilson directs a guest to the telephone, she says it’s in “the first bedroom,” while Brandon directs a different guest to the same location later by saying it’s “in the bedroom” (emphasis added), indicating that there’s really only one room that they sleep in but that Mrs. Wilson remains blissfully unaware. It’s quite good stuff, and the picture moves with such speed that you almost miss it. 

Rope was not terribly well received in its time, only coming to be considered one of Hitchcock’s better pictures by later audiences. It’s worth checking out, or even revisiting if, like me, you’ve already seen it. At eighty minutes, it’s a breeze to get through, even if your eyes will glaze over a little at the beginning and ending faux-philosophy of the main three players. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Under Capricorn (1949)

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In Douglas Brode’s book Edge of Your Seat, he writes of Under Capricorn: “Tepid, uninvolving mishmash set down under, with stars utterly unbelievable as Aussie husband and wife […] in a creaky, soap-operish plot that goes absolutely nowhere and, worse still, takes forever getting there.” Of all of Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers listed forty thrillers in the book, this is one of only two single-star reviews (the other is Topaz). In Truffaut/Hitchcock, the master of suspense recalled a contemporary NYT review that stated the first suspenseful moment comes at 100 minutes into the run time. In his autobiography Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, leading man Joseph Cotten called the movie “Under Corny Crap,” and the film’s box office likely suffered due to the scandal surrounding Ingrid Bergman that same year, when she became pregnant with the child of Roberto Rossellini (they were both married at the time). To circle back to Mr. Brode’s notation above, he makes two major errors: first, both Sam (Cotten) and Hattie Flusky (Bergman) are Irish expats living in Australia (though they remain “utterly unbelievable” as Irish folks as well), and secondly, this is not a thriller, but a melodrama that cribs from Gaslight in its final moments. Audiences at the time had come to expect something different from the filmmaker; in the preceding decade alone, he had made Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt (also starring Cotten), and Notorious, just to name a few. Under Capricorn, I would imagine, shares more in common with his earlier British non-thriller dramas like The Skin Game or Rich and Strange, and I would also go so far as to posit that it’s filed with his suspense films less because of the content of the feature itself and more because forty makes for a nicer, rounder number for a list of “Hitchcock Thrillers” than thirty-nine does. 

Not only is this a melodrama, it’s also a period piece, which meant it was already starting on the back foot for me. Taking place in the 1830s in New South Wales, then still a penal colony under British rule, the film finds Charles Adare (Michael Wilding) arriving in Sydney with his second cousin, Sir Richard, whom the crown has appointed as the region’s new governor. Charles is the youngest son of his family, and the practice of primogeniture means that he is set to inherit nothing, so he has come to the colony to seek his fortune. Although he’s a man of good humor, he’s fairly disinterested in honest work. After meeting with a local bank manager to discuss his prospects, he meets Sam Flusky, seeming to recognize the name; the manager tells him that Flusky is a successful landowner but also an emancipist (someone sent to Australia for penal reasons who has since served their time but remained on the continent). Despite being warned against becoming socially linked to Flusky, whose newfound wealth has not resulted in his acceptance in high society (such as it is) in Sydney, and being directly forbidden from associating with him by his cousin, Charles accepts an invitation to a dinner party at Sam’s. The dinner is attended solely by several local gentlemen, all of whom deliver poor excuses for the absence of their respective wives. The reason becomes clear when Sam’s wife, Hattie, descends the stairs in a drunken stupor. Surprised, Charles recognizes her as a childhood friend of his older sister’s, and suddenly recollects that she left Ireland suddenly when she eloped with a man below her station. Said man was her stable boy, Sam, who was sentenced to seven years on the chain gang for the slaying of Hattie’s brother Dermot. 

Sam, recognizing Charles’s immediate rehabilitative effect on Hattie, asks him to stay with them in his manor house; this raises the ire of Flusky’s housekeeper Milly (Margaret Leighton), who has become accustomed to running the household in Hattie’s stead, all while enabling and facilitating Mrs. Flusky’s all-hours stupefaction. What follows is a series of vignettes, as Charles manages, over time, to wean Hattie off the bottle and encourage her to reassert herself as mistress of the house. When Milly purposefully embarrasses her in front of the other servants, Hattie retreats back to her room and locks herself in; Charles climbs up to the balcony and lets himself in, setting her right again. Sam is not entirely unaware of the love that Charles begins to have for Hattie, but he also adores his wife and believes that she deserves to re-enter the society that shunned her while she waited seven years for her husband to be freed from imprisonment. When Charles’s various subterfuges pay off and Hattie attends a ball at the governor’s mansion, Milly poisons Sam’s mind with thoughts of their potential infidelities, resulting in Sam arriving and embarrassing Hattie so thoroughly that her rejection from high society is confirmed. Poor horseman Charles departs the Flusky home on the back of Sam’s wild mare, and the animal breaks its leg, forcing Sam to shoot the old girl and put her out of her misery. A confrontation with Charles follows, and Charles is shot, albeit nonfatally, leaving him delirious and intermittently unconscious; since Sam is a previously convicted felon, he is likely to be hanged for the crime. 

