Thriller

The Witch: A Puritanical Walk in the Wicked Woods

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anya Taylor-Joy in "The Witch"

Early in The Witch, Robert Eggers’s sly and skillful horror film, a man goes hunting with his 12-year-old son. They’re searching for game in the midst of a dark, ominous wood, but they also find time for some standard-issue father-son bonding. Only it isn’t quite standard-issue; when the man, William (Ralph Ineson), cautions the boy, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), against the dangers of sleeping too late, he solemnly intones, “The devil holds fast your eyelids.” That delectable piece of diction encapsulates The Witch‘s dual preoccupations. It’s a movie about the danger of religious fervor, but it’s also about communication—what people say (and don’t say), and, more importantly, how they say it. As the adage goes, the devil is in the dialogue.

The Witch, which takes place in the 17th century, purports to base its tale of literal and allegorical horror on actual period sources. To that end, the characters speak largely in early-modern English, which means there are a great many thous, haths, and dosts. (Even the film’s marketing materials get in on the act, treating the title’s W as consecutive V’s.) This requires a small act of translation on the part of the audience—not unlike when listening to Shakespeare, you have to actively puzzle out the characters’ speech, rather than simply absorbing it. This assumes that you can hear it; the film’s sound design picks up the rustling of branches and the bleating of animals, often compelling you to strain your ears to comprehend every flavorful morsel of colonial argot. Read More

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Room: Within Four Walls, Two Lives Unfold

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jacob Tremblay and Brie Larson, in "Room"

The boy lives with his Ma in Room. Not the room, not a room—just Room. To preface the proper noun with an article is to suggest the possibility of other rooms, different rooms. But there is only Room: Four walls, a ceiling with Skylight, and beyond that Outer Space and Heaven. That is all there is. That is the world.

A harrowing, heartbreaking drama from Lenny Abrahamson, Room is a film of many virtues—superlative acting, tender writing, enormous feeling—but its greatest achievement is immersing its audience into the boy’s state of mind, articulating how he perceives this tiny, cloistered space that is his entire universe. The screenplay is by Emma Donoghue, adapting her novel, which she wrote from the perspective of the boy, named Jack (portrayed on screen by Jacob Tremblay, in an astonishing performance). Her script is a model of economy and minimalism; she supplies Jack with a few quick voiceovers that concisely set the scene, but otherwise, she and Abrahamson simply drop you into this strange, unsettling place and let you puzzle things out for yourself. Read More

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Bridge of Spies: In This Cold War, It’s Chilliest Indoors

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Hanks stars as a lawyer over his head in Steven Spielberg's "Bridge of Spies"

The protagonist of Bridge of Spies, Steven Spielberg’s sage, supremely enjoyable Cold War thriller, doesn’t much look like a hero. With his graying hair and natty wardrobe, his appearance suggests a man more comfortable on the golf course than the battlefield. He doesn’t act like a hero either, not in the strictest sense of action; he never picks up a gun, and he spends half the movie sniffling, complaining about his cold. “I just want to go home and go to bed,” he says, more than once. These are not words you expect to hear from the hero of a spy flick. But even if James B. Donovan is not the square-jawed archetype who anchors most war pictures, he is a profoundly heroic character, effortlessly earning your admiration even as he’s quietly lifting your spirits. And Bridge of Spies itself is a sly, delightful piece of Spielbergian misdirection. Through the careful application of his typical late-period formula—namely, the combination of superb technique and wistful patriotism—Spielberg makes you feel, watching this film, as though you’re bearing witness to something grand. The trick is that you are, even if you’re also just listening to people talk.

Talk was the name of the game in the Cold War, a decades-long battle of bluster and braggadocio. Bridge of Spies instantly plugs into that atmosphere of boiling tension—the sense of constant threat, followed by perpetual inaction—during its brilliant, wordless opening sequence. A Brooklyn man picks up a ringing phone, listens impassively, then heads to the subway. A pair of FBI agents (including The Wire‘s Domenick Lombardozzi) cautiously tail him, then lose him, and then, in their frantic search to relocate him, literally run smack into him on a staircase. That was close! But in addition to serving as a wry piece of anticlimax, this non-chase sets the stage for the mounting anxiousness and fakery to come. Read More

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Sicario: A Land with No Laws, a War with No Heroes

Jeremy BeckReviews
Emily Blunt gets in way over her head in "Sicario"

For a film of such engulfing darkness, Sicario spends a surprising amount of time in broad daylight. In a different story, its frequent aerial shots of the Southwest’s rolling hills and dusty deserts might feel enchanting rather than foreboding. Yet right from its electric opening sequence—a daytime FBI raid in suburban Phoenix on a cartel stash house, the kind where all the residents pack shotguns, and cadavers line the walls like asbestos—Sicario turns that pervasive sunlight into a mirage. A vicious, lacerating depiction of the Mexican-American drug trade, the movie slowly and systematically snuffs out the slightest flicker of hope. They say drug use is a victimless crime, but in this arid land, narcotics distribution is a literal cutthroat industry, a ceaseless cycle of violence, corruption, and death.

Sounds fun, right? You’d be surprised. Yes, as a political think piece, Sicario is powerful, persuasive, and even enraging. But what makes it a great movie—something more than just a forcefully conceived polemic—is that it is also crackerjack crime fiction. Directed by Denis Villeneuve from a script by Taylor Sheridan, Sicario is a pulse-pounding piece of prime-cut entertainment, one that thrills just as much as it chills. It is both literally and metaphorically explosive, and while its suffocating bleakness may get you down, its taut plotting and bracing technique will knock you out. Read More

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Queen of Earth: Woman on the Verge of a Total Collapse

Jeremy BeckReviews
Katherine Waterston and Elisabeth Moss are so-called friends in "Queen of Earth"

Queen of Earth, the fourth feature from writer-director Alex Ross Perry, is a razor blade wrapped in translucent silk. It takes place almost entirely in a single, idyllic location—a sun-dappled New York lake house—where two seemingly close friends are ostensibly lounging on vacation. But despite the beauty of its setting and the privilege of its characters (one is the daughter of a famous artist, the other an apparent heiress), this grim, unsettling picture is by no means soothing. It is, rather, a barbed psychological study of one woman’s gradual descent into madness, and of another’s pain and helplessness. It is the kind of film that asks far more questions than it answers, chief among them: Why do people remain friends? Do we ever really know one another? Do we even know ourselves? Most importantly: What the hell is going on in this movie?

The latter inquiry is probably best directed at Virginia (Katherine Waterston, the femme fatale from Inherent Vice), the relatively stable half of Queen of Earth‘s lakeside duo. She is the aforementioned heiress; her parents own the resplendent villa, a cozy slice of serenity tucked next to a placid lagoon and surrounded by multihued leaves. Virginia is a layabout—she’s supposedly on holiday, but it’s unclear exactly what she’s taking holiday from—but she can at least credibly distinguish between fantasy and reality. The same cannot be said of Catherine (Elisabeth Moss, going for broke), Virginia’s spasmodic companion who opens the film in a state of extreme agitation and only grows more disheveled from there. Catherine’s face is the first thing we see in Queen of Earth, her blue eyes flashing anger as tears streak through her smudged black eyeliner. She’s getting dumped by her boyfriend, James (Kentucker Audley), and she isn’t taking it well. In the first of many extended close-ups that define the film’s intimate aesthetic (Perry cuts away only once), the camera watches nosily as Catherine sobs, seethes, and howls, eventually screaming “Go!” in a guttural rage. This woman, Moss makes inescapably clear, is badly damaged. She could really use a vacation. Read More

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