Thriller

Quick Hits: Scream VI, Cocaine Bear, Creed III, Magic Mike 3, and Emily

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michael B. Jordan in Creed III; Keri Russell in Cocaine Bear; Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera in Scream VI; Emma Mackey in Emily; Salma Hayek Pinault and Channing Tatum in Magic Mike's Last Dance

Between the Oscars, our TV rankings, and our list of the year’s best movies, it’s been a busy past month here at MovieManifesto. As a result, while I was able to write a few proper reviews of new movies (the new Shyamalan, the new Ant-Man), I neglected to make time for a bunch of additional 2023 films. That changes now! Well, sort of. Unlike Lydia Tár, I can’t stop time, so I’m unable to carve out enough space for full reviews. Instead, we’re firing off some quick-and-dirty capsules, checking in on five recent releases. Let’s get to it.

Scream VI. The clever double-act of the Scream pictures—the platonic ideal established by the first installment and never quite equaled since—is that they’re movies about scary movies and are also, well, scary movies. In the prior episode, Scream (which should have been called Scream 5, but never mind), new directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett satisfied one and only one side of that equation, cleverly skewering the toxic fandom that attends modern discourse but failing to serve up memorable carnage. Now returning with Scream VI, the pair have essentially flipped the script. The meta ideas bandied about here are a little less trenchant, but the nuts-and-bolts execution—and executions—is first-class. Read More

Read more

Knock at the Cabin: Whoever Wins, They Choose

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dave Bautista, Abby Quinn, and Nikki Amuka-Bird in Knock at the Cabin

In one of the many tense sequences in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, a young woman implores a housemate to shut the door before a malevolent force breaks through: “Don’t let them in!” That same pleading desperation permeates the opening scenes of Knock at the Cabin, Shyamalan’s new thriller, which finds a vacationing family—an adorable seven-year-old named Wen (Kristen Cui) and her two fathers, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Spoiler Alert’s Ben Aldridge)—under sudden assault from a quartet of armed, menacing invaders. But where The Village cultivated a tone of suffocating suspense (what will happen?), the mood here is instead one of clammy inevitability. The trespassers break through the cabin’s fortifications with minimal resistance, quickly tying up our heroes and establishing that the movie will not unfold as a typical home-invasion yarn. Sure, you may briefly wonder whether the victims will use their collective guile to escape (did someone just mention Chekhov’s gun?), but mostly you ponder why the intruders are there and—once you learn that answer—whether there is any legitimacy to their stated purpose.

Ever the economical storyteller, Shyamalan answers the first of those questions in a matter of minutes. (Even he isn’t as efficient as the film’s trailer, which naturally divulges the entire plot.) The housebreakers—led by gentle-giant Leonard (a very fine Dave Bautista), who’s joined by the fretful Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), the timid Adriane (Abby Quinn), and the surly Redmond (Rupert Grint, currently starring on the Shyamalan-produced Servant)—behave according to a peculiar, seemingly contradictory code. On the one hand, they are obviously threatening, with their crude weapons (mallets, picks) and their grim determination. Yet despite their forcible entry and disturbing fervor, they insist—with apparent honesty—that they aren’t there to hurt anyone. Rather, they solemnly inform their captives that unless the family sacrifices one of its own, the world will end. And to prove the truth of their purported prophecy, they will ritualistically kill one of their own until the prisoners—watching helplessly, and goosed by ensuing television reports of global bedlam—resolve to make an impossible choice. Read More

Read more

Infinity Pool: The Excremental Tourist

Jeremy BeckReviews
Alexander Skarsgård in Infinity Pool

If Brandon Cronenberg is anxious about being compared to his father, he’s doing a good job hiding it. His prior feature, the art-house hit Possessor, leveraged the metamorphic gifts of Andrea Riseborough (newly minted Oscar nominee!) for a sordid story of corporeal invasion and existential agony. Now he returns with Infinity Pool, a wild and grimy phantasmagoria full of damaged bodies and deranged images. It may lack the deceptive polish of his pop’s best work, but it rivals him for sheer nastiness.