This prompts Hattie to admit that it was actually she who shot her brother, and that Sam took the fall for her. When she confesses to the governor, he tells her that she will have to return to Ireland to stand trial, but Sam refuses to corroborate her version of events. Reluctantly, Sam decides he will return with her and leave his life as a nouveau riche gentleman behind, much to Milly’s chagrin. To keep him in Australia, she tries to poison Hattie, but is exposed, as is her scheme of making Hattie believe she’s losing her mind by leaving shrunken human heads in the lady’s suite. Charles recovers enough to claim that his shooting was an accident, and we all end happily ever after, with Sam and Hattie’s love having conquered all, and Charles returning to Ireland in disgrace, but cheerful. 

Under Capricorn is notable in that, like its immediate predecessor in Hitch’s C.V., Rope, the film is shot almost entirely in long, unedited shots, although the breaks here are a little more obvious than in his previous film. Unfortunately, they don’t end up amounting to much. There’s a credit for the use of Technicolor here, but it feels like a waste of that technology, as this a mostly beige and brown movie; Charles wears a couple of blue and green waistcoats, but the color of them is so muted that it hardly seems like costuming should have gone through the effort at all. That’s not to say that the film looks bad, but it certainly doesn’t leap off of the screen. Since this was a melodrama and not a suspense thriller, I couldn’t help but think about Douglas Sirk’s films in the genre. The snow in All That Heaven Allows is so pure and white that it almost looks blue, and the absurdly pink bedroom of Lana Turner’s daughter at the end of Imitation of Life is doing some excellent environmental storytelling; there’s not a single image in this film that’s as visually arresting as the scenery that Sirk worked with. The extended shots display a mastery of the craft, but it’s no surprise that Hitchcock made precisely two movies composed entirely of “oners” and then went back to using the technique only when it matters. In Rope, the film’s real-time nature makes that work for the entire thing, whereas its use in Under Capricorn feels like a failed experiment. It’s an interesting technical exercise, but nothing more. 

I viewed this as a Kino Lorber release, and while their print looks quite good, the quality control on the subtitles is, frankly, unacceptable. Flusky’s Roger Corman-quality matte painting house is named “Minyago Yugilla,” which supposedly means “Why weepest thou?”, and every time someone translates this for another character, the captions substitute “though” for “thou,” and that’s only one of the many errors that makes one wonder who’s minding the store over there. (I’m personally willing to accept, at a very reasonable rate, any proofreading jobs that any boutique physical media retailer has to offer, if there are any companies that are still offering this kind of work instead of outsourcing it to AI to be botched.) It’s not even as if the dialogue is all that difficult for a captioner to understand; to say that anyone in the film is failing at an Irish (or Australian) accent would be a lie, because it would imply that there is a single person in the cast who’s making the effort to even try one. There’s not much to speak of when it comes to extras on the disc, either, if that’s of interest to you. 

All of that being said, I went into this expecting a much worse film, and perhaps because my expectations were so low, I didn’t despise it the way that Brode, Cotten, Hitchcock, and the film-going public did. It held my interest well enough, even if it wasn’t terribly exciting, and I don’t think that I’ll ever revisit it or recommend it to others. This may be the worst performance of Bergman’s storied career; it is, at least, the worst one I’ve witnessed. Not helping matters is the hideous period dress that she’s forced to don on several occasions. Every bonnet they put on Bergman is more ostentatiously ugly than the last, and there’s a set of nightclothes that she wears that are meticulously decorated with lace that seems strategically placed to make one ask “Why?” There is already a nineteenth century period piece in which Bergman plays a wife driven to madness, featuring the presence of a sullen housemaid and Cotten in a lead role, and in which Bergman is publicly embarrassed at a societal function when she dares to leave the house for the first time in years. It’s Gaslight, obviously, and it’s a much, much better picture than this one. Under Capricorn is for completists only, and only the kind of completist who needs to either (a) see every Hitchcock ever made, or (b) who needs to watch all of the master of suspense’s thrillers while also needing the number of the said films to be an even forty.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: The Kirlian Witness (1979)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the psychotronic ’70s oddity The Kirlian Witness, a murder mystery in which the only witness to the crime is an ordinary house plant.

00:00 Welcome
01:41 Take One (1977)
09:20 Maisie (1939)
24:35 Camille 2000 (1969)
31:28 Heaven Can Wait (1943)
36:47 The Invisible Boy (1957)
41:39 Gazer (2025)
51:26 New Rose Hotel (1998)
56:50 The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026)
1:16:26 The Puffy Chair (2005)
1:20:47 Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021)
1:27:20 Demonwarp (1988)

1:30:05 The Kirlian Witness (1979)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Gazer (2025)

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Gazer is a 2025 film  from first-time director Ryan J. Sloan, who shares writing credit with the film’s star, Ariella Mastroianni. Mastroianni portrays Frankie Rhodes, a woman with a progressive neurological disorder that distorts her memories, induces psychedelic dreams, and sends her into long blackout periods of lost time. She’s separated from her daughter Cynthia, whose current guardian is Diane, the mother of Frankie’s late husband, whose death was ruled a suicide but which Diane suspects Frankie had a hand in. Finding it difficult to hold down a job because of her degenerating condition, Frankie opens the movie being fired from her job as a gas station attendant due to perpetually zoning out in the middle of her shifts. The film takes its title from Frankie’s activities on the job, as she stares up at the building across the street, losing time while making up narratives about the people that she sees, Rear Window style. On the night that she’s fired, she sees an episode of violence happen in one of the windows. Frankie attends a grief group for people whose loved ones committed suicide, where a woman she saw leaving the building (Renee Gagner) approaches her. She introduces herself as Paige Foster and relates that her mother overdosed, and telling Frankie that her brother has since become overprotective, which prompted the domestic assault incident Frankie witnessed. Paige offers Frankie $3000 dollars to sneak into the apartment, get her car keys, and bring the car to her at a different location so she can flee her brother, and Frankie agrees. 

