Love & Peace (Japan, dir. Sion Sono)
Ryo (Hiroki Hasegawa), a former musician now working an unsatisfying office job, impulsively buys a tiny turtle one day and names it Pikadon (a Japanese term for the atomic bomb). This momentarily inspires him to dream big dreams of rock ‘n roll success again. When his coworkers find out about the turtle and ridicule him, Ryo flushes Pikadon down into the Tokyo sewers and is immediately wracked with guilt. Pikadon meets a magical bum who takes in unwanted toys and pets. He accidentally gives Pikadon a wish-granting candy, and Pika’s wishes cause Ryo to be struck with musical inspiration that lead him to stumble into a music career. Meanwhile Pikadon grows larger and larger in accordance with Ryo’s ambitions. Love & Peace is, once again, a massive curveball from Sion Sono even after the wildly entertaining Tokyo Tribe. This is the sweetest film he’s ever made, a sometimes touching and genuinely heartwarming and hilarious story of rags to rock ‘n roll riches that just happens to include talking animals and toys and an adorable ever-growing turtle. It’s almost impossible to imagine the same guy who made Noriko’s Dinner Table is responsible for this! As always, it will be very exciting to see where Sono goes next.
Sensoria (Sweden, dir. Christian Hallman)
Following a traumatic event and the end of her relationship, Caroline (Lanna Ohlsson) moves into a new apartment building. Like any new place, her flat will take some getting used to with its weird neighbors, odd sounds, and creepy attic storage. But those odd noises keep getting more insistent, and her sleep is troubled with disturbing nightmares. Sensoria is another in a recent string of slow-burn psychological horror films detailing the breakdown of a female lead character, but as the story progresses it leans more toward the supernatural. The performances are solid, the film looks good, and the score and sound design are great, but ultimately the payoff doesn’t quite feel as dramatic as it should after the glacial first two acts. It’s a well-made but not otherwise all that distinctive, but Sensoria will no doubt find fans among people who love quiet, claustrophobic urban horror.
Klown Forever (Denmark, dir. Mikkel Nørgaard)
Five years after their disastrous, life-changing “fishing trip,” old friends Frank (Frank Hvam) and Casper (Casper Christensen) are in very different places in their lives. Frank and his now-wife Mia (Mia Lyhne) have a young daughter and a newborn baby, while Casper and Iben (Iben Hjejle) are divorced and Casper has transitioned to a hard-partying single life. Casper decides to move from Denmark to Los Angeles, leaving Frank hurt and confused as to why his oldest friend would suddenly move halfway around the world. Determined to fix their friendship and bring Casper back home, Frank flies to Los Angeles, where things naturally spiral wildly out of control. The first Klown feature was one of Drafthouse Films’s early acquisitions, and for good reason: it was absolutely hilarious and was comedically audacious. The sequel is a bit less of a surprise, but takes the same sensibility to some unexpected places. When they inevitably do stupid, thoughtless stuff, the stakes feel higher now that Frank is married with kids and both men are a bit older and more settled. The trip to the States gives them a lot of new territory to mine for deeply uncomfortable humor, but Klown Forever never feels mean-spirited. An absolutely worthy follow-up to one of the best comedies of the last decade.
Fantastic Fest 2015: Day 5
Originally published 30 September 2015
The Brand New Testament (Belgium, dir. Jaco Van Dormael)
God (Benoît Poelvoorde), as it happens, is real and lives in Brussels in an apartment building from which he created the world. He’s also a total asshole, inflicting nearly as much misery on his wife (Yolande Moreau) and young daughter Ea (Pili Groyne) as he does on humanity on a daily basis. Ea finally decides to escape like her older brother JC (David Murgia). But first she uses her dad’s computer to tell everyone on Earth when they’re going to die, which ruins his entire system. Ea recruits a scribe—a dyslexic homeless man—and sets out to find six apostles and write a new book of the bible about their lives. The Brand New Testament is one of the best, most original films I’ve seen this year. It’s poignant, hilarious, and completely unpredictable. The cast is excellent — especially young Pili Groyne as Ea — and the film has a look and tone reminiscent of Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s collaborations but enough of its own identity that it never feels derivative. Instead, it feels more like a confident peer to those films.
