Thriller

Last Night in Soho: Going Back, Going Blonde, Going Bonkers

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anya Taylor-Joy in Last Night in Soho

Remember the Swinging Sixties? That blissful English era of artistic revolution, high hedonism, and rampant sexism? At least, I think that’s what it involved; I wasn’t alive at the time, but I’ve consumed enough cultural artifacts from the period to approximate the woozy sensations of decadence and discovery. So has Edgar Wright, a voracious student of 20th-century pop culture whose movies tend to function as tributes to his dilettantish obsessions, as well as advertisements for the breadth of his own taste; his prior film, Baby Driver, was less a heist thriller than a feature-length playlist of classic tunes with vibrant visual accompaniment. Wright’s new feature, Last Night in Soho, initially scans as an ode to the lascivious London of yesteryear, a passionate homage to the pristine past that doubles as a sour lament for the degraded present. But there is more going on here than you might suspect—more ideas, more innovation, more mistakes.

“I like the old stuff better,” says Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie), an aspiring fashion designer newly arrived in London from the country. It’s a valid preference—the music that pours through her Beats by Dre headphones includes hits by The Kinks, Dusty Springfield, and Peter & Gordon—that nonetheless carries dubious implications. Nostalgia can be simplistic as well as seductive, and many a filmmaker has fallen prone to romanticizing the gauzy bygone days without grappling with their dark marks and complications. This time around, Wright is smarter than that; Last Night in Soho is simultaneously an appreciation and a reckoning. It conjures a hypnotic veil of old-world glamour, then vigorously pierces it to reveal the rot festering underneath. Read More

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Titane: Extra-Vehicular Activities

Jeremy BeckReviews
Agathe Rousselle in Titane

Car trouble gets a remodel in Titane, the blistering new thriller from the French provocateur Julia Ducournau. If you think the dudes from the Fast & Furious flicks are into vehicles, wait until you meet Alexia, a woman with a metal plate wedged into her head and a screw loose in her brain. The plate was installed during her childhood (the screw has presumably been loose since birth), after she inspired a crash by distracting her father while cooing “vroom-vroom” from the backseat; far from holding a grudge, as soon as she’s released from the hospital, she plants an adoring smooch on the sedan’s window. Flash forward 20-odd years, and her affections for automotives have, shall we say, matured, even if her moral compass continues pointing straight toward a black hole.

Ducournau’s first feature was Raw, and if you saw it, you haven’t forgotten it, especially the scene where a hungry teenage girl nibbled on her sister’s severed finger. Her follow-up bears a number of similarities, many of them appellative; Garance Marillier, who previously starred in Raw as that ravenous limb-muncher, returns here in a smaller role again playing someone named Justine, while other key characters are once more called Alexia and Adrien. More substantively, both films interrogate femininity in a masculine world, and the chaos that results when women start pushing past the guardrails that polite society has erected for them. Read More

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Malignant, The Card Counter, and Movies Going All-In

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Oscar Isaac in The Card Counter; Annabelle Wallis in Malignant

Last Sunday, the critic Walter Chaw tweeted that, because more than 90% of the new movies he watches are “pretty much the same”, he’s more likely to appreciate a film that “just cocks an arm and swings for all it’s worth”. I might quibble with the mathematical accuracy of his first statement, but despite the mixed metaphor, I’m inclined to agree with his second; even when they fail, ambitious movies tend to be more memorable than their cautious counterparts. Chaw presumably had a specific picture in mind, but this past weekend provided multiple titles that refused to play by multiplex rules. One is far better than the other, but both succeed in upending expectations and carving out their own atypical territory.