I’ve seen the film described as Hitchcockian, which is accurate. Beyond the shameless cribbing from Rear Window, the film takes on one of Alfred’s favorite elements, that of the wrongfully accused protagonist being pursued by the authorities while seeking to clear their name, and a Vertiginous series of mistaken identities. It’s also Lynchian, in that important information is revealed through surrealist dream sequences and characters that mirror one another or become confused with one another in esoteric, Mulhollandian ways, while psychedelic nightmare sequences pull from Twin Peaks for set and blocking inspiration. It’s also Cronenbergian, in that Frankie’s nightmares also often involve body horror imagery that’s directly taken from his catalog, and I do mean directly; there’s a shot of dream Frankie pulling an audiocassette out of a wound in her husband’s torso that’s so close to Videodrome that it might be legally actionable. 

If all of that sounds like this film is trafficking in too many ideas and lacks a cohesive creative vision, that’s because it is, and it does. It’s not a bad film at all, but it does have a lot of the hallmarks of being a freshman outing, and given that director Sloan has zero other credits on IMDb, it gives the impression that he emerged fully formed out of thin air as a filmmaker. Given that there’s no evidence of him getting any crew experience in the rest of his CV, this is even more impressive as a technical achievement, but its dependency on the use of other directors’ metaphorical color palettes means that, as a text, it fails to be more than the sum of its parts. There’s also a narrative device throughout the film in which Frankie listens to cassette tapes that she makes for herself, and the conceit never quite works, and it feels very much like a darling that the screenwriters couldn’t bring themselves to kill. It’s possible to excise the use of them in scenes like the one where Tape!Frankie is telling Present!Frankie not to linger too long in Paige’s apartment after getting her keys (a direction that Present! Frankie fails to follow, of course, and loses track of time) while also retaining the narrative throughline of Frankie recording journal entries for her daughter so that she can still communicate with her after her disorder takes her life as well as the scenes in which Frankie listens to previous recordings of Cynthia to keep herself company. As played in most scenes, however, the tapes are little more than a distraction in the scenes where Frankie listens to them “to focus,” and it feels like the hallmark of a director who’s too afraid to trust the audience as much as he should. 

That’s a shame, since the film has a lot going for it. The soundtrack is excellent, and perfectly meshes with the film’s overall sound design. There’s a really fantastic element in the visual design where all of the environments Frankie occupies while she’s dreaming are uncannily symmetrical, which is a nicely subtle way of playing with the narrative’s themes of mistaken identity and mirroring. I really sat up and paid attention when Dream!Frankie goes into her old house and opens a TV cabinet to find a one-eyed meat cube inside, the tongue of which Frankie pulls out like a magician’s endless string of handkerchiefs and then connects to her navel like a gross umbilical cord. Out of context, all of these dream sequences would work as their own individual horror shorts, and I appreciate that they don’t always mesh in a comprehensible way with Frankie’s real life decisions or memories, since it accurately reflects both her medical condition and the anxieties thereof. Mastroianni is also an odd but perfect choice for the lead. She’s quite petite, and the choice for Frankie to have a non-femme hair style renders her androgynous in a way that you rarely see in a main character unless it’s plot-mandated or narratively relevant. I found myself frequently frustrated with her choices in a way that threatened to make her impossible to root for, but not every lead has to be unchallenging. The film is also gorgeously photographed, with film grain artifacts and focus choices that make the film feel like it fell out of a time capsule from the New Hollywood era, so much so that when a newer version $100 bill or a cell phone pops up, you’re a little surprised. 

Where Gazer borrows too much from that New Hollywood era, however, is in its choice to be deliberately contemplative to an excessive degree. While in Paige’s apartment, Frankie looks down at the gas station where she used to work and we in the audience understand that this was the view that Paige and her attacker had the night of the assault; we don’t need to revisit this exact angle and reverse shot on Frankie on two additional occasions. I recently picked up a fun phrase from an old Siskel & Ebert episode that someone uploaded to YouTube, in which Roger criticized the performances in a certain film by saying that the actors were reciting their lines “like they had all day” to do it. I praised Mastroianni above, and while she’s usually quite good here, there are far too many scenes in which she enters and exits scenes with no energy at all, and it makes the film itself feel more sluggish, while Sloan leaves the camera running on some things like, as Roger would say, he had all to film it. Revelations about the central mystery happen quickly and get skipped over, while some scenes play out just shy of interminably, and I don’t think it’s quite the right choice. 

Gazer was recently added to Shudder, and you can find it there as of this writing. It allows its contemplation to get a little long in the tooth and the mystery itself is convoluted in a way that is going to leave a lot of viewers puzzled, but there are worse ways to spend an evening. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Send Help (2026)

