Horror

Obsession review: Hunger and Cursed

Jeremy BeckReviews
Inde Navarrette in Obsession

You’ve met dudes like Bear before, especially at the movies. He’s a lovelorn sad sack—a sweet, sensitive guy nursing a crush on a beautiful, unattainable girl. The first time we see him, he appears to be finally confessing his true feelings, delivering the kind of anecdote-laden speech that tends to produce everlasting happiness (think the end of When Harry Met Sally). This proves to be a feint—he’s in fact rehearsing his declaration of love—but it nonetheless cements Bear as an earnest, sympathetic protagonist. We’re all rooting for him.

Given this setup, you might think that Obsession, the second feature from multi-hyphenate Curry Barker, is a romantic comedy. It isn’t. It’s a horror movie, one that traffics in supernatural phenomena, jolting suspense, and sporadic bursts of blood and gore. It’s consistently unsettling, and not just for the way it interrogates how cinema exalts nobly suffering men at the expense of idealized, objectified women. Read More

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Mother Mary review: Bless This Dress

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michaela Coel and Anne Hathaway in Mother Mary

The tagline for David Lowery’s Mother Mary reads, “This is not a ghost story.” For certain cinephiles, this seems less like an ominous pronouncement than a bizarre statement of the obvious. Of course this isn’t A Ghost Story; that was Lowery’s 2017 experimental drama, which found Casey Affleck standing under a sheet and Rooney Mara stuffing pie in her face. It was challenging and slow, but it rewarded patience, with a remarkable third act that posed provocative questions about love, marriage, societal evolution, and the whole damn human condition.

Mother Mary is similarly ambitious and not nearly as good. But it has its moments, with impressive individual scenes and striking images. It wields its beauty in service of a thin and listless narrative, but taglines and titles aside, “story” has never been Lowery’s department. Read More

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Lee Cronin’s The Mummy review: Gloomy Sarcophagus

Jeremy BeckReviews
Natalie Grace in Lee Cronin's The Mummy

In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Kate Capshaw describes archaeologists as “funny little men searching for their mommies.” “Mummies,” Harrison Ford corrects her. What’s the difference? Even the scariest monsters have parents, and Lee Cronin’s The Mummy—more on that vexing title in a bit—is a horror movie about the agonies of child-rearing. We all want our kids to grow up safe and smart and responsible, but life tends to present challenges: disease, academic hardship, financial and spiritual ruin. Every family has its demons. Some are more demonic than others.

To describe The Mummy as a metaphor of tortured parenthood is to give it more credit than it deserves, and more depth than it courts. This ain’t Hereditary. It is instead a maximalist, blunt-force nightmare whose primary goal is to provoke terror through relentless, assaultive chaos. Keep your silly quips and your classical adventurism for Brendan Fraser. This supernatural being is out for blood. Read More

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Alpha review: The Girl with the Nag and Tattoo

Jeremy BeckReviews
Golshifteh Farahani and Mélissa Boros in Alpha

She’s only made three movies, but Julia Ducournau has already built her own cinematic festival of female suffering and endurance, focusing on women plagued by peculiar conditions. In Raw, the heroine seemed perfectly normal until she was overcome with a genetic craving that compelled her to eat her sister’s severed finger. Her challenges were trivial compared to the lead in Titane, a murderess whose automotive copulations slowly transformed her internal fluids into motor oil. Next to her, the tribulations of Alpha, the 13-year-old girl at the center of Ducournau’s eponymous new whatsit, are relatively prosaic; she just got a tattoo via a dirty needle and may have become infected with a strange virus. This quickly proves to be the least of her problems.

Having seen all of Ducournau’s features, I’m not sure that I’ve properly understood any of them. This is, mostly, a compliment. Aesthetically speaking, the French provocateur is a gifted and fearless stylist, using robust techniques and bold aural and visual flourishes. Intellectually, her works tend to be ambitious and enigmatic, probing thorny ideas but refusing to neatly spell out their themes. This can be vexing, but the inherent tension—the collision between muscular filmmaking and knotty storytelling—is also enveloping. You enjoy getting lost in the labyrinth. Read More

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Scream 7 review: The Ghostface and the Darkness

Jeremy BeckReviews
Neve Campbell in Scream 7

Remember when the Scream movies were about something? Wes Craven’s original horror classic was a playful deconstruction of the genre, though its meta wit didn’t prevent it from operating as a taut and suspenseful exercise. Its follow-ups were less engaging to various degrees, but they all at least purported to have something to say about the enduring conventions of the slasher picture. The up-the-ante imperative of sequels, the deadly stakes of trilogy cappers, the flexible laws of “requels” and franchises, the perils of fan service—these concepts weren’t always flawlessly executed, but they were ostensibly interesting ideas nonetheless.

Scream 7, directed by Kevin Williamson (who wrote the first film), is technically the latest entrant in the franchise. It has actors who reprise familiar roles, characters who are versed in the series’ canon, and a masked killer who taunts people over the phone in the voice of Roger L. Jackson. Yet it has remarkably little to say—about cinema, about horror, about itself. It’s a Scream movie that’s barely even about Scream movies. Read More

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