Thriller

It Comes at Night: Something Toxic in the Air, and a Virus, Too

Jeremy BeckReviews
Christopher Abbott and Joel Edgerton in "It Comes at Night"

There are no zombies in It Comes at Night, unless you count the vacant, dead-eyed stares that regularly materialize on each of its characters’ stricken faces. An eerie shiver of a horror-thriller, it’s scary less for its shocks than its sober observations on human nature. When a body is burned in the film’s harrowing opening sequence, the corpse never reanimates, though it does emerge in a spooky, silent nightmare, darkened eyes shooting daggers of ill will. In this movie, the dead stay dead. Maybe they’re the lucky ones.

The second feature from writer-director Trey Edward Shults, It Comes at Night takes for its premise that all-too-plausible scenario that has beckoned to many an aspiring artist: the apocalypse. Doomsday has long fascinated filmmakers, who relish the chance to turn a universal fear—it’s the end of the world!—into a personal vision; the last few years alone have given us works as varied as the demolition derby of Mad Max: Fury Road, the steampunk allegory of Snowpiercer, and the bro-sploitation comedy of This Is the End. It Comes at Night is quieter than those movies, but it is arguably more unsettling. For Shults, the collapse of civilization creates the opportunity to explore how people relate to and value one another, pitting civic values against Darwinian impulses. The picture he paints, much like the ghastly mural that adorns one of the walls of the house where the action occurs, is far from pretty. Read More

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Alien: Covenant: Still Meddling, Still Dying, but with Double the Robots

Jeremy BeckReviews
Katherine Waterston and Michael Fassbender in "Alien: Covenant"

During one of the best scenes in Alien: Covenant, a robot tells an antiquated model of himself why he was ultimately decommissioned. “You were too human,” the current version bluntly informs his predecessor. “Too idiosyncratic.” The explanation makes sense—the older model’s uncannily lifelike behavior unsettled his mortal masters—but it carries with it an undeniable sting of irony. Covenant, the sixth entry in the Alien franchise and the third directed by Ridley Scott, is a vigorous and impressive piece of mass-market entertainment, a finely calibrated horror film that boasts expert effects work and pulse-pounding set pieces. Yet it is also clearly the product of corporate assembly, a sequel to a prequel that ably perpetuates the series’ mythology but does so with minimal distinction or ingenuity. It’s a bit like that newly updated cyborg who lectures his elder counterpart: sleek and efficient, but not idiosyncratic enough.

Or maybe I’ve just seen too many Alien movies. If you haven’t watched Scott’s classic original (which is slightly overrated, but that’s a different discussion), you are likely to be gobsmacked by the spectacle of violent death and physical suffering that the director has arrayed before you. Setting aside Sigourney Weaver’s spunky and sexy performance, Alien achieved cinematic immortality for two reasons: its historically great tagline, and John Hurt’s upset stomach. Seeing as Covenant cannot hope to match the former (though “The path to paradise begins in hell” isn’t half-bad), it strives to one-up the latter. Throughout this movie, nasty critters burst out from within the insides of unsuspecting human hosts, spilling blood and splintering backbone in the process. Alien enthusiasts may have seen this before, but they likely haven’t seen it this excruciating and visceral. Read More

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Free Fire: Shots Squeezed Off, Insults Catapulted

Jeremy BeckReviews
Armie Hammer, Brie Larson, Cillian Murphy, Sam Riley, and Michael Smiley in "Free Fire"

Near the end of David Mamet’s Heist, two rival criminal factions engage in a shootout on a pier. It’s a fairly unremarkable scene, except that standing in the crossfire is Bergman, an irascible fence played by Danny DeVito. As the bullets whiz past him, Bergman transforms from a tough-talking hoodlum into a conciliatory wimp, yelping in protest, “Put the fucking guns down, let’s just talk!” Free Fire, the latest whatsit from the English auteur/weirdo Ben Wheatley, essentially extends this bit of off-kilter gunplay to feature length. It assembles a motley crew of hooligans, junkies, and reprobates, then sets them loose on one another in a display of inept savagery that’s more pitiful than lethal.