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Two decades after Red Eye, Rachel McAdams finally got back on a plane in a movie helmed by a horror director who already peaked decades earlier, and look what’s happened to her this time. Dowdy corporate strategist Linda Liddle (McAdams) is an incredibly valuable member of her team despite her social ineptitude, questionable hygiene, and lack of awareness about not having fish in the office. She’s so important, in fact, that her late employer promised her a vice presidency before he passed away, not that this piece of information is treated with any deference by the boss’s son Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) when he takes over. He’s the kind of trust fund kid for whom the idiom about rich boys “born on third base [who] think they invented baseball” was crafted; he wastes no time in giving Linda’s promised promotion to one of his frat brothers who steals credit for her work, using his c-suite position to sleaze it up by asking an attractive applicant “how far above and beyond [she’s] willing to go for [him]” despite having a devoted supermodel fiancée, and otherwise abusing the position of power that’s been dumped into his lap. To string Linda along a little further, he invites her on an overseas business trip that will give her time to iron out some final details, and everything changes when their plane goes down. Everyone else involved is killed, but Linda finds that Bradley has washed up on the same beach that she has, and she immediately uses the skills she learned as a Survivor hopeful (and superfan) to set up shelter and prevent Bradley from dying of shock or sunstroke. He remains an ungrateful ingrate and attempts to leverage his position as her boss into getting her to follow his orders, but there’s no HR-mandated slideshow about office dynamics that could prepare either of them for what lies ahead. 

Send Help writers Mark Swift and Damian Shannon have made their careers out of revisiting dependable intellectual property, having a hand in two incarnations of Jason Voorhees by writing both 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason and the 2009 Friday the 13th reboot, as well as penning the screenplay for the 2017 Dwayne Johnson vanity project/nineties nostalgia cash-in Baywatch. (Their other writing credit listed on Wikipedia, Shark Tale, credits Ice Age franchise creator Michael J. Wilson as screenwriter, with them having only a story credit for an earlier version of Shark Tale’s script.) It’s not a huge body of material to work with when inferring what appeals to them as writers, but it does trend toward sequels and reboots. Send Help is the first original screenplay of theirs to make it to production with their credit intact, but this doesn’t feel like the most “original” script. I must confess that I underestimated the cultural penetration that Triangle of Sadness had; I wasn’t surprised when Brandon texted me to say that the trailer for this film looked like someone had adapted the second half of Sadness as a Tubi original, but I was a bit taken aback by another friend stating upon exiting Send Help that they were also worried it would just be Sadness all over again. It’s possible 20th Century Studios also assumed Sadness had limited broad appeal; although these films don’t have exactly the same ending, it does feel like someone was looking over their fellow student’s shoulder during exam time. 

Which is not to say that this isn’t a fun ride in and of itself. It’s been a while since director Sam Raimi helmed a horror picture (2009’s Drag Me To Hell, although Multiverse of Madness gave him the chance to play around with some horror concepts, putting his Deadite action figures in Marvel’s limited sandbox) and even longer since he put out an R-rated picture (2000’s The Gift, for which I have a fondness that’s largely unshared by others). In the visuals shown in the film’s trailers, it’s hard to see Raimi’s unique cinematic playfulness on display, and the fact that he’s working with modern studio-driven color correction and saturation limits means those pre-release materials do nothing to differentiate this from your standard mass appeal cheapie like Primate. Once you’ve bought your ticket and you’re actually sitting in the theater for Send Help, that Raimi touch starts to come through. It may be ironic to say this after slightly teasing the film’s screenwriters about their tendency toward retrospection in their writing output in the last paragraph, but there was a warm familiarity to his return to his goofy, gooey theatrics. When it comes to Raimi’s legacy, those in the know will always think about The Evil Dead (or Army of Darkness) first, but in the mainstream, Raimi’s probably best remembered as “the Spider-Man guy,” and anyone under the age of twenty is not going to remember a time when he was a reliable splatter man, especially if they associate him with Oz the Great and Powerful or Doctor Strange. With that in mind, I’m not entirely certain just how well this one is going to go over with a general audience. I didn’t go into this film expecting to see a CGI boar get its eye popped out and then spend its death throes covering Rachel McAdams with snot, but when that did happen, I thought to myself “Oh, right, Sam Raimi.” Most people will be utterly agog when McAdams’s character, in the midst of dealing with being poisoned, gives O’Brien CPR while vomiting neon gunk on him, and I was too, and then: “Oh, right, Sam Raimi.” A vision of a dead woman stalking onto a beach before disappearing, then reappearing in a fake-out waking-up-from-a-nested-nightmare jump scare? Sam Raimi to the core. 

It’s comforting to see the old Raimi touch nestled in this film, even if he didn’t bother to bring Ted in for a cameo, but Send Help is also a movie that feels like it’s playing a little too safe. Perhaps his best trademark combination of humor and horror comes early in the film, when one of the c-suite dudebros is blown out of the crashing plane while attempting to force Linda to give him her seat, his tie catching on a snag and leaving him flailing outside of her window, which she closes as he expires. The film could have used a little bit more of this. Given the R-rating, there was a real opportunity here to push the envelope a little further, and the film doesn’t take that opportunity. McAdams and O’Brien both deliver solid performances, with the former excellently underplaying the moments in which the perkiness which has been her facade for so long that it’s become her reality slips and she grapples with her complicity in a death in her past, while the latter is so smarmy and obnoxious that no matter how exaggerated his karmic retribution technically may be, you never doubt that he deserves every bit of it. Send Help isn’t quite scary or mean enough, but you’ll laugh enough that you’ll enjoy yourself. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Dressed to Kill (1980)

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I had always heard Dressed to Kill discussed in conversation about transphobia in horror cinema of the past, alongside Psycho and Silence of the Lambs in that they contained some manner of attempts at empathy for their crossdressing psychosexual killers. Psycho ends with a psychological explanation for why Norman Bates did what he did, and Lambs includes a scene that explains that Buffalo Bill is not really trans; “Dr. Lecter,” Clarice says, “there’s no correlation in the literature between transsexualism and violence. Transsexuals are very passive.” As society has already started walking back the hard-won rights of trans people (of which they already had so very few, you pricks) in recent years, Dressed to Kill feels like an artifact of a different time, wherein Brian De Palma, as Jonathan Demme would a decade later with Lambs, takes the time to explain that being trans doesn’t make someone crazy or evil, but also can’t help imitating Psycho in a way that feels transphobic through a modern lens. Of course, this is of a kind with De Palma’s eighties Hitchcockian thrillers; Dressed to Kill is to Psycho as Body Double is to Vertigo, after all. 