The Missing Girl (USA, dir. A.D. Calvo)
Mort (Robert Longstreet) runs a comic and toy shop where he currently has one employee, aspiring comic artist Ellen (Alexia Rasmussen). After the car he inherited from his late father finally stops running for good, Ellen picks Mort up to drive to work. She drives him down a street he never goes down; when he was in high school, a girl named Missy went missing and her bloody clothes were found there. The same day, Mort runs into Skippy (Eric Ladin), a mean-spirited high school classmate who dated Missy. When Ellen gets a call from a New York publisher, she has to skip work but can’t get in touch with Mort, who begins to suspect foul play when she doesn’t report for her shift. This is a great, low-key film that quietly defies expectations of genre: it’s really funny, but it’s not exactly a comedy, and it has elements of mystery and crime but they don’t really dominate the proceedings. Instead, The Missing Girl is based on a slate of fantastic performances from a great cast. Longstreet, who has been on a hell of a roll the last few years, is perfect in the role of Mort. And Alexia Rasmussen, who had a pretty terrifying role in Zack Parker’s Proxy last year, is great as Ellen. The Missing Girl takes such care with its characters that by the end it’s tough not to want to spend even more time with them.
The Treacherous (South Korea, dir. Kyu-Dong Min)
In medieval Korea, the young king has gone mad. In order to gain more power for themselves, a father and son team of royal court members concoct a series of elaborate schemes that use the king’s insane lust to their advantage. Soon they are sent out to scour the land for women, and they bring back thousands to serve the king’s insatiable desire. But the men aren’t the only ones in the royal court with an agenda and cold-blooded cunning. Will they be able to turn the king’s madness to their advantage, or will they be outmaneuvered and punished for their treachery? The Treacherous is mostly a fairly standard Korean political period drama, but dealing with the king’s insane lust gives it some very memorable new tweaks to the formula. There’s a lot of nudity, obviously, and the highlight of the film may be the montage of women attending classes to teach them how to sexually please the king. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s not too far removed from a number of similar period dramas of its type. In other words, it’s handsomely mounted (pun intended?) and if you’re a fan of this kind of film you’ll probably find a lot to like here. And if you’re looking to get into them, this would probably be a good place to start with its unusual sense of humor.
High-Rise (UK, dir. Ben Wheatley)
In 1970s UK, successful doctor Laing (Tom Hiddleston) moves into an ultra-modern apartment building where there is a strict class stratification: poor on the bottom, rich on the top. As the building experiences intermittent power failures on the lower floors, a class conflict inevitably arises and the building descends into anarchy. As an absurdist satire of capitalism, the class concerns that have been a part of all of Wheatley’s previous films are front and center this time around. However, more than any of his previous work— even the straightforwardly comic Sightseers—High-Rise has a streak of jet-black humor running through it that helps ground its more surreal moments. And there are plenty of those moments, brilliantly designed and staged to underline the bizarre contrast between the 1970s fashions and retro-future look of the building and the increasingly brutal behavior of the occupants and mimicking the visual style of 1970s films. Wheatley continues his streak as one of the most interesting filmmakers working in UK genre cinema.
Follow (USA, dir. Owen Egerton)
A few days before Christmas, painter Quinn (Noah Segan) wakes up to fin
d his unbalanced girlfriend Viv (Haley Lu Richardson) dead from a gunshot and a gun in his hand. Uncertain of what happened, he panics and tries to figure out what to do while his life spirals out of control. Follow has a predictably great lead performance from Segan, but otherwise this is not terribly compelling stuff. While Richardson does what she can, the writing makes it virtually impossible for Viv to be anything other than a “crazy girlfriend” character before she’s a corpse. The tone is frustratingly inconsistent, and a lot of the humor is uncomfortably mean-spirited. It’s tough to make a “dead girlfriend” movie work as anything but a creepy quasi-necrophiliac fantasy, and Follow is no exception.