This is a matter of theme as well as form. In broad terms, Infinity Pool is a crude satire of white privilege and colonialist prerogatives. It’s set in the fictional country of Li Tolqa—filming took place in Croatia and Hungary, but the looming specter of “rainy season” suggests Southeast Asia—which attracts tourists with its opulent resorts and sandy beaches, but which someone ominously describes as “uncivilized.” The movie’s premise, which stirs echoes of last year’s Dual (and also The Prestige), revolves around a particularly perverse kind of black market: When interlopers break the law and find themselves subject to the third-world nation’s draconian justice system, they can evade punishment by paying the authorities (embodied by a louche Thomas Kretschmann) a hefty fee to manufacture a double—a perfect recreation endowed with their memories as well as their appearance—who will then suffer the death sentence in their stead. The only catch (OK fine, there are lots of catches) is that they must bear witness to their doppelganger’s execution. Read More

Read more

M3gan: Hell Comes to the Dollhouse

Jeremy BeckReviews
Amie Donald as M3gan

They say the eyes are windows to the soul, which is why the most expressive anthropomorphic characters in cinema—E.T., Gollum, Wall-E—all sport wide, soulful peepers. But windows work both ways. In M3gan, the sly and spry new horror-comedy directed by Gerard Johnstone, the titular android gazes out into the world through a pair of delicate grey-blue irises, less concerned with comprehending her internal essence than with mapping her external environment. Her vision is rendered like that of an eerily empathetic cyborg—when she sees a person, she instantly analyzes their “Emotional State” and assigns quantitative ratings to various feelings (trust, joy, fear), like a talent scout grading an athlete—but she’s doing more than just gauging behavioral patterns. She is constantly downloading new data and feeding it into her processor, which means she’s learning, judging, evolving.

How, you might wonder, will such a creature ultimately regard our society? Then again, you might not wonder that, because if you’ve seen any previous entry in the child-doll subgenre of horror, you already know. Yet while M3gan’s predictable plotting rarely deviates from its predecessors’ silly and shrieky playbook, it is nevertheless a thoroughly enjoyable diversion—smart, funny, and even a mite provocative. Read More

Read more

Glass Onion: The Sleuth Shall Set You Free

Jeremy BeckReviews
Daniel Craig in Glass Onion

The real mystery of Glass Onion, Rian Johnson’s breezy and punchy sequel to Knives Out, is how Netflix so badly bungled its distribution. After bidding the GDP of a small country to secure its production rights, the streaming giant broke with its own foolish tradition and granted the movie a semi-wide theatrical release… for seven measly days. It made a healthy chunk of change during that span (over $13 million despite a general lack of marketing), but if you missed it, you’ll need to wait for its small-screen premiere later this month. This is frustrating, not least because Glass Onion is exactly the type of picture whose experience is vastly improved in a crowded theater—not because of its crisp visuals or its gleaming sets, but because of the murmurs of pleasure it inspires from its audience. That ineffable kinship—the ripples of laughter, the squirms of tension, the collective hum of anticipation and enjoyment—is unique to theaters. Netflix’s half-measure—offering a modest release but severely restricting its scope (not to mention its opportunities to make money)—is a puzzle so bizarre, even Benoit Blanc couldn’t solve it.

Blanc is back in Glass Onion, again played by Daniel Craig with a winning combination of Southern-fried decency and innate perspicacity. His return is the lone nominal carryover from Knives Out, though Johnson also retains the broader architectural blueprint of the whodunit. As a result, there is a bit less suspense this time around, and a bit more familiarity. You know the formula: A dead body will turn up, a cluster of suspicious malcontents will be implicated and suspected, and in the end Blanc will pierce the elaborately constructed veil and elucidate the plot’s relentless machinations. The build-up will be artificially loaded with crucial clues and red herrings, while the climax will be breathlessly satisfying and also beside the point. Read More

Read more