At the outset—and, in fact, for the majority of its running time—James Wan’s Malignant isn’t especially novel. Despite stemming from a nominally original screenplay by Akela Cooper, it’s another haunted-house chiller that would fit snugly inside the Conjuring cinematic universe that Wan created back in 2013. Its heroine, Madison (Annabelle Wallis, best known to me as Grace on Peaky Blinders), is plagued by visions of a malevolent spirit called Gabriel, one of those shadowy creatures who’s never quite in focus but who looks a bit like the skeleton-masked bank robbers from The Town, only blacker and nastier. In addition to somehow speaking through electronic devices like a demonic Siri, Gabriel seems to be a burgeoning serial killer, and Madison—in an arresting manipulation of the image—periodically finds her mind transported to the sites of his murders, forced to watch his grisly wet work like a helpless, paralyzed bystander. Read More

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Original Screenplay Weekend! On Annette, Reminiscence, and the Night House

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Rebecca Hall in The Night House; Rebecca Ferguson and Hugh Jackman in Reminiscence; Adam Driver in Annette

Some original screenplays are more original than others. Last week, for example, I reviewed Disney’s Free Guy, a jumbled, weirdly fascinating action comedy that prides itself on not being based on any existing intellectual property, then spins an entire film from references to (and rip-offs of) other intellectual properties. I was happy to see Free Guy perform well (it’s now spawning a sequel, naturally), if only because I want studios to keep making original movies. As if by magic, this past weekend featured the release of three such pictures, a veritable bonanza of novel #content. (Technically there were four, but I failed to make time for Martin Campbell’s The Protégé.) None is a perfect film—in fact, all three have considerable problems—but my disappointment is tempered by my enthusiasm for their very existence. I didn’t love any of these movies, but I did love that I was able to watch them.

Of the trio, The Night House is the most conventional, which isn’t to say it’s typical. Directed by David Bruckner from a script by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, it’s a ruminative ghost story that’s less interested in freaking you out than pulling you in. Its heroine, a high school English teacher named Beth (a fantastic Rebecca Hall), isn’t just the frightened resident of a haunted house; she’s also a little bit scary herself. An early scene, in which she calmly shames a grade-grubbing parent into stunned silence, reveals her capacity for blunt anger, while a night out with colleagues quickly turns into an unhappy hour where busybodies tiptoe around a powder keg. Read More

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Old: Time Isn’t On Their Lakeside

Jeremy BeckReviews
Thomasin McKenzie and Alex Wolff in Old

The great twist of M. Night Shyamalan’s career is that his movies aren’t really about twists. Sure, a number of his films indulge in third-act rug-pulls that invariably induce gasps, hoots, or groans. But the thing about endings is that, while they tend to stick in our brains, they rarely make or break a picture. The Sixth Sense features one of the most memorable reveals of all time, but it wouldn’t be nearly as meaningful (or as memorable, for that matter) if it weren’t preceded by a delicate story that unfolds with such elegance and detail. And even if you scoffed at the conclusion of The Village, your momentary derision shouldn’t invalidate its haunting, excruciatingly suspenseful depiction of a frightened young woman attempting to navigate the world. So when I tell you that the ending of Old, Shyamalan’s latest feature-length puzzle box, doesn’t really matter, I’m not implying that it doesn’t carry any element of surprise; I’m simply expressing a judgment that this movie’s soft, not-entirely-unpredictable destination is less important than its silky, enveloping journey.

I’d still encourage you to go into Old as cold as possible, not only as a matter of principle but also because its very premise essentially constitutes a spoiler. Even here, though, foreknowledge can’t tarnish the pleasure in how Shyamalan gradually unveils his brain-teasing conceit. To wit: Roughly half an hour into the film, two vacationing children—six-year-old Trent (Nolan River) and 11-year-old Maddox (Alexa Swinton)—find themselves conversing pleasantly with fellow travelers, a married couple named Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and Jarin (Ken Leung). The camera, operated by the invaluable Mike Gioulakis, is fixed solely on the adults, with the kids sitting behind the frame. The mood is cheerful, but as Jarin plays the friendly game of guessing the youths’ ages (“I’m pretty good at this”), an invisible tension begins to grip the screen, an unspoken frisson of strangeness. Jarin turns his eyes to Maddox, still off screen, and appraises her figure: “I’d say you’re about 15,” he estimates, as Trevor Gureckis’ score starts to quietly throb. We hear giggles from the still-unseen youngsters, who promptly inform Jarin that they are, in fact, 6 and 11. As Jarin’s expression slips from amusement to bafflement, the camera finally (finally!) rotates back toward Maddox and Trent, and we see that they’re now a good five years older than they’d been a few minutes ago, and are being played by entirely different actors. Read More

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