In typical Psycho format, we spend most of the beginning of the film with a woman we don’t initially realize is doomed: Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson), a dissatisfied housewife whose husband fails to fulfill her sexual desires and whose young son Peter (Keith Gordon) bails on their plans to spend the afternoon at a museum together in order to work on one of his inventions. After a short check-in with her therapist, Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine), Kate goes to the museum herself, where she and a handsome man flirt throughout the various exhibits before they grab a cab together and get up to some hanky-panky, which continues all the way up to his apartment. She leaves in a frightened state after realizing that her hook-up has syphilis and gonorrhea when she finds his notice from the state health department while looking for a memo pad to leave him a note and almost makes it out of the building before remembering that she left her wedding ring on his bedside table. When she goes to retrieve it, however, a person in a black overcoat and hat, shades, and sporting blonde hair enters the elevator with her and slashes her with a razor, quite graphically and viciously. When the elevator stops at another floor, high class call girl Liz Blake (Nancy Allen) sees the body and screams; she reaches out to Kate as the doors start to close, catching a glimpse of the killer in the convex mirror. 

Liz ends up hauled in for questioning by scummy Detective Marino (a perfectly cast, despicable Dennis Franz), as is Dr. Elliott, who lies to Marino that he doesn’t have any clues, despite the fact that he came straight from receiving messages from both Marino and a patient named “Bobbi” on his answering machine, confessing to having stolen Elliott’s razor from his shaving kit and done something awful with it. At the police station, young Peter uses some of his audio surveillance equipment to eavesdrop on the various investigations. As Liz begins to see a woman stalking her all over the city, she eventually runs into Peter, who has been surreptitiously surveilling Elliott’s office to try and find out if one of his other patients was his mother’s killer. Can this unlikely duo stay one step ahead of the killer and figure out who they really are before the police pin it on Liz to close the case? 

We’ve already established that the film apes Psycho in its structure, starting out with a decoy protagonist who ends up killed halfway through, only to pass off the leading role to another woman. It also features multiple shower scenes in reference to Psycho’s most famous sequence, complete with showerhead closeups and murders (even if only in a dream). Kate reaches out her hand in death the same way Marion Crane did two decades prior, and when Liz picks up the murder weapon, the string section of the orchestra goes wild in a familiar way. Finally, and most notably, the killer is a man with a split personality, with “Bobbi” taking over their shared body in the same way that “Norma Bates” took over Norman’s. Where it differs is in its typical De Palma sleaziness (although recent viewings of latter day Hitchcocks like Topaz and Frenzy, which were unpleasant in a similar way, have made me question whether Hitch would have been as depraved as De Palma if he had been active in the same, morally loosened era). Kate Miller literally drops her panties in the cab ride following her cruising of the museum, and there are several sequences that spend a lot of time on loving close-ups of areolas and blonde pubic hair; this is an erotic thriller after all. 

Perhaps it’s that which makes its gender and sexual ethics feel so weird to the modern eye. The film is unusually sympathetic to sex work for its day, showing Liz as a smart woman who happens to be a prostitute; she invests in art and is even on a first name basis with her stockbroker, with whom she communicates about insider tips that her clients let slip. The film also takes the time to include a segment from The Phil Donahue Show in which the host interviews an MTF transgender person (then-contemporary term “transsexual” is used universally throughout) to establish that trans folks are just like you and me. But that all of this is present in a film that also spends so much of its runtime being sexually titillating makes the film feel tawdry in a way that trivializes its presumably sincere attempts to pre-emptively defend itself against accusations of bigotry. On the whole, it feels more old-fashioned than offensive, which is fine, because it works rather well as a suspense thriller outside of all of these elements. 

The film also feels very much like it’s in conversation with the 80s slasher boom, even if it couldn’t have been intended as such. Psycho is often cited as the prototype for the slasher genre, and with good reason, and this film was released less than twenty months after Halloween, the generally agreed upon catalyst of the next decade’s horror subgenre dominance. One of the ways that the film manages to subvert audience expectations is by having a summation sequence following the climax in which Dr. Levy (David Margulies) explains the irrational rationale of what caused “Bobbi” to split off from her main, male personality and how their shared body’s sexual arousal prompted “Bobbi” to emerge and try to destroy the objects of that desire. It’s textually very similar to the scene in which a psychiatrist explains Norman Bates’s “possession” to the survivors of Hitchcock’s film, but instead of ending in that moment, Dressed to Kill still has 10 minutes left. We get to see “Bobbi” in a hellish mental institution, where she kills a nurse and escapes to stalk Peter and Liz; Liz has another shower scene to bookend the one at the start, only to emerge and realize that Bobbi is in the room with her, then gets killed, only to awake screaming. I have no doubt that the asylum scene here was a visual influence on a similar sequence in A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Warriors, and that double fakeout ending of “the villain escapes for one last kill” followed by “the final girl dies but it’s only a dream” is familiar in retrospect but was probably novel in 1980. 

