Horror

A Quiet Place, Day One: The City That Never Speaks

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joseph Quinn and Lupita Nyong'o in A Quiet Place: Day One

The special thing about the first Quiet Place movie was that it didn’t do anything special. Sure, John Krasinski’s horror hit was cinematically imaginative, but it worked because it stayed small, applying its merciless technique to the fate of one family enduring the crucible of a sonically fraught apocalypse. In retrospect, it’s somewhat miraculous that A Quiet Place Part II fared as well as it did, given that its mild expansion (new people, new locations) inevitably diluted some of its tension. This nascent franchise will continue churning out additional installments so long as they keep making money, but the commercial imperatives of sequel-building—bigger thrills, grander mythology, general moreness—seem incompatible with the original’s white-knuckle intimacy.

A Quiet Place: Day One, from the writer-director Michael Sarnoski (Krasinski receives a story credit), seems to succumb to this contradiction before improbably evading it. In terms of pure suspense, it is the least successful Quiet Place picture thus far. It is also the most humane. Read More

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The Watchers: What You See Is What You Fret

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dakota Fanning in The Watchers

Think fast: Can you name a movie directed by someone with the surname Shyamalan where a handful of terrified survivors take shelter in primitive surroundings in the forest, bracing for an invasion of unseen monsters? If you guessed The Village, you’d be right, and also wrong. The Watchers, the debut feature from Ishana Night Shyamalan, conforms to a similar horror template as that 2004 tentpole, one of the most divisive (and best) pictures directed by her father, M. Night. It’s inevitable, in our era of toxic nepo-baby discourse, that the younger Shyamalan’s work will be measured against that of her sire (who serves as producer here), so there’s something admirable about her steering into the skid and inviting the comparison. In tone and style, The Watchers is a decidedly Shyamalan production, featuring a number of qualities—foreboding atmosphere, stiff dialogue, gripping images, hokey mythology—that inevitably evoke the filmmaker who was once infamously dubbed “the next Spielberg.”

It’s slightly disappointing, if hardly devastating, that The Watchers is a flawed movie, struggling to enliven its spooky premise with the requisite eccentricity or suspense. But it isn’t an ignoble effort, and it establishes Shyamalan as a director with a fine eye. She just isn’t always sure where to aim it. Read More

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In a Violent Nature: One Man’s Slash Is Another Man’s Pleasure

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from In a Violent Nature

A campfire tale soaked in bile and blood, In a Violent Nature is a deeply unpleasant experience. This, of course, is the point; written and directed by Chris Nash, the movie is designed to unsettle its audience and subvert our expectations. By this measure, I suppose you could call it a success. But when judged against more traditional metrics—e.g., character development, thematic meaning, entertainment value, being vaguely interesting, etc.—it’s a failure.

Not a poorly made one, though. Making his first feature, Nash adopts a distinctive and coherent visual style, which he implements with considerable (albeit clammy) rigor. Operating within a cramped aspect ratio, his camera moves with a slow, purposeful glide, stalking its victims with deadly purpose. He refuses to use a musical score, instead relying on immersive sound design in which off-screen conversations are barely heard, like whispers in the woods. His technique isn’t found-footage horror—it’s methodical rather than chaotic—but it does fabricate a queasy, you-are-there intimacy. The result is like a Dardenne Brothers movie from hell—a ground-level observation of a supernatural monstrosity. Read More

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I Saw the TV Glow: Long Live the Screen

Jeremy BeckReviews
Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine in I Saw the TV Glow

The line that best encapsulates the knotty themes of I Saw the TV Glow isn’t spoken aloud; instead, it’s scrawled across the screen in pink font: “Isabel and Tara are like family to me.” The author of that statement is Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), and the young women she’s referring to aren’t real people (or are they??) but the central characters in The Pink Opaque, her favorite episodic thriller. The notion that Maddy can cherish fictional figures akin to her actual relatives might strike you as ridiculous. For my part, I’ll cop to identifying with her sentiment in a peculiar way, given that 13 years ago on this very website, I celebrated Buffy the Vampire Slayer for its capacity to “make you feel as if you belong” and described watching an episode as the equivalent of “going home.” In other words, I get where she’s coming from.

Buffy, as it happens, is an obvious point of inspiration for The Pink Opaque, with its paranormal investigators, its monster-of-the-week structure, and its claim to a teenage audience in the ’90s (it airs on the “Young Adult Network”). But Jane Schoenbrun, I Saw the TV Glow’s writer and director, is after something more complicated than paying tribute to a childhood staple, even if they toss in a few tasty easter eggs. (One member of Buffy’s beloved Scooby Gang was named Tara; Amber Benson, the actress who played her, cameos here.) They’re more concerned with our relationship with the art that we consume—how it can shape us, bind us, even warp us. In High Fidelity, John Cusack surmised that shared interests are essential when connecting with friends and lovers: “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like.” But what if what you like alters who you are? Read More

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Immaculate: Snacc of All Trades, Master of Nun

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sydney Sweeney in Immaculate

Until she cracked the box-office code with Anyone But You (still in theaters, over three months later!), Sydney Sweeney was best known for her television work: as a tempestuous sexpot on Euphoria, as a privileged troublemaker on The White Lotus, as a mentally unstable cellmate on Sharp Objects. Even as her star ascended and she appeared in more movies, the pandemic and studio hesitation conspired to prevent her from arriving on the actual big screen, as streamers gobbled up solid pictures like Reality and Big Time Adolescence… and also The Voyeurs, a spiky little thriller that dropped on Amazon a few years ago with little fanfare. Strictly speaking, The Voyeurs wasn’t a good movie, but it did showcase Sweeney’s ability to be both exotic and innocent; it also afforded its director, Michael Mohan, the opportunity to ape Brian de Palma. Now, Mohan and Sweeney have reteamed for Immaculate, a horror flick that contemplates a different sort of lusty possession.

As with The Voyeurs, Immaculate isn’t very good, but it isn’t without its guilty pleasures. As a creature of pure genre, it offers a handful of images—a watchful eye peering through a crevice to witness a sacrilegious ritual; a distant figure launching herself from a background tower—that contain a certain elemental power. The opening scene finds a young nun (Simona Tabasco, also from The White Lotus) trying to escape from an Italian convent that might as well be a medieval castle; as she fumbles frantically with the keys at the wrought-iron gate, a quartet of elders inexorably stalk toward her, like four Darth Vaders in habits. There’s no ambiguity or complexity here, just primordial terror. Read More

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