She’s the perfect girlfriend. She’s smart but not intimidating. She’s pretty but doesn’t draw too much attention to herself. She’s a good listener but doesn’t dominate the conversation. She’s good in bed but doesn’t demand her own gratification. She’s everything a man could want, and nothing he can’t handle.
The chief satirical insight of Companion, the slick and engaging new thriller from Drew Hancock, is that the preceding paragraph’s negative phrases—emphasizing a woman’s passivity, her lack of desire or independence—function as positive attributes. For the men in this movie, the platonic ideal of romantic partnership isn’t equality but compliance. They aren’t interested in being challenged or enriched; they just want to be admired and obeyed. Read More
Coralie Fargeat’s first feature, about a female plaything who gets used up and left for dead only to rise from the metaphorical ashes and transform into a retaliatory angel, was aptly called Revenge. The same title might also apply to The Substance, Fargeat’s explosive, provocative, and decidedly gonzo follow-up of feminist reduction and wrath. Revenge, one of the best movies of 2018, was memorable in part for how it kept things small; its taut, sharp setting, involving just a handful of people and locations, imbued its typical thriller construction with an elemental ferocity. In quantitative terms, The Substance is similarly intimate—there are only two characters of any depth—but its scope is far more expansive, creating an intricate mythology while taking satirical aim at the boys’-club institution that is Hollywood. The target of Fargeat’s vengeance is no longer one man but the male gaze altogether.
What persists, beyond an undercurrent (overcurrent?) of righteous anger, is her supple craftsmanship. The Substance is a big movie full of garish violence and sweeping ideas, but its images are composed with elegance and precision. Consider its first few scenes. The ominous opening shot finds an unknown hand pumping a liquid into the curdled yolk of a fried egg, which then magically belches out another foodstuff that looks nearly identical, except that it’s slightly more pristine; as your eye takes pleasure in the contrasting colors—the yellow yolk sits on a complementary sky-blue surface, while the fluid is a distinctive puke-green—your brain instantly downloads both the film’s inherent mystery and its thematic preoccupation with doubling. Then comes the time-lapsed overhead view of a Walk of Fame star, progressing from its flawless manufacture to its gradual disintegration: the life cycle of a Hollywood starlet, distilled into a few cracks of stone. Without moving her camera or opening her mouth, Fargeat has primed you for her ensuing fable about the perils of female aging in Tinseltown. Read More
Up until now, Jeremy Saulnier has been something of an “Imagine if” filmmaker. Whether centering on a hapless schmo embroiled in a deadly noir (Blue Ruin) or a punk-rock band trapped by bloodthirsty Nazis (Green Room), his movies have thrust ordinary people into impossible situations, forcing you to contemplate how you might respond in such drastic scenarios. With Rebel Ridge, he attempts to heighten both sides of his unbalanced equation while retaining the same fundamental sense of helplessness. The hero here is the opposite of an everyman; he’s smart, determined, and physically gifted. But he’s still the underdog, because the foe he’s facing is no less than the very institution of American policing.
The chief pleasure of Rebel Ridge is how it packages its big ideas—about racism, class entrenchment, and state-sanctioned violence—into a story that’s small-scale and tidy. Well, initially; as the film progresses, its thematic ambitions grow broader, which has the paradoxical effect of diminishing its boldness. Still, even if Saulnier isn’t always in full control of his thornier ideas, he remains in complete command of his immediate environment. As a polemic, Rebel Ridge is provocative but also uneven; as an action movie, it’s terrific. Read More
Movies are built for catharsis. Regardless of genre—the romantic comedy’s race through the airport, the murder mystery’s unmasking of the killer, the sports picture’s big game—cinematic endings are designed to cash the checks that their films have spent the past two acts writing. The paradox of this construction, at least when it comes to the modern thriller, is that most directors are more skilled at building tension than unleashing bedlam. Auteurs such as Ari Aster, Osgood Perkins, and M. Night Shyamalan (to name a few) are all capable craftsmen, wielding their razor-sharp technique to amplify our unease, but while they’re skilled at manufacturing suspense, they often struggle to pay it off in ways that are genuinely unpredictable or exciting.
Last weekend saw two new releases acutely vulnerable to this common pitfall. One tumbles into it. The other does its best to evade it, partly by rewiring its chronology. At the risk of evoking that head-tapping “Roll Safe” meme, your third act can’t ruin your movie’s ending if it arrives in the first 15 minutes. Read More
M. Night Shyamalan fancies himself a philosopher as well as a showman. Sure, he makes genre movies designed to rattle your nerves, but he also wants to dig under your skin and force you to wrestle with his pet themes and ideas. The Sixth Sense, The Village, and Old are all spellbinding constructions, embroidered with aesthetic flair and clockwork precision, but they’re also treatises on the fragility of parenthood—the quixotic dream of just keeping your kids safe. With his prior feature, the well-intentioned but unsatisfying Knock at the Cabin, Shyamalan skewed the balance too far toward the intellectual, building a meditative puzzle about humanity and faith but neglecting to supply the requisite thrills. His follow-up, Trap, tilts decidedly in the opposite direction. It is not among his most thought-provoking works, but as a specimen of pure entertainment, it is what the kids call a banger.
One of those kids is Riley (Ariel Donoghue), an obsessive fan of beloved girl-pop star Lady Raven (Saleka Night Shyamalan, the director’s daughter). Riley is elated that her father, Cooper (a never-better Josh Hartnett), has rewarded her academic excellence by taking her to a Lady Raven matinee show in downtown Philadelphia. For his part, Cooper seems happy to be there, basking in his daughter’s ebullience, even as he can’t help but notice the arena’s curiously robust police presence… Read More