As another Brian De Palma visual spectacle, this one is top notch. The split personality narrative is echoed in the use of countless split diopter shots that look fantastic and are perfectly suited for when they appear; a sequence in which it’s used for a close-up of Peter listening in on Det. Marino’s conversation with Elliott so that we can pick up on the details that Elliott is lying while also watching Peter’s face fall is particularly excellent. There’s also a great scene in which Elliott comes home and starts watching TV while Liz calls her stockbroker, splitting the screen between them. As we get to see both what Elliott is watching (the aforementioned Donahue interview) and his face as he does so, Liz calls her madame from a second landline in her apartment so she can negotiate for a specific amount for the night while telling her broker when to expect her with the money the next day. The screen and the soundtrack are suddenly very busy, and it feels like it’s building to a frenzy, but despite all of the overlapping dialogue and crosscutting, one never really loses track of what’s happening. It’s masterful. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Looper (2012)

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After another stellar outing for Benoit Blanc in Wake Up Dead Man, I found myself realizing that there were still parts of Rian Johnson’s filmography that, despite our coverage of Brick (and Poker Face), The Last Jedi, Knives Out, and Glass Onion, were still untapped. I didn’t see Looper when it first came out, but I remember its production well, as it was shot in New Orleans (one of the best places to go to capture images of dystopian poverty in the immediate and long-term aftermath of Katrina) while I was in grad school there. In fact, my roommate at the time of filming was an extra; he was the piercer at the tattoo parlor that we lived in the back rooms of, and there was a casting call for “weird looking people” for a group scene. Having now seen the film and having scoured the big party scenes that I would have assumed he would have been in, I’m sorry to say that I couldn’t find him, alas. That’s not the kind of close watching that this film necessarily relies upon, but as with all of Johnson’s films, you better be paying attention if you want to get the maximum amount of satisfaction. 

Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a hitman living in Slumsville, USA in 2044. Addicted to an unnamed drug administered via eye dropper, Joe funds his habit as a “looper,” a specialized killer working for a crime syndicate that’s three decades in his future, where surveillance technology alerts law enforcement anytime someone dies. The mobsters of the 2070s skirt this by sending their victims into the past (the police apparently not being alerted if someone simply disappears), where Joe and the other loopers kill the doomed future victims and dispose of their bodies in exchange for silver. The loopers are themselves damned as well; all of them know that, sooner or later, they will have to “close their own loop,” meaning killing their own future selves (and getting one last big payday) and retiring, with the knowledge that they have only thirty years to live. When Joe’s buddy Seth (Paul Dano) fails to close his loop and allows his older self to escape, we get to see the lengths that temporally local crime boss Abe (Jeff Daniels) to make sure that Seth stays just alive enough not to destabilize the loop while also ensuring maximum suffering. 

When one of Joe’s victims does not appear on schedule, he’s sufficiently distracted that the man, who turns out to be his own older self (Bruce Willis) is able to escape. As it turns out, Old!Joe is on a mission to answer the age old question of “Would you be able to go back in time and kill baby Hitler?” with a resounding “Yes, and anyone else born that same day at that same hospital, just to be safe,” which turns out to be less morally straightforward than he expected. In the future, there’s an underworld figure toppling and absorbing various criminal enterprises into one evil force, the “Rainmaker,” and Old!Joe eventually fell in love with a woman who died at the hands of the Rainmaker’s goons. With Abe’s organization after both of them, Young!Joe and Old!Joe find that they can’t trust one another despite being one person. Meanwhile elsewhere, Sara (Emily Blunt) is raising her young telekinetic son on a farm; he’s not the only one, as about 10% of people have barroom card trick level telekinesis at this point, but he has potential to become much more. 

The performances here are fantastic. This was probably Willis’s last great outing (and I say that as a Moonlighting fan, so you know I’m always rooting for him), and he brings a lot of gravitas to the screen. There’s a moment where Young!Joe demands to see the photo of Old!Joe’s wife, saying that he can avoid ever speaking to her and thus ensure that she’s safe from being killed by the Rainmaker’s gunmen in 2074, but Old!Joe refuses; it’s not enough that he keeps her safe, but he wants his life back, specifically, no matter what he has to do. There’s a moment where Old!Joe realizes this about himself, that his decision is much less selfless and much more self-serving than he had convinced himself, and Willis conveys every moment of it with conviction. Gordon-Levitt, despite acting through prosthetics that are intended to make him look more like a young Willis, is nuanced in his interpretation of Willis’s body language, intonations, and idiosyncrasies, without it ever feeling like he’s doing an impression. Despite his small role, Dano makes his usual meaty meal out of a cowardly sleazeball, and it’s always a delight to see. Particularly impressive is the amount of menace that playing-against-type Jeff Daniels is bringing to the table. Perhaps glaringly, the person I haven’t mentioned yet here is Blunt, which is in some part due to her relative lack of screen time, as she doesn’t really appear until the midpoint of the film. But it’s also that she’s not given as much to do, as she’s relegated to a role that’s not really all that demanding, although there’s a scene where her son starts to pull a Carrie that shows her pull out some fierce chops. 

