thriller

The Parallax View (1974)

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It’s a well-known fact around these parts that I love a conspiracy thriller. I couldn’t have been more excited that my local arthouse theater programmed a month-long series of 1970s American thrillers, and I bought a ticket for almost every one of them. The first of these is a cornerstone of the genre, and one that was a sorely lacking blind spot in my checklist of canonical films of said phenotype. The Parallax View, a 1974 release from director Alan J. Pakula just two years before his second-best picture nomination for All the President’s Men (his first was for To Kill a Mockingbird), stars Warren Beatty. Beatty plays Joe Frady, a reporter in the Pacific Northwest, three years after he was present at the base of the Seattle Space Needle when a high-profile politician was assassinated in the restaurant above. He wasn’t in the room when it happened, but his ex-girlfriend Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) was, and she’s convinced that six of the other eyewitnesses who have died in the intervening time were the victims of foul play; Frady waves off her concerns as anxiety born of self-medicating, until she, too, turns up dead. Now convinced, Frady starts to pull at the frayed threads presented to him and discovers a conspiracy that permeates the fabric of the country’s leadership, one whose reach is far wider than he could have imagined. 

In the book upon which The Parallax View is based, the inciting assassination was that of JFK, making it a part of the subgenre of conspiracy media that specifically appeals to the Dale Gribble set. Here, the assassination that precedes the opening credits is that of a generic independent politician with an eye on the presidency, as the film was released too late to attach itself to the Kennedy assassination without making itself a period piece. That didn’t stop this one from becoming as locked into a certain time as a period piece would be in the intervening half century, however, while also remaining unfortunately (if not unsurprisingly) relevant to the current greased-by-blood American political machine. Sure, there’s a lot of culture shock upon seeing Frady purchase a plane ticket with cash after he’s already boarded the plane. On the other hand, the film seems almost prescient in its depiction of the abject terror of living in a society shaped by shadowy forces that can arrange car accidents for reporters, poison newspaper editors in a way that mimics a heart attack, and knock a passenger plane carrying a progressive candidate out of the sky. It’s not that hard to make a connection between the fictional conspiracy at play here and, for instance, the sudden death of a whistleblower who raised safety concerns about airplane manufacturing just six weeks ago. That’s not really prescience, really, any more than The Simpsons “predicted” any of the things it’s been credited with foreseeing in recent years; it’s just an indictment of the fact that we’ve made much less progress in the past sixty years than we would like to think. It’s all just the pageantry of empire. 

The Parallax View falls short of being a masterpiece. It has some really wonderful set pieces, and the picaresque nature of the narrative keeps things moving even when the story starts to feel a little slow. First, Frady goes to a tiny Oregon community where the political aide to the dead senator was last seen and where one of the witnesses was drowned while fishing when a dam was opened. This sequence is great, as you can feel the immense tension as the dam opens again while he’s investigating the area. This is preceded by an impressive fist fight between Frady and a local oaf, then followed by an exciting car chase that I would bet money was an inspiration to the future creators of The Dukes of Hazzard. Even after he manages not to drown, Frady’s editor Bill Rintels (Hume Cronyn) still isn’t convinced that there’s a conspiracy afoot, until Frady miraculously survives the assassination of in-hiding political insider Austin Tucker (William “Mr. Feeney” Daniels), at which point Rintels relents. In his investigation, Frady discovers that an organization known as The Parallax Corporation is using mail-in personality tests to find sociopaths and recruit them to become assassins. From here, we get to the film’s most famous sequence (and it, in and of itself, is a masterpiece): a five minute montage to which Frady (undercover after submitting a false test) is subjected to as a kind of orientation/brainwashing. You can see it here, and although it functions beautifully in isolation, it’s obviously much more effective in the film itself. 

In a lot of ways, this is the platonic ideal of a 1970s political thriller, disillusioned after a decade that saw the death of a beloved president, the murder of the leader of the Civil Rights Movement, the unmasking of another president’s illegal surveillance of the public. While the book was solely focused on the assassination of JFK, this one explicitly talks about the demoralization of an entire nation as there’s the murder of another public figure “every other week, it seems.” It’s also unrelentingly grim, as everyone turns out to be corruptible and already under Parallax’s sway despite initially seeming to be trustworthy, or genuinely good and invested in getting the truth out but very easy to kill and cover up, or less safe than they thought they were despite taking every precaution. No one is unreachable, no one is untouchable, no one is safe, and no number of civilian collaterals is considered too much, whether it be eighteen eyewitnesses, a plane full of people who were unlucky enough to be on the same flight as a senator, or an entire marching band that has the misfortune of having been selected to perform at a congressman’s campaign announcement. It’s bleak, but worth seeking out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

White Room (1990)

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Patricia Rozema’s sophomore feature White Room is about to get its first-ever Blu-ray release through Kino Lorber, along with Rozema’s lesser seen follow-up When Night is Falling and her calling-card debut I Heard the Mermaids Singing.  I’m sure that the 4K restoration of White Room will be a worthy purchase for any crate-digging home video collector who’s interested, considering the sensual immersion of its video art fantasy aesthetic and its dreamy pop music soundtrack.  At the same time, I’m happy to report that the still-in-print Canadian DVD I bought for a third of Kino Lorber’s list price is impressively crisp and a great cost-cutting alternative to the upcoming upgrade.  I’m also holding out hope that the Blu-ray release will lead to White Room‘s return to online streaming platforms, since it’s not currently available and it’s the kind of bizarre discovery that makes you want to recommend it to anyone who’ll listen.

Maurice Godin stars as a squeamish suburban nerd with a bad habit of peering into his neighbors’ windows as the world’s least pervy Peeping Tom.  Like a boyish, wholesome variation on a De Palma voyeur, he accidentally witnesses the rape & murder of a famous rockstar while watching her lounge around her secluded home and spends the rest of the movie beating himself up over his inaction at her death scene (literally whipping himself with thorny roses, in this instance).  Determined to become a more courageous, active participant in his own life, he moves out of his confectionary family home and into the big scary city of Toronto, where he quickly finds himself at the funeral of the murdered woman: a famous rockstar named Madeline X, played by Margot Kidder.  At the funeral, he falls for an older, mysterious woman (Kate Nelligan) who appears overly distraught at the musician’s passing, and by following her further down the rabbit hole he accidentally uncovers a larger music industry conspiracy he wishes he had just left alone. 

