Thriller

Greta: Come for Dinner, Stay Forever

Jeremy BeckReviews
Chloë Grace Moretz and Isabelle Huppert in "Greta".

It would be unfair to accuse Greta of jumping the rails, because it’s never on the rails in the first place. Deeply silly and persistently entertaining, this campy thriller would be laughable if it were remotely interested in being taken seriously. Thankfully, the director Neil Jordan, working from a script he wrote with Ray Wright, seems to have recognized the material’s inherent kitsch; he abandons logic and nuance in favor of cheesy suspense. He wants to give you goose bumps, not dig under your skin.

It’s a smart decision, if not as smart as casting Isabelle Huppert in the title role. One of the most intuitive actors in the world, Huppert often flashes a steely sternness, a rigidity that she wields to mask her characters’ inner pain and longing. The logline of Greta—elderly immigrant widow befriends bereaved Manhattan twentysomething—feints at a sober exploration of maternal isolation and compassion, and if you enter the film with no knowledge of its premise, you might expect the title character to be another of Huppert’s keenly intelligent, emotionally fraught women. But while she may be quick-witted and determined, Greta is not especially humane. In fact, she isn’t even human, because she’s actually a vampire. Read More

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Glass: The Supervillains Are Running the Asylum

Jeremy BeckReviews
Samuel L. Jackson, James McAvoy, and Bruce Willis in M. Night Shyamalan's "Glass".

One of the main characters of M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass suffers from dissociative identity disorder. That illness is not shared by its director. Shyamalan may have his flaws, but he wields his camera with a confidence, a sense of self, that’s unusual in the Hollywood studio system. Good thing, too, because when reduced to its building blocks, Glass is a ridiculous movie, a bizarrely plotted thriller that makes astonishingly little sense. Yet it also flaunts a genuine personality, along with an exhilarating degree of style, that elevate it comfortably above its stupidity. There’s a school of critics who insist that Shyamalan should stop penning his own screenplays, arguing that his shaky writing hampers his gifts as a director. Maybe that’s true, but consider the flip side: How many other filmmakers could have taken this script and turned it into something so effortlessly, indecently entertaining?

An ungainly, tantalizing hybrid of two superior genre movies, Glass positions itself as the climax of a suddenly uncovered cinematic universe. Way back in 2000, Unbreakable—still Shyamalan’s best film—followed the uneasy partnership between David Dunn (Bruce Willis) and Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), with the latter insistently tugging at the former to accept his destiny as a real-life superhero. Separately, Split followed the murderous exploits of Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), a Sybil-like serial killer who occasionally transformed into a savage, animal-like entity called The Beast. Shyamalan is often accused of repeating himself, but these two movies weren’t remotely alike in terms of either plot or tone; Unbreakable was a powerful study of obsession, confusion, and self-discovery, whereas Split was a hammy, razor-sharp, predator-versus-prey thriller. Yet the (admittedly delightful) stinger of Split revealed that it in fact occupied the same world as Unbreakable, and from those still-glowing ashes, Glass was born. Read More

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Suspiria: Witchy Women, Dying and Born Again

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dakota Johnson dances her way into Hell in "Suspiria"

Dance is death in Suspiria, Luca Guadagnino’s insane, exasperating, furiously watchable remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 cult classic. The collision of beauty and brutality on stage is hardly novel; Black Swan gave us a feral portrait of a performer who helplessly sacrificed her body and her sanity in the pursuit of artistic perfection. But Suspiria posits ballet as a more malevolent sort of blood sport, where lithe women twirl and leap and crash, all while sinister forces lurk behind the gleaming mirrors and beneath the polished floorboards, eager to feed on the talents of the young. I’m not speaking metaphorically; this really is a movie about a desiccated matriarch who craves to transplant her soul from her own befouled body into the supple flesh of an unsuspecting protégé. And you thought the battles in the Step Up franchise were intense!

Of course, Suspiria is more (or maybe less) than a gonzo supernatural thriller. “I could explain everything to you; I think that would be wrong, though,” an instructor murmurs to an unnerved pupil. I can’t explain much of anything to you, because this movie defies easy description, even as it eagerly courts post-hoc analysis. Suffice it to say that Suspiria seems to be about many things. Perhaps it’s about the intersection of political activism and grass-roots fanaticism, given that it’s set in Germany 1977 and glancingly depicts (by way of news broadcasts and radio snippets) the death knell of the Baader-Meinhof movement. Maybe it’s about femininity and solidarity, seeing as it traces the relationships—the camaraderie, the rivalries, the jealousy and admiration—of a company of female dancers at an elite academy. Maybe it’s about self-discovery; its main character, Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson), initially enters the conservatory’s halls with timidity, only to quickly reveal herself as an ambitious and capable dancer with a hunger for stardom. Maybe it’s about the persistence of fascism; how else to explain the extensive subplot about an elderly German man searching for his wife, who’s believed to have vanished decades ago at the Concentration Camps? Or maybe it’s just about a bunch of old women who want to be young again. Read More

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A Simple Favor: Sipping Martinis with a Twist. Lots of Twists.

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively in "A Simple Favor"

Anna Kendrick looks nice. I don’t mean that she’s attractive (though of course she is); I mean that, with her soft-blue eyes and small build and delicate features, she presents as a decent, wholesome person. That innate tenderness has served her well in films like 50/50, End of Watch, and The Accountant, where she’s quietly elevated the material around her with unassuming grace. A Simple Favor, the gleefully absurd, indecently entertaining new comedy-mystery from Paul Feig, efficiently exploits Kendrick’s inherent geniality while also cannily subverting it. Her character, a single mom and moderately popular suburban vlogger named Stephanie, is sugary-sweet and aggressively eager—she’s always volunteering for multiple PTA assignments (her surname is literally Smothers)—but her helping hand has an iron grip. Her dainty exterior camouflages a mettle of steel, arousing your suspicion that she has something to hide.

But really, who doesn’t? One of the many pleasures of A Simple Favor, which is as much an amateur detective yarn as a pointed comedy of manners, lies in teasing us with misdirection and insinuation, encouraging us to anticipate its inevitable twists and turns. It’s being marketed as coming from Feig’s “darker side”, which is misleading on a few counts. To begin with, the former Freaks and Geeks showrunner is no stranger to troubling themes; even his more straightforward comedies, like Bridesmaids and Spy, carry undercurrents of sadness and pain. But more centrally, labeling this movie dark is false advertising. A Simple Favor may traffic in deception, seduction, and murder, but none of that changes the fact that, at its core, it’s a total fucking hoot. Read More

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Searching: Tumbling Down the Internet Rabbit Hole

Jeremy BeckReviews
John Cho is frantic online in "Searching"

Did you know that technology is, like, A Thing? Were you aware that people regularly communicate via the internet, often in the guise of false personas? Have you ever grappled with the reality that innovations in hardware and software have, in both positive and negative ways, forever changed the contours of human interaction? If your answer to these questions is no, then you are sure to be electrified by Searching, a clever and gimmicky little thriller directed by Aneesh Chaganty. But if you have even the faintest familiarity with online culture—if you have a Gmail account or an iPhone or a web browser—you may find this film’s purported insights to be stale and preachy. Who knew the kids these days were so darned secretive?

I dare say most of us. But just as we shouldn’t judge an online account based on its avatar (whoops, spoiler alert!), we shouldn’t judge a movie for its tiresome themes alone. And Searching, despite its occasional shrillness, is a taut and engaging potboiler, as well as an audacious formal exercise. It may not have anything meaningful to say about technology, but it does use that technology in new and interesting ways. Read More

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