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2010s, 2013, Drama, gothic, Grade, Horror, mystery, Past, psychological, Review, review-movie, S, Thriller, Year

Film Review: Stoker – 2013

October 5, 2021 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	Park Chan-wook
Principal Cast	Mia Wasikowska as India Stoker Matthew Goode as Charlie Stoker Nicole Kidman as Evelyn Stoker Dermot Mulroney as Richard Stoker
Release Date	2013
Language(s)	English
Running Time	99 minutes
Report Card	Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary

India (Mia Wasikowska) walks across the street as the frame freezes. Her actor’s name appears across from her.

“My ears hear what other cannot. Small, faraway things people cannot normally see are visible to me. These senses are the fruits of a lifetime of longing. Longing to be rescued. To be completed. Just as the skirt needs the wind to billow…I’m not formed by things that are of myself alone. I wear my father’s belt tied around my mother’s blouse. And shoes which are from my uncle. This is me. Just as a flower does not choose its color…we are not responsible for what we have come to be. Only once you realize this do you become free. And to become adult, is to become free.”

These words are whispered by our protagonist, India (Mia Wasikowska) in a part opening montage and part intro credit sequence that opens on her walking away from a sports car and police car across the street to a green pasture. Her actress’s name, Mia Wasikowski appears on the screen right next to her as the frame freezes momentarily – the present fading into the past. Time flows again and she walks over the name, subsuming it. She stands over the pasture and looks over it, as the wind blows her skirt and the long grass around her. Another cast member’s name appears in the enclosing of her skirt as the frame freezes again. Once again, the present “intervenes” and the freeze stops while the name recedes into the invisible abyss it came from. This pattern continues to repeat before settling on a white flower spattered in red.

This image is unsettling because at this point in the monologue, India directly refers to how a flower doesn’t choose its colors, in the same way as people do not choose the contingent events that shape up their lives up to that moment. The camera cuts to an image of her face smiling as her whispered speech ends on her explaining that realizing this truth is to become adult, thereby becoming free. The frame freezes one last time as her smiling face dissolves to another shot of a younger her running through another field of green; the sounds of wind and rustling fabrics and grass give way to composer Clint Manwell’s fairy-tale like score which evokes feelings of wonder and propulsive change.

India (Mia Wasikowska) feels an injury on her foot.

Just like her “modern” counterpart, this younger India is also followed by the opening credits which appear in the environment around her. She pays them no mind; instead, she takes her shoes off upon noticing a callous and sits next to a gray statue who serves as a mirror image to her. Her wound bursts with clear pus after she pops it, bursting through the soundscape momentarily, before disappearing again. Without a moment wasted, India continues a search, canvassing multiple locations surrounding her expansive residence for “something.” Finally, she climbs up a tree and finds a Birthday present in a box wrapped with yellow ribbons.

Upon finding her mystery item, the film cuts to India’s birthday cake; the propulsive score fades away as the sounds of sirens and flames take charge – a sharp contrast to the scene in question. The camera pushes in on the cake and then rises above it before descending. Now covered in a glass container, the cake is unable to sustain its flames which dissipate into wisps of smoke as a phone starts to ring. A woman screams, “Richard. No!” as the glass container dissolves into the film’s title card proper, which is etched out by an invisible pen and ink.

The camera lingers on both Evelyn’s and India’s shooes. One wears heels while the other wears saddle shoes, a mark of adulthood and childhood respectively.

A preacher’s voice can be heard and it’s revealed that Richard, India’s father, has died. Thus, her 18th birthday, the threshold marking her “birth” as an adult, is marked by the loss of a parent, a figure meant to guide her on that path. Her mother, Evelyn, and her sit at the funeral, both distraught in their own ways. India is stoic and steely while her mother is visibly puffy and devastated. The camera goes to the pair’s feet momentarily; Evelyn is wearing heels while India is wearing saddle shoes. However, India notices a disturbance – a gaze taking notice of her. She turns her head to the side and notices a figure in the distance, a man staring down at her from above the hillocks she previously ran through.

India plays the piano as a spider crawls towards her.

