MIDSOMMAR (US/Sweden - 2019) Written and directed by Ari Aster. Cast: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, Will Poulter, William Jackson Harper, Vilhelm Blomgren, Ellora Torchia, Archie Madekwe, Isabelle Grill, Hampus Hallberg, Gunnel Fred, Liv Mjones, Bjorn Andresen, Lennart R. Svensson, Anders Beckman, Anders Back, Levente Puczko-Smith. (R, 147 mins) With last year's shattering HEREDITARY, writer/director Ari Aster immediately established himself as one of the top figures in so-called "elevated horror," a term given to the thinking person's horror films that earn significant mainstream praise, much to the consternation of the genre's fanboys, gatekeepers, and assorted too-cool-for-school edgelords who usually wait 8-12 months to watch said films so they can flippantly dismiss them long after the hype has died down. Aside from Toni Collette turning in one of the best performances in any movie in recent memory, HEREDITARY has quite a bit going on and is the kind of film where each subsequent rewatch has you noticing things you didn't catch before. It was a film about the supernatural, family, dysfunction, legacies passed down, and unimaginable grief. MIDSOMMAR, Aster's follow-up effort, is a different beast than HEREDITARY in many ways, but it's cut from the same cloth and in it, you see patterns and obsessions beginning to develop. Again, we have the element of the supernatural. Again, the main character struggles to cope with an indescribable family tragedy. And again, there's a mysterious group of people who have plans for that character and those around her, but this time, it's even more strangely sinister in the way it's used almost as running interference in service of a much grander design. After a genuinely shocking 12-minute pre-credits sequence, MIDSOMMAR is strangely lacking in overt scares, instead opting for a very methodical slow burn that's relentlessly unsettling, with a suffocating sense of dread, tension, and doom that finally explodes into all-out madness in the last half hour.
After facing that aforementioned family tragedy, college student Dani Ardor (Florence Pugh) is virtually paralyzed with grief. She relies on the support of her boyfriend of just over four years ("three and a half," he says before she has to correct him), grad student Christian (Chris Pratt-alike Jack Reynor), who was on the verge of breaking up with her but decided to hold off because the timing wasn't right, given her fragile psychological state. His grad student buddies--Mark (Will Poulter, who co-starred with Reynor in Kathryn Bigelow's underrated DETROIT), Josh (William Jackson Harper), and Swedish Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren)--have been looking forward to a long-planned summer trip to Sweden organized by Pelle, but as it draws closer after Dani's grieving and depressed state goes through winter and spring, Christian has yet to mention the trip to her until she hears the guys talking about it being two weeks away. Ignoring their advice to dump Dani, who they found clingy and needy even before the tragedy that sent her off the deep end ("Get rid of her and find someone who actually likes sex," Mark crassly advises), Christian instead invites her along on the trip, where they'll be heading to a remote, rural area of northern Sweden to visit "Harga," the commune where orphaned Pelle grew up after losing his parents in a fire, to observe their unique solstice celebration that occurs once every 90 years.
At this point, it almost has to be mentioned that, yes, THE WICKER MAN is an obvious influence, but Aster has described MIDSOMMAR as "a breakup movie." It was initially conceived as a more straightforward horror film but fleshed out signifcantly when Aster went through a particularly unpleasant breakup. Dani and Christian's relationship is already on precariously thin ice, and while Christian is there for her and says all the things a supportive boyfriend is supposed to say, Aster proceeds to demonstrate a variety of initially subtle and gradually more overt ways that he's kind of a selfish prick, both with Dani and with his friends. The fact that Aster clearly identifies and empathizes with Dani throughout could be a statement on where Aster feels the blame for that breakup may ultimately lie, but regardless, things never seem completely right among the Harga. At first, Aster presents them as harmless, pagan-esque hippie types but a series of strange occurrences--abetted by the way they indulge their guests with various hallucinogens--have the four Americans plus two Brits, Simon (Archie Madekwe) and Connie (Ellora Torchia), brought to the commune by Pelle's brother Ingmar (Hampus Hallberg), growing more concerned about their safety by the day. Things get dicey when they observe a ritual of exactly how the Harga deal with their elderly, but the red flags are seemingly endless: bizarre dining rituals, a caged bear on the edge of the property, strange symbols painted on walls and carved into rocks, a pyramid-shaped yellow house that they're forbidden to enter, an elder boasting that the Harga "observe the incest taboo" of modern society, and a young Harga woman (Isabelle Grill) flirting with Christian, first from afar but soon in increasingly aggressive ways, including baking her pubic hair into a pie. It isn't until Mark, serving as the Ugly American who's only along on the trip to get drunk, high, and laid, relieves himself on a sacred tree that the Harga stop playing nice and start putting their true plans into action.
