THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME (US - 2020) Directed by Antonio Campos. Written by Antonio Campos and Paulo Campos. Cast: Tom Holland, Bill Skarsgard, Robert Pattinson, Mia Wasikowska, Riley Keough, Jason Clarke, Sebastian Stan, Haley Bennett, Harry Melling, Eliza Scanlen, Douglas Hodge, Kristin Griffith, Pokey LaFarge, David Atkinson, Michael Banks Repeta, Gregory Kelly, David Maldonado, Michael Harding, Lucy Faust, Abby Glover, Zack Shires, Ivan Hoey Jr, Drew Starkey. (R, 138 mins) Based on a 2011 novel by Donald Ray Pollock, whose bleak rural noirs set in the colorfully-named southern Ohio town of Knockemstiff have often been termed "hillbilly gothic" by literary critics, THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME presents a relentlessly grim, fatalistic tableau that, despite the change in medium, unfolds with the precision and patience of a riveting page-turner. There's enough going on here that director/co-writer Antonio Campos (2016's criminally underseen CHRISTINE, a haunting biopic of Florida news reporter Christine Chubbuck, who infamously committed suicide on live TV in 1974) could've easily turned it into a Netflix miniseries instead of a Netflix original film, but it manages to cover everything it needs to in its never-dull 138 minutes. THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME jumps around for much of its first half, going back and forth from 1945 to 1957 to 1965 in a way that can be initially disorienting but eventually works everything out as the various characters, their connections, and their situations are put into play. The main character--troubled loner Arvin Russell (Tom Holland)--doesn't even take center stage until 45 minutes in, and to get a grasp on who he is, we must first learn about his father Willard (Bill Skarsgard), a quietly shell-shocked WWII vet who fought in the South Pacific, haunted by the mercy-killing of an American soldier he found crucified, barely alive, and being slowly devoured by flies. Discharged and en route to his home in the podunk West Virginia town of Coal Creek, the shy Willard stops at a diner in Knockemstiff and is immediately smitten with kind-hearted waitress Charlotte (Haley Bennett). They eventually marry and live in a house on a hill above Knockemstiff, and she soon gives birth to Arvin.
Willard remains troubled by his wartime experiences, and despite his devoutly Christian ways, he teaches nine-year-old Arvin (Michael Banks Repeta) that if anyone starts something with you, be sure to finish it, which he demonstrates by nearly beating two local yokels to death after they make derogatory comments about Charlotte. Rapidly going off the deep end, Willard builds a large cross on the back of his property, where he takes Arvin on nightly trips of emphatic prayer, which increase in frequency and intensity when Charlotte is diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Arvin will eventually be sent to Coal Creek to live with his grandmother Emma (Kristin Griffith) and his uncle Earskill (David Atkinson), who have adopted an orphaned baby named Lenora. Cut to 1965 as Vietnam is beginning dominate the news, with Arvin (Holland takes over the role at this point) and now-teenage Lenora (LITTLE WOMEN's Eliza Scanlan) sharing a close sibling bond that's tested with the arrival of new preacher Preston Teagardin (a reptilian Robert Pattinson), who opens his first Sunday service by passive-aggressively insulting the fried chicken livers prepared by an embarrassed Emma for a potluck dinner, the only meat she could afford at the butcher shop. Other characters drift in and out of the narrative, including Carl (Jason Clarke) and Sandy Henderson (Riley Keough), husband-and-wife serial killers who pick up male hitchhikers (calling them "models") and stage sexually explicit photos before Carl kills them; corrupt sheriff Lee Bodecker (Sebastian Stan); Lenora's birth parents, insane fire-and-brimstone religious fanatic Roy Laferty (Harry Melling) and his demure, wallflower wife Helen (Mia Wasikowska); and Knockemstiff pimp and white trash crime lord Tater Brown (Douglas Hodge), who's got Bodecker's nuts in a vice.
At some point early in the third act, you'll see where the story is taking Arvin, who takes his father's lessons to heart in the way he's hellbent on finishing shit that other people start. Not only does Campos do a masterful job of vividly capturing the atmosphere of rural southern Ohio from the '40s to the '60s, but THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME also shows characters in a perpetual cycle of hopelessness, almost imprisoned by fate. Repeated cycles of violence and tragedy are handed down like family curses, and a propensity for always making the worst decisions seems like a genetic pre-disposition for everyone. Campos has created what plays a lot like a Derek Cianfrance downer that's particularly reminiscent in tone and structure to 2013's THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES, especially with a lead character switch and a main star's unexpected exit around the 45-minute mark.
Skarsgard's taciturn, tightly-wound performance echoes the kind of peculiar eccentricity of the Michael Shannon of a decade ago, while Holland keeps Arvin's rage at a constant low boil, never exploding but always letting you see it growing in his eyes. Some of the ensemble--Bennett and Wasikowska, for example--aren't onscreen long enough to make a big impression, but whoever cast the unique-looking Melling and Scanlen as father-and-daughter is a genius. The biggest impression left by the supporting cast comes from Pattinson, who continues to establish himself as one of the most versatile and chameleon-like actors around with his loathsome, manipulative preacher, seducing a teenage parishioner and smugly trying to skate out of an unintended consequence with "How can you be pregnant when all we did was spend time with the Lord?" THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME is certain to provoke divisive reactions and one can argue that it has a couple more subplots than it really needs, but the degree of detail and characterization are testaments to Campos' dedication to the world-building essential to Pollock's writing, and it gets an added bit of authenticity from having the author narrate as well.
THE LODGE (US/UK - 2020) Directed by Veronika Franz & Severin Fiala. Written by Sergio Casci, Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. Cast: Riley Keough, Jaeden Martell, Richard Armitage, Alicia Silverstone, Lia McHugh, Daniel Keough. (R, 108 mins) If you're a fan of the so-called "elevated horror" trend and like it uncompromisingly grim and relentlessly downbeat, then be sure to check out THE LODGE, a film so dark and depressing that it makes HEREDITARY and MIDSOMMAR look like the feel-good crowd-pleasers of their years. The English-language debut of Austrian writers/directors and aunt/nephew filmmaking team Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, THE LODGE shares some superficial similarities with their acclaimed--and wildly overrated--2015 film GOODNIGHT MOMMY, namely that it traps a woman and two children in an isolated house of psychological horrors. While THE LODGE is a superior--and meaner--film in every way, Franz and Fiala still can't help tripping over their own feet in the way overly contrived and illogical things have to happen in order to advance the plot. There almost always has to be a suspension of disbelief to a certain degree, and for a while, you aren't sure what kind of horror you're dealing with in THE LODGE. That's when it works best, when it hasn't shown all of its cards. And even after that, it's still got its hooks in you, but the hoops it has to jump through to accomplish that do diminish it somewhat. Without spoiling anything (and if you've seen it, you'll know what I'm talking about), some immediate questions I had were "Why even show her the gun?" and "Does that even look like a real newspaper?"