The funeral service proper ends, but the preacher’s sermon continues playing in the soundscape of India’s mind. She tries to play piano while a spider crawls towards her feet. However, her attempts at distracting herself are interrupted by her mother, whose figure makes its presence known on the mirror above her. As Evelyn implores India to help with the event’s cooking, the latter stares her down with a kind of disdain. Even after turning to face Evelyn, as opposed to facing her mirror image, India refuses to say anything. Evelyn exasperatedly pushes her point while the aforementioned spider skirts up the grieving daughter’s leg.

India (Mia Wasikowska) sits in the kitchen to help make deviled eggs.

However, India does acquiesce to her mother’s demands and goes to the kitchen to help make deviled eggs. She overhears a pair of maids gossiping about the state of her family’s affairs. These unwanted thoughts her, so she starts to roll an egg, cracking it slowly. Outside noise fades out as the sound of the eggs breaking overwhelms the ears, until finally, Mrs. McGarrick (Phyllis Somerville), the Stoker’s head caretaker, silences the pair and goes to inquire into India’s state of mind. The two remnisce on their shared past with deviled eggs and it becomes clear that unlike, Evelyn, India sees the elderly caretaker as a surrogate-mother of sorts. Mrs. McGarrick takes out flowers which are tied with a yellow ribbon and asks India if she found her birthday present yet. India ties the color of the ribbon on the flower to the color of the ribbon on the box from her initial adventure and reveals she found a key in the box before also expressing surprise at the revelation that Mrs.McGarrick is tied to her yearly birthday presents, shoes, as opposed to her deceased father like she initially thought.

She leaves the kitchen momentarily and sees her mother talking to the stranger who gazed upon the mother-daughter duo earlier at the funeral. Her mother sees India and calls out to her, introducing the stranger as Roger’s brother, Charlie – a stranger turned into long lost uncle. The revelation deeply upsets India who immediately walks back into the kitchen. Her pale expression invites concern from Mrs.McGarrick who inquiries into what’s wrong. India responds honestly: “Yes. My father is dead”.

India (Mia Wasikowska) sleeps in her bed dejected.

As if in response to her dejection, the film cuts to a fully lethargic India. The camera tracks to the right from India’s face to a pair of shoes, like the ones she’s worn previously. This pair of shoes dissolves into another which dissolves into another and so on, each pair smaller than the one that came before it. Eventually, the dissolving shoes come to a small pair, fit for a toddler, before the camera tracks right back to India’s face. The camera steps back and reveals that India is laying in a circle of 16 pairs of shoes; each pair from the montage lies around her, in a displaced oval like shape, ranging from oldest to newest pair. Her “current” 17th pair, lies on the floor next to the bed; one pair for every birthday except for the most current birthday – the threshold to becoming an adult.

It’s not just that the 18th pair, the guide to walking the path to adulthood, is missing. India’s turmoil stems from the double mystery of who was fully responsible for her previous 17 pairs of shoes. Up to the moment of Mrs.McGarricks’ reveal, India has walked in her “father’s” footsteps. With the identity of the gift-giver stripped away, the path which has defined her so long as a subject is now that has to be re-treat, rediscovered. The words from the opening monologue ring more resounding here: “I’m not formed by things that are of myself alone “.

The montage which initially presented itself as a series of discrete images, moments bleeding into one another, turns out to be multiple sections of the same image. Far from being from different times, the shoes exist in the same “present” moment with India. However, the montage of them dissolving demonstrates the logic of how moments are just accumulations of everything that came before. Each “shoe” is an epoch that can now be re-cast; a past that can open the doors to new futures.

Evelyn (Nicole Kidman) comments that India and Richard’s hunting trophies are wastes of life but Charlie seems to appreciate the work the father-daughter duo did.

Meanwhile, Evelyn and Charlie talk about India and Richard’s close-knit relationship, one formed primarily around hunting birds. Evelyn bemoans the act as senseless violence, but Charlie shows great respect for the duo’s craft. He picks up one of their winged trophies and reveals an an egg underneath. The deviled eggs which start as one of India’s favorite treats become an egg which serves as a remainder of her relationship with her father which then dissolves into her eye itself. Eggs are treats are trophies are eyes. A series of poetic connections between the images are formed.

Eggs are white on the outside and yellow on the inside. Eggs, at least the ones shown in the film, are related to birds. In other circumstances, the eggs would break apart to allow new life to come out – the birth of something new. This is a story of a girl becoming a woman, on the threshold of adulthood, looking for a path to walk on as influences all around her permeate her crumbling shell.

