Wonder Woman - Patty Jenkins
Rating: 8.6/10 I know I’m being generous when I write the following, but the problem with the films in the DCEU lies in their abrupt emotional leaps. This problem reached its zenith with Batman v Superman’s infamous “Martha” scene, in which a fairly complex netting of thematic concerns and character decisions got badly tangled and lost somewhere in translation. It’s supposed to be the moment the scales fall away from Bruce Wayne’s eyes as his belief in Clark Kent as a hostile alien is shattered by the realization that Superman is capable of putting the life of a human before his own--and not just any human, but his adoptive mother. This is a kind of love Wayne has forgotten after twenty years branding, mutilating, and executing the scum of Gotham City, and the realization is thus twofold: he is faced with a choice to become the unfeeling murderer he thought Superman to be, or he can exercise mercy and reclaim his humanity. There is an elegant way of communicating this without mounds of exposition, and you can see how the intent was to charge a single word with enough meaning to spark a change of heart of this magnitude, but too little time is devoted to Kent’s relationship with his mother, the dialogue is miserably prosaic, and the movie falls apart like dominos. It’s a wonder all on its own that DC Films was able to pull itself out of the ensuing avalanche of scorn to release the even more abysmal Suicide Squad, an almost post-modern example of how not to make a superhero film, and then, finally, Wonder Woman, DC’s first origin film since Man of Steel--another movie plagued, among other things, by a fundamental misunderstanding of how emotional beats are supposed to function. But Wonder Woman marks a change. By now, it’s well-publicized as not only the female-directed, female-led, female-superhero movie that’s uniting audiences and critics in a collective shout of “Hey, this is pretty good!”, but also the female-directed, female-led, female-superhero movie that’s outperforming its now-playing competition to the tune of tens of millions, and closing in on some of the biggest-grossing films in the current comic-book explosion. The resounding message is that, for really the first time in movie history, a movie primarily by and for women is bankable. It is simultaneously not so different from comparable movies and radically new: it’s a simple fish-out-of-water meets coming-of-age plot with a period setting and big action setpieces, following Diana, Princess of Themyscira, as she (literally and figuratively!) enters the world of men. Wonder Woman’s crowning success is its ability to frame Diana (Gal Gadot, like you didn’t already know) as a character with dimension and agency. Rather than having her grunt and scowl her way through a series of obstacles a la Superman in Man of Steel or keep her at a remote, goddesslike remove from the world of mortals a la Superman in Batman v Superman, they establish her as a character with ethics that are challenged at every turn. She is motivated by the sort of steadfast morality Superman should have had all this time, and by an idealism that is all her own. Her goal for most of the film is to find and defeat Ares, the god of war, who she plainly sees as the cause of World War I. Once Ares is defeated, Diana is confident that humankind will return to its natural state of compassion, empathy, and purity. You can imagine how that turns out, but the film does not patronize, reduce, or condescend, making certain that there are no clear resolutions to the challenges it presents her, and to the audience. The are only the choices she makes, and just as it is for anyone, it so happens that she can make the wrong ones. The majority of these choices are expectedly obvious, but a sizable portion of Diana’s philosophical evolution occurs beneath the surface, in juxtaposition to the rest of the excellent cast. Robin Wright of House of Cards fame steps in for the role of Antiope, a hardened Amazon general who mentors and trains Diana from childhood to adulthood. She represents one of Diana’s potential futures and the one closest to what we see of her in Batman v Superman, balancing compassion and military grit in a brief window of time. Connie Nielsen, in the role of Diana’s mother Hippolyta, provides a sort of soft counterpoint to Antiope: she is as decisive and intelligent as she is temperate and even-handed, somewhat constrained by her role as queen but respectful of the burden of impartiality. Both are characters with agency and dimension, and one could imagine a different Wonder Woman paying more attention to their influence on Diana’s journey from girl to heroine. If the Doctor Poison role played by Elena Anaya, a Spanish actress some may recognize from The Skin I Live In and others from Habitación en Roma, feels a little underwritten, she is able to raise the character above its “villain” trappings with a tragic gravitas absent from the comparable role Svetlana Khodchenkova occupied in The Wolverine. She has a thematic purpose in Wonder Woman, but also a political one as a female villain in a movie with so many female heroines, and functions as a more defined counterpoint to Hippolyta and to Antiope. Doctor Poison is a glimpse at one of Diana’s options as a rightfully vengeful woman seeking the destruction of men at Ares’s side--but perhaps in soft counterpoint to her, Etta Candy enters the picture as a cheerfully domesticated woman, one who is either unaware of the accuracy of the parallel between her secretary position and slavery that Diana points out, or unwilling to do anything about it. She seems to awaken a bit in Diana’s presence, but all the same, represents an equally unsuitable alternative future. Decisions, decisions. Dozens and dozens of thinkpieces by better thinkers and writers are being produced on the subject, so I’ll turn my attention back to the film itself to say that, of all its virtues, the one that stands out is Wonder Woman’s sense of humor. It soars above the stale puerility of Suicide Squad thanks to the chemistry between Gadot and Chris Pine (playing Steven Trevor, an American spy), which is another one of its greatest strengths, handled respectfully and with restraint. Their relationship develops naturally from guarded curiosity to working partnership to romantic affection, playing the same game as Marvel’s Captain America: The First Avenger to similarly rewarding effect. The scenes of their initial meeting and the getting-to-know-each-other stuff are sweet without saccharinity, but most importantly, their kiss (not a spoiler, because come on) is treated like it is: a kiss, not a chance for Pine to grope Gadot while the camera watches. There’s remarkable restraint on the part of the camera in general, even for the action sequences, which have historically been moments of CGI overkill and subsonic soundbombing that bore and irritate when they should excite. Wonder Woman finally puts all that testosterone-heavy action to use by, whodathunk, spacing it out in gradually escalating chunks. This leaves room to include the things the DCEU has been sorely lacking: character development, thematic exploration, and dramatic stakes, so that when things do go into full-blown spectacle mode, there’s reason to squint through the noise and glare to follow what’s happening. But I can’t lie: although it’s been all praise thus far, Wonder Woman doesn’t erase the problem with movies in the DCEU we discussed, as it’s very much present in the third act. After an incredible scene where Diana reaches a philosophical crossroads of a profundity the likes of which Batman v Superman couldn’t match with three hours of broody pontification, we’re treated to the same kind of CGI-cumshot-compilation filmmaking that destroyed what remained of that movie’s credibility after the “Martha” debacle, with the added insult of reducing Diana’s entire character journey to a line as banal as “I believe in love,” while--I shit you not--she walks out of a blazing inferno, deflecting projectiles with her bracelets. In response, Ares--I shit you not--lifts his arms, screams “Then I will destroy you!” and proceeds to hurl lightning at Wonder Woman, who captures it, wraps it around her bracelets, leaps into the sky, and I shit you not, Kamehamehas him into oblivion. Alex leaned over to me shortly after the scene wrapped up to say “I didn’t know we were watching Dragonball Z.” Hence the reference, but I make it only half-jokingly, because the climax of this otherwise measured and mature superhero film, one that’s shattering records and preconceptions of what a movie like this is supposed to do, one-hundred percent plays like a test-run for a live-action Dragonball Z adaptation. On one hand, maybe that’s okay. Maybe it was intentional, a reminder that these comic-book movies will always come down to wish fulfillment: we just want to