Horror

Beau Is Afraid: Never Shed a Single Fear

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joaquin Phoenix in Beau Is Afraid

The title of Beau Is Afraid may be a declarative statement, but its contents prompt an earnest question: Can you blame him? The story of a man beset by all manner of physical and existential terrors—angry neighbors, poisonous insects, deranged combat veterans, despondent cheerleaders, mommy issues, and (above all) his own crippling anxiety—Ari Aster’s third feature is a cavalcade of fear and anguish. Such torment is perhaps to be expected from the dude who became an indie-horror sensation with Hereditary; what’s surprising about Beau Is Afraid is that it’s such a rollicking entertainment. Sure, it subjects its hero to an unceasing ordeal of misery and humiliation, but it does so in a way that’s often (if not always) hypnotic, beautiful, and funny.

None of those adjectives would apply to Beau himself; in fact, his personality seems to revolve around a single emotion, and it’s right there in the title. We first meet Beau when he first meets the world: The film’s opening scene (“impression” might be a more accurate word) simulates the process of his birth—an unnerving disharmony of yelps and screams, set against an inky blackness that gradually gives way to blinding light. It’s one of the only times in the movie when Aster wields his formidable talent with visible stress, and it’s a bold introduction to a picture that is at once rigorous and chaotic. Read More

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Quick Hits: Renfield, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Jeremy BeckReviews
Nicolas Cage in Renfield; Ariela Barer in How to Blow Up a Pipeline

As premises go, “Nicolas Cage plays a campy Count Dracula” is a pretty good one. And Renfield, Chris McKay’s new horror-comedy, eagerly exploits the goofy appeal of its conceit; it slathers one of American cinema’s most (in)famous overactors in revolting makeup, dresses him in baroque wardrobe, and affords him ample opportunity to howl, snarl, and preen. Still, as Cage vehicles go, it’s less unhinged than some of his more maniacal late-period work, and in fact his performance works best when he pretends to modulate his hammy instincts with faux politesse, like a dormant volcano teasing you with the prospect of imminent eruption. When an associate informs Dracula that he was just on his way to see him, the vampire’s smiling response—“Oh, you were on your way”—drips with such performative understanding, you wonder if he feeds on anxiety rather than blood.

That associate, of course, is Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), and the problem with Renfield is that it’s mostly about Renfield. This isn’t the fault of Hoult, a fine actor and capable showboat in his own right. (If you haven’t seen him on Hulu’s The Great, you’re missing one of the small screen’s most marvelous imbeciles.) And it makes strategic sense to keep Cage’s wildness in reserve so that he doesn’t drain the film of its oxygen. But the product that McKay and his screenwriter, Ryan Ridley (fleshing out a Robert Kirkman pitch), have constructed around their stars is too flimsy to support the weight of their talent. It’s an idea in search of a movie. Read More

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Quick Hits: Scream VI, Cocaine Bear, Creed III, Magic Mike 3, and Emily

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michael B. Jordan in Creed III; Keri Russell in Cocaine Bear; Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera in Scream VI; Emma Mackey in Emily; Salma Hayek Pinault and Channing Tatum in Magic Mike's Last Dance

Between the Oscars, our TV rankings, and our list of the year’s best movies, it’s been a busy past month here at MovieManifesto. As a result, while I was able to write a few proper reviews of new movies (the new Shyamalan, the new Ant-Man), I neglected to make time for a bunch of additional 2023 films. That changes now! Well, sort of. Unlike Lydia Tár, I can’t stop time, so I’m unable to carve out enough space for full reviews. Instead, we’re firing off some quick-and-dirty capsules, checking in on five recent releases. Let’s get to it.

Scream VI. The clever double-act of the Scream pictures—the platonic ideal established by the first installment and never quite equaled since—is that they’re movies about scary movies and are also, well, scary movies. In the prior episode, Scream (which should have been called Scream 5, but never mind), new directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett satisfied one and only one side of that equation, cleverly skewering the toxic fandom that attends modern discourse but failing to serve up memorable carnage. Now returning with Scream VI, the pair have essentially flipped the script. The meta ideas bandied about here are a little less trenchant, but the nuts-and-bolts execution—and executions—is first-class. Read More

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Infinity Pool: The Excremental Tourist

Jeremy BeckReviews
Alexander Skarsgård in Infinity Pool

If Brandon Cronenberg is anxious about being compared to his father, he’s doing a good job hiding it. His prior feature, the art-house hit Possessor, leveraged the metamorphic gifts of Andrea Riseborough (newly minted Oscar nominee!) for a sordid story of corporeal invasion and existential agony. Now he returns with Infinity Pool, a wild and grimy phantasmagoria full of damaged bodies and deranged images. It may lack the deceptive polish of his pop’s best work, but it rivals him for sheer nastiness.

This is a matter of theme as well as form. In broad terms, Infinity Pool is a crude satire of white privilege and colonialist prerogatives. It’s set in the fictional country of Li Tolqa—filming took place in Croatia and Hungary, but the looming specter of “rainy season” suggests Southeast Asia—which attracts tourists with its opulent resorts and sandy beaches, but which someone ominously describes as “uncivilized.” The movie’s premise, which stirs echoes of last year’s Dual (and also The Prestige), revolves around a particularly perverse kind of black market: When interlopers break the law and find themselves subject to the third-world nation’s draconian justice system, they can evade punishment by paying the authorities (embodied by a louche Thomas Kretschmann) a hefty fee to manufacture a double—a perfect recreation endowed with their memories as well as their appearance—who will then suffer the death sentence in their stead. The only catch (OK fine, there are lots of catches) is that they must bear witness to their doppelganger’s execution. Read More

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M3gan: Hell Comes to the Dollhouse

Jeremy BeckReviews
Amie Donald as M3gan

They say the eyes are windows to the soul, which is why the most expressive anthropomorphic characters in cinema—E.T., Gollum, Wall-E—all sport wide, soulful peepers. But windows work both ways. In M3gan, the sly and spry new horror-comedy directed by Gerard Johnstone, the titular android gazes out into the world through a pair of delicate grey-blue irises, less concerned with comprehending her internal essence than with mapping her external environment. Her vision is rendered like that of an eerily empathetic cyborg—when she sees a person, she instantly analyzes their “Emotional State” and assigns quantitative ratings to various feelings (trust, joy, fear), like a talent scout grading an athlete—but she’s doing more than just gauging behavioral patterns. She is constantly downloading new data and feeding it into her processor, which means she’s learning, judging, evolving.

How, you might wonder, will such a creature ultimately regard our society? Then again, you might not wonder that, because if you’ve seen any previous entry in the child-doll subgenre of horror, you already know. Yet while M3gan’s predictable plotting rarely deviates from its predecessors’ silly and shrieky playbook, it is nevertheless a thoroughly enjoyable diversion—smart, funny, and even a mite provocative. Read More

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