White Room is part romance novel, part noir, and full urban fairy tale.  Despite its contemporary fascination with MTV-era music video artistry, its narrative operates on the kind of traditionalist fairytale logic that always makes for great cinema, no matter the era.  None of the acting or character details are especially convincing as Real, but they’re in total harmony with the storybook narration track that refers to our cowardly hero as Norman the Gentle instead of just Norm. Its fictional rock numbers (partially credited to frequent Robert Eggers collaborator Mark Korven) play into that fairytale vibe as well, falling somewhere between the timeless literary songwriting of classic Kate Bush and the dreamy rock & roll of the Mary Timony album Mountains, which wouldn’t arrive for another decade.  Norm only travels from the suburbs to the urbs, but he might as well have journeyed across several cursed kingdoms to break his beloved free from the witch’s spell that kept her imprisoned in a daze (by which I mean her record company contract).

By her second feature, Rozema was already incredibly smart as a low-budget indie filmmaker, squeezing major visual impact out of meager resources.  As the film’s only celebrity get, Margot Kidder’s time on set appears to have been limited to only a few days, which Rozema stretches out across music video & interview clips to build genuine mystique around the murdered pop idol Madeline X.  The location shooting around Toronto manages to transform familiar city streets into a convincing fantasy world just by isolating the geometric lines of architecture & infrastructure in abstracted frames.  Most importantly, Rozema fully embraces the low-budget aesthetic of MTV-era video art in a way that frees her from restrictions of the real, physical world.  Besides the obvious music-video tangents afforded by the mysterious Madeline X, the film also finds excuses to indulge in video-art inserts via Norman’s POV, giving us glimpses of primal feelings that he’s too timid to express in words through video-warped images of seagulls, chess pieces, softcore pornography – whatever abstract flashes of imagery overwhelm his imagination then disappear before he can pick up a pen to jot them down.

Speaking of Norman’s imagination, he’s a difficult character to pin down: a voyeuristic man-boy who’s both driven & repelled by sex but is somehow not a threat to the women in his life.  If anything, he’s a pure object of desire for those women, modeling a romance paperback blouse through the second half of the runtime while women stare at his denim-clad ass.  He’s sometimes feminized in the edit, taking the place of the women he stalks in their most vulnerable moments and cast as the only actor who appears nude onscreen.  Godin’s performance can be a little frustrating in its boyish naivety, prompting you to imagine what more eccentric actors might have done with the role (Crispin Glover, Kyle MacLachlan, and Matt Farley all came to mind), but by the time the more hardened urbanites around him mock his earnestness with laughter it’s clear his blank-slate screen presence was more of an artistic choice than an oversight.  Norm is a fairytale prince defined by his desires & pursuits, and a lot of the joy in the film can be found in the small smirks of the women who find his naivety irresistibly cute.

If there’s anyone I’d most enthusiastically recommend White Room to besides hardcore Rozema Heads already won over by I Heard the Mermaids Singing, it would be to anyone who was charmed by the urban fantasy logic of this year’s kids-on-bikes comedy Riddle of Fire.  The narrator’s introduction of Norman the Gentle’s is just as amusingly verbose as the introduction of Petal Hollyhock, Princess of the Enchanted Blade in that more recent oddity.  Both films understand the rhythms & reasoning of fairytale storytelling on such a deep spiritual level that they can include video games & MTV parodies without their participation in the ancient traditions ever being questioned.  We instantly get the magical thinking of their narratives based on vibes alone.  The only acknowledgement of influences White Room has to get out of the way is in an end-credits dedication “with apologies to Emily Dickinson,” since the poet’s work was heavily referenced in the fictional pop-music lyrics of Madeline X.

-Brandon Ledet

Civil War (2024)

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The first noises you hear in Alex Garland’s Civil War are surround-sound blasts of static bouncing around the room in unpredictable, disorienting patterns.  That discordance continues in the film’s crate-digging soundtrack, which includes songs from bands like Suicide & Silver Apples that disorient their audiences with off-rhythm oscillation for a near-psychedelic effect.  Likewise, a sunny, up-beat party track from De La Soul violently clashes against a scene of brutal militarism in a way that’s chillingly wrong to the ear and to the heart.  Civil War is cinema of discordance, a blockbuster art film that purports to take an apolitical view of inflammatory politics.  That discordance is evident in its main subject: the psychology behind war journalism & battlefield photography.  Even though the work itself is often noble, journalists’ personal impulses to participate in violence as up-close spectators can be disturbingly inhuman, and Garland’s main interest appears to be in the volatile disharmony between those two truths.  It’s a movie about professional neutrals who act against every survival instinct in their bodies that tell them to fight or flee, and that instinct that says what you’re observing is dangerous & wrong carries over to the filmmaking craft as well – something that only becomes more disturbing when you find yourself enjoying it.

Kirsten Dunst stars as a respected photojournalist who reluctantly passes her torch to a young upstart played by Cailee Spaeny, mirroring the actors’ real-life professional dynamic as Sofia Coppola muses.  Along with two similarly, generationally divided newspaper men (Wagner Moura & Stephen McKinley Henderson), they travel down the East Coast of a near-future America that’s devolved into chaos & bloodshed, hoping to document the final days of an illegitimate president who refuses to leave office (Nick Offerman) before he is executed by the combined military of defecting states.  Like in Garland’s screenplay for 28 Days Later, their journey is an episodic collection of interactions with survivors who’ve shed the final semblances of civility in the wreckage of a dying society (including a show-stopping performance from Jesse Plemons as a small-time, sociopathic tyrant), except instead of a zombie virus everyone’s just fighting to survive extremist politics.  The journalists look down on people who’ve consciously decided to stay out of the war—including their own parents—but in the almighty name of objectivity they attempt the same political avoidance, just from a much closer, more thrilling proximity.  They sometimes pontificate about the importance of allowing readers to decide on the issues for themselves based on the raw data they provide from the front-lines, but Garland makes it clear that their attraction to the profession can be something much more selfish than that.  Moments after watching & documenting real people bleed to death through a camera lens, they shout, “What a rush!” and compliment the artistic quality of each other’s pictures.  They’re essentially adrenaline addicts who’ve found a way to philosophically justify getting their fix.