watch beautiful people with superpowers blow each other up in the name of good or evil. Maybe it’s a goofy send-up of the excess of previous DCEU films, or even comic-book movie action in general, meant to make us cringe and then reflect on how ridiculous this shit has gotten. On the other hand, maybe it’s evidence of yet more meddling on DC’s part. Maybe it’s a stipulation in the contracts of all directors who sign on for DC films: “Stupid fucking explosions (to be referred to as SFEs from here on) are the DC Films trademark; therefore, we require several at minimum in the finished product,” etc. Am I being hard on this part of the movie? A little, but when you’re this close to perfection, the blemishes look a lot worse. Don’t let that detract from the fact that there were long stretches of the film where I was filled with the emotional opposite of what I felt during most of It Comes At Night: joy, as Diana strides through machine-gun fire, leading a charge of men to take over a German ditch; as she slices her way through building after building of armed men and then demolishes a church building by leaping into it; as she discovers love, and then the complexity of human nature, and grapples with the choice to turn away from or defend us; as she discovers who she is and realizes what she can be. It may succumb to its genre trappings in the eleventh hour, but at its best, Wonder Woman is a truly magnificent superhero movie, and like its final shot of Diana, it’s ultimately such a vast leap forward it might as well be soaring. - Brian L.
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Trey Edward Shults - It Comes At Night
Rating: 10/10 The horror of It Comes At Night is that even the murder of a child can affect nothing and go without consequence, a truth the universe validates with indifference. The movie opens, however, with the murder of an old man suffering from a disease that a lesser movie would turn into its hook, and whose novelty it would diminish by insisting on causes, symptoms, rules, a cure, blunting the brutal thrust of the film with tropes and exposition. This movie has no time for trivialities. There is a story to tell and a truth to disseminate; so the old man is murdered, presumably to save him from whatever this apocalyptic plague would have done. Some might call this euthanasia or “mercy killing”; a courtesy; something done for his own good, born of a moral decision. Paul (Joel Edgerton) might call the act pragmatic, but the movie doesn’t shy from terrible truths, and we won’t, either: it’s murder, as the nonconsensual ending of another’s life always is, and it’s the smoke of his burning corpse, dumped down a ditch and hastily drenched in gasoline, that carries us into the movie proper. It Comes At Night follows Paul, Sarah (Carmen Ejogo), and Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a small family who have established a routine of survival in a post-apocalyptic world turned on its head by a plague. They keep indoors as often as possible and deign never to venture out at night, although that self-imposed rule isn’t followed for a second of the film’s 91 minutes. In the middle of the night following the cremation of Sarah’s father (David Pendleton), a stranger named Will (Christopher Abbott) attempts to break into their home, but is quickly subdued by Paul and his rifle. He’s lashed to a tree for two nights but insists to Paul that he has a wife and child, Kim (Riley Keough) and Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner), that need his help. Paul’s house seemed abandoned with its boarded windows, so he thought it would be safe to search for supplies. Will wins Paul’s trust, and upon concluding that both families have a better chance of surviving together, all six unite under Paul’s roof. Things begin to go awry shortly thereafter, and then take an even sharper turn to the worst. Guilt is the multi-armed god that looms over the film, the It that Comes At Night, winding slowly through the film’s pitch-black interiors, staring back from the shivering darkness of the forest, infecting the bodies of our protagonists and ravaging them with dreams, distrust, and sores. Close to the heart of the film is Travis, our quiet cipher who shoulders the brunt of the guilt and for whom the weight becomes unbearable as he is subjected to dreams (or visions?) in which he is initially haunted by the plague-ridden specter of his grandfather, the old man with whose murder the movie begins, and then by more insidious torturers. He is lonely, as an excellent sequence of shots demonstrates by contrasting his solitary wakefulness in the night with the comfortable stoicism of his parents’ marriage, and the playful romance of Will and Kim’s relationship. Kim is the first woman other than his mother that he has seen in a long time. It’s never disclosed just how long that is, but Travis, long unaccustomed to women or to being social, botches his first conversation with Kim by openly ogling her breasts, a moment of excruciating discomfort that wins our sympathy for Travis while also defining for us the isolation and misery of both families’ situation through Travis’ frustrations. Travis’ ogling drives a splinter of distrust between the two, but distrust suffuses every relation from the moment Paul meets Will to the film’s panicked, soul-altering climax. Paul’s relentlessly militant demeanor seems at odds with his past as a history teacher--“You need to know all about the Roman empire? I’m your guy”--but this offhand remark, dropped about halfway into the film, draws attention to the role of the past in the happenings of the present, of which so little is parceled out despite its seeming importance to the events of the film. In the lesser film this could have been, an origin for the plague would be vital to our understanding of the film’s post-apocalyptic scenario, helping us comprehend Paul’s inability to trust anyone but family, but It Comes At Night doesn’t waste the time or energy. This is a conscious choice, one made not out of any shortage of creativity, but because the events of the film, like the minutiae of life in ancient Rome that Paul spent so much of his life learning and passing on; like the small and intricate dramas of the little Roman lives that played out in it, all those centuries ago; like the lives and experiences of the men who ambush Paul and Will early in the film, erased by the pragmatic bullets Paul puts in their heads: all these things are without value or meaning in the indifferent regard of a cosmos that does not care for the moral convolutions of murder, whether of man or woman or child, or for the nature of intent, or even for the ravages of guilt, because the cosmos are remorseless, and survival is amoral. The movie underscores this point again and again. I think of the shots of Travis bearing his lantern through the darkened corridors of the house, a symbol of vulnerability and hopelessness, of a vain search for meaning; of the red door they are never to open at night, which becomes a literal symbol of death in the third act, to which Travis is inexorably drawn; of the plague, which seems to afflict characters like a physical manifestation of guilt over the lies they tell and the people they murder--but since there is no explanation for the plague in the world of the film, it is just as likely that anyone and everyone would have caught the plague anyway, regardless of its allegorical applications. Solely in this regard, I am reminded of The Walking Dead, whose title we have long been informed by Robert Kirkman himself refers not to its zombies, but to its living, doomed to carry on with the knowledge that no matter what atrocities they overcome or deeds of selfless humanism they perform, they will eventually join the undead and advance humanity another step toward extinction. It Comes At Night comes cut from that same nihilism in an even darker, rougher hue. Such is the appeal of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories: from Mad Max to The Road to The Girl With All the Gifts, they offer us a practically infinite sandbox where we are free to pose hypothetical situations and posit answers to any questions about mortality, nature, law, identity, and society that we can imagine. Every Big Question is met with a multiplicity of solutions, but it’s that very multiplicity that should remind us that there is no such thing as conclusivity. That, in turn, should remind us that our biggest questions, and even the notions they interrogate, are only exercises in self-awareness that have no bearing upon, consequence in, or effect upon the universe. The shovel that so easily manipulates sand shatters upon concrete. The dog that warns us of danger by day is slaughtered when it ventures into the woods at night. If your child is killed, and then you are killed, to whom does the life of the child matter? -Brian L.