India walks around the house and the whispers about her family’s affairs continue. In hushed tones, adults abound talk about her family; their words enter her mental landscape constantly. She notices Charlie talking to a seemingly distraught Mrs. McGarrick, but just as she sensed her Uncle Charlie earlier during the funeral, her uncle senses her gaze and turns to meet it. However, India immediately averts the battle of gazes and escapes. Before Charlie can catch up to her, she runs out of a side entrance of her expansive manor. The camera track India while she roams the outside of the house in the background of the frame; in the foreground, Charlie is being occupied by Evelyn.

However, this turns out to be far from the case as India, initially confident upon entering her abode from the front, is shocked when Charlie calls to her from at the top of the master staircase. Just like the first time she saw him, he reigns above her. He coyly asks her if she wants to know why she feels she’s at a disadvantage, both announcing his take on the duo’s power relation and also preferring an analysis of her own psyche; this is all done despite the fact, as India rightly retorts, that she was unaware of his existence till the day. He ignores her comment and asserts the real reason is because she’s standing below him. The subtext of the stairs is thus brought to the level of text and the viewer is made aware of both the importance of height and presence of stairs as a motif representing control.

In response to his claim, India slowly climbs up the staircase. The camera pushes in through a doorway, signifying the start of the confrontation between uncle and niece, showing India alone, rising to meet Charlie, who slowly enters the frame. She gets to the top of the stairs and stares her newly found family member down, asserting her right to stand as equal to him. She quite literally rises to the challenge.

Upon giving him a long look, she remarks that he looks remarkably like her father. Suddenly, her confused emotional state at his presence gains additional texture. Her father, the one who guided her and took her hunting, not only turns out to not be the one setting her path via the shoes she walks in but has returned, so to speak, in the form of a part hidden relation, part quasi-doppelgänger. Her confrontation with Charlie, is then, the first step she has to take to find herself.

Charlie responds to her comparison with an expression of sympathy towards her loss. A strange response which she notices and calls out, reminding her uncle that the loss is shared among them. Once again, he ignores her observation and tells her that he’s planning on staying with her and her mother for the foreseeable future. He makes it clear that he’s gotten her mother on board but tells India that he wants her approval as well because it’s “important” to him. Thus, the stage for Stoker is set and the battle for power can truly commence.

Given the title, Stoker, a viewer with context would think of Bram Stoker and his work in gothic horror. On that level, Stoker works. All the ingredients for gothic feeling are present: there’s a death encased in mystery, a hidden relative that shows up, and troubled familial relations that bubble up and sublimate in obscene fashion. However, as the first 13 minutes above demonstrate, the film operates closer to the psychoanalytic thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock: the bodies of birds appear like in Psycho, the game of gazes is played like in Vertigo, and at the most obvious level, the basic story beats of Hitchock’s film noir, Shadow of a Doubt, serve as Stoker’s jumping off point. Both stories feature an uncle named Charlie, who shares a special bond with his niece and who is covered in a veil of mystery. Likewise, both stories follow a niece as she struggles against penetrating the veil her uncle puts up. Stoker even goes so far as to replicate Shadow of a Doubt’s use of the staircase as the scene of battle between uncle and niece along with its presence as a motif.

But, unlike Hitchcock’s film which uses the relationship between the uncle and niece to reveal the duplicitous nature of the social order and the underpinnings of the idyllic American fantasy, Stoker uses the relationship to examine the way personal identity is generated and navigated. In other words, one film is aimed at a macro-level and the other at the micro-level. In this way, Stoker is able to traverse a whole different set of ideas from the vantage point of a coming-of-age horror.

Furthermore, though the story and narrative progression may be Hitchcock inspired, the editing, sensuality, and painterly mise-en-scène are all in line with director Park Chan-Wook’s style as an auteur. His stylistic flourishes here give the film it’s poetic sensibilities because he elects to show most of the story rather than tell it. On top of layering motifs in a more traditional sense, he constantly uses the nature of his edits – both sequencing and the edit itself – to suggest connections between seemingly disparate ideas. Like the egg becoming the eye, “apparent” match-cuts between objects of similar sizes and shapes along with dissolves between images are used to demonstrate the state of India’s psychic journey and how she’s processing the story as it goes along. As she makes connections, the viewer can piece together both the narrative and what it means to her own journey.

