GRETA (US/South Korea/China/Ireland - 2019) Directed by Neil Jordan. Written by Ray Wright and Neil Jordan. Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Chloe Grace Moretz, Maika Monroe, Stephen Rea, Colm Feore, Zawe Ashton, Jeff Hiller, Jessica Preddy, Thaddeus Daniels. (R, 98 mins) Best known for 1986's MONA LISA, 1992's THE CRYING GAME, and 1994's INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan has all the cache that comes with being a respected, Oscar-nominated director, but his career as a whole has been pretty hit-or-miss. Sure, he's also made fine films like 1996's MICHAEL COLLINS, 1997's THE BUTCHER BOY, 2002's THE GOOD THIEF, and 2010's little-seen ONDINE, and he created the acclaimed 2011-2013 Showtime series THE BORGIAS, but he's also got plenty of clunkers taking up space on his IMDb page, among them 1988's HIGH SPIRITS, one of the worst comedies of its decade, 1989's WE'RE NO ANGELS, a justifiably forgotten exercise in shameless mugging for Robert De Niro and Sean Penn, 1999's IN DREAMS, and 2007's embarrassingly bad Jodie Foster vigilante thriller THE BRAVE ONE. The box office success of INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE aside, Jordan typically doesn't fare well when he's in genre journeyman mode. With that in mind, one might approach GRETA, his first big-screen effort since his intermittently interesting 2013 vampire film BYZANTIUM, with some trepidation. A throwback to the sort of SINGLE WHITE FEMALE-esque, "(blank)-from-Hell" psycho-thrillers that were epidemic in the 1990s, GRETA is fun in a check-your-brain-at-the-door kind of way. To its credit, it isn't delusional enough to take itself too seriously, but at the same time, it can't just do some of the stupid shit it does and let Jordan off the hook just because he's a respected filmmaker slumming in a lurid B thriller that's significantly gussied-up by an overqualified star.
Frances McCullen (Chloe Grace Moretz) is a quiet old soul from Boston living in NYC with her bratty, spoiled friend Erica (Maika Monroe of IT FOLLOWS) in a spacious Tribeca loft given to Erica as a graduation gift by her wealthy father. A recent Smith College graduate working as a server in an upscale restaurant, Frances keeps her distance from her workaholic dad back home (Colm Feore) and is still processing her grief following her mom's death from cancer a year earlier. After work one evening, Frances spots an abandoned handbag on the subway and takes it home. Refusing to indulge Erica's suggestion that they keep the wad of cash that's inside and toss the bag, Frances checks an ID in the purse and the next morning, does the right thing and returns it to its owner in Brooklyn. That owner is Greta Hadig (Isabelle Huppert), a retired piano teacher. She's grateful for Frances' act of kindness, invites her in for coffee, and the pair quickly form a surrogate mother-daughter relationship when Frances, still missing her beloved mother, learns that Greta is a lonely widow whose estranged daughter is at a music conservatory in Greta's native France. Ditching a night of clubbing with an incredulous and seemingly insensitive Erica to have a quiet dinner with Greta, things come to a screeching halt when Greta has Frances grab some candles in the other room and she opens the wrong cabinet, finding over a dozen identical handbags with Post-It notes with the names of who found them, including one that reads "Frances McCullen."
Quickly realizing it's a sick scam and understandably creeped out, Frances feigns a sudden illness and leaves, immediately deciding that Greta is bad news. But Greta wants a friend and won't be ignored. She texts Frances hundreds of times, leaves a ton of messages on their home phone (call it nitpicking, but nothing says "directed and co-written by a 69-year-old" like a Tribeca twenty-something with a landline), and starts showing up at Frances' job, both inside and standing outside, motionless, intimidatingly staring at the restaurant for the entire duration of Frances' shift. She shows up outside the apartment, then texts Frances a series of pics that show she's following Erica and intending to harm her. Frances also discovers some secrets about Greta's family, starting with the fact that she's Hungarian and pretending to be French (which doesn't really have any bearing on anything). Of course, there isn't enough evidence for the cops to do anything, though Greta eventually causes a scene at the restaurant and gets arrested. She's promptly released, and the pair reach a tentative truce until Greta goes further off the deep end, hellbent on ensuring she has Frances all to herself.