The Blackcoat’s Daughter - Oz Perkins
Rating: 8/10 Before I sat down with it, The Blackcoat’s Daughter was little more than a name and some internet buzz. Out of all the cast, I recognized only Emma Roberts’s face, and that took me until almost the halfway mark as I am not very familiar with her work. From what I understand, her role in this movie isn’t entirely left-field since she has starred in American Horror Story and Scream Queens before, but my instincts tell me that her involvement in those horror properties probably didn’t demand quite the level of nuance she demonstrates here. With relatively little dialogue across the board, and hers a fairly minimal role in the scheme of things, she is mostly constrained to physical acting and does an excellent job communicating shifting emotional degrees through changes of posture and expression, as well as a notable turn in her relationships with the rest of the movie’s characters. “The scheme of things” takes a while to puzzle out, as The Blackcoat’s Daughter follows a nonlinear, dual-storyline structure and a measured, thoughtful (but not slow) pace. Google’s official synopsis is this: “During the dead of winter, a troubled young woman embarks on a mysterious journey to an isolated prep school where two stranded students face a sinister threat from an unseen evil force.” Roberts plays “troubled young woman” Joan, the “two stranded students” are Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton), and although the movie avoids telling us outright, it’s clear that Joan and Kat are connected early on. Kat and Rose are stranded at their Catholic prep school, which is let out for winter break. Kat’s parents seem to have vanished en route. Rose’s, she explains, did not know school was getting out earlier than Friday, and will not be able to reschedule their flight any earlier. After some discussion, it’s decided between the two girls, the headmaster, and a pair of school nurses on duty over the break that Rose, a senior, will watch over freshman Kat until Rose’s parents arrive to take her away and Kat’s situation is sorted out. Things complicate, or rather, are already more complicated than they appear. The movie opens with a disquieting segment in which Kat dreams of her father, dressed in black and his face perpetually out-of-frame, pointing out her mother’s wrecked vehicle in the snow. Some time after the girls meet with the headmaster, it comes to light that Rose’s parents aren’t simply neglectful - Rose needs to tell her boyfriend that she is pregnant, and lied to her parents about the exact day her winter break begins. The intrigue already mounting, things take a turn when Rose introduces the movie’s first hint of the supernatural in the midst of your typical “spook the freshman” gesture: she asks Kat whether she knows that the nurses wear wigs, and that their eyebrows are false. When Kat indicates that she doesn’t know, Rose coolly informs her that they were caught devil-worshipping right at school, and burned them off in the course of worship. Meanwhile, Joan is picked up at a deserted bus stop by kindly man named Bill. Joan is quiet and reserved, and it is easy to feel for her as she wanders the night in previous scenes, and to feel afraid for her as she accepts Bill’s offer. That his wife is present in the car diffuses some tension, but it is difficult to believe in the kindness of strangers, especially in a horror movie - and for a while, it seems as if our fears will be justified. One of the film’s most unnerving scenes occurs in the hotel the three stay in overnight when Joan, in no more than a towel and her hair still dripping, lets Bill into her room. The apprehension mounts as he locks the door and takes a seat opposite her, the scene unfolding in peculiar ellipses as they ply one another for motivation. Nothing happens, ultimately, but this scene leaves an unshakeable impression of danger that lingers over the rest of the movie. It, as well as virtually the entire movie, is awash in chiaroscuro. Light always seems to be weak or departing, leaving thick swathes of shadow to suggests a constant threat. In tandem with a rumbling score occasionally spiked with cello trills straight out of The Witch, The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a study in dread one that relies on atmosphere and structure to scare us and uses minimal gore to enhance these strengths. As such, its flaws reveal themselves slowly: despite a small cast and its tightly-written narrative halves, the pregnancy subplot feels thinly-written, inserted just to give Rose an excuse to mislead her parents and move the plot along. It’s used for equally thin dramatic effect and has no payoff. The supernatural elements of the plot are compelling and expertly-handled for the most part, and in an effort to preserve the film’s mystery, I have tried not to give away specifics. But once it becomes clear what kind of “supernatural” we’re dealing with, several tropes infiltrate the film, and the nature of the threat becomes a bit too literal, bringing down what could have been a far more fascinating slab of horror filmmaking with more reason to doubt what is happening and what ultimately unites the narratives. Still, we do get a memorably disturbing image a blade in phallic silhouette that, despite having no connection to the encounter between Joan and Bill earlier in the film, manages to fulfill the unspoken threat hanging over their meeting. There’s no doubt regarding its significance in context, and it reorients many of the films thematic concerns around a brutal metaphor. Like The Witch last year and The Babadook the year before that, The Blackcoat’s Daughter joins their ranks as another Bechdel-approved, psychologically-intensive, bonafide horror movie that, while not nearly as original as either of those movies, is bold enough in its storytelling and focused enough in its direction to earn a place on your horror watchlist for the year. It’s altogether a richer and more layered film than it seems and an exemplary piece of atmospheric modern horror. - Brian L. Logan - James Mangold