That being said, the nature of this journey is constantly up for re-interpretation. Pivotal scenes aren’t cut chronologically but are cut in the order India is making sense of them and rendering them coherent from her own vantage point. This gives seemingly obvious moments, a palpable level of uncertainty, because the nature of what the moment is supposed to demonstrate is indeterminate until the very end of that movement, but because movements fade into one another and are constantly recalled, every sequence gains a newfound freedom in how it’s used in the present to open up future possibilities. Consequently, the film feels dynamic even as moments repeat, because those moments come to mean something new.

Even if all the moving parts don’t make sense, Chan-wook’s construction of the film ensures the journey can be felt even if not fully understood. He achieves this feeling of consistency via in how he utilizes the architecture of the house to reflect the ebb and flow of power and also his attention towards maintaining a consistent color palette. While the latter has been mentioned above, the former hasn’t been given it’s due. At a basic level, the exterior of the house is white like the color of an egg’s shell. The green surrounding the house in the form of vegetation makes its way in the walls of the “public” spaces of the house, like the dining room. India is constantly in the color yellow’s proximity. Likewise, her mother is always in red’s presence. By establishing the colors early on and constantly repeating them in and out of the house, Chan-wook is able to get the audience to think about the meaning of them in the background of their minds. As a result, the colors become affectively charged which is why they can be felt even if their presence isn’t consciously noted. Chan-wook is weaving poetic patterns that operate on a level that appears like it’s just style, but is in style employed in lieu of accentuating the substance.

In light of this, it’s surprising to see that critical consensus is so harsh on the film, with many critics chastising the film for being style over substance. It’d be one thing if the film gallivanted from scene to scene for shock value; with violent masterpieces like Oldboy in Chan-wook’s filmography, it would be easy for him to just sink to spectacle. But Stoker is less focused on the spectacle than the journey itself. It’s filmed in a delicate and sensual way because unlike many of his previous excursions, Stoker is a women-led character study; that too, it’s a women led horror movie where the protagonist, far from being victimized, is allowed to find herself in the most emphatic fashion, something which would certainly not be possible if there was no substance beneath the film’s stylistic maneuverings.

This oddity is even more inexplicable given that, in many ways, Stoker feels like a dress rehearsal for The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook’s 2016 erotic thriller, considered by many, including myself, to be the director’s best work. Both film’s share a woman lead, explore relationships between women, and focus more on the unseen gazes of characters than any overt physical action. They both also showcase incredibly sensual moments of eroticism in unsuspecting fashion, demonstrating the way desire codes even the otherwise seemingly ordinary. Furthermore, while Stoker is an homage and twist on Shadow of a Doubt, The Handmaiden, feels like something similar in relation to Vertigo, at least from my view.

Perhaps the reason for Stoker’s undeserved treatment lies in its opacity. Though, the feeling of the film is something a viewer can take away from a viewing, the lack of direct explanation regarding some of the more overt symbols, like the spider, might put off those looking for a story that provides all the answers. However, it is precisely because the explanations are withheld, that the film opens up interpretative possibility and can evoke the feeling of poetry as opposed to pretentious philosophizing. It’s for that reason that Stoker is best reserved for those viewers who relish engaging with a film, whether that be mulling over it afterwards or playing it back it back to confirm a hint about a theory. It’s a film that rewards multiple viewings and interpretations of the events depicted. At the brisk rate of 99 minutes, Stoker would already be worth seeing for its visual splendor alone. Few films have this much fun presenting images in such confident fashion. However, given the depth Chan-wook manages to pack behind each and every movement, big or small, the film is something that any cinephile should give a watch.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	Stoker is a film about whispers, glances, stolen gazes, and strategies for getting one’s way. The story uses Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt as a jumping off point to explore the psychological journey of a young woman, India, who is forced to find herself after the death of her father and the mysterious emergence of her uncle. Her journey is one that fluctuates from romance to horror to thriller back again all while remaining couched in psychoanalytic motifs and relationships that give each and every moment a host of meanings. While fans of director Park Chan-wook’s other works should definitely seek out this underrated part of his filmography, I’d recommend Stoker to any viewer who enjoys the experience of being washed over by a film and trying to piece it together afterwards. For the viewer who enjoys the journey even if the destination is unclear, Stoker offers a key to a box waiting to be unlocked.
Rating	10/10
Grade	S

Go to Page 2 for the for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis.
Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .

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Uncategorized, Viewing Challenge

Halloween 2021: 31 Day Horror Marathon

October 1, 2021 The Critic 2 Comments

As is tradition, this year I’ll be watching 31 horror movies- 1 for each day in October. Last year my list was focused on helping me push though and get all the reviews I needed to finally publish my Best Horrors of the 2010-19 Decade List. Unfortunately, that challenge failed and the movie’s on the list are still being reviewed. The biggest takeaway I’ve gotten from both years attempting this challenge is keeping up 1 review a day.

While I’ve never failed at watching my allotted movie on it’s day, I have failed, especially last year, to get the reviews out on time, if at at all. Thankfully, the year since has been invaluable in both helping me develop my more thorough review style, something I was just starting to experiment with last year at this time, and in helping me better learn my limits in regards to quality and output.

That is why this year, my marathon list contains a host of re-watches from previous years. As part of my Site Update Project, I’ve gone through and started the process of taking my older reviews, namely ones without images or any longform analysis, and have been pushing them up to a much higher standard. The marathon gives me a good excuse and opportunity to invest time in some of my eldest reviews and help standardize them.

However, that doesn’t mean that I won’t review any new films. I have a healthy assortment of newer releases and classics I haven’t gotten to review yet. It’s just the focus this year is more on treading old ground again as opposed to trying to expand as fast as possible to new territories. Movies that I’ve reviewed before are marked with an *.

To that end, I will try to post reviews up to 4 days of the “watch” date presented below. For example, if a movie is to be watched on the 4th, the review or updates to review should be up by the 8th. Reviews will be marked with hyperlinks once “finished”. This delay should ensure that I have time to go more granular on the reviews that need the effort without severely compromising the flow of the marathon itself for those viewers following along. While there may be a few delays, I expect to be able to adhere to this schedule for the most part. With that out of the way, here’s the list.

The List

DATE	MOVIE	DIRECTOR
10-1-2021	Friday the 13th*	Sean S. Cunningham
10-2-2021	Stoker	Park Chan-Wook
10-3-2021	The Blair Witch Project	Eduardo Sánchez, Daniel Myrick
10-4-2021	Raw*	Julia Ducournau
10-5-2021	Insidious 2	James Wan
10-6-2021	The Thing*	John Carpenter
10-7-2021	Ring*	Hideo Nakata
10-8-2021	The Ring*	Gore Verbinski
10-9-2021	A Cure for Wellness	Gore Verbinski
10-10-2021	The Witch*	Robert Eggers
10-11-2021	Sinister*	Scott Derrickson
10-12-2021	Prince of Darkness	John Carpenter
10-13-2021	The Cabin in the Woods*	Drew Goddard
10-14-2021	Perfect Blue	Satoshi Kon
10-15-2021	In the Mouth of Madness*	John Carpenter
10-16-2021	Black Christmas*	Bob Clark
10-17-2021	The Empty Man	David Prior
10-18-2021	The Evil Dead*	Sam Raimi
10-19-2021	Saint Maud	Rose Glass
10-20-2021	Poltergeist *	Tobe Hooper
10-21-2021	Audition	Takashi Miike
10-22-2021	Green Room*	Jeremy Saulnier
10-23-2021	A Nightmare on Elm Street*	Wes Craven
10-24-2021	The Shining*	Stanley Kubrick
10-25-2021	Baskin	Can Evrenol
10-26-2021	A Quiet Place*	John Krasinski
10-27-2021	A Quiet Place Part II	John Krasinski
10-28-2021	Us*	Jordan Peele
10-29-2021	Train to Busan	Yeon Sang-ho
10-30-2021	The Killing of a Sacred Deer*	Yorgos Lanthimos
10-31-2021	Nosferatu*	F.W. Murnau

* – watched and reviewed before

2010s, 2015, Action, Crime, Drama, Grade, mystery, Past, Review, review-movie, S, Thriller, Year

Film Review: Sicario- 2015

September 30, 2021 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	Denis Villeneuve
Principal Cast	Emily Blunt as Kate Josh Brolin as Matt Benicio del Toro as Alejandro Daniel Kaluuya as Reggie
Release Date	2015
Language(s)	English
Running Time	121 minutes
Report Card	Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary

Text card explaining the genealogy of the word ‘sicario’

The film starts by defining the term ‘sicario’: it was initially used to refer to zealots defending their homeland but means ‘hitman’ in the status quo. Though both interpretations of the word signify a killer, one is oriented around protecting ideals while the other seems to confirm a nihilistic kill-or-be-killed world where no values could persist. This dichotomy between the two meanings of the word represents the battleground Sicario takes place on as it explores what the transition between the terms signifies about the world in a paradigmatic sense.