The kind of film that probably would've been the #1 movie in America for three weeks if this was March of 1999 instead of 2019, GRETA is dumber than a box of rocks, but there's no denying that it's entertaining. Sure, one can complain about the rampant stupidity of the characters. Once Erica figures out Greta is stalking her and confronts her on a crowded bus, what does she then do? Of course, she gets off the bus packed to the gills with potential witnesses and heads straight down the nearest dark alley alone. And when a psycho is holding you captive in a hidden room in their house and you manage to briefly get the upper hand via an impromptu finger amputation-by-cookie cutter, where do you run? Where else? The dark, cobweb-filled basement with no exit! Moretz isn't really required to do much more than be distraught and frazzled, while Monroe doesn't have a whole lot to do but the arc of her character is probably the most legitimately unpredictable element (frequent Jordan star Stephen Rea also turns up in the third act as a private eye hired by Frances' father). But GRETA wouldn't be much without the heroic efforts of the great Huppert, the iconic French legend with a record 16 Cesar Award nominations over a career dating back to 1971, and who's no stranger to throwing herself into a character, as anyone who's seen Michael Haneke's THE PIANO TEACHER and her Oscar-nominated performance in Paul Verhoeven's ELLE can attest. Taking what's a spiritual successor to the kind of "horror hag" roles that gave a major second wind to the careers of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Olivia de Havilland and others in the 1960s when they began aging out of traditional leading lady gigs and running with it, Huppert is off the chain throughout GRETA. Initially coming off as vulnerable yet vaguely sinister (you know something's up when she's having coffee with Frances and they're interrupted by a pounding that she blames on "the neighbors"), Huppert goes from zero-to-batshit pretty quickly, refusing to take no for an answer ("Everybody needs a friend!"), poisoning an elderly dog, furiously spitting gum in Frances' hair, flipping tables over in a posh restaurant while ranting in Hungarian, and pirouetting around her house while she disposes of an unwanted intruder. It's a role that's mostly beneath someone of Huppert's esteemed caliber, but she doesn't treat it as such, knowing exactly what kind of movie she's in and classing it up simply by probably relishing the opportunity to go over-the-top as the villain in a commercial thriller. GRETA doesn't hold up under much scrutiny, but it moves briskly and has a game star carrying it on her shoulders. Who ever thought we'd get to see Isabelle Huppert headlining a wide release in 2019?
THE PRODIGY (US - 2019) Directed by Nicholas McCarthy. Written by Jeff Buhler. Cast: Taylor Schilling, Jackson Robert Scott, Colm Feore, Peter Mooney, Paul Fauteux, Brittany Allen, Paula Boudreau, Olunike Adeyili, Elisa Moolecherry, Michael Dyson. (R, 92 mins) From 1956's THE BAD SEED and 1960's VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED to 1976's THE OMEN, 1984's CHILDREN OF THE CORN and 1993's THE GOOD SON to the modern era with 2009's ORPHAN to name just a select few, the "creepy kid" has been one of horror's more durable subgenres throughout the decades. Mario Bava's final film, 1977's SHOCK, released in the US in 1979 as BEYOND THE DOOR II, also had a memorable creepy kid in Marco (David Colin, Jr.), who's become possessed by the spirit of his dead father. SHOCK had an unforgettably effective jump scare in a hallway involving a practical effect pulled off simply by smart camera placement, and that moment is replicated by director Nicholas McCarthy in his latest film THE PRODIGY, the newest addition to the creepy kid pantheon. It's clearly meant as an affectionate homage, as McCarthy knows his horror history and has obviously seen SHOCK. He's also seen THE EXORCIST and THE EXORCIST III, both of which are invoked to various degrees in THE PRODIGY, but McCarthy knows better than to take the film down those familiar and over-traveled roads. Jeff Buhler (THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN) is the credited screenwriter (he also wrote the upcoming remakes of PET SEMATARY, JACOB'S LADDER and THE GRUDGE), but I'm curious how much of this was rewritten by McCarthy. Discounting his hired gun gig helming the 2017 Investigation Discovery docu-drama FINAL VISION, McCarthy's films thus far--2012's THE PACT, 2014's AT THE DEVIL'S DOOR, and "Easter," his segment of the 2016 horror anthology HOLIDAYS--all share common themes of strong women, usually mothers or someone (an aunt, an older sister) put in the position of being responsible for children, perhaps going to great lengths to protect them, and some level of dysfunction or trauma that haunts a family over generations, a curse often passed down like a genetic flaw. These recurring themes turn up throughout THE PRODIGY, which takes the "creepy kid" trope and incorporates it into what must be considered McCarthy's obsession. THE PACT is one of the best horror films of the last ten years, and while AT THE DEVIL'S DOOR and "Easter" weren't bad, they didn't live up to the potential McCarthy showed with his debut. The uncompromising and unpredictable THE PRODIGY feels, seven years later, like the logical follow-up to THE PACT.