There may be something amoral about picking at the ethics & psychology of front-line war journalism in this way, especially at a time when we’re relying on the bravery of on-the-ground documentation from Gaza to counteract & contradict official government narratives that downplay an ongoing genocide.  Civil War never makes any clear, overt statements about journalism as a discipline, though; it just dwells on how unnatural it is for journalists to be able to compartmentalize in real time during battle, even finding a perverse thrill in the excitement.  They are active participants in war without ever admitting it to themselves, and most of the emotional, character-based drama of the film is tied to the ability to maintain that emotional distance as the consequences of the war get increasingly personal.  As the lead, Dunst in particular struggles to stay protected in her compartmentalized headspace where nothing matters except getting “the money shot” of actual combatants being brutally killed just a few feet away from her camera.  It shuts off like a light switch when she sees her inhuman behavior reflected in the younger version of herself, played by Spaeny.  It also shuts off when reviewing her own artistically framed pictures of a dying colleague, which she deletes out of respect (and maybe out of self-disgust).  However, as soon as she finds herself in competition to capture a front-page photo before other nearby journalists beat her to the punch, it flips back on, and the movie doesn’t seem to have anything concrete to say about that switch except to note how deeply strange it is as a professional talent.  Nor does it really need to.

Like a lot of recent audience-dividers, it seems the major sticking point for most Civil War detractors is that Garland’s main thematic interests don’t match the themes of the movie they made up in their heads before arriving to the theater.  Any claims from either audience or filmmaker that the movie is apolitical ring false, given that Nick Offerman plays a 3rd-term president who declares “Some are calling it the greatest victory of all time” in press conferences about his obvious, disastrous failures.  If the allusions to Trump and the January 6 insurrection were any more blatant, the movie would be derided as an on-the-nose caricature.  The divide between artist & audience is just one of personal interests.  If you’re looking to Civil War for speculative fiction about where the current populist politics of our country may soon lead us, the movie is not interested enough in near-future worldbuilding to draw you a roadmap.  It’s much more interested in the psychology of the unbiased, objective spectators of this extremist political discord than in the politics of those actually, actively participating in it, which it takes more as a given.  Maybe that’s purely a statement about the nature of war journalism, or maybe it’s something that can be extrapolated as commentary on the consumption of horrific news footage as a subgenre of smartphone content, or as self-deprecating commentary on making fictional films about politics instead of directly participating in it.  Maybe even Garland himself doesn’t know exactly what he wants to say about the act of reducing the horrors of real-world violence into sensationalist words & images, but it’s at least clear that he feels something alienating & cold in that spectatorship, and that feeling is effectively conveyed through his choices behind the camera.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Tightrope (1984)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the New Orleans-set Clint Eastwood thriller Tightrope (1984).

00:00 Welcome

01:15 Columbo (1971 – 2003)
03:45 The Not-So-New 52
07:22 American Fiction (2023)
13:20 Stalker (1979)
24:45 Party Girl (1958)
29:55 White Heat (1949)

35:45 Tightrope (1984)

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

– The Podcast Crew

The Killer (2023)

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I would consider myself a David Fincher fan. I’ve long been a defender of Alien³, Se7en is a classic, and The Game is underrated. Although Fight Club is hyped to hell and back by the worst kind of people is not a negative for the film itself, in my opinion, because I think that Fincher is in on the joke that a lot of the film’s fanbase seems to have misunderstood. I also think that’s the case in his most recent work, The Killer, although several of the reviews I’ve read so far do not seem to agree. 

Michael Fassbender is The Killer, an assassin whose internal monologue is right up there with Christian Bale’s as Patrick Bateman or Ewan McGregor’s in Trainspotting, as he details the comings and goings in his day as he waits in an abandoned WeWork location in Paris for the right opportunity to slay a high-profile target. This includes a lot of unnecessary recitation of statistics about the world’s population, how his job as a professional killer has very little effect on these numbers and is therefore (to his mind) irrelevant, and how the clandestine nature of his work requires him to maintain the delicate balance between being intermittent garishness (because tourists are ignored in most big cities) and boringly invisible. In many ways, he’s not that different from Fincher’s previous unnamed protagonist in Fight Club, in that he is a disaffected man who believes he’s managed to concentrate all of life’s idiosyncrasies down into a series of mantras, but who isn’t really as smart, clever, or effective as he thinks he is. 

I watched the recent Sandman adaptation from Netflix with some trepidation, especially as it approached the adaptation of one of my favorite issues, “Men of Good Fortune.” That story comments about the constancy of human life despite the passage of what we perceive to be great periods of time in a way that I have always loved: when Dream enters a tavern in 1389, there are several overlapping, unattributed dialogue balloons that reveal little pieces of information about the people and the times in which they live: the “spirit of the working man” having died with the executed leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt, complaints about the mediocre restaurant fare and poll taxes, the need for the return of “law and order,” and how the general state of things means “the end of the world is soon.” When he returns to that same tavern in 1989, despite the change in the decor and the intervening centuries, the same talk is happening: “There’s going to be a revolution [over] Thatcher’s bloody poll tax,” “the labour movement died with the miners’ strike,” “no respect for law and order,” and, of course, “all the signs are there in the Bible[;] it’ll be the end of the world very soon.” There’s been so much superhero saturation in the last decade and a half, without much consideration of the fact that comic books and film/TV are very different media forms. That overlapping of dialogue balloons is something that the show tried to emulate but couldn’t capture.