MIDSOMMAR isn't an easy film, nor will it do much for the Swedish travel industry. It's extremely ambitious and displays an even higher level of confidence than HEREDITARY, from the Kubrickian shot compositions and edits (there's two great bits that invoke that legendary "bone-to-spaceship" cut in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY), to the obsessively-detailed production design. Important details are inferred rather than specifically spelled-out, both in the artwork and carved symbols spotted in the background throughout and in something as simple as a quick shot of Dani's Ativan prescription, showing that she's already dealing with serious anxiety issues. Aster perhaps tries to juggle too many ideas and story threads (the whole bit with the Harga's deformed oracle is never quite sufficiently explored), but he succeeds in creating a profoundly unsettling atmosphere in what's maybe the darkest and most downbeat film to ever take place almost completely in bright sunlight. Like Collette's work in HEREDITARY, the promising Pugh (LADY MACBETH, OUTLAW KING, FIGHTING WITH MY FAMILY) fearlessly dives into this with a devastating performance of exhausting anguish that just builds to the insane climax, which is where those still onboard will find to be a make-or-break proposition. In the end, it's almost like a Swedish cousin to HEREDITARY. There's a cult, there's a family, there's triumph over grief and a moving forward that's like a weight off Dani's shoulders while at the same time a harrowing descent into uncontrolled hysteria. MIDSOMMAR is distributed by A24, and even by their standards of giving wide releases to defiantly non-commercial fare that frequently results in audience hostility (THE WITCH, IT COMES AT NIGHT, GOOD TIME, and even HEREDITARY to an extent), it might be a bridge too far to ask a mainstream, multiplex audience to go along with a two-and-a-half hour art-house horror film that's a symbol-heavy breakup metaphor given a big summer opening on a long 4th of July holiday weekend. That said, a move of such pure balls is absolutely the A24 we know and love.
Buried at the end of summer and released with little publicity, the gothic ghost story THE LITTLE STRANGER was a huge flop, opening in 23rd place and grossing $713,000 on just under 500 screens. Based on the 2009 novel by Sarah Waters and adapted by Lucinda Coxon (THE DANISH GIRL), the film was a momentum-killer for Oscar-nominated ROOM director Lenny Abrahamson, and while it succeeds in atmosphere with impeccable production design and a memorably foreboding haunted house, it's ultimately a chiller too distant and stand-offish for its own good. The house in question is Hundreds Hall, the home of the once-prominent Ayres family. But it's the late 1940s and the mansion and the family have seen better days. Scion Roderick (Will Poulter) is severely burn-scarred, disabled, and shell-shocked following his WWII heroics in the RAF, his mother Mrs. Ayres (Charlotte Rampling) still mourns the childhood death of her first-born daughter Susan, nicknamed "Suki," and other daughter Caroline (Ruth Wilson) is a spinster trying to hold what's left of her family together. Much of Hundreds Hall is closed off and they're down to one servant in clumsy teenager Betty (Liv Hill). It's Betty's bout with a cold that brings mild-mannered Dr. Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson) into their lives and begins a series of events that Roderick believes is being caused by a malevolent spirit residing in the house. Caroline's docile dog suddenly mauls a little girl with no provocation, Mrs. Ayres finds scribbling on a closet wall that seems to spell out "Suki," and an increasingly agitated Roderick sets fire to his room in an attempted suicidal self-immolation and is promptly carted off to an insane asylum. All the while, the perpetually gloomy Faraday grows fond of Caroline and starts aggressively pushing the idea of marriage, and is also dealing with his own issues that stem from a traumatic childhood visit to Hundreds Hall with his mother, who was once part of the servant staff.
