Thriller

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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Men, Happening, and Women Under Attack

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Anamaria Vartolomei in Happening; Jessie Buckley in Men

The internet is fond of sarcastically asking if men are OK, but the same question might be more seriously asked of women. Pay equity, reproductive freedom, toxic masculinity, #MeToo—modern society is aswirl with issues surrounding female safety and autonomy. So it’s no surprise that cinema, with its quicksilver capacity to reflect on and respond to cultural shifts, is tackling these concepts with variety and alacrity. It is a bit surprising, however, for the same month to produce two theatrical releases which wrestle with men’s aggression and women’s liberation so directly, even if they do so in dramatically different ways.

Alex Garland’s third feature, the coyly titled Men, is the more ambitious work, at least in terms of scope and style. Garland favors small casts and isolated locations, but his films (Ex Machina, Annihilation) possess an aesthetic grandeur, teeming with bold colors and striking images. (His television series, the frustrating but beguiling Devs, is one of the most visually enthralling things you can find on the small screen.) This isn’t merely a matter of showing his audience pretty pictures but of somehow splicing beauty with deformity. Garland is a painterly artist with the emotional sensibility of a sick fuck. Read More

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At the Movies in 2022, Concept Is King

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Ana de Armas in Deep Water, Sandra Bullock in The Lost City, Daisy Edgar-Jones in Fresh, Mark Rylance in The Outfit, Mia Goth in X

When it comes to modern movies, there are now two Americas. The first is a land of franchise dominance and corporate hegemony, where superhero flicks and sequels rule the multiplex. Even for fans of costumed entertainment—and I generally count myself among their number—surveying the box-office landscape can yield a dispiriting and homogenous view. The 10 highest-grossing films of 2019 were all based on existing IP, with seven hailing from the Walt Disney Company and an eighth (Spider-Man: Far from Home) that’s fully enmeshed within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, i.e., the Mouse House’s flagship franchise; zoom out to the top 15, and only two pictures (Us and Knives Out) were truly original creations. The COVID-19 pandemic aggressively accelerated this trend, and while cautious audiences may finally be returning to theaters, they only really pack the place for familiar properties. The mushrooming sprawl of these four-quadrant productions—competently made, ruthlessly merchandised, exceedingly familiar, rigorously safe—has inspired many industry experts to lament the death of cinema.

Maybe they’re right. After all, as the collective conception of a box-office hit perpetually narrows in scope and variety, it’s difficult to imagine studios routinely green-lighting risky original projects. And yet! I am once again compelled to repel these dire predictions, because there lurks beneath this marketplace of non-ideas a second America—one where original movies keep getting made, and in different shapes, sizes, and styles. Last month alone saw the release of at least five new films that are noteworthy for their strangeness, their pluck, their originality. Forget recycled superhero stories; these are movies with genuine concepts. Read More

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KIMI: Uneasy Listening

Jeremy BeckReviews
Zoë Kravitz in KIMI

Steven Soderbergh routinely turns his camera into a bullhorn, using the crispness of his images (which he photographs himself, under the pseudonym Peter Andrews) to voice his displeasure with the ugliness of modern society. His latest picture, KIMI, gestures toward any number of topical themes: the physical and emotional aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, the dystopian possibilities of the encroaching surveillance state, the venality and brutality of the corporate aristocracy. Yet despite glimpses of social-justice protests and hints of conspiratorial malfeasance, KIMI isn’t really a message movie. It is instead a lean and efficient thriller: 89 precisely calibrated minutes of setup, tension, and payoff.

The economy is often one of Soderbergh’s narrative preoccupations, but drop the article, and it becomes one of his artistic strengths. It’s a gift shared by KIMI’s hero, Angela (Zoë Kravitz), an adept computer programmer who spends her work-from-home days scrolling through audio streams and slicing her way through lines of code. In essence, she’s an interpreter for KIMI, the Echo-like smart device that Angela is paid to make even smarter, updating its software to recognize that “peckerwood” is an insult and “ME!” is a Taylor Swift song. Sleek and tastefully designed, KIMI is shaped like an eggshell-white cone, and she’s all ears; whenever you say her name, her base glows neon-pink and she cheerfully announces, “I’m here.” (Her soothing voice, supplied by Betsy Brantley, is virtually indistinguishable from Siri or Alexa.) Her purpose is service, and her persistent monitoring of her environment—she is, quite simply, always listening—is merely a method of continually enhancing her performance. Surely there are no downsides to this sort of thing. Read More

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Scream: The Ghostface That Launched a Thousand Quips

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jenna Ortega and Ghostface in Scream

Scream is the fifth movie in the Scream franchise, which launched a quarter-century ago with a movie that was also called Scream. If you find this title repetition annoying, you aren’t alone; the film’s characters agree with you. “It should’ve been called Stab 8, not just Stab,” someone grouses at one point, referring to the series within the series that has apparently suffered from creative drought. This kind of meta commentary can be exhausting, but here it carries an element of sincerity. Despite being a bunch of cheap slasher flicks with no big stars, the Scream pictures have always aspired to a fairly lofty level of ambition, striving to combine playful semiotic analysis with genuine cinematic terror. These movies don’t just want to mock the clichés of classic horror; they also want to be horror classics.

Which this new Scream is not. Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the duo behind the similarly sly Ready or Not, it’s more functional than suspenseful, serving up the usual medley of shrieks, spurts, and shocks with formulaic toil. But it’s nevertheless appealing, with solid performances and a witty script (from James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick) whose insights extend beyond the usual canned callbacks and self-referential humor. The movie is predictably stocked with insignificant twists—who’s the real killer? who cares?—but its biggest surprise is that it actually has something to say. Read More

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