When I was first getting into comics as a teenager, decompression comics were all the rage, as comics attempted to emulate filmic narrative, and as films continue to adapt and echo comics, some of the seams are showing. I didn’t know that this was based on a graphic novel before starting the movie, but as soon as a credit popped up at the film’s opening which stated that it was “based on The Killer by Alexis ‘Matz’ Nolent [and] Illustrated by Luc Jacamon,” I had an inkling of what I was in for, and it did not disappoint. While Fassbender delivered his character’s long internal monologue, I felt like I could see exactly how it would play out on the page. The Killer’s monologue in a series of rectangular boxes, with his repeated mantras of “Stick to the plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise” (which appears five times) and “Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight” (four times) broken out as their own individual pieces of the monologue, trailing down the page. And in my mind’s eye, it totally worked, that decompression of the monologue over a series of still images as The Killer does his dirty work, presumably only repeating it to himself once per issue/chapter as he performs that segment’s murder. But when repeated like this over and over again in a film, its effect seems more silly than anything else. If you’ve ever read a collection of old Chris Claremont X-Men titles from the 80s and 90s, you’ll know what I’m talking about—it feels like every issue contains Wolverine repeating to himself that “[he’s] the best there is at what [he] do[es] … and what [he] do[es] isn’t very pretty,” and either Jean or Scott explaining their “psychic rapport,” or Cannonball expositing his powers by declaring “Ah’m nigh invulnerable when ah’m blasting!” If you’re only getting that month’s issue and reading it, then waiting until the next month, these things don’t stand out as much, but when you’re reading them all at once, it’s not only noticeable, but intrusive. That feels like it’s happening here in The Killer, but it somehow still manages to work in Fincher’s hands because he manages to make that repetition feel more like an indictment of the character and his ego, at least in my reading of the film. 

The Killer is often shown to be less adept at his profession than his internal monologue would imply, and the film’s humor (to me) lies in the irony between how good said Killer thinks that he is and his multiple bumbling failures. The whole thing feels like an indictment of the manosphere way of thinking; every few weeks, some guy will post something online like “My wife freaked out that I didn’t check my blindspots before changing lanes, and I explained to her that I have kept precise track of every single other vehicle on the interstate for the last hour,” and a bunch of other dudes will post “Hell yeah, brother” and their own stupid variation on “I too inflate my ego by LARPing as a hypervigilant hero.” The Killer feels like one of these guys, and it’s not lost on me that Fincher’s most famous work, the one that so many people fundamentally misunderstand, is one of the pieces of media that is a favorite of exactly this kind of person; this guy saw Fight Club and loved it for all the stupidest reasons. It’s not an out-and-out comedy; this isn’t the kind of movie where the Killer completes a monologue about how badass he is after field stripping and rebuilding a rifle only for a spring to pop out of somewhere accompanied by a sound effect. It is a movie, however, where the first twenty minutes are spent entirely in the head of our lead as he watches for his opportunity to take his shot while sharing his exercise and dietary regimen like it’s the opening of American Psycho, right down to listing the number of McDonald’s restaurants in France before reciting the protein content of his meals. And, after all of that … he doesn’t get the shot, instead killing the woman that his target is entertaining. He recites to himself that he must “Forbid empathy” as “Empathy is weakness,” but from the second chapter of the movie onward, his entire motivation is revenge because his girlfriend got roughed up because he screwed up his assignment (which he fouled up by … killing his target’s lover, a symmetry that he never recognizes or acknowledges because, again, he’s just not as smart as he thinks he is). Like a lot of manosphere grifters, he pretends that he has no emotions at all, but he only listens to his “work” playlists, and they’re all just The Smiths, which is the saddest of sadboy music ever committed to audiotape. 

I’ve really only focused on that first chapter for the most part. Chapter 2 features The Killer’s flight from Paris and return to his home in the Dominican Republic to find his home ransacked before tracking down his injured girlfriend to the hospital and gathering information about the people who were sent to kill him. Chapter 3 takes place in New Orleans, where The Killer was first recruited and where his handler lives (although not for long), as well as his steps to prepare for his revenge and further track down the people who tried to kill his girlfriend, and in Chapters 4 and 5 he travels to Florida and then New York to take out these two killers, one called the Brute and the other known as the Expert (Tilda Swinton). Finally, in Chapter 6, he confronts the man who contracted him in the first place. Through all of this, he experiences good luck much more than he demonstrates cleverness; it may make sense that European airline employees don’t find his sitcom aliases (which include Archie Bunker from All in the Family, Lou Grant from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and both Felix and Oscar from The Odd Couple) unusual, but once he’s back in The States, someone should at least make a joke about it. Most of the things that he manages to accomplish are things that just about anyone with access to the internet can do (like cloning a key card) or rely on other people to respond amicably to him (the garage owner who lets him use the washroom as if it were a public restroom, the taxi dispatcher allowing him entry after closing, the taxi driver agreeing to drive him despite the presence of other cabs and said driver’s impending smoke break), which is impossible to predict. 

The Killer sails through all of these interactions with ease and attributes it to his skill, but we rarely see anything that requires any actual skills. After missing that first shot, he does kill everyone else who crosses his path, but does so either by shooting from point blank range and thus making it impossible to miss, or breaking a middle-aged woman’s neck and pushing her down a flight of stairs, either of which are manageable feats of strength or skill for most able-bodied adults. His internal monologue frequently dips into smug assurances to an invisible audience that he knows what he’s doing by, for instance, predicting just how long it should take a person of a certain age and fitness to die from a particular attack, only to be instantly proven wrong when his victim doesn’t make it past thirty seconds. None of this ever makes The Killer question his self-assurance about how good he is at what he does, and while that’s a very annoying trait in the participants in the alpha male subculture that I feel is the target of the film’s mockery, it makes for a kind of tragicomic character that I found sufficiently amusing, if not precisely comedic. The most impressive thing that he does is fight off a much taller opponent, which relies more on his ability to take a beating than the memorization of little Snapple trivia facts. . 

