Horror

Barbarian: Scare-bnb

Jeremy BeckReviews
Georgina Campbell in Barbarian

He’s a really nice guy. That’s what you need to understand, and what serves as the human foundation for the hellish nightmare that follows. When Tess (Georgina Campbell), an attractive young documentarian interviewing for a job in Detroit, arrives at her Airbnb in the dead of night only to find it already occupied by a well-built man named Keith, you might think that she should dive back into her SUV and burn rubber. She contemplates that very course of action herself; she isn’t stupid, and the last thing she wants to do is star in a horror movie. But Keith is—and I can’t stress this enough—a really nice guy, and so Tess swallows hard and crosses the threshold from the porch into the house, and the terrible events that follow are set in relentless motion.

Written and directed by Zach Cregger, Barbarian is one of those twisty pictures where virtually any plot detail arguably qualifies as a spoiler. But the title alone, which appears on screen in a creepy elongated typeface as cockroaches skitter across its letters, at the least confirms that it isn’t a romantic comedy. That might be news to Tess and Keith, whose flung-together-by circumstance pairing—turns out the incompetent property-management company double-booked the rental—could qualify, in a different cinematic universe, as a meet-cute. In addition to possessing broad shoulders and a square jaw, Keith is uncommonly courteous and perceptive. He offers Tess the lone bedroom without hesitation, throwing in a self-deprecating crack about his square upbringing. When she doesn’t drink the tea he makes for her, he recognizes her suspicions and volunteers to open a bottle of wine in front of her, negating the possibility that he’s doing anything indecent. He’s even familiar with the little-seen jazz documentary that Tess finds formative. He’s Prince fucking Charming. Read More

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Why Didn’t You Go to the Movies Last Weekend?

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Nathalie Emmanuel in The Invitation, John Boyega in Breaking, Idris Elba in Three Thousand Years of Longing

Immediately prior to my showing of Three Thousands Years of Longing, the director George Miller delivered a pretaped message, thanking viewers for spending the time and money to see his latest epic on the big screen. It was meant to infuse a commercial transaction—I was, after all, paying a corporation for its product—with a personal touch, and it worked, though not in the way Miller intended. Watching him natter amiably about the importance of cinema, I got the sense that he was speaking directly to me—not because his words were especially powerful, but because despite sitting in a gigantic auditorium, I was one of maybe 10 people in the theater.

This does not appear to have been a unique experience. According to Box Office Mojo, Three Thousand Years of Longing—Miller’s long-awaited (or apparently not) follow-up to Mad Max: Fury Road—earned a pitiful $2.9 million last weekend, despite playing in over 2,400 theaters and sporting a hefty $60 million budget. When it came to new releases doing meager business, it wasn’t alone. Breaking, a fact-based thriller about a bank robbery starring John Boyega, couldn’t even scrape up a million bucks in 900 theaters; it was outgrossed by the random re-release of Rogue One, a Star Wars spin-off playing on barely one-quarter as many screens. Even the weekend’s most nominally successful new arrival, the low-budget horror movie The Invitation, premiered in the top spot with a dubious asterisk attached: Ignoring the COVID-19 pandemic, its $6.8 million tally marked the lowest figure for a first-place debut in nearly 20 years. Read More

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Nope: Intelligent Equine

Jeremy BeckReviews
Daniel Kaluuya in Nope

Throughout Nope, the eye-popping and brain-tingling third feature from Jordan Peele, title cards bearing the name of an animal interrupt the proceedings, as if to divide the movie into discrete, enigmatic chapters. The headings typically refer to various horses (Lucky, Ghost, etc.) who are owned and trained by the main characters, while the final section opens with a nickname assigned to the mysterious, malevolent force that looms in the sky above their house. At the rough midpoint, however, the elaborate scheming and the interplanetary hijinks are put on pause, and the film rewinds several decades to the set of a multi-camera sitcom, where the titular attraction is a chimpanzee called Gordy.

What follows is one of the most spellbinding set pieces I’ve seen on screen in quite some time. Combining sturdy cinematic building blocks—witty production design, precise framing, a painstakingly purposeful harmony of image and sound—Peele concocts a sequence that accumulates furious momentum yet is also achingly, exquisitely still. We glimpse the events, a ghastly display of chaos and carnage, from the perspective of a small boy named Jupe (Jacob Kim), who we already know will age into the commercially savvy proprietor of a Western-style theme park, where he will be played with sly confidence by Steven Yeun. Yet in the moment, that foreknowledge provides little comfort, and as the young Jupe hides under a table, paralyzed with fright, you are less likely to sympathize with him than embody him—frozen in horror, yet helpless to look away. Read More

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The Black Phone: No Answer, Try His Hell

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ethan Hawke in The Black Phone

Listen up, kids, here are some dos and don’ts courtesy of The Black Phone, the grimy new horror movie from Scott Derrickson: Do stand up to bullies by hitting them in the head with rocks. Don’t beat your children with a belt, even if you’re really just a sad dad on the inside. Do pay careful attention to your dreams, which may or may not be premonitions. Don’t invite the cops inside your home while lines of cocaine are visible on your coffee table. And if a dude in clown makeup driving a black van branded “Abracadabra” approaches you on a vacant sidewalk, do immediately walk the other way; don’t—seriously, do not—ask if you can see a magic trick.

That last nugget comes courtesy of The Grabber, a serial killer terrorizing a morose Denver neighborhood in 1978. With lank hair and dark eyes that peek out from behind a two-piece mask—the upper part topped with devilish horns, the lower forming a demented smile—he’s played by Ethan Hawke, continuing the actor’s not-unwelcome veer into villainy following his small-screen turn on Marvel’s Moon Knight. There are moments of real menace in Hawke’s performance here; when he smothers a child’s cries and threatens to gut him like a pig before strangling him with his own intestines, you know he means it. For the most part, though, he keeps things in second gear, gesturing toward evil rather than embodying it. Read More

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Crimes of the Future, Watcher, and Horror of Body and Mind

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Viggo Mortensen in Crimes of the Future; Maika Monroe in Watcher

What scares you? More to the point, what kind of movie scares you? It’s been 100 years since Max Schreck climbed out of his coffin in Nosferatu, and directors have been harnessing and refining cinematic tricks to terrify their audiences ever since. One of the pleasures of the horror genre is its versatility—its infinite methods for exploring madness. This past weekend featured the release of two creepy pictures that take decidedly different approaches in their similar effort to raise the goose bumps on your arms and the hackles on your neck. One tries to dig under your skin; the other carves your skin clean off.

David Cronenberg is the father of modern body horror—or maybe the grandfather, given that the Canadian envelope-pusher is now 79 years old. But the director’s latest grotesquery, the arresting and impressive and ultimately empty Crimes of the Future, proves that age hasn’t sapped him of his enthusiasm for staging imaginative corporeal brutality. In the film’s opening scene, an eight-year-old boy living off the coast of a Grecian island munches on a plastic wastebasket, swallowing its synthetic fibers with no apparent difficulty; shortly thereafter, his mother smothers him to death with a pillow. This shocking, vulgar sequence is arguably the least inexplicable thing that happens in the entire movie. Read More

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