Drama

Poor Things: Pride of Frankenstein

Jeremy BeckReviews
Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things

Poor Things opens at a stately manor in Victorian London, where chickens bark, pigs quack, and legless horses draw steam-powered carriages. These hybridized bastardizations are the work of Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a brilliant surgeon with scars on his face and curiosity in his heart. When he isn’t tutoring pompous medical students or belching out his farts through a contraption that turns gas into floating spheres, God (as he prefers to be called) toils in his vast private laboratory, concocting unholy experiments in his ongoing quest to investigate and bend the laws of nature. God wields his scalpel with such rigorous dispassion—a blend of mighty intelligence and clinical precision—that you might be tempted to perceive him as a proxy for Yorgos Lanthimos, the movie’s director and cinema’s preeminent scholar of human oddity. But that reading disserves Poor Things, which finds Lanthimos applying his craft with generosity as well as exactitude. God’s creations are perverse; Lanthimos has manufactured a miracle.

In doing so, he has sacrificed none of his talent for arresting imagery (not to mention caustic comedy). From its very first shot—that of a pregnant woman in a blue dress on a bridge, flinging herself to the icy waters below—Poor Things routinely marries the ghastly and the gorgeous. The production design, by Shona Heath and James Price, concocts environments of terrible wonder, like the airborne trams that slice through a smoggy metropolis or the yellow Escheresque staircase that crumbles in midair. (Even the black-and-white title cards that divide the picture into discrete chapters ripple with dazzling eccentricity.) The costumes, by Holly Waddington, are a resplendent array of gowns and bodices, despite every male character wanting to tear them to shreds. And the cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who also shot Lanthimos’ The Favourite, features bursts of bold color yet repeatedly contorts the frame into his singular fisheye style; at times he even shrinks the canvas to a small circle, as though we’re squinting through a peephole at all of the movie’s beautiful grotesqueries. Read More

Read more

Eileen: That Pretty Red Mess

Jeremy BeckReviews
Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway in Eileen

Smoke gets in more than just your eyes in Eileen; it fills up your lungs and seeps into your pores. Directed by William Oldroyd from a script by Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh (adapting the latter’s novel), this sly and engrossing psychological thriller wields fog like a haunted-house barker, cloaking its characters and vehicles in clouds of swirling vapor. Seductive imagery aside, the omnipresent haze is a fitting device for a movie that obscures its intentions, priming you for a queasy study of obsession before pivoting into a nightmare of a different sort.

This isn’t to imply that Eileen, in its bold strokes, is especially novel or even surprising. Its titular heroine, played with supple intensity by Thomasin McKenzie, is a familiar type: a loner whose existence is so mundane, she can scarcely give voice to her repressed desires. Eileen works at a juvenile detention center in Nowheresville, Massachusetts, where she mindlessly frisks female visitors and shuffles inmates through corridors. On her evening commute, she stops by the liquor store; when she arrives home at her ramshackle house, she places the fresh bottles at the feet of her drunken father (Shea Whigham), collecting the day’s empties without comment. She’s less a wallflower than a smear of taupe. Read More

Read more

May December: It’s a Generational Fling

Jeremy BeckReviews
Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore in May December

When we first meet Gracie and Joe, the married couple who constitute two-thirds of the unstable triangle that makes up Todd Haynes’ May December, they seem to be living an enviable fantasy of domestic bliss. Hosting that most idyllic of pastimes, the backyard barbecue, they share a passing kiss before busying themselves with their duties; Joe (Charles Melton) gets to work on the grill, while Gracie (Julianne Moore) bustles in the kitchen. The weather is sunny, the guests are smiling, and the mood is relaxed. But then Gracie opens the refrigerator door, and the music swells ominously as she makes a cataclysmic discovery: “We don’t have enough hot dogs.”

This is a very funny scene, even as it telegraphs Haynes’ bold, borderline-perverse intentions. With this movie, he is taking the meager lives of three pitiful people and imbuing them with the sweep of classic melodrama. Yet he is also doing the opposite: tackling subject matter that is fundamentally vulgar and investing it with extraordinary grace and sensitivity. May December traffics in illicit affairs and tawdry desires, which it heightens with extravagant skill and unapologetic grandeur. But where its bones are theatrical, its heart is achingly sincere. Read More

Read more

Saltburn: Brother, Can You Spare a Crime?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Barry Keoghan and Archie Madekwe in Saltburn

“Eat the rich” is generally meant as a metaphor, but in Saltburn, the new psychodrama from Emerald Fennell, it verges on becoming literal. Midway through the movie, during one of the many pivot points in its kinked narrative, a young man coos that he intends to devour his female quarry before burying his face between her legs. Shortly thereafter, we see him sinking into a bathtub, blood dripping down his chin, like a vampire crawling into his coffin after a fresh kill.

This is among the movie’s plentiful striking images that are designed to induce a gasp of horror or a shudder of pleasure. Saltburn’s plot may traffic in ghastly occurrences—deception, suicide, murder, undercooked eggs—but it primarily operates as a work of provocation. If you find yourself clucking your tongue at its tactlessness or wincing at its indecency, you are simply playing your part as the appalled observer. To paraphrase a popular line that tends to circulate on social media, the obscenity is the point. Read More

Read more

Anatomy of a Fall: Death Landing

Jeremy BeckReviews
Swann Arlaud and Sandra Hüller in Anatomy of a Fall

The first frame of Anatomy of a Fall, even before the traditional procession of vanity cards, is the text of a URL: didshedoit.com. The ensuing movie, a tense and absorbing courtroom drama directed by Justine Triet, doesn’t so much investigate the answer to that question as emphasize its unknowability. Like Rashomon before so, it posits that the quest for truth is a fool’s errand, and that past events are refracted through individual prisms of memory and perspective. Initially tasked with finding guilt or innocence, it instead grapples with the notion that those terms are illusory.

The “she” of that URL is Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), and the “it” is the death of her husband, Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis). That both characters share a first name with the actor playing them is just one sign that Triet is attempting to collapse fact and fiction, though her screenplay, which she wrote with Arthur Harari, isn’t rooted in any specific true-crime episode. It instead methodically builds itself out from the film’s opening scene, when Sandra and Samuel’s 11-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), returns from a walk with his dog to find his father’s bloody body splayed out at the base of their ski chalet. This completes the URL’s question: Did Samuel jump, or did Sandra push him? Read More

Read more