Or better yet, don't. THE LODGE is the kind of psychological chiller where it's best to just roll with it and--enjoy, if that's the appropriate word--the way the filmmakers string you along in effective slow-burner fashion. Laura (Alicia Silverstone) doesn't handle it well when her estranged psychologist husband Richard (Richard Armitage) breaks the news that he wants to proceed with their divorce so he can marry his younger girlfriend Grace (Riley Keough). With Laura soon out of the picture in a abrupt and jarring fashion, Richard is left with two grief-stricken children--17-year-old Aidan (Jaeden Martell from the IT movies and KNIVES OUT) and 12-year-old Mia (Lia McHugh)--and even after jumping ahead six months, they aren't ready to accept perceived homewrecker Grace in any capacity, let alone as their potential stepmother. In the first of several displays of his terrible decision-making skills, Richard thinks the four of them spending Christmas at the family's isolated mountain lodge in a remote area of Massachusetts would be a good chance for Grace and the kids to bond. Of course, he's wrong (he gets a curt "Fuck you" from Aidan for even suggesting it), and on top of that, he won't even be there since he has to drive several hours back to the city for two days for work and won't be rejoining the three of them until Christmas Day. The kids dismiss the shy, quiet Grace as a "psycho," and admittedly, she has some heavy baggage: when she was 12, she was the sole survivor of the mass suicide of 39 members of a cult led by her religious fanatic father (Keough's own father Daniel Keough in news footage flashbacks), all of them poisoning themselves after putting duct tape with the word "Sin" over their mouth. Years later, Richard studied the cult, wrote a book about it, and treated Grace before leaving his wife for her. Grace still suffers from PTSD and social anxiety, but has made great strides in putting her past behind her and trying to live a normal life. But when left alone with the kids, there's little else but tension and discomfort. Aidan wants nothing to do with her and won't even acknowledge her when she addresses him, but Mia seems to warm up a little, at least until showing her some old home movie footage of happier times with Mom and Dad at the lodge, which sends Grace into her room scrambling for her pills.
To say anything more would probably be saying too much, but things get more unsettling by the hour, especially with a blizzard rolling through, followed by the loss of electricity and running water, all of the food, coats, Christmas decorations, Grace's meds, and her little dog Grady disappearing, and Grace looking out the window to see the disturbing sight of 39 snow angels as she keeps hearing her dead father's voice commanding her to "repent." Obviously, there's more than one twist by the time it's over, and the big one is a shocker when it lands, especially since it plays out to an even greater tragedy. The Plot Convenience Playhouse elements can be frustrating (the gun!), but this is a terrific showcase for a never-better Keough, who's not quite Toni Collette or Florence Pugh here but still generates sympathy throughout (especially with Grace's story about how Grady was a gift she gave herself since her father never allowed her to have a dog), especially once things go south and her eyes take on an aura of dead, despairing emptiness. The kids probably never take the time to realize it, but if there's any villain in this story, it's Richard, whose selfish narcissism is so subtle that it takes a while to register. But watch how he seems almost inconvenienced by his children needing to grieve the loss of their mother (the kids well-played by Martell and McHugh, especially in the ways Martell shows how fiercely protective Aidan is of his little sister). Richard probably thinks he's a good dad, but he's aggressively trying to force the kids to get over their mom (it's also worth noting the resemblance between Silverstone and Keough, indicating that Richard is trading in his approaching-middle-aged wife for a younger version), and doesn't think anything of having inconsiderately loud sex with Grace during the family's first night in the lodge--Aidan and Mia lie in their beds, listening to all of it--before he heads back to the city for two days the next morning. It might take a second viewing to sift through some of what's going on here, and even as I'm writing this, I'm already thinking the clumsy way the gun is introduced almost has to be intentional in a subconscious ulterior motive kind-of way on Richard's part, though that might be reading too much into it.
It's also hard to ignore some of the similarities between THE LODGE and Ari Aster's HEREDITARY (the big one being a dollhouse diorama that Franz and Fiala utilize as a kind of visual commentary on the proceedings) and MIDSOMMAR (the story kicked off by an inconceivable tragedy), which may be happy accidents considering THE LODGE was shot in early 2018, several months before HEREDITARY even opened (it screened at Sundance in January 2019, but Neon sat on it for another year after bumping it from November 2019 to February 2020, possibly to create some distance from the inevitable Aster comparisons). With its brutally cold, snowy setting over the Christmas holiday, it also joins the ranks of essential wintertime horror movies, a sentiment that it even addresses when Grace, Aidan, and Mia watch John Carpenter's THE THING on TV. It's also the first production in five years from the relaunched, in-name-only Hammer, though it has little stylistic connection with the legendary house of horror aside from a quick shout-out to 1961's SCREAM OF FEAR. THE LODGE has some structural flaws for sure (Mia seems devoutly religious early on, until that character trait is more or less abandoned), but with its disquieting score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, the unnerving sound design, and strong performances by Keough, Martell, and McHugh, THE LODGE is a finely-crafted, claustrophobic day-ruiner of a fright flick that gets under your skin. And while her screen time is brief, it's worth mentioning that between her appearances in KING COBRA, THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER, and this, along with some other under-the-radar indies, '90s icon Alicia Silverstone has very quietly been establishing some character actor bona fides 25 years removed from CLUELESS.
UNDER THE SILVER LAKE (US - 2019) Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell. Cast: Andrew Garfield, Riley Keough, Topher Grace, Callie Hernandez, Don McManus, Jeremy Bobb, Riki Lindhome, Zosia Mamet, Patrick Fischler, Jimmi Simpson, Grace Van Patten, India Menuez, Wendy Vanden Heuvel, Chris Gann, Stephanie Moore, Sibongile Mlambo, Rex Linn, Annabelle Dexter-Jones, Laura-Leigh, Luke Baines, Sydney Sweeney, David Yow, Summer Bishil, Deborah Geffner. (R, 139 mins) It says something about just how strange and impenetrable UNDER THE SILVER LAKE is that distributor A24--the folks who specialize in giving nationwide rollouts to divisive audience-alienators like THE WITCH, IT COMES AT NIGHT, GOOD TIME, and HEREDITARY--were at a complete loss as to what to do with it. The much-anticipated follow-up to writer/director David Robert Mitchell's acclaimed 2015 horror hit IT FOLLOWS, UNDER THE SILVER LAKE was filmed in late 2016 and released overseas last summer after a mixed reception at Cannes. Skittish about its commercial prospects at home, A24 moved the film to December 2018, then pulled it from the release schedule entirely, ultimately unveiling it with little fanfare on just two screens on April 19, 2019, with a VOD dumping four days later. In more ways than one, UNDER THE SILVER LAKE is to Mitchell what SOUTHLAND TALES was to Richard Kelly, the acclaimed writer/director who was given wide latitude after 2001's DONNIE DARKO got zero attention in theaters before becoming a bona fide cult sensation once it hit video stores. Following the success of IT FOLLOWS, Mitchell was more or less permitted to make the film he wanted to make with UNDER THE SILVER LAKE. It's not IT FOLLOWS, just like SOUTHLAND TALES wasn't DONNIE DARKO, and it's an odd time for visionary auteurs when Kelly hasn't made a movie in ten years and unfortunately seems to have fallen off the face of the earth, and here's Mitchell, another wunderkind granted almost complete freedom on a project and creating something that's left its producers and distributors (and some audiences) completely dumbfounded. History has a way of repeating itself.
