Reviews

The Watchers: What You See Is What You Fret

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dakota Fanning in The Watchers

Think fast: Can you name a movie directed by someone with the surname Shyamalan where a handful of terrified survivors take shelter in primitive surroundings in the forest, bracing for an invasion of unseen monsters? If you guessed The Village, you’d be right, and also wrong. The Watchers, the debut feature from Ishana Night Shyamalan, conforms to a similar horror template as that 2004 tentpole, one of the most divisive (and best) pictures directed by her father, M. Night. It’s inevitable, in our era of toxic nepo-baby discourse, that the younger Shyamalan’s work will be measured against that of her sire (who serves as producer here), so there’s something admirable about her steering into the skid and inviting the comparison. In tone and style, The Watchers is a decidedly Shyamalan production, featuring a number of qualities—foreboding atmosphere, stiff dialogue, gripping images, hokey mythology—that inevitably evoke the filmmaker who was once infamously dubbed “the next Spielberg.”

It’s slightly disappointing, if hardly devastating, that The Watchers is a flawed movie, struggling to enliven its spooky premise with the requisite eccentricity or suspense. But it isn’t an ignoble effort, and it establishes Shyamalan as a director with a fine eye. She just isn’t always sure where to aim it. Read More

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Hit Man: Murder for Liar

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adria Arjona and Glen Powell in Hit Man

Last year, Netflix released David Fincher’s The Killer, a fit between director and subject matter that was so hand-in-glove perfect, it practically felt like a self-portrait. Now the streaming giant is “distributing” (to your TV set, if not to your local theater) Richard Linklater’s Hit Man—a less obvious match. Linklater’s career is sufficiently long (his first feature came in 1990) that he can’t be pigeonholed into a single genre, but his best-known works—Dazed and Confused, the Before trilogy, Boyhood—are talky, leisurely dramedies that contemplate the passage of time with relaxed, unforced intimacy. He’s an ambler, not a sprinter. This is the guy to make a movie about an undercover faux assassin?

Turns out, the pairing—like Linklater’s cozy, fluid dialogue—is natural and smooth. That’s partly because Gary Johnson, the New Orleans philosophy professor whose real-life exploits entrapping solicitors of murder were previously chronicled by Skip Hollandsworth in a Texas Monthly article, is less a killer than a bullshitter; he outfoxes his quarry rather than overpowering them. But it’s also because Linklater has wielded his gift for capturing the idiosyncrasies of human connection—the freewheeling conversations, the swirling emotions, the physical attraction—and retrofitted it into a crime-adjacent thriller that’s more concerned with pleasure than violence. The result is a movie that’s consistently enjoyable and even a little suspenseful. Read More

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In a Violent Nature: One Man’s Slash Is Another Man’s Pleasure

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from In a Violent Nature

A campfire tale soaked in bile and blood, In a Violent Nature is a deeply unpleasant experience. This, of course, is the point; written and directed by Chris Nash, the movie is designed to unsettle its audience and subvert our expectations. By this measure, I suppose you could call it a success. But when judged against more traditional metrics—e.g., character development, thematic meaning, entertainment value, being vaguely interesting, etc.—it’s a failure.

Not a poorly made one, though. Making his first feature, Nash adopts a distinctive and coherent visual style, which he implements with considerable (albeit clammy) rigor. Operating within a cramped aspect ratio, his camera moves with a slow, purposeful glide, stalking its victims with deadly purpose. He refuses to use a musical score, instead relying on immersive sound design in which off-screen conversations are barely heard, like whispers in the woods. His technique isn’t found-footage horror—it’s methodical rather than chaotic—but it does fabricate a queasy, you-are-there intimacy. The result is like a Dardenne Brothers movie from hell—a ground-level observation of a supernatural monstrosity. Read More

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Furiosa, a Mad Max Saga: Witness Glee

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anya Taylor-Joy in Furiosa

We often talk about directors playing around in a metaphorical sandbox, but George Miller uses the most actual sand. The Australian auteur has made an impressive variety of pictures—a sick-kid melodrama, an animated penguin musical, a mythological whatsit about a narratologist and her djinn—but he’ll forever be associated with the Mad Max films, those apocalyptic action epics where he wanders into the desert and smashes his million-dollar toys into bits. It isn’t quite that Miller keeps making the same movie over and over—more that he keeps finding new ways to reignite the simple, cathartic charge of vehicles speeding across the screen and bursting into flames. Furiosa represents his fifth such effort, and whether or not it’s his best (must our infernal culture always rank things?), it’s proof that he’s gotten awfully good at blowing things up.

In quantitative terms, Furiosa is a less herculean effort than its immediate precursor, Mad Max: Fury Road, which achieved cinematic immortality for its wall-to-wall (dune-to-dune?) automotive carnage. I remain a modest dissenter to Fury Road’s reception as a modern masterpiece—for all its brawny magnificence, it’s deficient in terms of theme and character—but I admire it for its bravura skill and relentless momentum; aside from a brief (and fairly dull) interlude by a desolate tree, it’s essentially one long, exhilarating car chase. Structurally, Furiosa is more conventional, using rip-roaring set pieces as exclamation points as it unspools a fraught, sprawling narrative. Yet conceptually, it’s far more ambitious—spanning decades instead of days, adopting a Tarantino-esque blueprint (five numbered chapters), and interrogating the ecstasy and futility of vengeance. Read More

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I Saw the TV Glow: Long Live the Screen

Jeremy BeckReviews
Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine in I Saw the TV Glow

The line that best encapsulates the knotty themes of I Saw the TV Glow isn’t spoken aloud; instead, it’s scrawled across the screen in pink font: “Isabel and Tara are like family to me.” The author of that statement is Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), and the young women she’s referring to aren’t real people (or are they??) but the central characters in The Pink Opaque, her favorite episodic thriller. The notion that Maddy can cherish fictional figures akin to her actual relatives might strike you as ridiculous. For my part, I’ll cop to identifying with her sentiment in a peculiar way, given that 13 years ago on this very website, I celebrated Buffy the Vampire Slayer for its capacity to “make you feel as if you belong” and described watching an episode as the equivalent of “going home.” In other words, I get where she’s coming from.

Buffy, as it happens, is an obvious point of inspiration for The Pink Opaque, with its paranormal investigators, its monster-of-the-week structure, and its claim to a teenage audience in the ’90s (it airs on the “Young Adult Network”). But Jane Schoenbrun, I Saw the TV Glow’s writer and director, is after something more complicated than paying tribute to a childhood staple, even if they toss in a few tasty easter eggs. (One member of Buffy’s beloved Scooby Gang was named Tara; Amber Benson, the actress who played her, cameos here.) They’re more concerned with our relationship with the art that we consume—how it can shape us, bind us, even warp us. In High Fidelity, John Cusack surmised that shared interests are essential when connecting with friends and lovers: “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like.” But what if what you like alters who you are? Read More

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