Rating: 9 out of 10 Logan is a movie of profound warmth for its titular character. It may age him, weaken him, and brutalize him, but it digs into Logan’s psyche deeper than any before, making full use of its R rating to spare us nothing. Freed from the constraints of broad-appeal storytelling as well as the Gordian knot of the X-Men film continuity, director James Mangold sets out to craft a western out of the superhero movie and triumphs. Everything missing from Bryan Singer’s X-Men universe is here in spades, from the profanity and viscera that is so illogically absent from the original franchise to a richer, more nuanced focus on character. In the future, mutants are scarce. There is Logan, who works as a chauffeur to pay for the medication he must administer to the ailing (ex) Professor Charles Xavier, who is looked after by a reptilian mutant named Caliban when Logan’s away. Logan is old and cantankerous, far more so than in any previous iteration. Xavier, whose paternal attitude became a difficult sell once James McAvoy’s portrayal of the young, hedonistic Charles was introduced, is more foul-mouthed, more damaged, and more believable than before. Caliban may be underdeveloped in the scheme of things, but for perspective’s sake, demonstrates more personality in his half-hour of screentime than Cyclops across three movies. That seems to be it. They live on the U.S./Mexico border in an dingy, dusty factory, driven to these meager environs by an event for which “Westchester” becomes shorthand - a disaster for which Xavier feels responsible, and which is heavily implied to have spelled the end of the X-Men. Xavier is old, and his mind, classified as a weapon of mass destruction by the U.S. government, is slowly deteriorating. The medicine and the drum-like structure Xavier is kept in quickly make sense, and despite some conflict among the three, they seem to be getting along well enough in these conditions until a woman named Gabriella comes to Logan for help. His first response is a curt “Get the fuck away from me,” but there’s more to her than it seems. She’s a nurse on the run from a shadowy organization with an interest in her daughter, who Gabriella desperately needs to get over the Canadian border. Her pursuers are represented by a man with red Ozzy glasses, a mechanical hand, and a condescending drawl, and he starts applying pressure from the moment he enters the picture, murdering Gabriella and storming the factory where Logan and company are holed up. What no one counts on is Gabriella’s girl, who isn’t her girl at all, but a subject of the same experiments that turned Logan into the Wolverine. In one of the film’s numerous showstoppers, she lays waste to scores of heavily-armed men on her own before Logan steps in to help. The girl, aka X-23, is an absolute dynamo. Some of the credit must go to the choreographers, editors, and special-effects personnel, but the performance is Dafne Keen’s, and she is a find like few others in recent memory. Because X-23 is mute for most of the film, Keen’s physicality comes heavily into play. The sheer skill it takes to pull this off is admirable, but comparing the depth of her performance to her age, it’s nothing short of incredible. And her battle screech is terrifying. With no choice but to honor Gabriella’s request, Logan takes off across the country with Xavier and X-23. The latter bond almost immediately, but ever the gunslinger, Logan is frosty and distant in his interactions with her. He treats her and her journey like a job to get done. It’s when he doesn’t that things go awry, as an extended stay at a family ranch, a critical point for many of the film’s blossoming plot threads, demonstrates. There’s no lasting peace in a movie like this. One might be tempted to call the scenes at the ranch predictable, but that would be missing the point. Logan isn’t out to reinvent basic storytelling but the limitations of the superhero genre, which have been rather strict. Watchmen and Deadpool, another (loose) X-Men property, should be credited with starting the push for A Better Superhero Film, but Logan should be regarded as the one that really expanded the playfield once all is said and done. It employs tropes like the troubled hero, the moment of respite shattered by violence, the father-daughter relationship, and the redemptive arc not out of laziness, but to make the point that the superhero genre can function as more than an origin-story generator or smash-’em-up showcase while still including elements of both. Not to say that there aren’t some missteps along the way. They don’t always detract from the experience, and in some way enhance what’s special about Logan, but they deserve mention all the same. One trope Logan can’t shake is the superhero movie’s insistence on spotlighting every freaky superpower with annoying, lingering close-ups. The X-Men movies has always been pretty shameless about this, though admittedly, there are a lot of diverse and interesting mutants with diverse and interesting superpowers. It’s just that most of them didn’t make it into this movie. Sometime in the third act, we’re introduced to a horde of mutants who each get half a minute or so to show off their powers...right in the middle of the climactic battle. It’s jarring and clownish after almost two hours of serious filmmaking, and it’s difficult to tell whether they’re supposed to be callbacks to Singer’s franchise or the result of studio intervention. The girl with the frost breath and the other girl who can...control wood splinters or something, are the worst offenders, and it’s even more disappointing that these subpar mutants take down most of the film’s antagonists - which isn’t saying much, actually, since there is a surprising deficit of personality among them. The organization that created X-23 is clearly dangerous and adequately fills the villain spot, but after two almost-back-to-back viewings, I still have trouble remembering any of their names apart from X-24. I won’t spoil his character for those who haven’t seen Logan yet, for whatever reason. Luckily, this isn’t a movie that requires larger-than-life adversaries. It may go without saying that Logan is one of the good guys, but in the tradition of the western, the distinction isn’t clear-cut in the world of the film. It even states this point for us in the words of an actual western playing on a hotel TV: “good and bad is a brand.” There’s more to the quote, but these words are vital: the distinction between hero and villain, human and monster, amount to projection, perspective, and semantics. Actions are just actions, and their meaning is ours to supply. It’s not a new idea, but it’s nearly revolutionary in the context of a superhero movie, especially one connected to a franchise that’s never really worked with anything but absolutes - and in its exploration of this ambiguity, it is truer to the tormented character of the Wolverine than any film before or, we pretty confidently predict, since. -Brian L.