What is funny about this is that, at least in my interpretation of the text, Fincher has made another movie that will see its proponents divided starkly along the lines of those who think that the machismo that the film is parodying is something to be unironically emulated and those who will read it as a satire of exactly that kind of person. It’s well-made and well-executed, but it honestly feels more like a mini-series than anything else, especially with its perfectly divided “chapters,” which I have no doubt is meant to invoke the nature of comic book storytelling if it isn’t directly lifted from the source material. Each one has something going for it, but taken altogether, the whole thing feels less than the sum of its parts, like when you binge a TV program and are suddenly taken aback at having reached the ending so suddenly and so quickly and are annoyed at yourself for not having savored the experience more. When it comes to staying power, it will likely find itself more in the lukewarm waters alongside Panic Room rather than Gone Girl, but it’s nonetheless solid, entertaining, and tongue-in-cheek. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Royal Hotel (2023)

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I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the barebones, few-frills thriller The Royal Hotel is my favorite film of the year so far, given that I bought in early on director Kitty Green (Casting JonBenet) & actor Julia Garner (Electrick Children) back when stock prices were low.  Still, it clicked with me as both collaborators’ finest work to date, following their much more muted workplace chiller The Assistant in 2020.  The Royal Hotel explodes The Assistant‘s post-#MeToo themes of misogynist microaggressions & mundane labor exploitations into a much more immediate, visceral chokehold thriller – channeling 1990s psych thrillers like Dead Calm instead of the low-hum, methodical terror of Jeanne Dielman.  If it were even slightly dumber or trashier, it could pull off a sensationalist title like You In Danger, Girl: The Movie or The Male Gaze: A Horror Story, while The Assistant was much more careful to not be boxed in by expectations of genre.  It’s wildly entertaining as a result, while never losing sight of the political target in its crosshairs (a tactic also adopted by this year’s fellow sun-drenched indie drama How to Blow Up a Pipeline).

Garner costars besides Jessica Henwick as a pair of American tourists who find themselves flat broke while backpacking in Australia.  In an act of financial desperation (or, depending on the character, an act of self-immolation), the 20-somethings take a government-assigned temp job working as barmaids in the Australian Outback, serving beers to the roughneck workers of a remote mining town.  From there, the plot plays out like a slightly more grounded version of Alex Garland’s Men, with each of the blackout drunk brutes on the other side of the bar attempting slightly different angles on manufacturing sexual consent from the “fresh meat” working the register, whether with charm or with the threat of violence.  Like in Men, the customers are all essentially the same threat disguised in slightly different presentations, except this time they swarm their victims like George Romero zombie hordes, overwhelming the humble little pub in waves of drunken chaos.  The women are constantly told to smile & “take a joke” while struggling to interpret the thin line between flirting and bullying, like the difference between an Australian calling you “a cunt” vs. an Australian calling you “a sour cunt.”  Meanwhile, every social signal from every direction is telling them to get so drunk they don’t care what happens to them, since they’re powerless to stop it anyway – whether as self-protection or as willful self-destruction, depending on who’s drinking.

The premise of two outsider tourists being shipped off to an isolated mining-town bar specifically to serve as eye-candy for the sexually frustrated workers sounds like a screenplay contrivance looking to justify a metaphor, but Green & co-writer Oscar Redding were inspired to write The Royal Hotel by real life events, relying on the 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie as shockingly direct source material.  The young tourists profiled in Hotel Coolgardie may be Finnish instead of American, but their stories are followed closely in The Royal Hotel to the point of exact images & phrases of dialogue being photocopied in direct adaptation.  Hotel Coolgardie is just as horrifying as Green’s movie, except it’s shot & presented more like a TLC reality show than a psychological thriller, which almost makes the women’s story more unnerving.  In either case, the premise makes for wickedly effective Service Industry Horror that’s deeply relatable to anyone who’s ever worked a chaotic front-of-house job with rowdy, drunken customers, the same way The Assistant is relatable to anyone who’s ever worked a soul-draining office job for an evil corporate overlord (speaking as someone who’s done both).  They’re not just single-use metaphors about the horrors of “male attention” (a phrase used in both the doc and the narrative feature), since the generalized exploitations of modern labor and the women’s personal levels of desire to survive the ordeal complicate the central theme at every turn.

The Royal Hotel is a great film about misogyny, labor, social pressure, and alcoholic stupor.  And that’s not even getting into the racist power imbalance between the mostly white miners and the Indigenous workers who make up most of the service class (give or take a couple misplaced tourists).  Its Australian-set psych thriller credentials are cemented both by the appearances of a majestic kangaroo and the appearance of a menacing Hugo Weaving, near unrecognizable behind thick layers of sunburn and beard hairs.  It feels more immediate than nostalgic, though, distinctly a movie of its time.  Conceptually, it’s presented as Kitty Green’s simplest, most widely accessible work to date, but the nuances beyond its surface tensions & metaphors get remarkably complex the second you start to scratch at them – which is exactly what makes it her best.

-Brandon Ledet

Good Boy (2023)

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Scandinavian cinema has a distinctly fucked up sense of humor to it, so it’s not surprising that two of the year’s best black comedies have been released out of Norway.  Kristoffer Borgli’s debut feature Sick of Myself (in which an art-world narcissist medically self-harms for media attention) is the higher profile of the two, already landing the director a buzzy follow-up starring Nic Cage (in Dream Scenario).  By contrast, the darkly comic Tinder thriller Good Boy is a much smaller, limited production – restricted to just four characters shooting in four sparse locales.  Despite earning a few key critical accolades on the festival circuit (including a coveted spot-on John Waters’s Best Films of the Year list), Sick of Myself is hardly an MCU-scale cultural behemoth worth rooting against in favor of its underfunded underdog.  Still, running only 75 minutes and released to zero fanfare, Good Boy is a fucked up little Norwegian romance drama worth championing for its minor, muted victories, at least so director Viljar Bøe might be able to torture audiences on a much bigger scale in his next production.  There’s plenty of dark Norwegian humor to go around.

