Thriller

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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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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Send Help review: Triangle of Madness

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien in Send Help

Rachel McAdams is a babe. It’s been over two decades since she broke out with the one-two summer punch of Mean Girls (where she played a scholastic queen bee) and The Notebook (where she portrayed the object of Ryan Gosling’s eternal devotion), and her wholesome sex appeal hasn’t waned a bit. Even when she tamps down her natural vivacity—as a dogged spy in A Most Wanted Man, as a subjugated housewife in Disobedience—her spark of glamour remains irrepressible. So it’s both a stretch and a joke that Send Help finds McAdams playing Linda Liddle, a socially maladroit office drone with stringy hair, a prominent pimple on her chin, and an even larger mole on her cheek. As her onomatopoetic surname suggests, Linda is meek, weak, and mousy. If Regina George didn’t terrorize her in high school, it’s only because Linda was too small to be noticed.

Less total loser than thankless nobody, Linda works in the accounting strategy and planning department of a generic firm, where her rigorous calculations get co-opted by her dismissive male superiors. (The screenplay, by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, intentionally keeps her job’s details vague.) She may know numbers, but her personality is radioactive; when she tries to invite herself to a planned karaoke outing, her coworkers stare at her like she’s speaking an alien language. Linda’s fumbling is especially unfortunate given that she’s desperate to impress her new boss, a preening hotshot named Bradley (Dylan O’Brien) with custom loafers, a private putting machine, and a lifelong membership in the boys’ club. He seems approachable enough (“Open door policy!”), but he’s an oily prick who wants nothing to do with her; when she traps him by her cubicle, his face goes through several stages of agony as he gradually resolves to wipe a smudge of tuna fish off her lip. There’s no possible scenario where Bradley would truly value Linda. Is there? Read More

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In the Testament of Ann Lee and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Religion Gets Musical

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Amanda Seyfried in The Testament of Ann Lee; Ralph Fiennes in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

All movies compel suspension of disbelief, but the musical demands an extra dose of willful credulity. In real life, people don’t break into choreographed song-and-dance routines, so appreciating the genre requires accepting the form’s heightened surreality. It’s an act of faith—a gesture of surrender to a higher power whom you trust to guide you through the inexplicable.

This means that musicals about religion create a kind of feedback loop, reinforcing their characters’ spirituality—the belief in the unseen, the quest to convert others through vigorous performance—via their staging and technique. As (ahem) fate would have it, two recent releases toy with this idea, even if neither of them conforms to classical conventions of how movie musicals are meant to operate. Read More

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