Fantastic Fest 2015: Day 6
Originally published 4 October 2015
The Devil’s Candy (USA, dir. Sean Byrne)
Jesse (Ethan Embry), his wife Astrid (Shiri Appleby), and their young daughter Zooey (Kiara Glasco) are excited to move out of their cramped house in the city and onto a large, suspiciously cheap parcel of land in a more rural area. Their enthusiasm is tempered when their real estate agent explains that an old woman and her husband died in the house, but not enough to deter them from putting an offer on it. It turns out the agent was not entirely honest: the old couple were murdered by their troubled son Ray (Pruitt Taylor Vince), who hears demonic voices commanding him to do terrible things. As Jesse finds himself troubled by some disturbing new artistic inspiration, Ray is out of the hospital and on his way home. Sean Byrne’s follow-up to The Loved Ones is a solid, tense horror thriller with a great cast who really make the viewer care about their characters. Embry is great as Jesse, and Kiara Glasco turns in a fantastic performance as Zooey. Along with Shiri Appleby, the three principal actors have a natural chemistry that makes them convincing as a happy family who happens to love metal. And Pruitt Taylor Vince is awesome as always as the tragic but dangerous Ray. There’s an out-of-place subplot about a sinister art gallery, but it never takes up too much time to be much of a distraction. For the most part, The Devil’s Candy is a big improvement on The Loved Ones, and an interesting and entertaining take on the traditional haunted house horror story.
The Similars (Mexico, dir. Isaac Ezban)
Late one night in October 1968, several strangers are trapped by a massive rainstorm at an isolated bus terminal. Cut off from the outside world due to communications interference, they are left to figure out what is happening on their own when scattered reports start coming in of a curious infection that soon arrives in the bus station. Who will survive the night, and what will they look like? The Similars mimics the look and style of an original series Twilight Zone episode, shot with a palette so drained of color that it is nearly black & white. It takes a very long time to establish its characters and situation, and by the time it get ramped up there are moments of absurd humor, but it’s tough to get a handle on the tone of the film. It’s entirely possible that The Similars is meant to be more of a straightforward comedy than it seems, and it seems likely that there may be cultural ideas being played on that viewers outside of Mexico (where the film was made) might not be familiar with. Unfortunately, this makes The Similars something of a frustrating watch, although it’s easy to admire writer/director Isaac Ezban’s commitment to such a weird idea.
Dangerous Men (USA, dir. John M. Rad)
Drafthouse Films will be releasing this film, made over the course of 20 years by filmmaker John M. Rad, soon. I feel like I shouldn’t even say anything about it, as it is PACKED with huge surprises. If you liked The Visitor and (especially) Miami Connection, trust that you’re going to want to see this one ASAP. Hilarious, unique, and utterly bizarre. It’s sort of an action movie, but that’s really all you should know going into it. This screening was done with a 35mm print, which looked virtually brand new, so maybe some lucky folks will get to see it that way when it hits theaters soon!
Too Late (USA, dir. Dennis Hauck)
Private dick Sampson (John Hawkes) gets a call one morning from a young stripper he met a few years earlier named Dorothy (Crystal Reed). She’s in trouble and could use Sampson’s help. He comes running and quickly finds himself in the middle of a very messy situation, which the film presents out of chronological order. Too Late has one hell of a hook: shot on 35mm, it’s made from four single 20-minute takes — the length of a reel. The final reel has a few little edits but is also mostly presented as a single long take. Fantastic Fest viewers got the special treat of seeing the film projected from a 35mm print, making it one of only a tiny handful of new films at the fest screened on actual film. It obviously owes a lot to Tarantino with its referential dialogue and plays on noir tropes, but after a shaky start Too Late turns into an exceptional thriller. John Hawkes is perfect in the lead, and there are plenty of great character touches to accompany the impressive technical feats on display. This is very much a love letter to the films writer/director Dennis Hauck was influenced by as well as to celluloid itself.