It's easy to fall into a trap of thinking THE PRODIGY is showing its cards too early, but it's obviously misdirection by design on the part of the filmmakers. A cross-cutting prologue depicts a young woman (Brittany Allen) escaping from the farmhouse of a rural Ohio serial killer (Paul Fauteux) who amputates the right hands of his female victims. At the same time she leads authorities to his middle-of-nowhere home and he's killed in a blast of gunfire by the cops, a baby boy named Miles is born in Pennsylvania to Sarah (Taylor Schilling) and John Blume (Peter Mooney). Even before he's a year old, Miles is saying "Da-Da," and his cognitive abilities are accelerated well beyond his age as he enters his toddler and pre-school years. By the age of eight, Miles (Jackson Robert Scott, best known as the doomed Georgie in 2017's IT) is a genius requiring a special school, though Sarah is concerned that his development is behind in other areas, such as his inability to adapt in social situations with other children. Miles has moments where he isn't himself, and when a babysitter (Elisa Moolecherry) is seriously injured in a basement trap clearly set by Miles, he says he has no recollection of anything. He starts having bad dreams and Sarah records him talking in his sleep in what she initially assumes is gibberish but what's later revealed to be a form of Hungarian but in a rarely-used and archaic dialect. As his actions grow more sinister, he tries to explain to his parents that he sometimes doesn't feel like he's in his own body, to the point where Sarah and John can no longer ignore that something is very wrong with Miles.
Based on that synopsis, you're probably assuming this is another rote possession film but that's just the set-up. It's not a spoiler to say that Miles' body is inhabited by the spirit of the serial killer, as it's plainly spelled out in the opening sequence. But McCarthy's interests lie elsewhere, whether it's the escalating tension of the situation and the various stylistic ways that it's conveyed (great use of mirrors, windows, and shadows),or how Sarah's distrust of her own son grows stronger and more panicked with each passing scene (John, still silently haunted by the abuse he suffered at the hands of his own father, is largely ineffectual when it comes to handling Miles; it's also John who serves as the requisite idiot, picking the worst possible time to tell Miles that they're taking him to a mental institution). As THE PRODIGY goes on, it ventures into some places that are pretty dark and disturbing for a commercial horror outing, particularly in one sequence--a one-on-one "regression" therapy session with Miles and a psychiatrist (Colm Feore)--that provoked audible gasps from the audience (trust me, you'll never be able to predict where their conversation ends up going, and both Scott and Feore play it perfectly), and in a shocking final act where Sarah resorts to extreme methods to help her son.