Good Boy might not have a professional-level budget, but it does have a killer hook.  It’s a story of unethical puppy play, pulling some uneasy laughs and genuine chills out of the basic discomfort of stumbling into someone else’s elaborate kink scene without context or warning.  After scoring a successful Tinder date with a legitimate millionaire, an unsuspecting Psychology student is introduced to her new beau’s unconventional pet: a human man who spends 24/7 in a dog costume.  Any cautious probing about the weirdness of keeping a human being as a house pet is outright dismissed by the Norwegian Psycho; he responds to reasonable questions like “What’s his deal?” with “He’s a dog.”  Of course, because this is a movie, it turns out the dog’s deal is much sicker than that, and his loving captivity within the millionaire’s household turns out to be less voluntary & consensual than initially let on.  Much less.  The story gradually devolves into full-on torture porn from there, but much in the way that the equivalent American dating-app thriller Fresh did last year: maintaining a wicked sense of humor throughout.  It’s all one big joke about dating a total control freak; he just happens to be a very specific kind of freak.

For all of its kink-scene iconography, Good Boy is less about the degenerate amorality of real-life puppy players than it is about the violent amorality of stubbornly Conservative thinkers, recalling the sickly domesticity of recent titles like Swallow & Hatching.  It dodges a lot of the kink-shaming implications of its premise by doubling down on something we can all agree on: the ultra-wealthy are the world’s true degenerate freaks.  It undeniably banks on the viewer’s kneejerk discomfort with other people’s private kink play scenarios, though, drawing just as much terror out of the human-dog’s elaborate furry costuming (his mask has a hinged jaw!) as it does out of the violence that keeps him living the fantasy.  Speaking personally, the movie didn’t change the way I think about narcissist millionaires, trad homesteaders, or proudly kinky puppy players.  However, it did change how I interacted with my dog for the next couple days, causing me to pause while feeding her, pilling her, and getting her ready for bed to consider just how strange of a relationship we have on either side of the pet-owner divide.  It may not be an especially deep movie, thematically, but it still made something familiar & routine feel totally alien & horrific in its immediate afterglow, which is all I can really ask for out of a prankish, low-budget horror movie.

-Brandon Ledet

Oldboy (2003)

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Like many bored, frugal Americans, I recently dragged myself out of the house on National Cinema Day to take advantage of the newly invented corporate holiday’s adverised movie ticket price of $4.  I very much appreciated the discount, just as I appreciate local theaters’ weekly $6 ticket deals on Tuesdays.  On the audience’s end, it’s nice to feel like we’re scoring a bargain; on theaters’ end, it’s a smart ploy to lure us through the door to buy the popcorn & cocktails that actually drive profits.  On both sides, it was just a great excuse to hide from the heat on what turned out to be the hottest day in the history of recorded temperatures in New Orleans (so far!).  What I couldn’t get over while sweating my way through The Broad Theater’s parking lot, though, was the genius of stoking ticket sales during such a low tide of new, exciting releases.  Besides the promise of central air-conditioning, there just wasn’t much on The Broad’s marquee that looked like it would pull in a huge crowd without the $4 ticket deal.  Barbie & Black Beetle were the blockbusters on offer, neither of which were in their first-weekend rush; Passages & Landscape with Invisible Hand were their smaller, artsier counterbalance, neither of which are especially attention-grabby outside a small circle of media obsessives who know the names Cory Finley & Ira Sachs.  And so that left room on the marquee for the true heroes of the day: a restoration of the four-hour French New Wave manboy autopsy The Mother and the Whore and an opportunistic re-release of Emma Seligman’s stress-nightmare comedy Shiva Baby, working up some enthusiasm for the following week’s follow-up Bottoms.  Early this summer, when there was absolutely nothing of importance or interest to see in local theaters, IP-driven monstrosities like Fast X, Super Mario Bros, and The Little Mermaid clogged up local marquees for months, leaving us in a stagnant cultural dead zone.  By National Cinema Day, theaters & distributors had figured out the perfect way to fill that cultural void: robust repertory programming.

Truth be told, August’s best repertory re-release had already left theaters by National Cinema Day, but I made time to catch it at The Broad earlier that week on a $6 Tuesday deal.  A new digital restoration of Park Chan-wook’s international breakout Oldboy was re-released nationwide by the hip cinema distributor Neon last month, commemorating the film’s 20th anniversary.  That’s two whole decades of college-freshmen edgelords daring each other to watch this Totally Badass, Totally Fucked Up revenge thriller over a case of the cheapest beer that’s ever been swallowed. And since I was a college freshman around when Oldboy first hit DVD myself, it’s incredible that I had never seen it before its prestigious victory lap this August, enjoying the afterglow of Park’s more refined, acclaimed works like The Handmaiden & Decision to Leave.  My friend group just happened to get our grubby, beer-clutching hands on other edgelord starter-pack films of the 2000s instead: American Psycho, Requiem for a Dream, Suicide Club, Ichi the Killer, etc.  However, I am a movie nerd with an internet connection, so I have absorbed plenty of the details & circumstances of the sex & violence in Oldboy over the past couple decades of “You’ve got to see this fucked up movie!” cultural osmosis, to the point where I wasn’t sure what was left to be discovered by finally watching it once its re-release arrived at my nearest theater.  I mostly showed up to watch Oldboy out of solemn duty as a Cult Cinema enthusiast needing to mark a major 2000s title off my checklist.  So, given how familiar I felt with its major bullet points (and hammer holes), I was shocked by how well the mystery aspect of the movie worked for me as a new viewer.  Just like its reformed shitbag protagonist, I really wanted to know the whos & whys behind the elaborate torture schemes.  Unlike the titular oldboy, though, I was fully aware of how much we’d have to suffer to get to those answers.