That phrase might also describe Wheatley’s prior films, which have relied on showy extremism to enliven themes and narratives that are fundamentally banal. These include Kill List, a glum study of blue-collar ennui that morphed into a grisly and tasteless horror movie, and High-Rise, an initially fascinating but ultimately unwatchable satire that squandered a terrific cast in favor of incoherent montage. (I haven’t seen A Field in England, but Variety assessed it as combining “imagination-teasing ingenuity” with “a startling lapse in basic storytelling competence”, which seems to fit.) Qualitatively, Free Fire represents a dramatic improvement for Wheatley, but what’s most interesting is how he’s improved. No longer straining to confound audiences with his avant-garde brilliance, Wheatley has instead chosen to wield his gifts for the old-fashioned virtue of entertainment. Free Fire has little heart and even less depth, but compared to the arduous nature of Wheatley’s past works, its breezy emptiness is oddly refreshing. Read More

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Split: His Minds Have Something Sinister in Mind

Jeremy BeckReviews
James McAvoy as, er, a lot of people in M. Night Shyamalan's "Split"

To call Split a comeback for M. Night Shyamalan is both accurate and somewhat troubling. The cinematic Icarus of the early twenty-first century, Shyamalan’s rapid ascent and subsequent plunge was difficult to watch. But his transgressions were sins of commission rather than omission—even when he was failing, he was always trying. Yet his most recent film, the found-footage flick The Visit, heralded a director who had diluted his ambition with pinches of modesty and self-awareness. That trend continues with Split, a lean and spiky movie that feels as though it could have arrived in the ’90s, before its creator let those “the next Spielberg” claims go to his head. This raises the question: Should we really be applauding filmmakers for abandoning their fearless attempts at the new and instead returning to the cozy confines of the familiar?

If it results in movies as taut and entertaining as this one, then yes. Split may be a pure, unvarnished genre exercise, but it’s a damn good one, a superlative example of twitchy suspense and tightly controlled craft. During his period of failure—which, in this critic’s view, spans from Lady in the Water to After Earth but definitely does NOT include The Village—Shyamalan tried all sorts of new things; they didn’t work. Split does many things—it frightens, delights, stumbles, and amazes—but most simply, it works. Read More

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Nocturnal Animals: Brutality Is Skin Deep

Jeremy BeckReviews
Amy Adams is a wreck in Tom Ford's "Nocturnal Animals"

Title sequences can do more than just convey rudimentary information about a film’s cast and crew—they can set the mood, introduce a plot, establish a theme. So what to make of the opening credits of Nocturnal Animals, which impassively present a parade of naked, obese women dancing in slow-motion as firecrackers explode around them? Is this garish display meant to be revolting? Titillating? Provocative? Profound? Forced to guess, one might argue that the director, Tom Ford, is attempting to draw a line between happiness and despair, remarking that beauty and brutality are often intertwined. (To do so, one would first need to ignore the accusations of body-shaming that have dogged Ford regarding the sequence.) But that isn’t quite right, because the dirty joke of this dirty movie is that, much like its jarring opening credits, it means absolutely nothing.

Which is not to say that Nocturnal Animals is unsightly. Far from it. A famous fashion designer making his second foray into cinema (following the well-received, overwrought A Single Man), Ford fails to weave the gorgeous with the grotesque as meaningfully as he’d like, but he nevertheless supplies ample quantities of both. For the former, he casts Amy Adams (always a good start), dresses her in ravishing clothes, and plops her in the middle of an austere, pristinely manicured Malibu mansion. Adams plays Susan, a paragon of first-world materialism; she owns an art gallery, attends fancy parties, and is married to a handsome husband (Armie Hammer) who regularly jets off to New York to close deals and screw mistresses. Despite her wealth and creature comforts, Susan is plainly disenchanted with her life—she needs a jolt of excitement to jostle her out of her ennui. Read More

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