There's some intriguing elements to THE LITTLE STRANGER, but the pace is so oppressively glacial that even fans of slow-burn horror will find it to be a patience-tester (Wilson has experience with this style, having starred in I AM THE PRETTY THING THAT LIVES IN THE HOUSE, the absolute slowest of all horror slow-burners). Abrahamson captures a mood of sustained dread, but he's so focused on that aspect that with the exception of one well-done sequence where Mrs. Ayers encounters something in an empty room, the scares never come and all you're left with is a frustratingly ambiguous final shot that's more likely to provoke dismissal than discussion. Well-intentioned and well-acted (Rampling is, as always, a treasure who elevates everything she's in), but this is a meandering, ponderous bore. (R, 112 mins) COLD SKIN (Spain/France - 2018)
Based on a novel by Albert Sanchez Pinol, the somewhat Lovecraftian COLD SKIN feels a lot like a throwback to those circa 2000-2003 Spanish-made Filmax/Fantastic Factory/Brian Yuzna productions. There's a definite DAGON influence here with its aquatic creatures and even some Stuart Gordon-like sexual transgression, and though French filmmaker Xavier Gens conveys it through sounds and implication, that artistic decision doesn't make it any less unsettling. Gens hasn't really lived up the promise of his 2007 feature debut FRONTIER(S), his contribution to the "New French Extreme" explosion from a decade and change ago. He had a miserable experience going Hollywood with HITMAN and while 2011's ultra-grim THE DIVIDE has some defenders, it's little more than an exploitative, post-apocalyptic SALO, or THE LAST BOMB SHELTER ON THE LEFT. He did some hired gun TV work before returning to the horror genre with 2017's barely-released and instantly-forgotten THE CRUCIFIXION, arguably the most pointless modern-era EXORCIST knockoff this side of THE VATICAN TAPES. Though not without its flaws and budgetary shortcomings, the ambitious and often surprisingly thoughtful COLD SKIN is Gens' best film since FRONTIER(S) simply by virtue of it not being awful. That said, things get off to a shaky start with that oft-used Nietzsche quote about gazing into the abyss and it gazing back at you, which at this point is pretty much the screenwriting equivalent of walking into a Guitar Center and showing off by playing the intro to "Stairway to Heaven."
Set in late 1914 just as the world is heading toward war, a nameless meteorologist (David Oakes) is set to spend a year in voluntary "solitude-like exile" by manning the weather outpost on an isolated island near the Antarctic Circle. It's a job no one really wants unless they want to be alone (even the boat captain dropping him off asks "What are you running from?"), and the island's only other inhabitant is Gruner (Ray Stevenson, who stepped in when Stellan Skarsgard bailed during pre-production), the drunken and grizzled-bordering-on-feral lighthouse keeper, who informs him that his predecessor died not long after arriving a year earlier. Hunkered down for a year of cataloging wind and weather patterns, the meteorologist, dubbed "Friend" by Gruner, is in for a rude awakening when his cabin is attacked on the first night by a horde of amphibious creatures--resembling a cross-breeding of Voldemort with the Crawlers from THE DESCENT--who emerge from the water and only attack at night. The cabin catches fire and burns down, forcing Friend to find refuge at the lighthouse--somewhat fortified by spikes and makeshift barriers that merely slow the creatures down rather than keep them out--with Gruner. Friend also finds another surprise: Gruner has captured one of the female creatures, Aneris (Aura Garrido), and uses her as a sex slave. Friend and Gruner tentatively agree to share the lighthouse, forced to team up every night to fight off the persistent creatures as Gruner goes increasingly off the rails, especially once Friend starts treating the frightened Aneris with dignity and compassion. Given his past work, Gens is surprisingly restrained here, especially considering a key plot point being the sexual abuse of Aneris by Gruner. The creatures are an inconsistent mix of practical makeup and CGI, and the greenscreen work is occasionally