If you've seen McCarthy's past films, all of those concerns reappear here--dark family secrets, abuse and trauma, the notion of a spirit overtaking a body and "wearing it like a costume," as memorably stated in AT THE DEVIL'S DOOR, and a strong, determined mother who will stop at nothing to save her child--with the "creepy kid" tropes coming into play in unexpectedly subversive ways. THE PRODIGY also benefits from a strong and believable performance by Schilling and a remarkable one from young Scott, who fearlessly dives into this, getting to say and do things that earn the R rating, and he has a penetrating glare that isn't easily shaken, more than earning his rightful place among the horror genre's great creepy kids. McCarthy is one of horror's most promising filmmakers, and while THE PRODIGY is his first effort to get a nationwide rollout, he remains a figure that serious students of horror have largely kept to themselves, And to that end, I'm glad he hasn't quite broken out into the mainstream, opting (thus far) to create a body of work that chances playing the long game instead of directing something that will be forgotten two weeks after it's released. Like, say, the upcoming remakes of PET SEMATARY and CHILD'S PLAY, two trailers that preceded THE PRODIGY.
ANON (Germany/US/Canada - 2018) Written and directed by Andrew Niccol. Cast: Clive Owen, Amanda Seyfried, Colm Feore, Mark O'Brien, Sonya Walger, Joe Pingue, Iddo Goldberg, Charlie Ebbs, Damon Runyan, Sara Mitich, Doug Murray, Jean Michel Le Gal, Douglas Stolfi. (Unrated, 100 mins) The Netflix pickup ANON finds filmmaker Andrew Niccol back in the realm of high-concept sci-fi that briefly established him as the Next Big Thing in the 1990s. He's best known for writing and directing 1997's GATTACA and he received an Oscar nomination for scripting 1998's THE TRUMAN SHOW. Since then, Niccol's career has been on an erratic trajectory, splitting time between further explorations in sci-fi like the 2002 Al Pacino flop S1M0NE and 2011's terrible IN TIME, and political films like 2005's LORD OF WAR and 2015's barely-released drone treatise GOOD KILL, which was overshadowed by the more successful sleeper hit EYE IN THE SKY. He also tried his hand at big-budget YA sci-fi with 2013's THE HOST, but 20 years on, Niccol still hasn't matched the one-two punch of GATTACA and THE TRUMAN SHOW. His latest film ANON explores themes previously seen in his earlier sci-fi films but with middling and repetitive results. The production design is superb and it's a very expensive-looking film, but after a promising start, Niccol's script devolves into a string of rote cliches and tired genre tropes, becoming the kind of film that doesn't even bother following its own internal logic.
Set in a dystopian near-future (is there any other kind?), ANON presents a world where everyone's POV is one of constant information. Pass a stranger on the street, you get a readout of their name, age, and vital stats. Order a hot dog from a food truck, and the nutritional information is displayed. It's a totalitarian practice that makes crime solving easy for glum, burned-out cop Sal Frieland (Clive Owen). He can simply look at a victim, access the playback of the last ten seconds of their life, and see what the victim saw. But after coming across several corpses whose digital memories have been hacked and scrambled, it's clear to Frieland and his boss Gattis (Colm Feore) that they're dealing with a "ghost," a face without a name that goes about undetected, their stats and identity not in "The Ether," a term used to describe the seemingly limitless digital reality that holds the data and images and the place in which they venture to solve crimes. The only thing they know for sure is that the killer is female, and the trail eventually leads to "Anon" (Amanda Seyfried, also in IN TIME), a mercenary hacker who specializes in erasing memories and playback that a client wants gone, be it criminal activities, extramarital affairs, etc. But Anon's clients are turning up dead, so Frieland goes undercover as an investment broker for over a month, establishing an identity and memories outside of his existence as a cop and then seeking out "memory hackers" in the hopes that he'll draw Anon out of hiding, setting himself up as bait to catch her in the act. This ultimately leads to Frieland's perception of reality becoming dangerously skewed as Anon--or someone--gets inside his head and starts toying with his mind.