Adam Wingard - “Blair Witch”
Rating: 8/10 Blair Witch is an elevation of just about everything that made The Blair Witch Project a bona fide horror classic. Most major studios have it in their heads that bigger-and-better is the way to go, and inevitably confuse that with bigger-therefore-better. It’s an easy mistake to make, because it’s partially true. Many of the greatest sequels are bigger movies than their predecessors, wielding longer runtimes, more creative set pieces, and more complex narratives in an effort to outdo the previous installment, but Blair Witch has the luck of following not just The Blair Witch Project but also Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, a sequel so awful it killed the franchise and left it to rot for sixteen years. With that buffer in place, the only expectations anyone should have going into this installment is that it will be better than the last one. It is. Blair Witch wipes the slate and splatters it with new blood. Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett are currently some of the brightest lights in horror and sci-fi, and following You’re Next and The Guest, are on a hot streak Blair Witch effortlessly continues. While the movie can lapse into that bigger-therefore-better mentality (sometimes literally, as our protagonists at one point wake up to dozens and dozens more of those eerie stick-men than we saw in the first movie, hanging from the trees all around their camp), Wingard and Barrett seem to understand that a good sequel isn’t about giving us more of the first, but about developing and building on what worked. They understand that The Blair Witch Project, and horror in general, is about the unknown, and that suggestion is the most powerful weapon in a horror movie’s arsenal. A step further, they understand that terror is about disorientation, something The Blair Witch Project, a movie based on a largely improvised script, does all too well. More than half the time, no one involved in the movie knew exactly what was going to happen or how it was going to turn out. That’s why it’s still capable of terrifying you, even without the assistance of maybe the most successful viral marketing campaign ever. That’s also what makes it impossible to replicate, but Wingard and Barrett do their best to maintain its spirit. They do an excellent job, for the most part. The plot is organic, accommodating for updated camera tech: Peter, brother to the original film’s Heather, is so convinced that his sister is still alive somewhere in the Black Hills Forest that he takes a blurry YouTube clip as proof and convinces his friends to follow him to a meeting with the couple that uploaded the clip. Together, armed with ear-mounted cameras, the six of them set out into the forest to track her down. The amateurish cinematography and non-sequiturial editing is spot-on, but in an effort to mitigate the “writtenness” of certain scenes and the unspoken understanding between filmmakers and audience that this is indeed a movie, there is a lot of self-aware humor. I was iffy on it. On one hand, it’s trademark for Wingard. You’re Next was built on this sort of thing, and it’s not like the original didn’t feature a corny joke here at there at the outset. On the other, poking fun at horror cliches (“Everyone needs to stop doing that,” says one character after the fifth or so consecutive jump-scare) has become its own unfunny cliche, and depending on the sort of viewer you are, can either relieve some tension or take you out of an otherwise immersive horror experience. Other additions fare better, the standout being a particularly clever reconfiguration of the established mythology. Now, the Blair Witch was not merely killed, but killed on a “makeshift rack”: strapped high in a tree with her limbs weighted with stones, she was slowly pulled apart over several days. This gives chilling new context to the stick-men and piles of stones when they eventually start appearing outside of tents. The movie reintroduces Rustin Parr, a name mentioned in the original film during one of its early interview segments as a clue to what’s really happening in the forest. This is inexplicably left out of some cuts of the film, so it’s great to see it included here. Lastly, it’s also hinted that reality itself may not be stable in the Black Hills Forest, an intriguing new element that recalls the most interesting parts of 2011’s Grave Encounters. After separating from the group, two characters find their way back, but don’t trust what they see when they get there. “It’s another trick!” yells one. “When was the last time you saw us?” “This afternoon.” “We’ve been out here for six days!” While these details make Blair Witch a more than worthy sequel, it’s also a horror movie. On that front, it more than delivers - but not the way Project delivers. Rather than attempt the same oppressive terror of the first movie, Blair Witch mainly opts for jump-scares that do not, for once, feel cheap. Rather, they act as strategic mile-markers on the way to the finale inside Rustin Parr’s burned-out house, where the movie goes off the rails in the most glorious way possible, folding and imploding in on itself like some nightmare origami. In a year boasting The Witch, The Conjuring 2, and Don’t Breathe, Blair Witch still manages to offer up some of the most wide-eyed, white-knuckled, scream-into-your-hands sequences of 2016, and in keeping with the movie’s theme of elevation, offers us two more glimpses at the Blair Witch than we got in the first movie - which is to say, we get two glimpses. And that’s all we need. Watch for them. It’s been over a week since I was able to catch a pre-screening of the film, and my skin is still crawling at the thought of what I saw, and the last words we hear from the Blair Witch’s mouth. -Brian L.
Rob Zombie - “31”
Rating: 6.9/10 Reviewed at Fathom Events Advanced Screening Rob Zombie has undoubtedly made his name in the horror movie scene over the past decade and change, in both good and bad ways. 31 is a film that went through substantial cuts thanks to the MPAA, being rejected for an “R” rating three to four times, and sadly, it’s extremely noticeable. Zombie is known for his hillbilly horror flicks and a sadistic amount of gore and violence, and 31 sticks to that formula, bringing back familiar faces such as Malcolm Mcdowell and Zombie’s wife Sheri Moon along with Richard Brake (from the Halloween 2 remake) and Jeff Daniel Phillips (The Lords of Salem). 31 has a very straightforward survival horror plot with weird shades of The Purge or even The Hunger Games mixed in: five carnival workers get kidnapped close to Halloween by a group of rich people and brought to an (insanely large) compound to play a sick game of 31 over the course of a twelve-hour night. They are given basic weapons to defend themselves from waves of killers whose names all bizarrely end in “head.” Sick Head, a Latin-speaking Nazi midget with a love for torture (this is definitely a Rob Zombie movie) is the first they take on, but he’s not even remotely scary. Who can take that description seriously? Nevertheless, he manages to kill one of the five workers in a cheesy, unnecessary scene. The gang of four are treated to a string of nasty mind games after that for the rest of the movie, including a meal that turns into a game of Russian roulette when they’re told that one of the plates is laced with cyanide. Venus, one of the carnival workers, doesn’t buy that information and continues chowing down until she discovers that what they’re eating is actually the dead carcass of their friend. Yum. Because of his hassle with the MPAA, the major kill scenes in the theatrical release of 31 feel a bit weak. Cameras pan out before the weapons connect, which gets annoying. The last killer, Doom Head, gets an unneeded backstory, but there are mild amounts of dark humor to balance these kinds of moments out. There’s also