The establishing shot starts from the vantage point of the idealistic interpretation of the word: a domestic view of a neighborhood in Arizona is interrupted as a group of soldiers, defenders of the homeland, creep into frame while the late Jóhann Jóhannsson’s palpable score reverberates like a droning heartbeat in the background, adding to the feeling of tension. The leader of the group, Kate (Emily Blunt), sits in a tank ready for breach before the vehicle breaks into a house, scattering dust all over the area. She gets down to investigate the residence with her squad but is suddenly caught off guard by a armed resident in the house. She evades his bullet and manages to kill him. The sound calms down. It seems like the dust has settled.

However, his bullet, despite missing her, opens another wound that proves to be even more devastating . The wall, broken in by the impact of the shot, reveals a series of bagged up corpses hiding within – a simple hostage retrieval becomes a mortifying entry into the macabre.

Kate (Emily Blunt) goes outside to vomit.

Kate immediately goes outside to vomit. Being a soldier doesn’t entail being unaffected by such senseless violence, and the brutality of the situation shakes Kate and her crew. She’s asked by personnel on how to document the situation given its severity. Kate insists that the records reveal everything; transparency is more necessary than ever.

While she tries to get an accurate count on the number of bodies in the house, a group of officers outside find a padlocked door in a shed and try and open it. The cuts and expectations established previously lead the viewer to think it’s more bodies hidden away, but the intense heartbeat track comes back signaling shifting times. Suddenly, the shed explodes.

Debris and dust scatter everywhere, obfuscating the frame, and Kate is once again lost in the fog of the situation, unable to see anything besides the carnage. The domestic area turned mausoleum has now become the site of an explosion – suburbia rendered into a site of gratuitous violence. In her efforts to preserve the rule of law, Kate finds herself soaked with so much blood that she can’t seem to scrub it all off in the shower. As she looks into a clouded reflection of herself in her bathroom mirror, it’s clear her more idealistic worldview has been delivered a tremendous blow.

Kate’s superiors speak to Matt (Josh Brolin) about her qualifications.

The next day comes. Kate and her partner on the force, Reggie (Daniel Kaluuya), wait outside of a glass-paned room as their superiors discuss the previous day’s mission. A man speaks to the group with the camera positioned to his back. His framing suggests importance and a sense of mystery. He asks about Kate and Reggie’s respective backgrounds, approving of Kate’s but rejecting Reggie upon hearing about his legal education. The group calls Kate in and introduces her to the man of the hour, Matt (Josh Brolin).

First, he asks her about her relationship and child status. He’s abrupt and straight to the point. She responds she’s both divorced and childless. He tells her he’s hunting the cartels behind the bodies and bombings. She expresses interest. Her superior, Forsing (Jeffrey Donovan) tells her that joining such a task-force requires volunteering for the position. She asks Matt if they’ll be able to hold the people who committed the acts responsible. He guarantees that they’ll be able to deal with the masterminds behind the operation itself.

She agrees with no hesitation and her journey begins. However, as she leaves the room, she notices that the charming, yet serious Matt, shrouded in mystery, is wearing flip-flops in sharp contrast to everyone else in the room wearing business professional clothing – another indication that appearances are not to be trusted. Images are always imbued with an purpose and can’t be taken at face value.

The film cuts to a neighborhood in Nogales, Mexico. A young boy wakes up his father, Silvio(Maximiliano Hernández), to ask him to play soccer. Silvio gets up, eats breakfast while getting a nice helping of side-eye from his wife, puts on his police uniform, and then proceeds to take his son out on a walk. This adjunct narrative is a sense of normalcy that gives the viewer a reprieve from the violence; however, its presence immediately generates a sense of unease. The opening’s mention of Mexico in relation to sicario qua assassin, the eruption of violence in the American residence, the focus on cartel violence, and Silvio’s status as police officer transform a seemingly benign scene and moment into one that threatens to become catastrophic.