After an intriguing set-up, ANON soon demonstrates little urgency settling into a groove of Philip K. Dick worship combined with Niccol's usual sci-fi fixations of identity, individuality, and privacy. It all culminates in a heavy-handed lecture from Anon for a final scene, and the ultimate reveal of the guilty party is largely a non-event since we don't even spend enough time with the character in question for it to pack much resonance. And the longer ANON goes on, the more careless it becomes. Every inconsistency or deux ex machina that it pulls out of its ass can be explained away with "He got in my memory...that's what he wanted me to think!" The biggest eye-roller comes after Frieland spends over a month undercover and hires Anon to do a job and the cybersecurity experts working with the police are able to begin tracking her. After three days back as a cop, Gattis tells Frieland he has to go back undercover and re-establish contact with Anon, which concerns Frieland since his most recent memories and experiences will show him being a cop doing cop things and investigating her. "We'll put a patch over it!" Gattis says, as if Frieland has asked him a silly question. A patch? If you could just "put a patch over it" and mask the memories, then why make Frieland spend over a month working as an investment broker, creating a fake girlfriend for him to cheat on with a real hooker in order to give Anon a specific memory to digitally wipe when they could've just faked it all along? A patch? Owen treads on familiar ground here, with Frieland essentially being a cop version of his CHILDREN OF MEN character. Niccol doesn't really do Owen any favors, giving Frieland a checklist of cliched baggage--he's an alcoholic, his kid was killed in a tragic accident, and he's got a bitchy and unsympathetic ex-wife (Sonya Walger) who's moved on--that's supposed to function as backstory. ANON certainly isn't terrible, but it's tired and uninspired, feeling like the kind of sci-fi movie that should've hit theaters in 2002 or thereabouts. In a way, Netflix is the perfect venue for it, since there's a good chance at least some people will mistake it for a feature-length BLACK MIRROR episode.
About a decade ago, British filmmaker Christopher Smith seemed to be establishing himself as a promising genre figure with the subway tunnel horror flick CREEP (2005), the office-team-building-retreat slasher film SEVERANCE (2006), the lost-at-sea mindfuck TRIANGLE (2009), and the medieval witchcraft saga BLACK DEATH (2011). Smith was building some momentum (SEVERANCE and TRIANGLE quickly found cult followings, and the excellent BLACK DEATH got some critical acclaim), but things sort-of sputtered out for him. He seemed to settle into hired-gun mode with the 2012 miniseries LABYRINTH, based on the Kate Mosse novel. LABYRINTH wasn't seen in the US until it aired on the CW in 2014, and he followed that with an unexpected departure in the barely-released 2014 family comedy GET SANTA, the biggest outlier in his filmography so far. The modern-day noir DETOUR is a return to form of sorts for writer/director Smith. He gets to play with time and linear structure a bit and he explores themes of doppelgangers that figured so prominently in TRIANGLE. And he allows himself some room to show off a little by throwing in some obvious split-screen shout-outs to Brian De Palma. For a while, Smith gets dangerously close to making DETOUR a little too smug and cute for its own good, right down to main character Harper (Tye Sheridan, grown up a bit since JOE and MUD) having a poster for the 1966 Paul Newman movie HARPER on his bedroom wall and later seen watching Edgar G. Ulmer's 1945 Poverty Row cheapie classic DETOUR on TV.