That said, UNDER THE SILVER LAKE is a better and, relatively speaking, more disciplined film than SOUTHLAND TALES, and it's not just Kelly to whom Mitchell owes a debt. He's also wearing his love of David Lynch and Brian De Palma on his sleeve and fashioning the whole thing as a sort-of INHERENT VICE-esque shaggy dog story that's incredibly ambitious and compulsively intriguing for much of its lengthy duration. That is until Mitchell starts trying to explain too many things, which is something Lynch would've never done. In probably his best performance to date, HACKSAW RIDGE Oscar-nominee Andrew Garfield stars as Sam, an aimless, unemployed L.A. slacker who's five days away from being evicted. He loves comic books and movies, his apartment is filled with old movie posters and his mom calls him to talk about Janet Gaynor and remind him that the silent classic SEVENTH HEAVEN is airing on Turner Classic Movies later that night. Sam fills his days hooking up with an aspiring actress and friend-with-benefits (Riki Lindhome) and watching his bikini-clad neighbor Sarah (Riley Keough) through binoculars. That night, she invites him over. Her bedroom walls are adorned with movie posters and they watch HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE on TCM. After some flirting and a kiss, her two roommates return home with an eye-patched, pirate-looking guy and a suddenly nervous Sarah abruptly ends the evening, telling him to come over and hang out tomorrow. The next day, Sarah's apartment is empty, she and the roommates are gone, and the building manager (Rex Linn) says they just up and left. Sam sneaks into the vacant apartment and is almost seen by a mystery woman (Zosia Mamet), who grabs a shoebox full of Sarah's personal items from a closet and gets in a car with two other women. Sam follows them and witnesses them hand off the shoebox to the pirate guy, who urgently sprints away with it.
To go any deeper into a straight synopsis is pointless, as it'll likely make me sounds as insane as Sam, who embarks on a dangerous journey throughout and underneath L.A. and Hollywood in search of Sarah. Her disappearance was really all he needed to fully embrace his inner crackpot conspiracy theorist, especially once the actress friend is scared away after finding pages upon pages of papers on Sam's bedside table revealed to be his scribbled notes documenting old episodes of WHEEL OF FORTUNE, as he's convinced that Vanna White is sending coded messages with her eye movements. Sarah may or may not be dead, and Sam's investigation involves, in no particular order: a rash of serial dog killings plaguing the neighborhood; strange, shadowy figures following him; the July 1970 issue of Playboy; the death of prominent billionaire Jefferson Sevence (Chris Gann) and three women in a car fire; a freeze-frame of a TV news update on the Sevence death showing the burned remnants of what looks like Sarah's hat and the charred remains of a dog found in the purse of one of the women; Sam's drinking buddy (Topher Grace) using a drone to spy on women; self-published graphic novel writer Comic Guy (Patrick Fischler), who has an intense interest in subliminal messages and the "programming" inherent in advertising; a symbol painted on the wall of Sarah's apartment that Comic Guy reveals to be known among the homeless to mean "Keep quiet;" Sam finding hidden codes and messages in the lyrics of an up-and-coming L.A. indie rock band called Jesus and the Brides of Dracula; one such code sending him to the James Dean bust at the Griffith Park Observatory, where The Homeless King (Jesus Lizard frontman David Yow) introduces him to a series of hidden tunnels under the park; the sudden appearance of Owl's Kiss, a murderous figure from Comic Guy's zine Under the Silver Lake; a map found in an old cereal box that mirrors the tunnels underneath Griffith Park; and an elderly songwriter (Jeremy Bobb), whose influence on popular culture is more than Sam can fathom.
What does all of this mean? It means there's certain to be years of thinkpieces and essays written about UNDER THE SILVER LAKE. Even Mitchell says there's too much here to unpack on one viewing, but from the start, you're paying attention to every number and detail that appears, as everything on the screen is likely there for a reason (Comic Guy's address is 1492, the drinking buddy's is 1016, and there's a flashing "751" on a scoreboard). But it's just as likely that some of these details are just there for Mitchell to fuck with the audience. There's a prescient subtext that definitely addresses the issue of toxic masculinity, invoked with background chatter of "the male gaze" at a Jesus and the Brides of Dracula secret show that Sam attends, his eventually meeting a trio of actresses who work for an escort service called "Shooting Star" and are also seen in the company of the pirate guy (Sam will see one of them in a club as they dance to R.E.M.'s "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" a further nod to conspiracy kooks); and in the drinking buddy's use of a drone to secretly record women. But it's also a blistering rebuke of a kind of male, namely the adult stuck in a state of perpetual adolescence. Sam has no apparent job or means of supporting himself, yet he drives a nice car (that eventually gets repossessed) and hangs out at pricey coffee shops (one assumption might be that his mom is sending him money and he's pissing it away). But Sam's humiliating dressing-down by the songwriter is a key moment as the man claims that he's responsible for everything formative in everyone's lives, from classic songs to memorable jingles, even playing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on a piano and cackling that people think that song changed their lives ("That song wasn't written for distorted guitar...it was written by me between a blowjob and an omelette! I'm the voice of your generation!").
With the brutal takedown of pop culture by the songwriter (a great scene, by the way, and destined get 30 million views on YouTube), and Sam's ultimate discovery of what's really going on and the reasoning behind it all, UNDER THE SILVER LAKE's third act veers into FIGHT CLUB territory, which is maybe one influence more than the narrative of this labyrinthine saga can handle. The "waking nightmare" feel of the story begins collapsing when Mitchell feels the need to start explaining, and his decision to force it all to make sense (and a lot of it still doesn't) grinds things to a tedious halt when it matters most. But in fairness, this is the kind of film that you can watch ten times and have ten different reactions, depending on which element you choose to focus. On one viewing, it feels like it's biting off way more than it can chew, though the endless in-jokes (there's a funny sight gag involving an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, a pointed reference to nobody liking Garfield's turn as Spidey, a planned trilogy halted after two films) and movie references (there's a slew of David Lynch shout-outs, like the tunnels invoking the horror underneath the Norman Rockwell-esque surface of BLUE VELVET; Sam beating the shit out of two teenage vandals in a moment that's every bit as gratifying as mobster Robert Loggia's revenge on an obnoxious tailgater in LOST HIGHWAY; and the very presence of Fischler, unforgettable in the traumatizing Winkie's scene in MULHOLLAND DR) are undeniably entertaining. Is UNDER THE SILVER LAKE a brilliantly-conceived, unsolvable puzzle that cineastes will be deciphering for years to come or is Mitchell is sending the gullible on a wild goose chase? It's impossible to tell, but one recurring theme throughout is masturbation, which becomes a metaphor for Sam's obsessive pursuit, never more blatantly than when he takes a break to jerk off while a Jesus and the Brides of Dracula vinyl plays in reverse as he scours their album for hidden messages. Maybe all we're doing with all this overanalyzing is jerking ourselves off. Maybe that's kinda what Mitchell's doing with UNDER THE SILVER LAKE.
THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT (Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany - 2018) Written and directed by Lars von Trier. Cast: Matt Dillon, Bruno Ganz, Uma Thurman, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Sofie Grabol, Riley Keough, Jeremy Davies, Ed Speleers, Emil Thorstrup, Marijana Jankovic, Carina Skenhede, Rocco Day, Cohen Day, Osy Ikhile, Yu Ji-tae, David Bailie. (R, 151 mins) When an ill-advised joke about "understanding" and "sympathizing with" Hitler understandably failed to land, professional provocateur and arthouse troll Lars von Trier was kicked out of the Cannes Film Festival in 2011 with his MELANCHOLIA in competition. His triumphant return to the festival earlier this year with the serial killer thriller THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT led to harumphing outrage and at least 100 walkouts. In other words, Mission Accomplished. IFC Films released von Trier's unrated, uncensored, 155-minute version for a one-night theatrical run in late November prior to the VOD rollout of the R-rated cut, shortened by four minutes. I don't really see why an edited version is necessary if it's mainly going to be seen on VOD anyway, and you can tell where the cuts are--the brutal murders of two children being a key point of repulsion at Cannes, along with one graphic scene of a woman's breasts being mutilated and sliced off. But even if you could see these few bits at full strength in the cut version, THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT isn't exactly the second coming of HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER. It is a tour-de-force for an all-in Matt Dillon as Jack, an odd, antisocial, obsessive-compulsive architect-turned-serial killer based in the rural outskirts of the Pacific Northwest, recounting five random murders over a 12-year period to an initially unseen man named Verge (Bruno Ganz). Verge scoffs at Jack's boasts and claims, sardonically taunting him with "Don't believe you're going to tell me something I haven't heard before." But by the end, Verge's snide dismissals and mocking tone will give way to legitimate horror and disgust, to the point where he finally deems Jack an "Antichrist."
Jack's murderous ways seem to have started as a spur-of-the-moment impulse decision. In "Incident 1," he happens upon a woman (Uma Thurman) stranded on the side of the road with a flat tire and a broken jack (sly foreshadowing?). She's pushy and abrasive, demanding more and more of Jack's time and telling him he "looks like a serial killer." That is, until she walks it back and says he looks like too much of a wimp to be a murderer, to which Jack's knee-jerk response is to bash her head in with the jack. Independently wealthy from an inheritance, Jack owns an empty warehouse space with a massive walk-in freezer, which he puts to use by storing her corpse. Jack's first attempt at premeditated murder comes in "Incident 2," where he awkwardly and unconvincingly tries to talk his way into home of a cop's widow (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), first by pretending to be a detective ("I'd like to see a police badge," she says. "So would I," replies Jack), and then only gaining entrance by playing on her greed by saying he's there to talk about a possible increase in her late husband's pension. After killing her, he's nearly caught by a passing cop (Ed Speleers) when his OCD and his obsessive cleanliness repeatedly force him to go back into the house and double/triple/quadruple-check to make sure he didn't miss a spot of blood, repeatedly scrubbing the floors and walls over and over again ("A murderer with OCD and to top it off, a cleaning compulsion?" needles Verge). In "Incident 3," Jack is a gun nut in a red hat taking a single mom (Sofie Grabol) and her two young sons, George (Cohen Day) and Grumpy (Rocco Day), to a vacant shooting range with predictably horrific results, including a macabre picnic where he forces her to feed bites of apple pie to her two dead boys ("This has been a good day," Jack beams with pride after this "family" outing). By this point, Jack has grown more confident in his abilities as a chameleon-like killer and begins sending murder photos to the press, calling himself "Mr. Sophistication," likely a reference to the grimly sardonic emcee at Ben Gazzara's seedy burlesque club in the 1976 John Cassavetes cult classic THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE). In "Incident 4," Jack is in full-on "bad boy" mode, manipulating and psychologically abusing Jacqueline (Riley Keough) by giving her the nickname "Simple" and boasting that he's killed 60 people and "in a couple of minutes, it'll be 61." "Incident 5" has Jack abducting five random people and taking them to his freezer--now filled with years' worth of collected victims--and lining them up for a full metal jacket to rip through all of their heads with one shot, only to be stalled by the fact that the guy at the gun shop (Jeremy Davies, twitchy as ever) sold him mislabeled ammo.
Amidst the horrors on display, there's quite a bit of dark, absurdist humor throughout, like Jack leaving one victim's severed breast under the windshield wiper of the cop who earlier issued him a parking ticket, and then using the other breast to make a wallet. And almost everything out of Verge's mouth is gold, with Ganz deploying a tone so incredulously mocking of Jack that you can't help but laugh (their conversations are reminiscent of Charlotte Gainsbourg and Stellan Skarsgard's framing sequences in NYMPHOMANIAC). But the film really loses its way after the fifth incident, and when we finally see Verge onscreen near the end, the magic of Ganz's vocal performance is lost thanks to von Trier's decision to turn him into a Chuck Palahniuk plot construct. Of course, the film was never meant to exist in reality, as Jack is the most unreliable of narrators (it's even possible that "Incident 1" isn't even his first murder, since he seems so testy and preoccupied from the start), and he gets away with his acts much too easily, but at some point, THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT stops being shocking and provocative and just becomes repetitive and exhausting, with a bloated running time that borders on loitering.
A walking embodiment of the DSM-5, Jack believes that his murders constitute "art," a sentiment stemming from his disputing the differences between "architect" and "engineer" when describing his profession. This leads to endless debates with Verge about art, iconography, and the nature of "masterpieces" that play over shots of revered paintings, museum pieces, newsreel footage of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Idi Amin, various massacres and genocides, and, eventually, in a grating bit of masturbatory self-adulation, a highlight reel of clips from past von Trier films. There's some political and social commentary to be mined from this (there's no slogan on Jack's red hat in "Incident 3," but the implication is obvious), and Jack very often comes off like a pathetic incel with some major issues with women (note how it's being called a "wimp" that initially sets him off). Dillon dives into this role with fearless abandon, and von Trier crafts some undoubtedly effective and haunting images, whether it's the positioning of the victims in "Incident 3," the taxidermy method in which he preserves Grumpy's body, or something like Jack's thumb and the tip of his index finger cleaning off a single blood-drenched blade of grass, and finally, the ultimate construction of his "house." But less could've been more with THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT, and von Trier is, as usual, so self-indulgently preoccupied with poking people with sticks to get a reaction that he disappears up his own ass. Few filmmakers are more divisive than Lars von Trier, and there's moments of greatness even in his lesser films. But his need to shock and provoke for a reaction too often feels like the work of an enfant terrible making a name for himself rather than a 62-year-old who's in his fourth decade of filmmaking.
