Film Freak Central

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) - 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

WW84
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal
screenplay by Patty Jenkins & Geoff Johns & Dave Callaham
directed by Patty Jenkins

by Walter Chaw At some point, someone in some boardroom should have pushed away from the table and asked whether it was a good idea to have a subplot in their new Wonder Woman movie about a person in the Middle East wishing that colonizers would be expelled from occupied territories. (The granting of said wish subsequently leading somehow to nuclear holocaust.) I mean, with or without an Israeli actress in the lead role. Not to say it's not geometrically worse with an Israeli actress in the lead role, because it is. Look, the real wonder of WW84 is that this maybe isn't the worst thing about it. Neither is how flat it looks, or how it starts with 45 minutes of poorly-timed slapstick before shifting into absolutely deadening action sequences, a weird body-possession intrigue, and a horrifying message about how you should never wish for things because everything has consequences attached to it. With so much riding on its shoulders, the burden to be all things to all people has resulted in a vivisected monstrosity of plastic inauthenticity. WW84 additionally has one of the most beautiful people in the world--who's playing an immortal superhero--tearfully proclaim that she wants something to go right for her for once in her life. What I'm saying is, WW84 is a very particular, very limited kind of fantasy gratification that also happens to have fantasy gratification as its needlessly magical plot.

Zoom Generation: FFC Interviews Rob Savage & Jemma Moore

Shudder's Host, directed and co-written by Rob Savage, is this peculiar moment's The Blair Witch Project, a landmark film that provides insight into not just these dark times via the technologies that have evolved from our collective woe, but also how we ourselves have evolved, changed in unexpected ways by the products of our hands. Never so much as to lose touch with what scares us, though. Even the genesis of the project--Host was born of a prank a bored Savage devised to scare his friends on a Zoom chat one evening (a prank posted later on social media, where it gained another half-life)--has its roots in how things that are old-hat (the noise in the attic, the jump scare, the Rear Window effect of being a voyeur to the love and death of loved ones without the power to affect them) don't go away as the tools of our existence change. They adapt. What we've always feared, we fear still. And here we are now with this stuff we've Frankensteined into existence (social media, virtual hosting, Bluetooth, the cloud) without a complete understanding of the doors it'll unlock in our relationship with the universe. We're playing with fire, and Host is a warning no less eloquent for being too late.

Me You Madness (2021)

**½/****
starring Ed Westwick, Louise Linton
written and directed by Louise Linton

by Walter Chaw Louise Linton's Me You Madness is a particularly fraught and grim fandango seeking to walk the line between self-parody and self-aggrandizement. It dances along the edge of a blade, this one, with the kind of extraordinary privilege afforded the fabulously wealthy, powerful, and beautiful. On the one hand, you're making fun of your ridiculous luck; on the other hand, or maybe the same hand, you're rubbing everyone's face in it. False modesty is dangerous--and unsuccessful self-satire is the most deluded manifestation of it. Shit, successful self-satire isn't that great, either, because it suggests that one's station is so elevated it can be a target of satire. So is Me You Madness terrible? It's fabulously terrible, calamitously terrible. It's also genuinely fascinating as both symptom and diagnosis of exactly what's wrong with the particular strain of capitalistic excess embodied by Linton and her vile husband, Steve Mnuchin. These are the architects of the end of the world, and this is evidence that they're aware of it but don't quite know what it is that they know.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

½*/****
starring Godzilla, King Kong, Alexander Skarsgård, Demián Bichir
screenplay by Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein
directed by Adam Wingard

by Walter Chaw Godzilla is a reaction to America's attack on two civilian targets with nuclear weapons in the same way the current American superhero cycle is a reaction to 9/11. King Kong is an offshoot of Edgar Wallace's sledgehammer racist "Sanders of the River" tales, which he parlayed into early drafts of the screenplay that eventually became 1933's King Kong. Though it's possible to make a Godzilla or a King Kong movie without these ghosts of American war crimes, colonialism, and racism haunting it, Adam Wingard's Godzilla vs. Kong (hereafter GvK) ain't it. Not when these two giant metaphors for the poison of American exceptionalism destroy Hong Kong, a Chinese city the British only recently returned to the Chinese, before banding together to fight a Mexican-American's Japanese-piloted robot dinosaur. The film is a mess, an ideological jumble and a disaster of narrative that reduces its able cast to half exposition dump, half glazed reaction shots. It doesn't have anything to say and even in the worst of its predecessors, this was never the case. GvK isn't interested in ecology, in arms proliferation, in sociopolitical struggles--and failing all the big things it's not about, it's also free of parental issues, a romantic subplot, a compelling villain, or, indeed, a compelling hero. It's a giant nothing-burger. And that's without mentioning this new craze of writing a perfect minority child to teach the growed-ups how to get in touch with their better natures.

She's Having a Baby (1988) [John Hughes: 5-Movie Collection] - Blu-ray Disc

*½/**** Image C Sound A Extras B-
starring Kevin Bacon, Elizabeth McGovern, Alec Baldwin, James Ray
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers I rented She's Having a Baby the moment it hit video out of brand loyalty to John Hughes, whose teen movies had had an epic and indoctrinating influence on my peers and me. And I was largely indifferent to it up until the closing-credits montage of celebrities tossing out names for the titular baby, at which point my lack of enthusiasm gave way to dismay.^* At the time, I assumed the film's subject matter was too adult for 13-year-old me (and it was), but 18 years later I didn't like it any better, and after revisiting it with another 15 years' distance--which brings us to 2021--I've decided that when it comes to She's Having a Baby, "it's not me, it's you" suffices. Even though the travails of one Jefferson "Jake" Briggs remain as hypothetical to me as they were when I was a kid, movies, as Roger Ebert was fond of saying, are empathy machines; the cinema would never have flourished if films demanded a 1:1 relationship with the viewer's experiences. (Granted, this is also how they've gotten away with being so lily-white for so long.) Definitive proof of She's Having a Baby's mediocrity came for me when I saw Tamara Jenkins's Private Life, in which a cultured New York couple struggles with infertility as their biological clocks wind down. It was, next to First Reformed, my favourite film of 2018. I've never been on that side of the family equation and I'm not a churchgoer, either.

Body Politics: FFC Interviews Dusty Mancinelli & Madeleine Sims-Fewer

Even among the generally positive responses to Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli's superlative Violation, one finds evidence of the predictable fallout that occurs whenever a woman in horror, particularly in the rape-revenge category of horror, fails to adhere to expectations of victimhood. Surely a woman who reacts to rape with violence is psycho, yes? Violation has as its closest analogues the Greek tragedies involving a woman cruelly wronged who righteously wrongs in return; the final image of the film is as clear a metaphor as I can imagine for how we all, men and women alike, take on the sins of the father in our various acts of consumption, both gustatorial and sexual. I was excited to speak with co-writers/co-directors Ms. Sims-Fewer (who also stars) and Mr. Mancinelli about their film and its positive--if sometimes confused--reception. So often, exhaustingly often, when one seeks to change perception, one instead manages to reveal how unchangeable perceptions can be. We should be beyond this conversation in 2021. In a lot of ways, Violation reveals that we've yet to properly broach the topic. The pair, sitting on a pale blue couch with a Frida Kahlo throw pillow between them--an appropriate totem of gender ambiguity and, indeed, rage, I thought--were engaged and smart about what their film was about. Violation is intentional in a way that very few movies can get away with--and it gets away with it because it's, y'know, brilliant. I started by asking them the perhaps obvious question of why men hate women who reveal themselves as fully human.

Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021)

****/****
starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Amy Adams
screenplay by Chris Terrio
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw It opens with soundwaves visualized as ripples in the air--Superman's (Henry Cavill) death cry touching every part of a blasted world as the protection and decency he represents is murdered. I have historically hated Zack Snyder's vision of this universe because it felt grimdark in a weightless way, the posturing of an emo teenager who hasn't earned his weariness and cynicism. It felt like a put-on. Immature. When the worst parts of comic fandom coalesced to demand a director's cut of a genuinely abominable film, Justice League, I, partly out of self-protection from a hateful horde and partly out of a sense of moral superiority, looked upon the project as first impossible, then misguided. I thought myself better than all this, which is unforgivable. I guess I wanted to believe that in a world in which I have figured nothing out, I had at least figured out that anything championed by trolls and incels could have no possible value to someone like me--who, of course, has nothing in common with these troglodytes except, you know, for the loneliness and the self-loathing and the suspicion of corporate-think. Maybe it's just fear that makes me as hateful as they are. And maybe it's just fear that makes them as hateful as they are, too. I think what's most surprising to me about Zack Snyder's Justice League (hereafter ZSJL) is how skillful it is as a diagnosis of the horrific, unfillable void that drives the very population most responsible for its existence. If the messages of the film are internalized, it may even help.

Cherry (2021)

***/****
starring Tom Holland, Ciara Bravo, Jack Reynor, Michael Rispoli
screenplay by Angela Russo-Otstot and Jessica Goldberg, based on the novel by Nico Walker
directed by Anthony Russo & Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw When you hit someone coming and going, I think that either it's personal or you don't know what you want. For me, when MCU wunderkinds the Russo Brothers decide to make a big-budget, S.E. Hinton meets John Irving via T.S. Garp version of Rush, shit, I'm into it. One can either complain that everything coming out is the product of an algorithm or endeavour to notice when, for good or for ill, one gets exactly the kind of auteurist dream project in all the show-offy, chaotic glory one's been pining for in endless, exhausting thinkpieces. Criticism that the Russos are trying too hard with Cherry sounds to me suspiciously like the sort of unimaginative personal-grievance pieces cropping up around about the time Scorsese was making stuff like New York, New York, or when The Matrix sequels failed entirely to behave, or when Zack Snyder delivers a four-hour Greek God cut of a superhero movie that is distinctly the product of a single voice. I mean, hate it if you want to, but also fuck off.

Crisis (2021)

*/****
starring Gary Oldman, Armie Hammer, Evangeline Lilly, Greg Kinnear
written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki

by Walter Chaw Nicholas Jarecki's Crisis is a Stanley Kramer piece, a "means well," ripped-from-the-headlines message flick that hews closer to 3 Needles than to Traffic in terms of effectiveness and humility. In place of dialogue, there is exposition; and in place of performances, there are swollen forehead veins and trembling lower lips, aghast at the injustices of a cold universe. Crisis sheds "importance" from itself like dander from a stressed but beloved pet, and it's unseemly to come down too hard on it when its greatest crimes are that it is middlebrow in its politeness and really doesn't have much to say beyond what's already inherently obvious. It's possible to do stuff like this and make something like The Insider--that is, something powerful, artful, and transformative. More commonly, it turns out like Crisis has turned out: instantly forgettable and mildly embarrassing in the way of your hip dad trying to jam with you about the evils of the sticky icky. Oh, and use a condom, son.

Tom and Jerry (2021)

½*/****
starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Michael Peña, Colin Jost, Ken Jeong
written by Kevin Costello
directed by Tim Story

by Walter Chaw I want to say right off the bat that Hanna-Barbera's "Tom & Jerry" cartoons were in constant syndication when I was a kid. I watched them every day after school, like all my friends did, and we agreed that we liked it best when Tom and Jerry were friends. We weren't peaceniks; honestly, I think all the unleavened brutality of the cartoons got tedious after a short while and we were starved for something that suggested creativity beyond how best to murder a cat. Thinking back, I wonder if these cartoons had anything to do with how cat abuse is still played for comedy in movies--I mean, you can't hurt them, right? The thing that's tempting about reviewing the new Tom and Jerry is to not take it very seriously. There's enough to skewer, after all, without bothering to engage it. Yet real people worked on this, an entire animation company's creative capital was spent on doing everything they could to honour the questionable source material (and they do a really good job), and now here it is, the second attempt at a feature-length Tom and Jerry movie in almost 30 years, ostensibly landing as some sort of family entertainment designed to make your kids docile and pacific for 100 minutes. Honestly, I don't think it's worth the damage it potentially does. I mean, you can feed your children paint chips, too. And it'll fill 'em up! But the cancer is something to consider.

Coming 2 America (2021)

*/****
starring Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, Jermaine Fowler, Wesley Snipes
screenplay by Kenya Barris and Barry W. Blaustein & David Sheffield
directed by Craig Brewer

by Walter Chaw I don't understand Craig Brewer's Coming 2 America, probably because I don't understand John Landis's Coming to America, either. For me, they are both artifacts of an alien culture where the references are obscure and the humour is arcane. I spent most of my life thinking the first film was making fun of Africans, only to learn that for a generation of Black creatives, the film was a rare example of positive, even admiring, representation of Africans in the American popular culture. I think that's true; I also know the fish-out-of-water machinations of Coming to America's plot--the cheap sex jokes, the gay terror, the burlesque of it--rubbed me the wrong way then and still do. But there's a sweetness to Akeem (Eddie Murphy), isn't there? These films are decidedly not for me. I do trust people with vital voices like Ryan Coogler, who apparently loved the first film and had his own ideas about a sequel--and I would say the analogue I can find while I'm grasping for one is the reception of Short Round in Temple of Doom, which I initially rejected with horror but now embrace as one of the few positive Asian representations in that same American popular culture. Strange bedfellows, Shorty and Prince Akeem, but there you have it.

Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)

****/****
screenplay by Qui Nguyen & Adele Lim
directed by Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada

by Walter Chaw I've thought a lot lately about quitting, and seriously, this thing I've done over the last twenty-some years--this thing that started, ultimately, because I was a kid who couldn't speak the language and wanted desperately to belong to something that would never have me on my terms. I've thought about quitting, and it's a dangerous thing for someone like me to think that way. Movies were a thing I loved that never betrayed me, never abandoned me, whenever there was pain or confusion, or something I needed to work through; this was the art form that was primary for me as a catalyst for introspection. There's literature and music and poetry, of course, yet film could encompass all of those things. It's saved my life a time or two. I thought I had a place among others who loved it like me, but no one loves it like me--people love it like they love it. Or they just use it because they've failed at everything else and don't have the introspection to feel despair. When you give yourself over to an idea of affiliation through the appreciation of objects, you're doomed to disappointment and loneliness. When a person like me thinks about quitting, he's thinking about cutting the line that connects him to his life. I've been thinking about quitting, because what's the point of any of it when your rope is tied to a quintessence of dust? I don't trust this anymore.

Supernova (2021)

****/****
starring Colin Firth, Stanley Tucci
written and directed by Harry Macqueen

by Walter Chaw Tusker (Stanley Tucci) is an author of some minor renown who has a way with a toast and a loving, if sometimes crabby, relationship with his husband, Sam (Colin Firth). Sam is a concert pianist of even more minor renown whom Tusker teases at a diner along the route of a holiday they're taking in the English countryside by telling a waitress that Sam will be glad to sign an autograph for her if she likes. It's clear the poor woman doesn't have the first idea who Sam is, but she's very polite about it. Sam asks why Tusker does things like this when Tusker admits that half the time he doesn't get any joy out of it. Tusker says, "For the other half of the time." In his film Supernova, writer-director Harry Macqueen's script is consistently like this: understated, beautifully observed, intensely human. It's a two-hander with two of the absolute best actors on the planet, so how much script and direction do they need? However much it is, Macqueen gives them just enough. I love the way Sam says "Tusker" like "Tosca," the Puccini opera, but I love it because that's the way, accent or no, your name will evolve with your partner over a life together. It's not a nickname, it's a secret language. After 24 years, no one says "Walter" like my wife says it. It's subtle, but I hear it. I know the contours of it in her voice like I know the curve of her hip when I sleep next to her. The film opens with Sam and Tusker bickering, first about a map, then about what station they're listening to. When Donovan's "Catch the Wind" comes on the radio and Tusker, to cool the tension a bit, cajoles Sam into singing along, well, I fell in love with them. Tusker and Sam are real people.

Shadow in the Cloud (2021)

***/****
starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Beulah Koae, Taylor John Smith, Nick Robinson
written by Max Landis and Roseanne Liang
directed by Roseanne Liang

by Walter Chaw Roseanne Liang's Shadow in the Cloud opens with a vintage training cartoon for WWII flyboys about the dangers of gremlins clogging their bombers' works, indicating that whatever this film seems like it's going to be about, it's going to have a monster in it. And it's inevitable, once you know that, for you to think about how one of the episodes recreated for Twilight Zone: The Movie was "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," in which a gremlin on the wing of a plane terrorizes a nervous flier. And then how John Landis co-directed that film (though not that segment) and, through unimaginable carelessness compounded by his unfettered ego and well-documented lack of a moral compass, instructed a helicopter pilot to fly too low over illegal pyrotechnics, resulting in the chopper's crash and the brutal death of leading man Vic Morrow and child actors Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen. Child actors who shouldn't have been working at that time of night due to labour laws, as it happens, but, shhh!: an artiste is at work. It's all on video (Zapruder-esque footage of the crash aired multiple times on the 6 o'clock news), there was a trial with damning testimony, the film's producers--including Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy--fled the country and refused to testify (because, in Spielberg's case, he was "too important" to do so (the judge agreed)), and then, the world the way that it is, Landis got off. He even went to Morrow's funeral uninvited to spew some blubbery words, and now, in the late-Leni Reifenstahl phase of his career, he's treated like an elder statesman allowed to reframe his legacy. Let me help you with that. His legacy is three things, each of them true: he is the director of An American Werewolf in London and a couple of obnoxious comedies people like for some reason; he is a murderer; and he is the father of one of the all-too-predictably worst people on the planet.

Palmer (2021) + Music (2021)

PALMER
*/****
starring Justin Timberlake, Juno Temple, Alisha Wainwright, June Squibb
written by Cheryl Guerrero
directed by Fisher Stevens

MUSIC
ZERO STARS/****
starring Kate Hudson, Leslie Odom Jr., Maddie Ziegler, Hector Elizondo
screenplay by Sia & Dallas Clayton
directed by Sia

by Walter Chaw I feel like I've seen Fisher Stevens's well-intentioned Palmer dozens of times in the last three months alone. This version takes a few half-hearted stabs at social relevance with a heartfully-plucked acoustic guitar on the soundtrack but is finally nothing more than Justin Timberlake's latest shot at movie stardom. He's going deep as Palmer, fresh out of prison with a gruff attitude and a neckbeard denoting his impoverished status, reminding largely that his best role isn't the one where he plays a guy married to Carey Mulligan in Inside Llewyn Davis, but the one where he lip-syncs The Killers' "All These Things That I've Done" in Southland Tales. The familiar movements: Palmer has to get laid, get a job, and become the guardian to a moppet, who saves him. He's got a hard shell, that Palmer, though the hint of a grin halfway through as he's driving his catalyst-towards-redemption to school hints that underneath his hard shell, there's a big ol' softy. The twist is that the moppet is non-gender-conforming Sam (Ryder Allen), who likes to wear pink, put barrettes in his hair, and have tea parties with the girls in his class. He also hates football but lives in the south, and Palmer used to be a bigshot high-school football player. Man, what a conundrum in which Palmer's found himself. A dadgum conundrum's what it is.

Willy's Wonderland (2021) - VOD

½*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Emily Tosta, Ric Reitz, Beth Grant
written by G.O. Parsons
directed by Kevin Lewis

by Walter Chaw Kevin Lewis's high-concept Nicolas Cage-vs.-Chuck E. Cheese thriller Willy's Wonderland misses because it believes it can't miss. Star Cage has built a career for himself as that weirdo who will do stupid movies, and here he is playing The Janitor, a man of no words who cleans things up. A real contempt for the audience roils off this garbage, the belief that there need be no real effort expended in the creation of this product as long as there's enough Nic Cage doing dumb shit as bizarrely as possible. It's lazy. There's one long exposition dump towards the beginning of it, delivered by a somehow and sorely overmatched Emily Tosta, about Satanic rituals and stuff at the local theme restaurant, and honestly, it was all done better in that video game "Five Nights at Freddy's", where the reason for the robot characters springing to homicidal life isn't really addressed at all. It's painfully bad, Willy's Wonderland, in exactly the way things are bad when a bunch of bros get together to capitalize on a phenomenon they can't begin to understand and couldn't be bothered to interrogate. Cage + animatronic monsters? As William Hurt once asked, "How do you fuck that up?"

Sundance '21: We're All Going to the World's Fair

***/****
starring Anna Cobb, Michael J. Rogers
written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun

by Walter Chaw We spend our teen years--and, if we're not careful, our entire lives--imagining ourselves a player in a grand, romantic storyline where everything that happens has meaning, every misdeed receives justice, and every moment of grace is returned in kind. We need to feel like there's more to this than just chaos and meaningless suffering. Most of all, we need to believe that we have some control over how things turn out on both a personal level and a cosmic one, too. The alternative, after all, tends to be despair. I suspect the reason Boomers are the majority demographic in the Q-nonsense is their fear of a world in which they suddenly understand nothing requires some sort of recourse, no matter how tortured.

Judas and the Black Messiah (2021)

**½/****
starring Daniel Kaluuya, LaKeith Stanfield, Jesse Plemons, Martin Sheen
screenplay by Will Berson & Shaka King
directed by Shaka King

by Walter Chaw Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah is a fantastic Vietnam War movie that is not simultaneously a fantastic biopic of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. It reminded me a lot, and directly, of Brian De Palma's moral opera Casualties of War, which first challenged me to reckon with the American military not as a source of global good but as the perpetrators of atrocity at the whim of an inexorable capitalist, expansionist empire hiding behind the cowl of religion and white supremacy. In that film, '80s emblem of white, "compassionate" conservatism Michael J. Fox plays a green soldier who turns whistleblower as the witness to the misdeeds of his rapacious, brutal company commander, (Sean Penn). Based, like Judas and the Black Messiah, on true events, Casualties of War, again like King's film, sees white America as engaged in war crimes against minority populations. Alas, like De Palma's indisputably powerful piece, King's film is a better cultural self-excoriation than it is an examination of whatever's embedded in the American character that sees the flaying of Black (and Asian) bodies as both inevitable and isolated throughout our short history. In each film, there is the implication that justice of a sort has been served: in the one with trial and imprisonment for the malefactors, in the other (Judas and the Black Messiah) with the reported real-life suicide of the rat in Fred Hampton's cupboard. Neither movie really reckons with the growing silence of minority voices in our discourse.

Sundance '21: Strawberry Mansion

****/****
starring Penny Fuller, Kentucker Audley, Grace Glowicki, Reed Birney
written and directed by Albert Birney & Kentucker Audley

by Walter Chaw Strawberry Mansion is very much like a live-action "Adventure Time", perhaps doomed, like Pendleton Ward's existentialist/surrealist masterpiece, to a long road to appreciation as something emotionally incisive rather than something especially but merely unconventional. Of all the antecedents it boasts (add eXistenZ, Alphaville, Tom Schiller's Nothing Lasts Forever, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Douglas Adams's work, and, um, Laura to the mix), however, Strawberry Mansion finally reminds me most of the Oliver Stone-produced miniseries "Wild Palms" in both its literal execution and the low thrum of underlying paranoia about the commodification of dream sleep. The danger is great that a stew as heady as this will be ponderous at best, indecipherable at worst, but it's delivered with a confident, even light touch by co-writers/co-directors Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney. As odd as it seems on the surface, the picture, again like "Adventure Time", has easy-to-argue themes and is guided by what feels like real, cathartic pathos. Strawberry Mansion's aggressive artifice actually enhances its emotional authenticity. I love this film.

Possessor (2020) + Freaky (2020); Freaky (2020) [Killer Switch Edition] - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code

Possessor Uncut
****/****
starring Christopher Abbott, Andrea Riseborough, Rossif Sutherland, Jennifer Jason Leigh
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

FREAKY
**½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Katie Finneran, Alan Ruck
written by Michael Kennedy & Christopher Landon
directed by Christopher Landon

by Walter Chaw "You've gone strange on me," Ava (Tuppence Middleton) says to her boyfriend Colin (Christopher Abbott) one morning when he, frisky in the kitchen, reacts to her rejection of his advances with an expression that's impossible to read. Colin has gone strange. He really isn't himself. Ava is the daughter of a wealthy and powerful man, John Parse (Sean Bean), who has earned wealthy and powerful enemies, and though he's surrounded himself with all of the things wealth can buy, including a reasonable level of separation from the rabble, he's vulnerable to the mistakes he's made as the bad father he knows himself to be. I appreciate that his name derives from a word meaning "parts" or, colloquially, a deconstruction of a whole into the small, individual components of which it is composed. Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor has both nothing and everything to do with Ava and John and Colin; it is a multitude I haven't been able to shake for days, and so I watched Possessor a second time to try to exorcise it from me. I don't think it worked. Time will tell. Possessor is a science-fiction film the way Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a science-fiction film, and a horror movie the way Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a horror movie, but what it most resembles is Kathryn Bigelow's nightmare chimera of the two, Strange Days. All of these movies make you sick (heartsick, soulsick, sick-sick), but Possessor has about it the massive, impersonal nihilism of Philip K. Dick. We are cogs in a machine, and the machine is broken. But also it never worked in the first place. The picture is a true fable of our deconstruction.

Sundance '21: Violation

****/****
starring Madeleine Sims-Fewer, Anna Maguire, Jesse LaVercombe, Obi Abili
written and directed by Madeleine Sims-Fewer & Dusty Mancinelli

by Walter Chaw Just the image of a man, naked, fighting for his life against a clothed assailant after a sexually-compromised engagement feels by itself something like rebellion. Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer's Violation isn't the first in the struggle, but it's a powerful addition to a fulsome rape-revenge subgenre that, with classics like Abel Ferrara's Ms. 45, Lars Von Trier's Dogville, and Meir Zarchi's I Spit on Your Grave leading a to-this-point male-dominated field, has always had something on its mind about the way women are brutalized in a society that sees them mainly as appendages for male desire. What I like best about Violation, though, isn't its similarities to modern examples, but rather its relationship (not unlike Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring) to ancient examples such as Medea and Atreus. Indeed, the film lands somewhere between the two: the House of Atreus cursed because of a rape and playing out through the rendering and surreptitious cannibalism that Violation makes distaff through Medea's vengeful filicide (at least in the Euripedes telling). Violation is ancient Greek, too, in the pulling of atrocity into the immediate comparison to not the indifference of the natural world, but the transformative viciousness that animates it. Things are always in a state of violent flux; it's nature's lone promise. And this cosmological tendency towards equilibrium is only achieved through the passing through of distant polarities. The road to "fine" leads through bliss and blood.