But just when you're about to justifiably give up, Smith talks you off the ledge and DETOUR's gimmicky structure actually starts showing a purpose, and the characters have a lot more going on under the surface. The film gets better as it goes along, really reaching its stride in the second act before the third, where it doesn't quite fizzle out but offers one improbable plot twist too many. Harper is a rich California college kid whose mother is in a coma after a car accident and whose stepdad Vincent (Stephen Moyer) seems to already have a mistress and is counting the days until his wife finally dies. Out drinking at a shithole bar in a rough part of town, Harper makes the acquaintance of Johnny Ray (Emory Cohen of THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES), an abusive, bullying psychopath with a long-suffering stripper girlfriend named Cherry (Bel Powley of THE DIARY OF A TEENAGE GIRL). Drunk Harper talks about hypothetically paying Johnny $20,000 to follow Vincent to Vegas and kill him. He's understandably caught by surprise when Johnny and Cherry turn up at his front door the next morning ready to hit the road and whack his stepfather. Harper tries to reason with Johnny but Johnny's the kind of unstable lunatic who's always looking for a fight, won't take no for an answer and no matter what you say, it's wrong ("You wanna fuck her?" Johnny asks Harper about Cherry. Harper: "No!" Johnny: "What, you think she's ugly?"). At this point, Smith breaks the film into two diverging narratives--one showing Harper, Johnny, and Cherry heading to Vegas to kill Vincent and a second where Harper turns his back and Johnny and goes back into his house, choosing to confront Vincent himself. Both narratives head in unexpected directions that keep DETOUR consistently interesting before settling into a more conventional mode for the finale. There's some nice twists involving the characters and their motivations, and Irish actor John Lynch (Shades in Richard Stanley's 1990 masterpiece HARDWARE) has a memorable turn channeling GANGS OF NEW YORK-style Daniel Day-Lewis as an enraged pimp to whom Johnny owes $50K under the threat of taking Cherry away from him and selling her to a guy who'll keep her locked up and "use her for a hillbilly fuck-mat." Cape Town and other South African locations don't really convince as stand-ins for California or Nevada, but despite that and a few other missteps, DETOUR is a not-bad little thriller that fits nicely into the Smith oeuvre and should find some admirers on Blu-ray and streaming. Magnet released this on VOD and on five screens in the US to an abysmal opening weekend gross of $145. (R, 97 mins)
MEAN DREAMS (Canada/US - 2017)
There's a bit of a Terrence Malick-circa-BADLANDS vibe to this Canadian thriller shot in Sault Ste. Marie and set in the rural outskirts of upper peninsula Michigan. It's not just in its quiet opening shots of character walking through a cornfield, but in its tried-and-true lovers-on-the-run scenario. That sense of serene calm doesn't last long as young high-school dropout Jonas Ford (Josh Wiggins of MAX) toils in the fields on his family's on-life-support farm, dealing with an embittered dad (Joe Cobden) and an alcoholic mom (Vickie Papavs). He finally finds some light in his dark existence when he meets Casey Caraway (Sophie Nelisse of THE BOOK THIEF), a teenage girl who moved into the next house down the road with her widower father Wayne (the late Bill Paxton, in his next-to-last film), who's just been hired as a new cop in town. Wayne objects to all the time Casey's been spending with Jonas and makes it clear he's not welcome anymore, but things really escalate when Jonas, who has seen Wayne hiding a duffel bag full of drugs in his garage, intervenes when he catches Wayne beating Casey. Jonas goes to the police chief (Colm Feore), who completely blows him off, and ends up on an unintended ride-along after breaking into Wayne's garage and hiding under the tonneau cover of his truck bed as Wayne drives off for a meet with some dealers, kills them, and keeps the drugs and the money for himself. Through not the most plausible means, Jonas manages to get away with the money and takes off with Casey, with an enraged Wayne not far behind.
The script by Kevin Coughlin and Ryan Grassby doesn't offer much in the way of surprises, but director Nathan Morlando (CITIZEN GANGSTER) really establishes a moody, downbeat atmosphere of rural despair that gives its lovestruck heroes sufficient reason to impulsively run away. The romance moves a little too quickly and Jonas blows right by some red flags ("Do you lie a lot?" he asks, to which Casey replies "All the time"), and it has moments that strain credulity, like Jonas getting a nasty cut in his abdomen and Casey stitching it up and disinfecting it after robbing a pharmacy at gunpoint. The choking feeling of desperation and needing to get as far away as possible is made somewhat more plausible by Paxton's vicious performance as an all-around bad guy (his very presence in this is a shout-out to the 1992 cult movie ONE FALSE MOVE and 1998's A SIMPLE PLAN), easily one of the most despicable characters the beloved actor was ever tasked with playing. MEAN DREAMS doesn't have an original thought in its head, but it's well-made, Wiggins and Nelisse are appealing young stars, and Paxton always made anything better just by being in it. He'll be missed. (R, 105 mins)