HOLD THE DARK (US/Switzerland - 2018) Directed by Jeremy Saulnier. Written by Macon Blair. Cast: Jeffrey Wright, Alexander Skarsgard, James Badge Dale, Riley Keough, Julian Black Antelope, Peter McRobbie, Tantoo Cardinal, Macon Blair, Jonathan Whitesell, Savonna Spracklin, Maureen Thomas, Sean Hoy, Brian Martell, Beckam Crawford. (Unrated, 125 mins) Adapted from William Giraldi's 2015 novel, the bitterly cold and endlessly snowy Netflix Original HOLD THE DARK is the latest bleak, grim thriller from BLUE RUIN and GREEN ROOM director Jeremy Saulnier. It's the filmmaker's most ambitious work yet, with some stunning cinematography by Magnus Nordenhof Jonck, jaw-dropping aerial shots that would look incredible on a big screen, and one of the most masterfully-staged and brilliantly-executed shootouts to come down the pike in quite some time. This long sequence, with its tension escalating to unrelenting terror and punctuated by bursts of shocking and extremely graphic violence, is the centerpiece of HOLD THE DARK and as a result, what follows can't help but pale in comparison, especially since Saulnier and screenwriter Macon Blair (the star of BLUE RUIN and the writer/director of I DON'T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE) jettison the more procedural, straightforward plotting of Giraldi's novel to go for something more allegorical and ambiguous. In a way, it's gussying up what could be a 90-minute commercial thriller and turning it into a somber slow-burner that runs just over two hours and veers toward the arthouse, giving it the feel of something A24 would pick and open nationwide just to piss people off. It often doesn't feel too far removed from last year's sleeper hit WIND RIVER, and though it has that distinct sense of Saulnier dread and despair, it could also be seen as what might happen if Taylor Sheridan remade WOLFEN.
In the small village of Keelut in the northernmost reaches of Alaska, three children have been taken away by wolves and are presumed eaten. One grieving mother is Medora Slone (Riley Keough), whose six-year-old son Bailey (Beckam Crawford) is the latest victim. Shell-shocked and alone--her soldier husband Vernon (Alexander Skarsgard) is in Fallujah and she hasn't yet notified him of Bailey's death--she sends a letter to renowned nature writer and wolf expert Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright), imploring him to track down and kill the wolf who took Bailey. Core arrives in Keelut and is almost as much of a broken soul as Medora, estranged from his grown daughter and hoping to visit her in Anchorage, where she teaches. There's an interesting subtext to these early scenes that show man is the interloper and wasn't meant for these parts, and while he agrees to track the wolf pack, he reminds Medora that "the natural order of things doesn't warrant revenge." Meanwhile, in Fallujuh, Vernon--after doing something that's the first of the film's many jolting shocks--is sent home after taking a sniper's bullet in the neck, and...
Well, that's about all the plot that can be summarized without going into significant spoilers. In short, Core has been summoned to Keelut under misleading circumstances. There's also, in no particular order, a padlocked cellar housing something unexpected that sends the story in a completely different direction, Vernon's reaction to his son's death sending him on a quest for revenge with his friend and fellow grieving father Cheeon (Julian Black Antelope), the Eskimo locals deeming the "Nordic-looking" Medora possessed by a wolf-demon known as a "tourmaq," and a melancholy Core reluctantly finding himself teamed with Donald Marium (James Badge Dale), the weary sheriff of Emery, the nearest thing resembling a modern town, and under whose jurisdiction Keelut falls. HOLD THE DARK is a film that's not eager to wrap things up in a conventional way, and that sometimes works against it. The ending is ambiguous to the point of frustration, and Saulnier and Blair seem unsure of where to take the narrative after the truly harrowing shootout that rivals anything in GREEN ROOM and is easily the most impressive single sequence of the filmmaker's career thus far. It's admirable that they don't spell things out like the novel did, particularly when it comes to Vernon and Medora's marriage, but there's clearly something "off" from the start, and that's even before a sleeping Core is stirred awake by a nude Medora wearing nothing but a ceremonial wolf mask as she grabs his hand and forces him to choke her. HOLD THE DARK establishes a parallel with the Slones and the wolf pack, and it's interesting to look back at the film once it's over and see how Saulnier and Blair have laid the reveals in plain sight all along. While that makes for some clever twists, it also feels like HOLD THE DARK is trotting out too many enigmatic bells and whistles in an attempt to be more highbrow than it needs to be. That said, what's here is an impressive step up in scope for Saulnier and Blair, and the cast brings their A-game, particularly Wright (why doesn't he get more leads?) and Dale, who's never been better. Part mystery, part culture-clash drama (Cheeon has a serious beef with the Emery police after it took an entire day for them to investigate his daughter's disappearance), and part horror film, HOLD THE DARK sucks you in and keeps your attention, and its strong points far outweigh its occasional hiccups.
PATERNO (US - 2018) Directed by Barry Levinson. Written by Debora Cahn and John C. Richards. Cast: Al Pacino, Riley Keough, Kathy Baker, Greg Grunberg, Annie Parisse, Larry Mitchell, Steve Coulter, Kristen Bush, Ben Cook, Sean Cullen, Peter Jacobson, Tom Kemp, Michael Mastro, Jim Johnson, Murphy Guyer, Julian Gamble, Darren Goldstein, William Hill. (Unrated, 105 mins)
There was once an air of prestige surrounding HBO's original movies, particularly in the 1990s glory days which saw them regularly producing top-notch films like BARBARIANS AT THE GATE, AND THE BAND PLAYED ON, THE TUSKEGEE AIRMEN, THE LATE SHIFT, GIA, IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK, and INTRODUCING DOROTHY DANDRIDGE, just to name a few. For the last decade, the network has specialized in at least one fact-based drama or biopic every spring, with some highlights being 2010's YOU DON'T KNOW JACK, with Al Pacino as Jack Kevorkian, 2012's GAME CHANGE, chronicling the Republican side of the 2008 election with Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin and Ed Harris as John McCain, and 2013's BEHIND THE CANDELABRA, with Michael Douglas as Liberace. The HBO spring movies have been slipping in recent years, content to rely on painstaking makeup jobs as opposed to the solid writing that made their 1990s films so memorable. 2013's PHIL SPECTOR is arguably the worst of the bunch, a slobbering Spector apologia from David Mamet, with Spector played by a frizzy wig attached to the head of Al Pacino. Last year's THE WIZARD OF LIES cast Robert De Niro in a perfect recreation of Ponzi scheme poster boy Bernie Madoff, but otherwise felt content to serve as a live-action version of Madoff's Wikipedia page, with director Barry Levinson indulging in some predictable Scorsese worship, right down to De Niro using some of his leftover Ace Rothstein schtick from CASINO.