As a digital “restoration”, the new Oldboy release is not some revelatory visual experience; this is not Criterion cleaning up & hyper-saturating a Technicolor marvel like The Red Shoes.  Neon’s Oldboy scan still looks stuck in the mid-00s, and it’s much more likely to impress a longtime devotee who’s used to screening it on a cathode-ray TV than a first-time viewer.  Its overt aughtsiness is integral to its prominence in the pop culture canon, though, so it’s for the best that it still looks of its time.  Its sickly fluorescent lighting is true to the aesthetics of American torture porn in that era—typified by Saw & Hostel—while its absurdly convoluted plot mechanics recall the grander, elevated European torture porn of the time: Martyrs, Calvaire, Inside, etc.  Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-sik) may have been imprisoned & tormented in a small cell outside of time for fifteen grueling years, but he’s allowed a window to the outside world in a small motel-style television, where he consumes early-aughts pop culture & news coverage like oxygen entering his lungs.  Once “freed,” he’s equipped with a 2000s-vintage flip phone, a pay-by-the-hour internet cafe, and a rudimentary video chat platform that doesn’t yet stream audio.  Of course, he hasn’t really been freed at all, as the mysterious tormenter behind his imprisonment uses these wicked tools of the early internet to imprison him in a slightly larger cell (the massive city of Seoul instead of just one room inside it).  He’s trapped by the lack of reasoning behind his torment and the mysterious face responsible for it, given five days to solve the puzzle and secure his revenge before the punishment gets even more severe.  The audience knows he’s being played with like a half-dead mouse, but it takes a while to find the cat who’s batting him around, and it takes even longer to figure out why that cat hasn’t gotten bored of him yet. 

Maybe I’m wrong about that.  Maybe all audiences everywhere already know every beat of Oldboy, and I was the last genre gobbler around who could enter the theater without knowing exactly where its twisty story is going.  After so many years of dorm room canonization, it wouldn’t be surprising if there were no surprises left in Oldboy for the uninitiated.  I hadn’t seen it, nor read its comic book source material, nor spoiled myself with its 2010s Spike Lee remake, and even I already felt like I had its iconic hallway fight scene and the grimiest details of the final villain’s speech committed to memory.  It was a joy to squirm along with fellow in-the-flesh moviegoers during its scenes of covert incest & unflinching dental gore, though, and I was surprised by how much I cared about the motivation behind those grotesqueries beyond their shock-value novelty.  In fact, I skipped out on seeing a personal-favorite cult classic I’ve seen many times before (but never in a proper theater) to make time for that first-time watch of Oldboy, and I left a satisfied customer; it was up against a 50-year anniversary restoration of the landmark folk horror The Wicker Man that same week.  Neon’s re-release of Oldboy appeared to be a successful financial gamble too, surpassing the box office sales of the film’s original run in just a couple weeks.  I can only hope that success means more nation-wide repertory programming is on the way, bolstering the couple regular local slots The Prytania clears in its schedule for its Wildwood & Classic Movies series.  The Broad is pretty great about picking these releases up when they’re offered by distributors, which is how I’ve gotten to see other, obscurer cult classics like The Doom Generation, Funeral Parade of Roses, and The Last Movie for the first time in a proper theater.  It’s a rare treat that’s getting a lot less rare, and I hope that it becomes the go-to move when padding out release schedules during the leaner months on the theatrical release calendar.  It would certainly lure me in to buy more cocktails & popcorn, whatever keeps the projectors on.

-Brandon Ledet

How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2023)

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In Bertrand Bonello’s 2016 political provocation Nocturama, a group of young, hip domestic terrorists set off a disparate series of homemade bombs in modern Paris, then await the state’s violent military response in a shopping mall.  In Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a group of young, hip domestic terrorists set off two homemade bombs along a Texan desert pipeline, then await the state’s violent military response in the hot American sand.  The Parisian kids never fully explain the reasoning behind their explosives beyond a vague sense of economic unrest & cultural ennui.  The central point of Nocturama is making its teenage dissidents look cool—which it does—before they all meet a violent end.  By contrast, the American kids explain the ideology behind their explosive Direct Actions at length, intending to disrupt the economic viability of crude oil as a means to slow down Climate Change.  The point of How to Blow Up a Pipeline isn’t to inform the audience how to replicate this violence ourselves, but to motivate us to get serious about Climate Change as a mass extinction event that needs to be directly, immediately combated.  Both films are structured as non-linear heist thrillers, joining their hip teen terrorists in the hours before their respective bombings before flashing back to the planning stages of those attacks.  They both function as feature-length Building the Team montages as a result, which is always the most satisfying sequence in heist movies anyway.  In contrast, the American version of Nocturama is less pretty & more explainy than the French one, but it’s also a much more useful political motivator, which counts for a lot in this context. 

Goldhaber & crew do their best to make this Lefty manifesto traditionally entertaining so that its incendiary politics ignite the widest audience possible. This was never a concern of Bonello’s, who made a provocative aesthetic object to be appreciated by a small audience of art nerds.  How to Blow Up a Pipeline uses retro synth scoring & 90s blockbuster fonts to disguise itself as a throwback to crowd-pleaser heist thrillers like Point Break, but its full-hearted advocacy of its climate activists’ property destruction is much more daring & modern than the genre’s cop-friendly past.  Most of the shocking plot twists are the exact kind of undercover, double-crossing character reveals we’re used to in that context, but the movie loudly endorses the titular bombing and the activists behind it every chance it gets.  The most Goldhaber & editor Daniel Garber shake up the traditional blockbuster heist film formula is by cutting away from explosions seconds before detonation to retreat into flashbacks, letting the tension ride for several minutes before returning to the Bruckheimerian balls of fire.  Otherwise, it works within a familiar, comforting Dad Movie story template that this time just happens to be populated by pissed-off crust punks & college campus leftists.  The tension of whether a homemade explosive will be jolted the wrong way by those nervous rioters before they reach their targeted pipeline is continuously effective in the moment, but it’s all in service of stringing the audience along to listen to the reason behind their planned property destruction in their downtime between backroom chemistry experiments.