shoddy, sometimes taking you out of the scene with a sense of artifice that doesn't appear to be by design. The attacking creatures storm the lighthouse in a very WORLD WAR Z fashion that's a little wonky and cartoonish, but there's some creepily effective moments throughout, particularly when Friend finds the dead meteorologist's notebook filled with sketches of a violent and sexual nature, with random scribblings like "Darwin was wrong." Stevenson is very good in a performance that grows unexpectedly complex as the film goes on, and Gens pulls off a few nice effects-aided technical shots, like a slow pan across the beach that takes the story from summer to winter. COLD SKIN needed a bigger budget to realize its full potential, but after a decade of floundering, this is Gens' most accomplished work since FRONTIER(S). (Unrated, 107 mins)
DETROIT (US - 2017) Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Written by Mark Boal. Cast: John Boyega, Will Poulter, Anthony Mackie, John Krasinski, Algee Smith, Jacob Latimore, Jason Mitchell, Hannah Murray, Kaitlyn Dever, Jack Reynor, Ben O'Toole, Nathan Davis Jr, Peyton Alex Smith, Malcolm David Kelley, Joseph David-Jones, Laz Alonso, Austin Hebert, Jennifer Ehle, Chris Coy, Miguel Pimentel, Chris Chalk, Glenn Fitzgerald, Dennis Staroselsky, Darren Goldstein, Jeremy Strong, Gbenga Akkinagbe. (R, 143 mins) A harrowing chronicle of the 12th Street Riots in Detroit in late July 1967, with a focus on the infamous "Algiers Motel Incident," DETROIT is the latest from the HURT LOCKER and ZERO DARK THIRTY team of director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal. It's pretty powerful--unflinching and disturbing, and difficult to watch at times. As a dramatization, it takes some liberties, changes a few names, and condenses some incidents for time and storytelling purposes, but according to those who were there who were either interviewed by Bigelow and Boal or, in the case of Juli Hysell, who was 18 years old at the time (played in the film by Hannah Murray), on the set as a consultant, it largely sticks with the events of the night, if not the aftermath. DETROIT's themes and imagery resonate today with seemingly endless police shootings of frequently unarmed suspects by inevitably acquitted cops and the resulting protests by groups like Black Lives Matter. Things haven't changed over 50 years, and while the more "woke" film cognoscenti argue, in their increasingly ludicrous pursuit of things to find offensive, that it's a film that shouldn't have been directed by a 65-year-old white woman, Academy Award-winner Bigelow again demonstrates that that she's one of the top American filmmakers going, something anyone in the know figured out back in 1987 with NEAR DARK, and one that you wish would work more frequently.
In an unusual prologue conveyed by a series of Jacob Lawrence paintings, white flight to the suburbs begins to take hold in post-WWII, leaving much of the Detroit area as segregated black neighborhoods left to decline, with increased police presence slowly ratcheting up the racial tension. That tension explodes on July 23, 1967 with a raid on a private club, without a liquor license, hosting a party for returning black Vietnam vets. The cops herd them out of the building like cattle, prodding them into paddy wagons as bystanders demand to know "What did they do?" Before long, bottles are thrown, windows are smashed, stores are looted, and a Molotov cocktail sets a gas station ablaze. Despite pleas from congressman John Conyers (Laz Alonso), his constituents continue destroying their neighborhood out of a sense of frustration that's only growing. Gov. George Romney (seen in archival news footage, used frequently throughout) deploys the National Guard, the US Army, and the state police to maintain a presence in the area in a virtual martial law-like state. The riots force aspiring R&B group The Dramatics, led by frontman Larry "Cleveland" Reed (Algee Smith), to leave a gig at the Fox Theater in downtown Detroit, but they're separated after a bus is hit by bottles, with Larry and his buddy Fred Temple (Jacob Latimore) venturing off on their own and ultimately checking into the nearby Algiers Motel to lay low for the night.
