Horror

The Monkey: Toy to the World, the Sword Is Come

Jeremy BeckReviews
Theo James in The Monkey

Longlegs may have cemented Osgood Perkins’ stature in the horror community, but his twisted sensibility has been fully formed ever since his debut feature, The Blackcoat’s Daughter. In both of those films, as well as the two that came in between (Gretel & Hansel and I Am the Pretty Thing Whose Title Is Too Long), Perkins flaunted his gifts as a skilled purveyor of heebie-jeebies, wielding slick camerawork and atonal rhythms to keep viewers on edge and off balance. You might think that venturing into the realm of Stephen King would only elevate the director’s midnight-madness credentials, but The Monkey, which Perkins has adapted from a King short story, is his least scary movie thus far. There is, however, a reason for its relative lack of terror. Quite simply: It’s a comedy.

Specifically, The Monkey deploys countless variations of a single joke. It posits, not without cause, that the spectacle of watching human beings die on screen can be funny as well as tragic. This is undeniably in poor taste, which is part of what makes it amusing. Perkins, channeling his bloodletting instincts in a direction that’s silly rather than spooky, commits to his premise with innovative gusto. People don’t just die in this movie; they are shot, stabbed, dismembered, decapitated, electrocuted, immolated, trampled by horses, and engulfed by a swarm of bees. It’s your worst nightmare, unless you’re a coroner who loves your work. Read More

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Companion: Beauty Is in the AI of the Beholder

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jack Quaid and Sophie Thatcher in Companion

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

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Presence: Phantom Dread

Jeremy BeckReviews
Callina Liang in Presence

As auteurs go, Steven Soderbergh is relatively humble. His closing credits never use the phrase “a film by,” and while he typically shoots and edits his movies himself—not since 2011’s Contagion has anyone else fulfilled either of those roles in one of his features—he also deploys pseudonyms (Peter Andrews for cinematography, Mary Ann Bernard for editing), as if to minimize the fastidious control he exerts over his own productions. That’s especially noteworthy in the case of Presence, given that its star is, well, Steven Soderbergh—or rather, his camera.

To be sure, there are actors in this movie, which centers on a white-collar nuclear family that’s just moved into an appealing new home in suburban New Jersey; Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan play the parents, respectively named Rebekah and Chris, while their disaffected teenage children are Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang). But the heart of Presence is its titular entity, an invisible being that roams about the house in a state of persistent curiosity, and whose field of vision doubles as the audience’s point of view. Read More

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Nosferatu: What Dreams May Succumb

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lily Rose Depp in Nosferatu

Bathed in ghostly white moonlight, a man stands in the center of a black roadway lined with forest-green pines. In the distance, he spots the faint outline of a moving object, which he gradually perceives to be a horse-drawn carriage. As the animals gather velocity and momentum, he realizes that he’s about to be trampled. He shuts his eyes and braces for impact, only to realize that the vehicle has magically stopped and angled itself perpendicular to him, its door thrown open, beckoning him into the waiting darkness. And then the coachman calls out, “Did you order an Uber?”

I made that last part up. The vampire mythos, with its lustful symbolism and its gargled accents, is easily vulnerable to ridicule. And there are certainly times when Nosferatu, Robert Eggers’ sumptuous remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 touchstone, dances up to the cliff’s edge of parody. But what rescues it—what turns your stifled laughter into shrieks of horror and gapes of wonder—is that it approaches its material with absolute sincerity, and without a shred of irony or detachment. Eggers, undertaking the perilous task of updating a 102-year-old classic, has of course renovated the silent black-and-white original, imprinting it with intoxicating sound and color. Yet he has not sacrificed any of its elemental power, forgoing the temptation for winking archness and instead operating with brazen, old-fashioned conviction. Read More

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Y2K: Millennium Ugh

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jaeden Martell, Rachel Zegler, and Julian Dennison in Y2K

Being unpopular in high school can feel like the end of the world. Your parents are embarrassing. Your best friend is a loser. The cool kids either bully you or ignore you. The girl you have a crush on barely knows you exist. And sentient computers have hatched a conspiracy to enslave the human race.

That the last of these items feels concordant with its predecessors is the central joke of Y2K, Kyle Mooney’s occasionally inspired, ultimately tedious new horror comedy. For Eli (Jaeden Martell, one of those anodyne actors who seems destined to play teenagers into his 30s), every day feels like its own miniature apocalypse—a perpetual ritual of awkwardness and humiliation. That’s an exaggeration, of course; his parents (Alicia Silverstone and Tim Heidecker) are sweet and supportive (how mortifying!), and he has plenty of fun playing videogames and goofing around with his closest pal, Danny (a solid Julian Dennison). But Eli still feels anxious and unfulfilled, especially because Laura (Rachel Zegler), the hot brainiac whom he sweatily flirts with online, seems more interested in older, more muscular dudes. So when his humdrum Friday night turns into a chaotic free-for-all full of death and dismemberment, he’s more than ready to save the day and get the girl. Read More

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