The Witch (USA, dir. Robert Eggers)
Banished from his village for reasons never fully explained (although related to his strict Christianity), William (Ralph Ineson) and his family build a home and farm out in the wilderness of 1600s America. One day his infant son Samuel is taken by something in the woods while under the care of Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), the oldest of William and his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie)’s five children. Katherine is devastated by grief, and while William believes a wolf took the boy, young siblings Jonas (Lucas Dawson) and Mercy (Ellie Grainger) insist that the family’s goat Black Phillip told them a witch took Sam. Weird occurrences begin to afflict the family as fingers are pointed and suspicions intensify. The Witch won best director at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and with obvious reason: it’s an intricately detailed study of life on the early American frontier, and the intense research done by writer/director Robert Eggers really pays off. Eggers plays the story (subtitled “A New-England Folk Tale”) totally seriously, and his chilling portrayal of the fears of 1600s American settlers makes this one of the most original and unnerving horror films in recent memory.
Fantastic Fest 2015: Day 7
Originally published 4 October 2015
Baskin (Turkey, dir. Can Evrenol)
A team of bullying cops get a mysterious call for assistance and end up fighting something much more sinister than their standard criminals in an abandoned police station. Baskin, like a lot of movies at Fantastic Fest, takes quite a while to get going, and unfortunately the more time we spend with its pointedly unsympathetic leads the less we’re inclined to worry about them. The film is getting a good amount of buzz from horror fans, and it does deliver plentiful gore and weirdo imagery, but its pacing feels slack and it’s tough to get too involved with what’s happening when there’s not really anyone to care about. It looks slick, and the garish Argento-esque lighting gives it something of an unexpected psychedelic flavor, but overall Baskin is too familiar to be really exciting.
Liza the Fox-Fairy (Hungary, dir. Károly Ujj Mészáros)
Lonely Liza (Mónika Balsai) is the caretaker for the widow of the former Japanese ambassador to Hungary. Six years ago, the ghost of Japanese pop star Tomy Tani (David Sakurai) started to visit Liza and they would sing and dance together. But when Liza reaches her thirtieth birthday without finding true love, Tomy sets into motion a devious plan to keep her all for himself by eliminating all potential competition from Liza’s life. Liza the Fox-Fairy is a massively entertaining fantasy comedy, packed with beautiful images and a wall-to-wall soundtrack of faux-’60s Japanese pop tunes that are utterly convincing as products of that era. The film is hilarious and sweet without getting too dark, even though Tomy’s plan revolves around causing a whole lot of people to die. It’s tough to imagine anyone stone-hearted enough to resist the charms of either Liza or the film that bears her name. This one was a huge surprise, and seemingly came out of nowhere to end up as one of the best films at the fest.
Tikkun (Israel, dir. Avishai Savan)
Yeshiva student Haim-Aaro
n (Aharon Traitel)’s devotion to his studies is driving him to the brink of death. When he has an accident that nearly kills him, Aaron’s father (Khalifa Natour) stubbornly refuses to accept the paramedics’ insistence that the young man is dead and violently fights to bring him back to life. But the Aaron that emerges from the incident is a different person, and his father is given a vision that tells him saving Aaron’s life was an act of defiance against the will of God. Tikkun is visually striking with its elaborate lighting and shot in black and white, but for too much of its running time it is also dramatically inert. There’s just not a lot going on in this film, and even figuring out that Haim Aaron is behaving differently after the accident requires a lot of inference from context since by all outward appearance nothing has changed. Tikkun climaxes with a scene of a graphic transgression that does not feel earned by its narrative at all. Instead, it comes across as a moment of gross exploitation in a film that otherwise feels like an almost comically self-serious black and white drama. In other words, it seems like Oscar Bait with a penetration shot. It comes as such a shock when the film veers so far into transgressive territory, but it also feels like a desperate attempt to inject some kind of dramatic content into a film that is otherwise sorely missing it.
The Mind’s Eye (USA, dir. Joe Begos)
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