enough gore to make anyone with a light stomach spit their popcorn back out. 31 holds up for just under an hour and thirty minutes, which makes me wonder how long the unrated version set to hit blu-ray will end up. I’d recommend skipping the theater and watching it when it makes it to stores for you to bring home. If you are okay with a cut-up version of Rob Zombie’s new movie and are antsy to see it, go check it out in theaters. Otherwise, wait to pick up a physical copy. 31 releases worldwide on September 16th. - Dakota G. “Don’t Breathe” - Fede Alvarez Rating: 7.9/10 Fede Alvarez has a lot of strengths, but dialogue isn’t one of them. If you happened to watch his first film, 2013’s Evil Dead remake, you know it’s not exactly the sort of thing you’ll be quoting next week. It’s real strengths are its polished visuals and forward momentum, traits that Alvarez’s first original feature preserves. Much like its predecessor, Don’t Breathe also works best when “everyone stops talking,” in the words of a friend - when the cursory attempts at emotional investment and the general padding of the first twenty-ish minutes subsumes to the film’s hooky premise of three burglars versus a blind killing machine. It works really well, actually. Soon after our protagonists pry their way into the Blind Man’s home, we’re treated to an impressive long-take shot as they make their way around, checking into each room and eventually up the stairs to where the Blind Man sleeps. Major points to Alvarez and his cast for making a glorified tour of the main set so riveting. I found myself smiling. There are plenty of other scenes of this nature, some featured in the trailer, which samples one of the movie’s best: a chase in a dark basement filmed through a sort of hazy night vision lens. Alvarez does well with other horror-house staples like the barricaded-in-a-bedroom and crawl-through-the-air-vents sequences. What I didn’t expect, but found even more rewarding, was a lot of deadpan humor baked in right alongside the movie’s gory, gross second half. I’m not sure there’s a way to explain without spoilers, but suffice to say that the movie manages to show us a hammer and a turkey baster and somehow shock us with the least likely of the two. Seriously, I almost screamed. The Blind Man is a great villain, and the editing slyly plays him up. As another friend pointed out, we rarely see him enter the frame, if ever: he’s often just there, wreaking havoc, and two fast-cuts later he’s in the next room terrorizing one of our other protagonists, or outside, or two floors up, or in the basement...and so forth. It might seem like bad film-making out of context, but his apparent powers of teleportation fit right in amid the mounting absurdity, which is so po-faced you’ll be tempted to take it seriously. Please, don’t do that. Don’t Breathe wants you clutching your armrests, sure, but it also wants you to laugh. You can feel the influence working on Evil Dead had on Alvarez in this respect, as that movie also cracked a smile under all the viscera from time to time. It may have been a little harder to see through the hypersensitive lens through which we watch remakes of beloved properties, but it’s much more apparent here. That turkey baster, man. It’s weakest moments can all be traced back to the dialogue and elementary character archetypes, which are worse than Evil Dead’s. Jane Levy has an abusive mother. This robbery is her way out. Her friend pouts in her direction when she’s not looking. He’s got a thing for her. The throwaway gangsta character mixes up the words “settlement” and “sediment.” One scene goes exactly as you’d expect when Jane Levy mentions God. “God?” says the Blind Man, prepping the turkey baster. “There isn’t any God. It’s a joke.” A little later, he adds “A man can do anything when he stops believing in God” as justification for what he’s done and will do. For what it’s worth, I would have preferred the Blind Man remained the Michael Meyers-ish figure he appears to be for most of the movie, silent but inhumanly brutal. Giving him lines - worse, a philosophy - cheapens his role and reeks of overthinking. Too many villains these days have philosophies. Give us simple evil. It’s an eighty-eight minute on-the-sly redo of People Under the Stairs, dammit. There’s no time! If you enjoyed 2013’s Evil Dead, wished The People Under the Stairs was a little grittier, and don’t mind second-guessing your turkey this Thanksgiving, buy yourself a ticket to Don’t Breathe as soon as possible. It’s a good time. -Brian L. Review: “The Conjuring 2”
Rating: 8.5/10 Trailer James Wan has been in the horror business long enough to have started developing not only a recognizable style and the touch of a seasoned genre storyteller, but also to have started communicating a particular worldview that began its gestation as far back as Insidious in 2011, his first attempt at a franchise after launching the improbably successful Saw movies. Being that this summer’s horror blockbuster The Conjuring 2 will be Wan’s last directorial effort in the genre for a while, with his next project the DC live-action adaptation of their Aquaman property, it’s fitting that Conjuring 2 pays all kinds of homage to his past work while also advancing its vision of the spirit realm he first established with The Further. In fact, as Conjuring 2 opens up, Wan seems to forget that he’s not actually filming another installment of Insidious: his depiction of Lorraine Warren’s (Vera Farmiga) out-of-body tour through the Amityville house on the night of its most gruesome murder resembles co-star Patrick Wilson’s sojourn into The Further, from the slow zoom-in-and-out on her eyes to the echoey sound design and subtle slo-mo. With its population of twitchy ghosts and darting, giggling children, it’s a very similar space to the one we saw in Insidious, lacking only that version’s fog and impenetrable shadows - most likely a deliberate attempt to differentiate the franchises, but also, perhaps, an indication of Wan’s growing confidence in his own vision of the afterlife. The ghosts and demons of both the Insidious and Conjuring franchises, and even harkening back as far as his underrated Dead Silence, tell us the most: his ghosts are pale, doll-like apparitions that move in quick-edits, while demons sit in the frame, heavy and still and shrouded in darkness. Even in sudden shock-cuts, like Insidious’s signature boo-moment when the “Darth Maul” demon gapes behind Patrick Wilson’s head (reprised in Conjuring 2, with the ghost of Bill Wilkins substituting), his demons seem to have already been there before they became visible, or before we became aware of them. It sends the message that we are temporary, but evil is not. Evil is a fixture of the world. Lorraine even seems to speak to this while sitting opposite a cypher for total skepticism (Franka Potente’s Anita Gregory) and one for total faith (Simon McBurney’s Maurice Gross), discussing the Enfield case in daylight: “The demons are worse.” The Conjuring 2 spends quite a while establishing this premise, too: following once again in the tradition of the Insidious movies, and arguably that of all great possession/demonic-presence horror, Wan pits a tightly-knit family against a crafty, malevolent enemy bent on unraveling them. While there’s plenty to be said regarding the movie’s top-notch scares and sustained atmosphere of dread, the movie’s tactics would be useless if it didn’t take the time to set up the emotional core of the Hodgsons’ family life, whose repeated testing over the course of the movie shapes and strengthens its ability to scare us, and at its very best, to stay with us. In a case of economical storytelling, we get everything we need to know about the family caught in the middle of the movie’s paranormal activity in just a handful of scenes - the Hodgson kids’ walk home from school, the misunderstanding in the kitchen, and a