Levinson also directs PATERNO, which goes through motions in such a "Movie of the Week" fashion that it doesn't even work up the enthusiasm to rip off Scorsese. PATERNO reunites the director with his YOU DON'T KNOW JACK star Pacino for a chronicle of the Penn State child sex abuse scandal that broke in late 2011 and quickly took down beloved, legendary football coach Joe Paterno, who died of lung cancer just two months later in January 2012. Pacino absolutely looks the part and is in appropriate "restrained Pacino" mode here. Where PATERNO drops the ball is that, like THE WIZARD OF LIES, it just goes through the story as if the script is a series of bullet points. There's nothing here you don't already know if you followed the story as it broke, and the filmmakers aren't really interested in going beneath the surface for anything substantive. It could've been so many things, especially if you're aware that when HBO originally announced the project way back in 2013, it was called HAPPY VALLEY (also the name of a 2014 documentary on the scandal from THE TILLMAN STORY director Amir Bar-Lev) and was to have been directed by Brian De Palma. Pacino was attached as Paterno from the start, and veteran character actor John Carroll Lynch (FARGO, ZODIAC) was cast as his longtime assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, who retired in 1999 and was ultimately convicted on 45 counts of child molestation and corruption of minors among other charges, with boys as young as 10 years of age. HAPPY VALLEY was put on hold during pre-production for "budget concerns" and was subsequently rechristened PATERNO when HBO gave it the greenlight once again in 2016, with Pacino but without De Palma and Lynch. It's telling that the film is now simply called PATERNO, since Sandusky (now played by eerie lookalike Jim Johnson) is seen fleetingly on maybe three occasions and has one audible line of dialogue. PATERNO opens with "JoePa" in a hospital MRI machine reflecting on the just-breaking scandal. And if you know the story, then you know the rest.
Levinson and writers Debora Cahn and John C. Richards could've taken just about any other approach and made a stronger film. They could've set it in 2001 when Paterno was allegedly first made aware of Sandusky's heinous crimes after then-graduate assistant coach Mike McQueary (briefly played here by Darren Goldstein) witnessed him raping a boy in the Penn State locker room, to which Sandusky still had access post-retirement, and would often take victims he procured from his Second Mile charity. Or, they could've focused on Sara Ganim (Riley Keough), the Patriot News reporter who first broke the story and encountered all manner of stonewalling, cover-ups, vanishing police reports, and a conspiracy of silence that would've made for a riveting investigative drama along the lines of ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, ZODIAC, or SPOTLIGHT. In terms of setting the film in 2011, the crux of the story is "Did JoePa know or not?" and at that point in time, Ganim's pursuit of that answer and jumping every hurdle in her way would've been more compelling and revealing, at least as an examination of how football is so deeply ingrained in the fabric of Penn State, thus leading to the "protect the shield" attitude of the school, the students, and the community.
Or, they could've given Pacino something more to do that look doddering and befuddled as the 84-year-old Paterno. In a way, that's accurate, as Paterno clearly comes off as a man whose football-focused tunnelvision made him pretty much oblivious to, if not everything else around him, then at least the seriousness of Sandusky's crimes. This was a man who spent over 60 years in coaching and concerned himself with little else. One of the more interesting moments comes when he doesn't even get the optics of how bad it would look if he admitted waiting two days to tell the university higher-ups what he heard about Sandusky because he "didn't want to ruin" their weekend. More details like that would've helped, but scene after scene just has Pacino's JoePa puttering around, looking confused, and unable or unwilling to understand the gravity of the situation as if to say "Why is this happening to me?" But this approach is a cop-out: by never really substantively getting into JoePa's head and relegating Ganim to the sideline for much of the second half, PATERNO never has to take a stand, it never has to risk criticizing its subject, and it never has to do anything beyond ensuring that Pacino gets nominated for an Emmy and a Golden Globe next year. BARBARIANS AT THE GATE, AND THE BAND PLAYED ON, and their HBO contemporaries of the '90s didn't earn their deserved accolades by sidestepping the issues, pulling their punches, and letting the makeup department do the heavy lifting. PATERNO offers a generally fine Pacino performance that his fans will want to see, but this film should be more than a showcase for its iconic star.
LOGAN LUCKY (US - 2017) Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by Rebecca Blunt. Cast: Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, Hilary Swank, Seth MacFarlane, Riley Keough, Katie Holmes, Katherine Waterston, Dwight Yoakam, Sebastian Stan, Brian Gleeson, Jack Quaid, Farrah McKenzie, David Denman, Macon Blair, Jon Eyez, Deneen Tyler, Ann Mahoney, Jim O'Heir. (PG-13, 118 mins) Steven Soderbergh cried wolf on retiring from feature films a number of times before finally making it official after 2013's SIDE EFFECTS, but he never really went away. He directed HBO's Liberace biopic BEHIND THE CANDELABRA and all 20 episodes of Cinemax's two-season series THE KNICK. He didn't direct the MAGIC MIKE sequel MAGIC MIKE XXL but he served as its cinematographer under his D.P. pseudonym "Peter Andrews" and he edited it as "Mary Ann Bernard." He was also executive producer on other series like Amazon's RED OAKS, Starz's THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE (a spinoff of his experimental 2009 Sasha Gray vehicle), and Netflix's upcoming GODLESS, in addition to producing indies like WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN and Spike Lee's DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS. In short, Soderbergh is working more than ever, and with an arsenal of pseudonyms that's approaching Joe D'Amato and Jess Franco levels, his return to the big screen was only a matter of time. LOGAN LUCKY, shot by "Peter Andrews," edited by "Mary Ann Bernard," and written by the unknown "Rebecca Blunt," which is already assumed to be yet another Soderbergh alias, finds the filmmaker in familiar territory, insofar as it's a heist movie that puts it in the same wheelhouse as his OCEAN'S ELEVEN trilogy and OUT OF SIGHT, and like the OCEAN'S movies, it's played for laughs, but Soderbergh's feature film homecoming has some tricks up its sleeve that make it very much its own unique thing.
In his fourth Soderbergh film, Channing Tatum stars as Jimmy Logan, a West Virginia construction worker fired by his crew boss after failing to disclose the bum knee from a high school football injury that ended his once-plausible chances of making it to the NFL. His ex-wife Bobbie Jo (Katie Holmes) lives just across the state line in North Carolina and is planning to move with their daughter Sadie (Farrah McKenzie) to Lynchburg, VA, where her wealthy second husband (David Denman) is opening a new car dealership. Jimmy receives little consolation from his younger brother Clyde (Adam Driver), a bartender with a prosthetic left arm in place of the one he lost in Iraq. Clyde reminds Jimmy of the "Logan Curse," which has affected generations of their family, prompting Jimmy to take drastic measures to reverse it. With the help of their baby sister Mellie (Riley Keough), the Logan siblings team up to rob the cash deposit vault of the Charlotte Motor Speedway during the final NASCAR race of the season by taking advantage of the pneumatic tube system that moves throughout and under the speedway via chutes, a system Jimmy discovered on his last job with the construction crew, remedying a series of sinkholes that formed beneath the speedway property. The Logans enlist the aid of appropriately-named explosives man Joe Bang ("introducing Daniel Craig"), and are not deterred by the problematic fact that he's still locked up ("I am in-car-cer-ra-ted!" Bang sounds out for the Logans) for another five months and the job needs to be pulled off before the construction crew completes their work in four weeks.