It’s extremely shallow of me to compare Pipeline‘s cool-cred endorsement of violent political action to the much more nihilist, beauty-obsessed Nocturama, as if they’re the only two films of their kind.  There’s a wide range of uncivil unrest advocacy cinema in this movie’s lineage, from 2018’s Empty Metal to 1983’s Born in Flames to 1966’s Battle of Algiers.  It would also be shallow of me to assign an auteurist reading to its production, given that it’s officially credited as “a film by Daniel Goldhaber, Ariela Barar, Jordan Sjol, and Daniel Garber” (a list that includes the director’s co-writers and aforementioned editor).  I’m going to do it anyway, though, because I’m a shallow guy.  I appreciate that some of the paranoid technophobia from Goldhaber’s debut feature Cam bled through to this follow-up, represented in Pipeline by characters’ constant awareness of being surveilled via their smartphones, even when dormant.  Still, I miss the slick, fantastical aesthetics of that indoor sex-work cyberthriller, which are traded in here for the grit & sweat of the outdoor American West.  That cinematic preference for beauty & artifice over more practical, real-world concerns is likely why Nocturama was at the forefront of my mind throughout Pipeline.  I felt as if I had already seen my ideal version of this picture in Bonello’s puzzle-box terrorist thriller, so even when admiring the big-picture politics & scene-to-scene tension of Goldhaber’s version, I could never fully crossover into zealous love for it.  It’s a consistently entertaining, ideologically solid eco-activist thriller that never fully shook me out of my cowardly complacency as a passive political thinker & pop media consumer. Or, that’s at least what I want to convey to the FBI.

-Brandon Ledet

Holy Shit! (2023)

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There are plenty reasons why Spielberg’s shark-attack classic Jaws has endured in the public consciousness for the past half-century: its early showcase of the crowd-pleaser director’s technical talents, its emotional scarring of young aquaphobic Gen-Xrs, its annual holiday celebrations on both The 4th of July and Shark Week, etc.  Between all of the praise for its iconic horror scoring & mechanical-shark puppetry, though, we rarely take the time to praise Jaws for one of its most frequent, looming influences on modern genre filmmaking – the motivations of its villain.  I don’t mean its monstrously gigantic shark, whose descendants would not be assigned clear motivations for their people-eating sprees until preposterous sequels like Jaws 4: The Revenge.  No, I mean the capitalist mayor of Amity, who refuses to shut down his small town’s beaches for The 4th of July to prevent more inevitable shark attacks so local businesses can keep the holiday money flowing, like so much swimmers’ blood.  The Mayor Vaughn motivator is an easy go-to for cheap-o genre movies that need a simple, clear reason for their villains to allow needless violence to continue past the point of credulity.  It works both as ready-made stock political commentary that makes the schlockiest schlock out there appear to have something to say about the evils of Capitalism, and as a self-fulfilling “The show must go on” handwave that endorses the continuation of outlandish movie violence because the violence needs to happen for there to be a movie worth making in the first place.

The Mayor Vaughn motivator has trickled so far down the genre-filmmaking hierarchy that it’s now reached German scheisse comedies about exploding port-a-potties.  The low-brow, high-concept, single-location thriller Holy Shit! is set entirely within the four plastic walls of a locked German port-a-potty, which is set to explode with our shit-smeared hero inside it if he does not escape in time.  Much of the fun is in admiring the ways the film stretches this bar-napkin premise to feature length, which includes impaling the poor prisoner’s arm on a long stretch of rebar to lock him in place and dropping his smartphone just out of reach on the wrong side of the toilet seat.  The film never cheats on its premise; it remains locked inside the portable toilet for the entire runtime, only flashing back to outside events in auditory hallucination and bringing all outside characters within the visible frame of the port-a-potty door.  The only place it doesn’t have to strain its premise, really, is in finding motivation for the madman who locks his professional nemesis inside the toilet and rigs it to explode.  He’s given the off-the-shelf Mayor Vaughn motivator for expediency, trapping his plastic-shitter prisoner on a construction site that he’s determined to see dynamited to oblivion no matter who dares get in the way.  It’s almost overkill when the villain goes a step further by attempting to woo the hero’s girlfriend on top of demanding that the show must go on, but no one is watching a movie with this premise and this title expecting narrative restraint.

The only time Holy Shit! ventures outside its port-a-potty setting is in an opening music video fantasy featuring a hot-babe construction worker posing in full nudie-magazine glamour.  It turns out that image is of a centerfold crudely pasted to the construction site port-a-potty’s walls, which our concussed hero blankly stares at until he fully comes to.  After piecing together how he got trapped in his 127 Hours On The Crapper prison in the first place and abandoning his plans to dial for help on his shitty phone, he begins to MacGyver his way out of the predicament using whatever basic items are within reach.  His skills as an architect eventually come into play when he starts drawing geometric escape plans on the port-a-potty walls, making the film a scatological rehash of Cube.  Holy Shit! earns its title multiple times over as the shituation escalates and our disarmed hero has to self-mutilate in order to escape, calling into question if he’ll survive the sepsis after he survives the dynamite.  Incredibly, as juvenile as the film can be conceptually, it never pushes itself too far into winking, mood-killing irony.  It even often pauses between its outrageous shit & gore gags to focus on small, delicate details: dripping water, a ladybug, a sentimental photograph.  Only the Mayor Vaughn archetype goes fully off the rails in his broad caricature of genre movie villainy, and it’s somewhat necessary to keep him so over-the-top in every single beat so that all of the exploding port-a-potty gross-outs around him appear tame & tasteful by comparison.

You’d expect this scatological perversion of trapped-in-a-box thrillers like Cube, Devil, Buried, Phone Booth, and Panic Room would come off desperate & thin, but Holy Shit! is surprisingly solid.  Fibrous, even.  It’s continuously shocking without ever cheating on its extremely limited premise, which is all most shlock audiences are asking for out of movies of its ilk.  There’s nothing especially surprising about its villain, though, who is a cookie-cutter capitalist monster who those same audiences have watched wash up on the beaches of Amity over & over again for the past five decades running.

-Brandon Ledet