little aside in the laundry room between mother Peggy Hodgson and a friend - nicely reemphasized in a couple of later scenes. There is a full-blown musical number at the movie’s midpoint that’s perfectly poised between pure cheese and affecting breather, allowing the first half of the film time to settle before the stakes jump in the second. It gives us a chance to see the divided Hodgsons reunite and share what’s ultimately a pretty tender family moment to the strains of Patrick Wilson’s Elvis impersonation. They way Janet (Madison Wolfe, firing on all cylinders the entire movie) rectifies a first-act misunderstanding regarding a cigarette with her mother is also unexpectedly touching for the innocence of the gesture, and Peggy’s reaction: one of unconditional love and forgiveness amid what has been, for most of the movie’s runtime up to that point, a lot of escalating anxiety. James Wan has perfected the jump-scare and uses it to maximum effect for The Conjuring 2. Apart from an innate understanding of audience expectations and an immaculate sense of timing he’s fine-tuned in accordance with those expectations, he’s really harnessed the aspect of sound design, which I think can elevate a good horror movie to a great one. It goes beyond just timing loud noises or blowing out the bass, becoming a matter of detail. Earlier, I touched on the echoey quality of the scenes in this movie’s “Further,” but there’s also the excellent grafting of Wilkins’s voice over Janet’s in those scenes where he communicates through her, and various, almost subliminal cues, such as Wilkins’s whistled tune, which, if you listen closely, is buried deep in the mix leading up to the film’s very first paranormal event. One of the movie’s simplest and most memorable scares is in fact entirely in the audio: a disembodied scream from a dark tent at the end of a hallway. Nothing pops out, nothing gets thrown around, but it stops your heart for a second and leaves you cold. The film’s most bravura scene isn’t even connected to the haunting in Enfield, or at least not initially, and shows off every one of James Wan’s strengths: the scene in the Warren’s very own study, when Lorraine comes face to face with the film’s demonic entity. Wan pours every trick in the jump-scare playbook into this scene, stacking one atop the other until the dust of overuse falls away, leaving one of the most stunning sequences of jump scares I can think of in the genre. The breath-holding tension, the stuttering lights, the slamming doors and windows, the self-playing records, the disembodied shadows, the freaky paintings, the death-white fingers - they don’t feel like the tropes they are, but instead like a series of escalations leading up to a narratively significant event. Wan understands this best of all, and it bears repeating: his scares serve a goddamn purpose, and that’s why they work. This is a major issue with horror movies in general and was even a flaw in the otherwise excellent The Conjuring, that I feel has been properly addressed for the sequel. There are very few gotcha-moments in Conjuring 2 that exist purely for the sake of having some gotcha-moments in there - I suppose the scenes in the flooded basement and the Crooked Man’s tent count, but these are relatively brief and harmless diversions from the movie’s larger continuity. Maybe the most glaring flaw with the original Conjuring was its climactic exorcism, which, while just as stylishly shot as anything else, was sudden, jarring, and ultimately way too light and inconsequential to make more than a lukewarm impression. It gets better with repeated viewing, but still falls flat. The sequel, on the other hand, takes great pains to establish its Poltergeist-y climax and set in motion the pieces that lead to the clash between the Warrens, the Hodgsons, and the entities haunting them both, reaping the benefits of a tighter, more complete, and more dramatically satisfying progression despite The Conjuring 2 being a longer and more patient affair than the 2013 movie. And, since it earns its terrific (and terrifying) climax, Conjuring 2 also earns its lengthy happy ending, which we can chalk up as both another improvement on its predecessor and another facet of Wan’s cinematic worldview: it may not be the most original take, but Wan’s preoccupation with this trope of families-vs-evil-forces seems to indicate to us that, despite the prevalence of evil of the world, family survives. All told, I think that with the release of The Conjuring 2, it’s time to finally start taking James Wan seriously as a horror auteur. The timing may be a little awkward - this is his last horror movie for a while, as mentioned - and the movie may be heavily indebted to classic horror iconography, but the craft and care of the The Conjuring 2, to an even greater degree than The Conjuring, can’t be ignored. As a whole, it represents the crystallization of an exciting voice in the genre and all but certifies James Wan’s status as one of Hollywood’s great horror directors - and on top of that, it’s a goddamned sequel, and a goddamned great one, too. That, if nothing else, deserves some goddamned recognition. Review - “Hush” Score: 8/10 A couple of years ago, Mike Flanagan was attached to a “dream project” film adaptation of Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game. As a pretty big fan of both auteurs and blown away by Oculus, a film already rife with overtones of King, I was eager to see what Flanagan could do with the minimal environment and characters of one of King’s most underrated stories, but news died after that early buzz. So, apparently, did the project. While I’m still not sure where that adaptation is now, whether it’s been handed off to another director or trapped in some sort of development hell, Flanagan chose to redirect his efforts to the Netflix-exclusive home-invasion film, Hush. Watching the movie, one gets the sense that Flanagan hasn’t so much abandoned the idea of adapting Gerald’s Game as he has simply decided to step back and circle it for now, honing his chops until that project moves forward. While it and Hush are superficially pretty disparate - Hush being about a deaf writer trapped in her house in the woods fending off a masked killer, and Gerald’s Game the story of a woman who accidentally kills her husband while she is handcuffed to the bed of their cabin in the woods - there are all sorts of parallels we can start to draw between the two. Both foreground strong, resourceful women in states of unique isolation battling both a predatory male presence and their own minds. The subtext is pretty evident and echoes a major chunk of Oculus, but I’d actually compare it more closely to 10 Cloverfield Lane (reviewed here!), and would even argue it has one clear edge over that movie: while both end in spectacle, Hush isn’t burdened with the task of establishing a franchise, and so never buckles under its own script to the same degree as Lane. That movie was lauded for its Hitchcockian mystery and slow-cooking suspense - rightfully so! - and both of those things can also be found here, augmented by the time-tested intrigue of the home-invasion flick: the “What would I do?” question that makes the subgenre a perennial favorite of thriller and horror directors. There’s a quiet, simmering tension throughout that I attribute mostly to the camerawork and set design, perhaps the most elegantly understated I’ve seen in a home-invasion movie since 2008’s The Strangers. As with Oculus and Absentia, Flanagan’s shoestring-budget debut, Hush is a pseudo-haunted house film. Absentia took on addiction, Oculus wrestled child abuse, and here, the terror of Hush is its protagonist’s vulnerability, which the movie takes great pains to remind us of without ever belittling or reducing Maddie to a “scream queen.” She is, in fact, exactly the opposite. Most shots are deceptively wide, especially following the killer’s reveal, pitting her against the open spaces of her house in the woods and leaving the filmmakers plenty of room to play with depth and perception. While I would have liked to see a little more creativity in this regard, there are other, subtle touches to appreciate - a window or an open doorway in just about every frame, for example, and an abundance of shadows undercut by glaring moonlight. Nothing is ever fully hidden. It’s impossible to get comfortable, even when Maddie is armed to the teeth - she just never seems to be safe. Admittedly, Hush isn’t You’re Next. It doesn’t have much of a sense of humor and it adheres to the major rules of the home-invasion game, but breaks enough of the little ones to feel fresher than it really is. While I chalk it up as another win for Flanagan, some of the more conventional aspects of the film are going to bug certain viewers, even if the movie provides maybe the first solid justification for all or most of those conventions: Maddie’s deafness. Most home-invasion movie protagonists are only isolated by darkness and script contrivances, but Maddie’s inability to even hear the killer - or herself! - adds a bonus layer of anxiety to the viewing experience, while also providing an out for most of the issues one can usually take up with home-invasion flicks. It’s very rare for a movie like this to get me talking to the screen, but that’s what I was driven to - and it wasn’t even the usual litany of why-the-hell-would-yous, don’t-do-thats, what-are-you-doings, and I-fucking-told-yous, but more genuine expostulations: I remember a handful of nos, a few oh-Gods, several oh-shits, and one completely involuntary gasp. That’s just good writing. Having already proven himself adept at handling fractured narratives and intersecting plotlines with Absentia and Oculus, to see Mike Flanagan working the same magic with the linear, A-to-B-to-C storytelling format of Hush is immensely rewarding. It’s that sense of control that really sells Hush and will come in handy if Gerald’s Game ever gets off the ground again, and at a fleet 81 minutes, credits and all, Flanagan’s third proper feature is a tightly-coiled and surprisingly accessible spring-trap of a movie, showcasing this young director’s growing potential. Don’t miss out. -Brian L. The Witch Rating: 9.5/10 We can’t talk about horror without talking about its erosion. It’s a sad reality: when movies like The Babadook and It Follows come along as near-perfect examples of the genre, we can’t praise a single thing about them without almost obligatorily commenting on just how poor the surrounding dreck really is. So these days, when an entity like the Satanic Temple publicly announces their support of a horror movie, it’s a bigger deal than it might have been in the genre’s heyday sometime in the 80s. You can't help a little cynicism and suspect it's for the publicity, especially when the film in question is pitted against a so-called "faith epic," Risen, to be released the same day. On the other hand, we should keep in mind the track record of A24, the studio behind The Witch: from the hard sci-fi of Ex Machina to the restrained period drama of A Most Violent Year, the studio has been on a roll with elegant, well-assembled feature films spanning a respectable range of genres. Add to that some lively festival buzz stretching back over a year, and at the very least, one must wonder if there is something more to The Witch than the average horror effort after all. There damn well is. It’s easy to see why the Satanic Temple was so quick to back Robert Eggers’s debut: although the devil is very much a player in the events of the film, the fact is that, for the better part of The Witch, the true enemy is Catholicism. If we want to go a step further, we can say that it’s really the belief in the devil, not so much Old Scratch himself, that antagonizes the colonial family at the heart of the movie, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to argue that perhaps there isn’t a single devil in the film. But there's a witch. There may even be several. There may be none. It seems to me that the “witch” of the title doesn’t refer solely to the cackling things we see in the first fifteen minutes or the last, to the seductress waiting in the film’s supremely menacing New England forest, or even to the accused Thomasin, the film’s heroine (of sorts). What the title refers to, and what the film is most concerned with, is the belief in malignant evil as it operates through the reality of witchcraft and the archetypal “witch”: a silly impossibility to us, but a deadly and literal reality to Thomasin’s family. Early in the film, as William and Caleb are out setting traps, William asks Caleb to discuss his “natural state of evil.” Caleb is a boy no older than eleven. The worst we see him do for sure is lie to his mother. Yet he explains with rote efficiency, as he is taught to do by his father and his father’s Puritan religion, his inherently sinful nature; that all he thinks and does, and all he is, is subject to and deserving of eternal punishment. This is the mindset The Witch places us inside, and from where its horror chiefly derives. He, like his family, believes he is destined for hellfire, that the devil waits around every corner and is not merely some boogeyman but a living, cunning, hateful thing bent on their destruction. It stares from the eyes of a hare. It haunts their property as a black, smiling goat. And because he believes - because his family believes - it is so. There is no escaping hell in the world of The Witch because Thomasin’s family are born into it and must suffer their way out. Life is a nightmare, and our sympathy for the characters is partly pity as a result - pity for their ignorance. When Caleb returns stumbling, shivering, and lockjawed from an encounter with the witch in the woods, the family’s first thought is not pneumonia or disease at all, but witchcraft. And when they turn to prayer, the only medicine they know, and that prayer proves ineffectual, the spiritual anguish that descends on them is more horrifying than any monster Eggers can show us. Caleb doesn’t escape, and neither does Thomasin - but her fate is arguably the better one. Sure: on the surface, she seems to opt out, choosing to join what she can’t beat. It plays almost like a betrayal. It’s far more than that. Her conversation with Black Philip will go down as a legendary moment in horror film-making - it had the same effect on Alex and I that I think Father Merrin’s encounter with Regan in The Exorcist must have had on audiences in 1973, which is to say, almost rapturous terror - but the moment Thomasin drives a blade into her mother’s throat, and then keeps driving it, is when The Witch clicks. Thomasin’s decision is really the only one her family’s lifestyle leaves her. She chooses freedom. I think there’s all sorts of ambiguity to the last reel of the film. I’m not convinced that what we see isn’t partly, maybe even totally, Thomasin’s fantasy. There is an overwhelming focus on her face and the pitch-black negative space all around her, suggesting that what we see, and what we think we see, is inside her head. At the same time, there is a literality to the entire film, a staring documentary quality to the cinematography and an unnerving authenticity to the 17th century dialogue that lends itself just as easily to opposing interpretations. It’s my conviction that the only evil at work here is, again, only the belief in evil. This isn’t a siege story about a family succumbing to a witch coven. It’s a tragedy, first and foremost, about a group of deeply paranoid and suppressed individuals combusting with the psychological pressures of religious zealotry and frontier survival. The Witch is where horror needs to go. -Brian L. |
"Curtains" is where you can catch movie reviews by the Metal Lifestyle staff.
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