Other figures drift in and out of the story in inspired, Coen Bros.-like situations, from obnoxious British business mogul and NASCAR team owner Max Chilblain (Seth MacFarlane, looking like a cross between Mandy Patinkin and Avery Schreiber); Dayton White (Sebastian Stan), a Chilblain driver who suffers a bad reaction after being contractually obligated to drink a Chilblain-endorsed energy drink on camera; Joe Bang's lunkhead brothers Sam Bang (Brian Gleeson) and Fish Bang (Jack Quaid); and, much later, humorless, no-nonsense FBI agent Sarah Grayson (Hilary Swank). Soderbergh goes against your gut expectations by avoiding the easy trap of milking these characters for condescending laughs, instead opting for a Coen Bros. approach where he shows much empathy for the Logans, and even for Joe Bang's brothers, who are more the stereotypical hillbilly yokels to a certain degree (they're introduced toilet seat-pitching and bragging that they "know everything there is to know about computers," including "all the Twitters"). Jimmy's plan is ridiculous and damn near impossible but time and again, he, along with Clyde, Mellie, and Joe Bang, prove themselves quite resourceful and have clearly thought this whole thing through even as obstacles constantly threaten to halt the job. The often absurdist humor doesn't approach the lunacy of, say, RAISING ARIZONA, but rather, the more deadpan side of FARGO. Tatum and especially Driver really nail the tone here and are gifted with numerous bits of quotable dialogue. Sure, Clyde's prosthetic arm is played for some easy laughs, but they're great laughs, and one brief detour into a prison riot negotiation (the standoff arranged to get Joe Bang out of jail) between the exasperated warden (Dwight Yoakam) and inmates demanding the prison library stock the titles in the Game of Thrones series that George R.R. Martin has yet to publish is brilliantly funny, as they refuse to believe that the new books don't exist and the warden can't convince them that the TV series has moved past the novels. LOGAN LUCKY could maybe run 15 minutes shorter and it has a few too many characters than it has time to properly showcase (MacFarlane, Stan, and Katherine Waterston as a nurse in a mobile free clinic are barely in it, and Swank doesn't even appear until 95 minutes in), but it's a lot of fun and a reminder that "offbeat" and "quirky" can still be a good thing. Plus it's got one perfect scene involving Sadie and John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads," that's maybe the sweetest thing Soderbergh's ever done.
IT COMES AT NIGHT (US - 2017) Written and directed by Trey Edward Shults. Cast: Joel Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Carmen Ejogo, Riley Keough, Kelvin Harrison Jr., David Pendleton, Griffin Robert Faulkner. (R, 91 mins) It's not surprising that A24 picked up the distribution rights for IT COMES AT NIGHT, an intense and extremely claustrophobic psychological horror film that falls in line with two other divisive genre titles they're released: THE WITCH and THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER--well-crafted, minimalist exercises in escalating tension and paranoia that attract significant critical acclaim while alienating mainstream moviegoers. It's the second feature film by 28-year-old Trey Edward Shults, a Terrence Malick protege whose 2015 indie family dysfunction drama KRISHA got some significant critical acclaim. He then worked as a production assistant on Jeff Nichols' 2016 film MIDNIGHT SPECIAL, where he met co-star Joel Edgerton, who produces and stars in IT COMES AT NIGHT, a film that will likely frustrate those looking for standard, straighforward horror with clear-cut explanations for the things that occur. Shults is more interested in symbolism, atmosphere, and creating a sense of disorientation (certain scenes have a different aspect ratio, and that's by design) and mounting unease that explodes into paranoia that ultimately leads to tragedy. It's grim and uncompromising, and as far as multiplex counter-programming goes, make no mistake--this is the Feel Bad Hit of the Summer.
Shults opens the film with the camera planted on an elderly, dying man covered in sores in what are obviously the last minutes of his life. Muffled voices try to comfort him as the camera pulls back to show the room covered in plastic sheeting and his family members wearing gloves and oxygen masks. The dying man, Bud (David Pendleton) is taken outside in a wheelbarrow as another man tells him he's sorry and that they love him before shooting him in the head, pouring gasoline over his corpse, and setting him ablaze. Bud was killed by his son-in-law Paul (Edgerton), who's moved his family--wife Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) and 17-year-old son Travis (Kevin Harrison Jr.)--into an isolated, boarded-up cabin in the woods following some kind of plague that has wiped out an undetermined number of people. As they grieve over the loss of Grandpa Bud, who became infected only a day earlier, they cope with the day-to-day monotony of life in this post-apocalyptic dystopia. Food is rationed, they have their own water filtration system, and they never stray far from the house, and never, under any circumstances, do they go out at night. One night in the wee hours, Paul hears someone trying to break into the house through its only entrance, a red door at the end of a hallway that remains locked at all times. The intruder is Will (Christopher Abbott), and Paul ties him to a tree for a couple of days to ensure that he isn't infected. Will pleads with Paul for help, insisting he can be trusted, that he has his own family to protect and he was only looking for water, and broke into the house because he saw it boarded up and assumed it was abandoned. A hesitant Paul determines that Will can be trusted to an extent, and the two drive off to get Will's wife Kim (Riley Keough), their young son Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner), and their water and food supply, which includes six chickens and a goat played by Black Phillip from THE WITCH.
The two clans quickly bond and an extended family is on the verge of forming, with Paul and Sarah agreeing with the notion of strength in numbers, especially since, if Will found them (likely after he saw the smoke from the cremation of Bud), others might find them as well, and they might not be as friendly. It isn't long before unease and mistrust sets in, from barely-perceived slights to statements that conflict with previously provided information. Paul is visibly distressed when Will mentions that he's an only child, but in his early story of how he ended up breaking into the house, he specifically stated that he had a brother (when Paul questions him about it, Will says "Well, brother-in-law...he's Kim's brother...he's like my brother"). The seeds of mistrust and simmering resentment are planted (did Will deliberately mislead Paul or was it just a wrong choice of words after being tied to a tree for two days without food or water?), and it's all downhill from there, coming to a head when Travis hears some noises in the night and finds young Andrew asleep on the floor in what was Bud's room after an apparent bout of sleepwalking. Travis notices that the red door is unlocked and ajar and his lost dog Stanley is infected and dying right outside. Who opened the door? Was it a sleepwalking Andrew? Was someone trying to break in? Is someone hiding in the house? Will and Kim deny that Andrew's a sleepwalker and they insist he's too short to reach the lock and the handle, instead suggesting that maybe Travis was half-asleep and imagined the door being unlocked. With little Andrew unable to remember if he touched Stanley and Travis possibly being infected after holding Andrew's hand and walking him back to bed, the families distance themselves on opposite sides of the cabin, and it's quite clear at this point that none of this is going to end well.
