Horror

The Invisible Man: Touch Me, Not So Easy to Leave Me

Jeremy BeckReviews
Elisabeth Moss in "The Invisible Man"

There’s virtually no dialogue in the first five minutes of The Invisible Man, but that doesn’t stop the director Leigh Whannell from telling you everything you need to know. We open in the dead of night, on a woman lying awake in bed, her partner’s arm slung across her waist like a fleshy chain. Her eyes wide with anxiety, she silently extricates herself from his grasp, then tiptoes through their opulent beachside home, packing a bag and disabling the alarm. She also deactivates the house’s many security cameras, except for one: the feed from the bedroom, which she routes to her phone and keeps glancing at in panic, worried that her jailer might have risen. As she quietly maneuvers toward the exit and her freedom, the tension mounts, with various obstacles—a dog’s dish, a car’s sensor, a looming enclosure—conspiring to impede her escape.

It’s the first of many gripping sequences in the movie, an expertly orchestrated medley of image, sound, and music. Yet beyond highlighting Whannell’s considerable craft, the opening is meaningful for the way it telegraphs the film’s metaphorical intentions. The Invisible Man is, quite simply, a picture about domestic abuse. It examines how powerful men feel entitled to possess beautiful women, resulting in violence that’s both physical and emotional. And it contemplates how such subjugation corrodes victims’ health and self-worth, how it can be toxic and dehumanizing. Also, there’s an invisible man. Read More

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The Lighthouse: Stormy Weather, Madness on the Horizon

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe in Robert Eggers' "The Lighthouse".

A punishing movie whose bits of greatness are obscured by a fog of auteurist pretension, The Lighthouse is a deeply frustrating experience, a tantalizing work that defies explanation and categorization. It defies enjoyment too; as technically impressive and formidably confident as it may be, it isn’t much fun to watch. But it does carry a genuine personality, the imprint of a director who refuses to sacrifice his bizarre vision for the sake of more quotidian values like accessibility. Or, you know, coherence.

That director is Robert Eggers, whose first feature, the terrific horror movie The Witch, blended creeptastic folk-story terror with silky filmmaking craft. It also featured characters speaking in period-specific dialect, a trick Eggers repeats here, though the setting has been bumped up by a few centuries to the late 1800s. The screenplay, which Eggers wrote with his brother Max, is laden with old-timey jargon—“aye” in place of “yes”, “ye” instead of “you”, etc.—which enhances the film’s already-ornate degree of detail. Assuming, of course, you can understand what the hell they’re saying. Read More

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It Chapter Two: The Losers Are Bigger, and So Is the Clown

Jeremy BeckReviews
Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise in "It Chapter Two"

Size matters in It Chapter Two, and that’s bad news for everyone, unless you’re a special-effects technician or Paul Bunyan. Big, loud, and long—but not powerful, memorable, or scary—Andy Muschietti’s follow-up to his 2017 smash hit completes the saga of six misfits and their supernatural battle against one angry clown. But while this sequel flashes forward 27 years, alighting on the members of the self-proclaimed Losers Club as disenchanted adults, its sensibility is distinctly childlike. Dismissive of subtlety and ignorant of tension, Chapter Two stomps around wildly, craving your attention and desperate for your dread. Its creepy clown—named Pennywise, of course, and again played by Bill Skarsgård with streaks of red gashing his pasty-white makeup—may remain a force of malevolent evil, but at times he seems less like the movie’s villain than its spirit animal.

Not that he’s around all that much. In fact, aside from the prologue—in which a pleasant evening at a carnival turns icky and gory, with a paranormal murder preceded by a vulgar, distinctly human hate crime—Pennywise is a nonentity for most of Chapter Two, lurking in the periphery or cloaking himself in other forms of varying ghastliness. It’s an approach that makes some theoretical sense; the clown is such a nightmarish symbol, Muschietti doesn’t want to dilute his gruesome power through overuse. And his solution—to terrorize his characters, and his audience, by subjecting them to a twisted menagerie of misshapen monsters—might have worked, had the director exhibited some grasp of how to transfigure computer-generated phantasms into genuine fright. Read More

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Ready or Not: Here Come the Wealthy Satanists

Jeremy BeckReviews
Samara Weaving in "Ready or Not"

The rich really are different in Ready or Not, a bloody—and bloody-fun—satire of the American aristocracy. Every family has its quirky rituals, but the Le Domas clan—the coterie of smarmy blue bloods depicted here—is so accustomed to disposing of dead bodies, they instinctively toss a coin whenever they encounter a fresh corpse, a literal delegation of heads or tails. And if you think you’ve ever struggled to fit in with your moneyed in-laws, at least your great aunt has never charged at you while wielding a giant battle axe.

That’s just one of many daunting challenges faced by Grace (Samara Weaving), the heroine of this grisly, giddy tale. When the movie opens, she’s steeling herself for a different sort of nightmare: marrying into the Le Domas empire following a whirlwind romance with Alex (City on a Hill’s Mark O’Brien), one of the scions of the famous gaming dynasty. (“We prefer dominion,” he gently corrects her.) And if you strip away the brutal prologue, which finds a five-year-old Alex hiding in a closet while his relatives coolly murder a well-dressed man, the opening act of Ready or Not could perhaps be mistaken for a fish-out-of-water comedy, along with a send-up of the rich and brainless. Read More

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Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: Book Smart, Kids Dumb

Jeremy BeckReviews
The kids are not all right.

Less teenage horror movie than lightly creepy seminar, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark functions as a kind of starter kit for curious viewers looking to dabble in the cinema of fright. Cogently threading together a handful of spooky tales lifted from Alvin Schwartz’s famous anthology of the same name, this passable imitator assembles the building blocks of classic fear fests, then nudges them into predictable, clockwork motion. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, which may be why it seems geared toward horror virgins—the innocent few who really haven’t seen this stuff before. As an example of the genre, it’s pedestrian; as an introduction to it, it’s effective.

The director André Øvredal has a keen understanding of the essential elements, which he draws together with workmanlike efficiency. There is a haunted house, complete with creaky hinges, dark closets, and a cavernous basement. There is a cornfield, the rows upon ominous rows of crops lorded over by an ugly, unsmiling scarecrow. There are rusty wheelchairs, slowly turning doorknobs, and long, spindly shadows that emanate from nowhere, stretching menacingly across cobwebbed walls. And then there are the more visible and corporeal terrors: wriggling spiders; reanimated corpses; Richard Nixon. Read More

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