Larry and Fred end up partying with some people in a house on the Algiers property known as "the annex," where rooms are also rented. These people include hot-tempered Carl (Jason Mitchell, best known as Eazy-E in STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON), his friend Aubrey (Nathan Davis Jr), and Vietnam vet Greene (Anthony Mackie), among others, plus 18-year-old Hysell and her friend Karen (Kaitlyn Dever), two white girls from Ohio. Demonstrating what black men go through with cops on a daily basis, Carl shoots Aubrey with a blank from a tiny starter pistol, which provides a laugh for everyone. Emboldened, Carl fires more blanks out of a window in the direction of some National Guardsmen on patrol. This sends the Guard, some Army officers, and some local cops on the scene to raid the Algiers. Three Detroit P.D. patrolmen arrive and, under the leadership of bullying, racist Krauss (Will Poulter of THE REVENANT), the situation escalates into a grueling night of intimidation and torture as Krauss (who's already killed Carl and planted a knife on him to claim it was justified), Demens (Jack Reynor), and Flynn (Ben O'Toole) are set off by the sight of two white girls hanging out in a motel filled with black men and begin terrorizing everyone in search of the gun and the shooter.They play a "death game," a psychological tactic of taking someone into another room and firing a gun, tricking the others into talking, lest they be shot as well. Things get even worse from there, as Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega), a security guard working at a market across the street from the Algiers, tries to maintain some semblance of order by going along to get along, respecting the cops and deferring to Krauss with the best intentions for everyone's safety even though he's horrified by what he sees and feels too outnumbered to stop it.
DETROIT's midsection is bookended by a clunky beginning and a protracted finale that turns into a standard courtroom drama not helped by the distracting late-film appearance of John Krasinski, who's still too recognizably John Krasinski to play an asshole defense attorney more concerned with putting the victims on trial (Dismukes is also charged, along with the three cops, when the story breaks and ultimately three dead bodies and several seriously injured motel residents need to be explained). But the long, agonizing Algiers sequence that makes up the biggest chunk of the film is a masterpiece of sustained, visceral tension. You'll actually feel your heart racing and your stomach knotting as things quickly spiral out of control, with Bigelow and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (THE HURT LOCKER, CAPTAIN PHILLIPS) creating an unbearably claustrophobic atmosphere with a lot of close-ups and a refusal to shy away from the brutality exhibited by the cops, whose power trip is abetted by the military and the state police looking the other way and leaving when they see Krauss' unhinged handling of the situation. Poulter is a big reason the Algiers section works as well as it does. Not a classically attractive leading man, the British Poulter scowls and smirks so much that he looks like an inbred Dylan Baker much of the time, vividly portraying what will probably go down as the most repugnant movie villain of 2017, and doing it so convincingly that it may actually do him more harm than good. Krauss is the kind of loathsome character that can be a typecasting career-killer for the actor who brings him to life, and Poulter (who never overdoes it, which makes it even more terrifying) is so good here that you may end up instantly despising him every time you see him in the future.
Top-billed Boyega is ostensibly the star as Dismukes, but his character arc seems like some scenes are missing, at least when it comes to the extent of his culpability in what happened. It's not really clear why he was put on trial or why Juli picks him out of a police lineup and gets him charged with the cops, beyond a knee-jerk need to pin it all on a black guy, which homicide detectives seem eager to do until too many people start telling the same story of three out-of-control cops. As presented here, Dismukes went along to get along. He was a passive observer who didn't take part in any of the violence or mayhem but felt powerless to stand up to Krauss, and may have been deemed guilty by association simply because of his security guard uniform. By the end, the emotional core of the film is Larry "Cleveland" Reed," a man with an incredible singing voice who was so traumatized by his night at the Algiers that it altered the course of his life. He walked away from a lucrative career with The Dramatics to live a quiet life in Detroit, where he leads a church choir to this day. Smith's performance is every bit as powerful as Poulter's in different ways, but despite a middle that's as brilliantly-handled as anything you'll see in a movie this year, along with convincing period detail that's right up there with ZODIAC, DETROIT falls short of greatness due to a cumbersome and unfocused start and finish that's kind of all over the place. Still a terrific film that needs to be seen, though one really must question the logic of releasing this in the summer.