The terrors of IT COMES AT NIGHT exist almost entirely in the mind, as the constant state of vigilance gives way to paranoia, distrust, and hostility, bringing out the worst in everyone. Shults, who wrote the story as part of the grieving process just after his father died, tells the story mostly through the eyes of impressionable and sensitive Travis, who's loved by his parents but nonetheless feels isolated and lonely, especially when he overhears both of the couples having sex at various points. He's also fantasizing and having dreams about Kim, and even those are invaded by nightmarish visions of death and disease, offering no escape from his depressing existence. Paul notices his curious son eyeing Kim and tells him to stay focused, stern but sympathetic in his understanding that despite everything that's happened, Travis is still a 17-year-old kid with raging hormones who's had everything--his beloved grandfather, his dog, and his adolescence--taken from him by a world that's become a plague-ravaged hellhole. It's a terrific and subtly understated performance by Harrison (THE BIRTH OF A NATION and the Fox series SHOTS FIRED), who does a lot of acting with his eyes and his body language. It's refreshing how Shults exhibits some serious discipline in his handling of the story and the direction in which it heads. He demonstrates his knowledge of the masters, at times channeling Stanley Kubrick in the use of natural or very limited lighting from flashlights or lanterns, and the way the Steadicam prowls the dark and ominous hallways, making the sizable cabin feel like a smaller Overlook Hotel, or in the very John Carpenter way he has his characters barricaded inside to keep an existential evil outside. Everything that happens within the context of IT COMES AT NIGHT's world is thoroughly plausible and believably handled by the actors, who never resort to chewing the scenery and overselling the situation. Even the little kid, who only has a few lines, is really good. IT COMES AT NIGHT is a film that probably shouldn't have been given a wide release in the summer. It's a cerebral, methodical downer that people looking for another Blumhouse jump-scare rollercoaster ride will leave disgruntled and grumbling (cue audible mutterings of "That was stupid" and "Fuckin' bullshit" as the credits rolled and the audience shuffled out of a Saturday matinee showing). But, like THE WITCH and THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER, IT COMES AT NIGHT is an intelligent, challenging genre offering that gets under your skin and will stay with you long after it's over.
THE DISCOVERY (US/UK - 2017) Directed by Charlie McDowell. Written by Charlie McDowell and Justin Lader. Cast: Jason Segel, Rooney Mara, Robert Redford, Jesse Plemons, Riley Keough, Ron Canada, Mary Steenburgen, Wendy Makkena, MJ Karmi. (Unrated, 102 mins) Watching the Netflix Original film THE DISCOVERY, it seems completely feasible than director/co-writer Charlie McDowell (son of Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen) and writing partner Justin Lader (they previously worked together on the 2014 Mark Duplass indie THE ONE I LOVE) came up with a killer opening sequence and struggled to build a story around it. The first five minutes of THE DISCOVERY would make a great short film. A few years in the future, controversial physicist Dr. Thomas Harbor (Robert Redford) is being interviewed by a TV news journalist (Steenburgen) on the one-year anniversary of what's come to be known as "The Discovery." Harbor is a household name the world over for finding irrefutable, scientific proof of the afterlife, demonstrating that the spirit breaks down measurable brain waves to a subatomic level as those particles venture to another plane of existence beyond our reality. Upon his presenting The Discovery to the world, death became the ultimate reward. People with terminal illnesses welcomed their diagnosis. The global suicide rate skyrocketed, as people had proof of what they now "know" is a better world waiting for them and they voluntarily check out to expedite their journey to that better place. Everyone from the homeless to the depressed to Hollywood celebrities and sports heroes started taking their own lives, with over a million suicides in the first year. As the interview goes along, one of the news crew's production assistants interrupts to say "Thank you, Dr. Harbor, for my fresh start," turns a gun on himself and blows his brains out on camera.
A year after that, Harbor is running a research facility in an isolated, gothic-looking compound in a remote Rhode Island seaside town, and is visited by his estranged son Will Stevenson (Jason Segel), a neurologist who started using his late mother's maiden name to distance himself from The Discovery. Harbor is working with his other son Toby (Jesse Plemons) and longtime research assistant Cooper (Ron Canada), with the compound staffed by Harbor acolytes, all failed suicides who now view Harbor as some kind of messiah. Will is visiting in a hapless attempt to persuade his father to stop experimenting with the afterlife, feeling tremendous guilt about the whole situation because the incident that inspired Harbor's research--a near-death experience Will had as a child--was embellished by a young and mischievous Will, who told his parents he "saw things" while he was flatlined. Harbor entertains no thoughts of abandoning his research. He's actually had a new breakthrough: a machine that can record the images seen by the recently deceased. Harbor needs a cadaver, which leads to Will, Toby, and Isla (Rooney Mara), a woman Will met on the ferry and later saved from a suicide attempt, stealing a corpse from a local hospital. Hooking the body up to the machine yields no results, but while dismantling the wires and electrodes alone, Will sees blurred images on a monitor that must be what the dead man is seeing in his afterlife. Keeping this secret from his father, Will and Isla, both damaged souls (he blames his mother's suicide on Harbor, she fell asleep and her five-year-old son vanished, never to be seen again), begin a tentative, hesitant romance while getting to the truth of the images seen in the video of the dead man's afterlife.
THE DISCOVERY falls apart right around the time Will, Isla, and Toby decide to steal a corpse from the morgue, with the lone attendant complaining "I'm doing the work of five people!" as if that's sufficient excuse for making it look that easy to wheel a dead body out of a hospital. With a premise that's crying out for someone like PRIMER and UPSTREAM COLOR auteur Shane Carruth, there's numerous directions THE DISCOVERY could've gone: a philosophical, existential FOUNTAIN mode Darren Aronofsky-meets-circa TREE OF LIFE Terrence Malick mind-bender; a love story that traverses Heaven and Earth in a more scientific take on Wim Wenders' WINGS OF DESIRE and FARAWAY, SO CLOSE; a sci-fi variant on Paul Thomas Anderson's THE MASTER; a post-Duplass mumblecore drama; and even a horror route, with the inherent creepiness of the garbled video transmissions of the afterlife having an undeniable John Carpenter/PRINCE OF DARKNESS aura about them. But in McDowell's hands, the film doesn't take any of these paths. It just stands there, confused, until a cliched twist ending that plays out like Charlie Brooker adapting Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" as an episode of BLACK MIRROR. Segel and Mara do what they can with their mopey characters (judging from her appearance here, it looks a lot like Mara's Isla was written with ANOTHER EARTH's Brit Marling in mind--this seems like the kind of project in which Marling would script and star). In one of the least-engaged performances of his career, Redford seems to have dropped by for a few days of shooting and is stuck with the film's most impenetrable and inconsistent character. Initially presented as a committed, principled man of science, Harbor isn't interested in God or religion and just looks at the hard facts, but by the second anniversary of The Discovery, he's either a manipulative cult leader or a mad scientist--the movie can't seem to decide, but Redford never adjusts his performance either way. It's a role that seems more fitting for McDowell's dad Malcolm, and Redford just looks bored, fidgety and uncomfortable throughout, like he realized after his first day on the set that this was a dud and it was too late to back out of it. For a star of his magnitude, Redford's onscreen appearances were relatively sparse from the 1980s to the 2000s as he focused his creative energies on directing and Sundance, but in the last seven years, he's been more visible than in past decades, even having fun in big-budget special effects movies like CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER and PETE'S DRAGON, the kind of tentpole projects he would never do in his heyday. A living legend at 80, Redford has nothing to prove to anyone, but if THE DISCOVERY is any indication, it would perhaps behoove him to go back to being a little more picky about his acting gigs in his emeritus years. McDowell concocts an intriguing premise with THE DISCOVERY but just doesn't know what to do with it, leading to a dull, dreary misfire that does little to combat the stigma that most Netflix Original films debut there for a reason.