The sci-fi conceits of the plot are fun. The introduction of the idea that telekinesis has been discovered and is widespread but is limited to what amounts to little more than parlor tricks feels like a weird tangent given that it disappears from the plot for a while, but when it comes back, it’s relevant and feels like a piece falling into place. That’s always been one of Johnson’s strengths as a screenwriter, and one that feels very satisfying to me as a bit of a systems thinker myself. The film doesn’t spend any time faffing about with trying to justify its time travel conventions, as Old!Joe gestures to a bunch of drinking straws on the table between them and says that they could give themselves headaches making diagrams with them or just get on with things, and that’s what they (and the film) do. One gets the sense that Johnson was the kind of person who may have made just those kinds of diagrams in his younger days and knows exactly what complaints to expect and how to make them irrelevant. 

I still have yet to see The Brothers Bloom, but I do know that it’s a bit of a departure from the serious noir-at-a-high-school vibes of Brick and the techno noir of Looper, which is a bit of a bummer. I don’t foresee myself growing tired of Benoit Blanc (or Poker Face, although its fate hangs in the balance as of this writing), but I wish there were more noir reinventions from Johnson to watch now. Since it’s been over a decade since Looper and he hasn’t gone back to that well, I don’t know if we’ll see him release another one soon, if ever. I’d like to see him try his hand at one of these again, as it’s always a pleasure to see.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Breakdown (1997)

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Gaslight, heatstroke, truck hoss.

Kurt Russell stars in the 1997 dirt-road thriller Breakdown as a man who is LOOKING for his WIFE. If that’s not his most defining characteristic, it’s at least his most often recited mission statement. In a bigger picture sense, he’s an East Coast yuppie who’s relocating to California, violently derailed by working-class Southwest roughnecks along the way. He’s initially targeted because he’s driving a newfangled SUV he cannot actually afford, the kind of vanity-purchase truck that runs on computer chips instead of old-fashioned engine power. As the menacing, truck-driving men who abduct his WIFE put it, he might as well have bought a bumper sticker that says, “Rich assholes looking for trouble.” Those gruff brutes unplug some electric gadgetry on his shiny new toy while he’s not looking, leaving him stranded on the side of the road with his WIFE (Kathleen Quinlan) until the preppy-clothed couple are “rescued” by a passing trucker (J.T. Walsh) who offers to drive them to a nearby payphone so they can request a tow. Only, the wife never makes it to that payphone; she’s kidnapped and held for ransom, at a much higher price point than Russell’s credit-card-indebted poser can afford. So, he has to get his hands dirty and fight his way back to her like a real man, with trucks and guns and such.

Breakdown largely plays like a Hollywood studio echo of Australia’s Ozploitation boom in previous decades. The dizzying desert heat, small-town gaslighting, and lethal machismo that Russell’s hero suffers while LOOKING for his WIFE all recall Wake in Fright, especially by the time he’s stripped of his Big City respectability in the final action beats. Meanwhile, the truck-on-truck violence he has to engage in to complete his mission recall the diesel-fueled warfare of Mad Max & Roadgames — two Aussie action classics. Breakdown is entertaining enough as a thriller-of-the-week relic in its first half, when most of the villainy is psychological. The way Russell is bounced from diner to bank to cop station with no one willing to acknowledge that his wife was kidnapped in broad daylight is maddening. J.T. Walsh perfectly performs banal evil in that stretch as the low-level crime boss in charge of her abduction: an everyday, unassuming trucker who’s just trying to feed his shit-heel family by committing heinous crimes against total strangers. However, it isn’t until the dirt-road chases of the go-for-broke finale that the movie shift gears from Pretty Good to Great, Actually. Bullets are traded at top highway speeds, trailer homes are smashed in demolition derby spectacle, and big rigs crash over the concrete walls of overpasses, crushing bodies below in dark, cosmic punchlines.

If there’s any discernible visual style workman director Jonathan Mostow brings to Breakdown, it’s all in the first act. When we first meet the yuppie-couple-in-crisis, Mostow looks down on them from helicopter & crane shots like a vulture circling its next meal. Once Russell is isolated in his one-man mission to get his wife back, though, it’s all just by-the-books Hollywood studio routine. The thrills quickly become what critic Mark Kermode describes as “smashy-crashy” action filmmaking, with the iciness of J.T. Walsh’s villain and the psychological torment of the small-town indifference to his crimes taking a back seat to big trucks doing big damage at high speeds. It’s not quite as mean nor as grimy as the Ozploitation films it most closely resembles, but it does have the budget to escalate their scale to explosive proportions. It’s a fun studio thriller, but not much more. Catch it next time it plays on cable TV or, like me, pick up a used DVD copy on the shelves of your local Goodwill. Trust me; it’s there.

-Brandon Ledet

Bugonia (2025)

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Just a few short weeks back, Brandon and I covered the 2003 Korean sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet! on the podcast, mostly because of our interest in the then-upcoming remake directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Bugonia. At the conclusion of our discussion, I remarked that I was curious to see what Lanthimos would change for his version, and whether he would keep the film’s epilogue twist as it was in the earlier film, forgo it altogether, or tweak it in some small way. Ultimately, if you have seen Save the Green Planet!, then you’re not going to be surprised by the roads that Bugonia takes, but if you’re like me, you’re still going to enjoy the ride quite a bit. 

Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is a high profile female pharmaceutical executive that we first meet as she introduces “a new era” at work, one in which an “incident” (which remains unelaborated upon but about which we can make certain assumptions) has led to a “friendlier” face for the company. What this boils down to, mostly, is that she wants it made explicit to the workers in the office that they should take it for granted that they are allowed to go home at the end of their work day … as long as quotas are met, and people should obviously stay at the office if they have work to do. It’s typical corporate double speak, where a corporation wants to harvest the positive associations that come with a “kinder, gentler” approach to work-life balance in the wake of a public relations backlash, but still expects business to proceed as usual with no real change. It’s not a particularly flattering portrait, but it’s a familiar one. Outside of work, she has an extensive (and expensive) “reverse aging” routine that includes supplements, red-light masks, and extensive martial arts self defense training. 

Teddy (Jesse Plemmons) works for Michelle’s company, Auxolith, packing boxes. He’s so far down the ladder that his team—which includes a woman who’s continuing to work despite injuring her hand and is clearly too aware of how easy it is to get rid of a squeaky wheel who might file a comp claim—doesn’t warrant even the most perfunctory of pep talks about quotas and staying late. Following a diagnosis that has rendered his mother (Alicia Silverstone) comatose, he has fallen down a rabbit hole of online conspiracy theories that have led him to one conclusion: aliens from Andromeda have infiltrated human organizations with the intent of enslaving the human race, and his boss is one of them. To this end, he enlists the help of his intellectually-disabled cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) in abducting Michelle when she arrives home from work one day. From there, he locks her in the basement, shaves her head so that she can’t use her hair to contact her mothership, and proceeds to demand that she prepare a message to tell her fellow Andromedans to expect Teddy’s arrival as advocate for the human race against their invasion. Michelle, naturally, has no idea what he’s talking about. Or does she? 

If you’ve seen Save the Green Planet!, or even just saw the trailer, most of this is familiar to you. Teddy and his Korean counterpart, Lee Byeong-gu, even share the same backstory that their characters’ mothers are both hospitalized long term, and they share beekeeping as a hobby, with colony collapse disorder forming an integral part of both men’s alien-invasion hypotheses. The differences are pretty minor. Byeong-gu’s girlfriend in Planet! is replaced here by Teddy’s cousin; the plot point in which the captive CEO convinces the former to leave Byeong-gu by claiming that he doesn’t truly love her is replaced by a scene in which Michelle tells Don that the imminent arrival of the police puts him in serious danger. The biggest narrative change is probably the total excision of Planet!‘s subplot about two police officers, one an experienced but disgraced renegade and the other a young fast-tracked hot shot who circumvents his chain of command to consult the outsider. Although there is a police officer in this film, he’s unlike either of the two detectives, as he’s instead a socially awkward local police officer who is implied to have molested Teddy when he was the younger man’s teenage babysitter. If you’ve seen Planet!, you’ll likely recall that the two detectives therein had little bearing on the narrative and seemed to simply exist in order to give the film somewhere else to check in every once in a while and break up the monotony of spending the entire film solely in Byeong-gu’s basement. Here, those opportunities to give the audience a break come largely in the form of Teddy’s flashbacks to the time when his mother’s illness first began to affect her and his time having to still go into work while having his missing boss locked up in the basement, covered in antihistamine lotion (to numb her—or rather “its”—psychic powers). It’s a small difference, but by always keeping us in the same room as one of the two opposing forces at the movie’s core Lanthimos manages to ensure that the tension is always rising. 

Of course, the most interesting and notable difference here is that the kidnapped executive in Planet! was a man named Kang Man-shik, while Bugonia has Stone playing a girlboss CEO, and that one small change has a big impact. Because of the difference in the optics and the gendered dynamics alone, watching Byeong-gu and his short girlfriend abduct Kang is a very different experience from watching two burly men attack Emma Stone, one of America’s Sweethearts. The fact that we see her practicing for just such a possibility as one of her first defining character traits reminds us of the bleak truth that there’s no amount of power, wealth, or status that a woman can amass to guarantee her protection from a very determined crazy man, and even as a member of the executive class she’s still prepared for the possibility that she’ll have to fight for her life just like more conventionally vulnerable women. Stone plays Michelle with a quiet strength and dignity that she only allows to slip when she’s alone, and it’s a performance that’s so potent and visceral that it’s easy to forget that—regardless of the seemingly batshit nonsense Teddy picked up on the internet—she is nonetheless a banal force of evil, a stakeholder in the enforcement of a power structure that Teddy (and we) have every right to resent and pray for the downfall of. There’s no need to go overcomplicating it with aliens (or any other brain-rotted conspiracies); Auxolith made Teddy’s mother sick and faced no consequences, and that’s enough to make him hate Michelle, with all the rest of it being a hat on a hat. Still, in seeing a woman chained to a mattress in the basement of a man with demonstrable tendency to fly into a rage, we can’t help but sympathize with her, more than we ever did with Kang. 

There are a lot of little ideas and concepts to find within this text and pick over. I find it fascinating that Teddy ultimately does the same thing that Auxolith does with regards to reckless human testing, as he chemically castrated himself prior to the movie’s events and gives his unfortunate cousin the same injection prior to their taking of Michelle. Later in the film, Don tries to explain to Teddy that he’s having side effects from the drug, possibly even a sudden onset of chemical depression, which ultimately has tragic consequences. His kidnapping of Michelle in and of itself is an abduction of the kind that he believes aliens are guilty of. Like a lot of people who fall into these traps of conspiracies that engineer a more comprehensible world out of unconnected events, Teddy is a hypocrite, and that makes him and Michelle the same. And then, of course, there’s that ending. As one would probably expect from a remake helmed by Lanthimos, this is not merely a reheated dish, but a fresh take, even if you already know what all of the ingredients are. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond