Film Freak Central

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival '22: Mother, May I? + Old Flame

MOTHER, MAY I?
*/****
starring Kyle Gallner, Holland Roden, Michael Giannone, Chris Mulkey
written and directed by Laurence Vannicelli

OLD FLAME
**½/****
starring Rebeca Robles, Andy Gershenzon
written and directed by Christopher Denham

by Walter Chaw Laurence Vannicelli's sophomore hyphenate feature, the two-hander Mother, May I?, feels timid given the richness of its premise and, for the places it's not willing to go, really has only enough going for it for a short--a proof of concept, maybe, a long trailer that hints at dark psychosexual undercurrents. At its current length, it all comes to nothing, a gothic horror about possession and maternal/filial relationships that has all the elements but not the will to put them together. I heard a description once of serious cognitive decline as having a slice of bread in one hand, a toaster in the other, a bottle of jam and a butter knife on the counter, and having no idea how any of it comes together. That's Mother, May I?, which finds Emmett (Kyle Gallner) and his fiance Anya (Holland Roden) tasked with cleaning out his recently-departed mother's expansive manse in the woods, complete with a reedy lake and an overly friendly neighbour, Bill (Chris Mulkey). It's rich, made richer by a mindfuck game Emmett and Anya play in which they set a timer and then force each other to speak truthfully about past traumas before it runs out. Emmett has a few: his mother abandoned him at some point in the past, orphaning him in her affections, and her death has left him nothing but a windfall in the eventual sale of the family reserve. During one of their ersatz therapy sessions, Anya playacts as Emmett's dead mom, and Emmett starts wondering if his mother hasn't actually taken over Anya's body when she doesn't snap out of it after the timer goes off.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival '22: Megalomaniac

***½/****
starring Eline Schumacher, Wim Willaert, Benjamin Ramon, Pierre Nisse
written and directed by Karim Ouelhaj

by Walter Chaw Belgian filmmaker Karim Ouelhaj's Megalomaniac joins Danish filmmaker Christian Taldrup's Speak No Evil as fresh additions to what feels like a new iteration of the "French New Extremity" subgenre coined by ARTFORUM's James Quandt, which flowered briefly at the turn of the 21^st century. Films of the loosely-defined movement dealt with the ugliest parts of France's social history, treating atrocities long thought better hidden with a frankness as unusual as the explicitness of the images. I love many of these films--Pascal Laugier's Martyrs and Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day, in fact, rank high among my all-time favourites, even though I almost never recommend them in polite company. Their violence is extreme and intimate. In place of catharsis, find only despair and self-loathing. I have felt this existential howl watching certain films of Bergman's--Tobe Hooper's, too. But I would say the French New Extremity caught the attention of the mainstream for the craft of its presentation and the care and intelligence with which the characters made to suffer were drawn. They're difficult to dismiss as exploitation or "foreign" in a pejorative sense. They're gruelling but artistically rigorous, making them difficult to diminish. I think of many of the genre pictures of South Korea like this, too: devastation exploitation flicks made by Steven Spielberg. And though credit is due the birthplace of the Marquis de Sade and Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol for finding another meat-spigot to turn at the dawn of our last fin de siècle, works by Lars von Trier (The House That Jack Built certainly and even Antichrist) and Fatih Akin's The Golden Glove suggest whatever was in the water is spreading.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival '22: All Jacked Up and Full of Worms

*/****
starring Phillip Andre Botello, Sammy Arechar, Betsey Brown, Trevor Dawkins
written and directed by Alex Phillips

by Walter Chaw A sub-, sub-, sub-genre of exploitation flicks--stuff like Jim Hosking's The Greasy Strangler--has cropped up seemingly out of nowhere in mainstream-adjacent spaces where it appears the only aim, or goal, is provocation. I watched The Greasy Strangler with irritation and impatience until a scene in which two characters shrieked "potato chips" at each other in incomprehensible accents broke me into helpless hysterics. I don't know if it's funny or its full-throated dedication to battering all defenses finally just worked. For what it's worth, the movie went back to being irritating and trying for me almost immediately. I have a different response to Jackass, a chaos agent provocateur that ultimately strikes at the heart of some real and touching truths about not necessarily healthy male relationships, but possibly the healthiest most male relationships are allowed to be. Nevertheless, there are similarities between stuff like it and The Greasy Strangler. Both proceed because there must be something that is next, not because there is a narrative that demands it or characters with motivations leading organically to another sequence. In that way, these films are not unlike life in all its arbitrary bullshit and oft-times malignant-seeming causes and potentially tragicomic effects. Exaggerating random vicissitudes as filtered through sentient existence could conceivably be considered satire at best or, you know, knowledge of some kind that might prove useful in providing perspective to those looking for meaning and structure in the universe. What I have trouble with is how often this stuff feels like the parts of Kevin Smith films--which is all of Kevin Smith's films now--that are puerile and embarrassing. Feature-length shit-monsters from Dogma.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival '22: Influencer

***/****
starring Sara Canning, Emily Tennant, Cassandra Naud, Rory J. Saper
written by Tesh Guttikonda & Kurtis David Harder
directed by Kurtis David Harder

by Walter Chaw Much like the higher-profile Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Kurtis David Harder's Influencer takes aim at Zoomers with a sharp eye for critical detail and an even sharper ear for cutting dialogue. It's plotted with machine-like precision and delivers a series of switches--and switch-backs--that aren't just amusing: they speak ironically to the very interchangeability of Influencer's stars that the film seeks to satirize. I don't know if this is intentional, but it's appreciated. I especially loved the subtle shots at both a culture that would "other" someone with a physical deformity and that same culture that would still "other" but "other for profit" the same deformity. That's some dour shit about the state of things, providing the film a bracing jolt of topical venom. It's not the murder and identity theft getting under your skin in Influencer, it's the full-frontal assault of the new beauty myth as it transitions from makeup conglomerates to social-media stars turning a side-hustle of self-objectification and narcissism into a six-digit lifestyle. There's a lot going on in this movie, in other words, though on its surface it's a fleet thriller with charismatic leads who manage to give their objectionable rakes a legible undercurrent of depth and humanity. Squint a little and Influencer is a sly update of de Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses, only one of the partners in this classist love triangle is eternally missing: a ghost in the worldwide machine.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival '22: Mother Superior

*½/****
starring Isabella Händler, Inge Maux, Jochen Nickel, Tim Werths
written and directed by Marie Alice Wolfszahn

by Walter Chaw Marie Alice Wolfszahn's Mother Superior is an overly familiar period piece about a young woman engaged as a caretaker for a mysterious and ailing older woman in a rambling country house--a plot most recently explored in the superlative Saint Maud and Sebastián Lelio's pretty good The Wonder, due out soon. It's possible to mine interest and value from a template so threadbare, but there's a built-in danger of playing with a premise the audience has likely already started to unravel as soon as the particulars are established. In Mother Superior, the young nurse is Sigrun (Isabella Händler), whom, we gather from the opening-credits sequence, is maybe the offspring of a Nazi breeding program. She goes to work as a nurse for creepy Baroness Heidenreich (Inge Maux), who is suffering from Parkinson's disease--though it only really manifests in some trembling when she tries to drink tea. Why would an aspiring anesthesiologist agree to be the hospice nurse for the Baroness? also-creepy caretaker Otto (Jochen Nickel) would like to know. Unfortunately, five minutes in, most everyone who's seen another movie would be able to tell him.

BHFF '18: Knife + Heart

Un couteau dans le coeur
***½/****
starring Vanessa Paradis, Nicolas Maury, Kate Moran, Jonathan Genet
screenplay by Yann Gonzalez, Cristiano Mangione
directed by Yann Gonzalez

by Walter Chaw Yann Gonzalez's Knife + Heart is a smart film by a smart filmmaker. It's a movie-lover's fugue, a tribute to the heyday of gay porn and the grindhouse theatres that showed it, a salute to editors, a shrine to multi-cultural myths about birds. It's a deep well with obvious pleasures, a film with a recognizable structure complete with solution that still manages to avoid the standard exposition and perfunctory resolution. The spiritual brother to Brian De Palma's Body Double (exploitative and sleazy and also commentary on exploitation and sleaze), it's a movie about looking that has as its central image a blind grackle--an extinct variety of the common pest that used to bring folks back from the dead by burning off the ever-after as it flew too close to the sun. Its central couple is gay-porn director Anne (Vanessa Paradis) and her editor and former lover Lois (Kate Moran), who churn out the sort of softcore masterpieces of art-film erotica favoured once upon a time by your Kenneth Angers, your Paul Morrisseys and Radley Metzgers. All of her work is autobiographical in some way. There's no line separating Anne's reality, nor her dreamlife, from the mindscreen of her movies.

BHFF '18: The Cannibal Club

O Clube dos Canibais
***/****
starring Ana Luiza Rios, Tavinho Teixeira, Zé Maria, Pedro Domingues
written and directed by Guto Parente

by Walter Chaw Guto Parente's The Cannibal Club is satire served grisly, sexy, slick, and unsubtle, an update in theme if not form of Paul Bartel's still-unsurpassed Eating Raoul--a fable of the class struggle eternal as the 1% literally feeds, as it is wont to do, on the other 99. The more things change, and all that; it's instructive to revisit Eating Raoul's opening narration about Hollywood, which seems to apply equally to every group of monkeys in pants: "Here sex hunger is reflected in every aspect of daily life...where random vice and amorality permeate every strata of society, and the barrier between food and sex has totally dissolved." For Parente, Bartel's murderous--and eventually cannibalistic--marrieds the Blands are Gilda and Otavio (Ana Luiza Rios and Tavinho Teixeira), a rich couple living on a sprawling estate in Fortaleza, Brazil, who go through an alarming number of low-income workers together. The young men are provided by an employment agency, seduced by the lady of the house, and at the moment of climax, murdered by Otavio (who's been jerking off in the wings), butchered, then eaten. Otavio is also a member of the titular club, where the hoi polloi of Brazilian corporate culture gathers to watch a graphic sex show that ends in the murder of the chained couple, who are then, likewise, served up in the Brazilian fashion: on skewers, shaved at the table. There's a hint of Peter Greenaway in that.

BHFF '18: Empathy Inc

*½/****
written by Mark Leidner
directed by Yedidya Gorsetman

by Walter Chaw More earnest than truly clever, Yedidya Gorsetman's shoestring Empathy Inc is a competently-made (save for one dialogue sequence where the actors are clearly on different sets) and reasonably efficient take on the Vic Morrow instalment of Twilight Zone: The Movie. If it ends up resembling more the Primer version of "The Prisoner of Benda", well, so be it. The picture starts well enough, as corporate middle-manager Joel (Zack Robidas) finds himself the scapegoat of a start-up's collapse, destitute and forced to move in with wife Jessica's (Kathy Searle) demonic parents (Charmaine Reedy and Fenton Lawless). An exceedingly irritating dinner sequence early on highlights Joel and Jessica's desperate need to move out, and so Joel invests a cool million of his father-in-law's cash in a VR tech that allows wealthy sociopaths to pretend to be poor. It's an empathy-graft, see, and it works for Joel, who doesn't seem to need it--and anyway, it's not clear why feigning homelessness would give the Trumps empathy for the homeless (it's like a starfish developing empathy for circus performers if you put it on a unicycle), but there you have it. Needless to say, the way the tech works is more Source Code than those goggles you slide your iPhone into. Well-performed if underwritten, Empathy Inc relies overmuch on extreme angles (probably to hide the lo-fi and found sets), though Gorsetman demonstrates a good sense of who to cast and how to use them to the best of their abilities. Too bad Jessica is an afterthought, alternately harridan and helpmeet, with her entire aspiring-actor subplot at once too clearly a metaphor for the masks we wear and too murky for any other purpose. The biggest mistake, however, is aiming for profundity when it should've been looking for ways to explore its concept. It says something when a Shane Carruth film is more fun than yours.

BHFF '18: Boo!

*/****
starring Jaden Piner, Rob Zabrecky, Aurora Perrineau, Charley Palmer Rothwell
written by Luke Jaden & Diane Michelle
directed by Luke Jaden

by Walter Chaw Luke Jaden's feature-length hyphenate debut (he co-wrote the script with Diane Michelle), Boo! is an insular family drama framed against a chain-letter premise involving one religious family's decision not to participate in paying a Halloween prank forward. What follows are a lot of jump scares and some on-the-nose dialogue that could have benefited, I think, from more workshopping. The problem is that the picture wants very badly to be about the toll of religious fundamentalism on the development of children (a well-taken point, of course), but it becomes the proselytizer itself with its straw-man of a bible-thumping patriarch, James (Rob Zabrecky), set up to bear the brunt of the film's sins. His constant references to the "good book" feel unnatural, rehearsed, what a movie evangelical would say. When his wife Elyse (Jill Marie Jones) reveals a tragedy in their past and her unwillingness to go to James at a point of crisis because of what he would say, it raises the question of how it is these people ended up together in the first place and why, exactly, Elyse has fallen from the flock, if in fact she's done so.

Brooklyn Horror Film Festival '18: An Introduction

by Walter Chaw Summer seems to be lasting longer, the weather in general is more severe. If the '80s were about apocalyptic fears around the proliferation of atomic weapons and an unstable President, the '10s are about those same fears multiplied by the corporatized destruction of the planet and, in a stealthy sort of way, the rise of the genuinely ignorant as the arbiters of culture and government. When George W. was President, I was interested in the defense that he seemed like the drunk uncle you'd have at a backyard BBQ. He didn't read much, trumpeted his "C" average in school, made up words, started a war because someone was mean to his daddy. Idiots found him relatable and non-threatening; "Conservative Party" developed a more literal definition. I liked to suggest the President be someone who read more than you, did things you couldn't do, was actually smart and not Fredo-smaht!. The only thing this thirtysomething percent of Americans who still think Trump is great--either cynically and opportunistically, or because they're really just stupider than fuck--were ever right about is that their elected leader is the ultimate "trigger" for people who are their betters. Like psychopathic juvies tormenting their unit nurse, they think it's worth it to distress them. It feels good and new, and as the fires grow higher, so, too, does their ardour for their golden calf.