Reggie is sent home while Kate (Emily Blunt) is allowed to proceed.

Back in the United Sates, Reggie drives Kate to her first day on Matt’s team. She’s told she’s going to El Paso with them on some preliminary task-work. However, upon getting to the gate, Reggie is denied access and the uncertainty about the situation increases. The emissary of the law is not allowed to pry his eyes upon this supposedly legal execution of justice. He’s forced to leave as Kate continues forward.

As she gets closer to the plane, another man, with his head turned around as to disguise his visage, appears at the plane’s tail. Matt comes out to greet Kate letting her know that the wayward man is Alejandro (Benicio del Toro) – another unexpected surprise. The trio get on the plane and Alejandro asks Kate if she’s ever been to Juárez; the shoe fully drops and the pretenses dissipate as Kate realizes that the mission she’s signed up for is far more expansive than she could have imagined.

While the nature of where Sicario mysteries lead is fairly by the books, the way its cinematically rendered gives it a poignancy that elevates the film into something special. Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s script is propulsive and juggles multiple storylines, giving director Denis Villenevue the ability to flex his muscles and leave his mark of the genre. Instead of focusing on the mystery, Villenevue repeatedly turns the viewer’s attention to the dichotomy introduced at the film’s start by utilizing parallels in characters and groups to demonstrate the way the terms and the manner by which they’re used to categorize can rapidly shift .

There’s an implied distinction between between killing while oriented towards an ideal that stands for something greater than oneself and killing for the sake of something material, like wealth. The former position is one that’s idealistic and moves towards a vision of a “just” world. The latter is one that’s nihilistic and treats the world of winner-take-all. Or is that really the case? Are the two ideas separate or do they bleed into one another? Could one assassinate as an ideal or choose to assassinate in order to move towards an ideal? Villeneuve allows these questions to fester by taking the parallel’s Sheridan’s script sets up between the cartel and the US government, the Mexican police force and the American police force, and so on, and forces the viewer to play a horrifying game of compare and contrast.

One act of violence by one side is met by a seemingly equal atrocious act on the other. A “good” character postures and makes a comment on a “bad” character but then takes action that seems just as egregious. Villeneuve chooses to showcase the “immoral” bouts of violence in more explicit detail and withhold the brutality within the “ethical” instances of violence. He gives just enough information for the viewer to imagine how a scene would progress given both the context clues and the explicit parallels, forcing the audience to come to their own conclusions regarding the mechanics and ethics underpinning certain bouts of brutality. The subjective process of imagining the violence generates an uncomfortable proximity to the situation and forces us to deal with the contradictions in values.

This move also generates an empathetic connection with Kate who is thrust into the same world of twists, turns, and moments of depravity and forced to find stable footing in spite of it all. The first act sets up Kate as resourceful, honest, and passionate. She dodges a bullet, kills an assailant, takes control of her group, and wants to achieve justice – an ideal protagonist to root for. However, the moment she volunteers to achieve her ethical vision, she’s forced into a world where friend and foe mean very little, and the boundaries between what the “good” and “evil” are doing is suspect. Thus, an action of violence which may be immediately justified as necessary can be questioned because the viewer experiences it with Kate; she’s a moral barometer that lets us traverse the hazy backdrop the film plays against.

Sicario’s genre peers would usually feature a character like Alejandro or Matt as the lead – a burly man of mystery ready to whatever it takes to get the job done. However, the choice to have the lead be a highly capable woman with her morals intact in a sea of men and violence provides a vantage point that gives the otherwise gratuitous moments of sheer visceral terror a counterpoint that has heft. She’s not a damsel in distress, and she’s not some battle-hardened veteran looking for a fight; she’s just a competent soldier looking to do the right thing in circumstances that go against everything she’s been taught to accept. Blunt exemplifies this by constantly modulating between a soldier capable of holding her own and someone way out of their depth being racked by panic. She’s the perfect vehicle for both her character and the moral fiber of the film. By building up her competency and then slowly revealing its limits within a brutal, new environment, the film is able to push forward new ground on a story and make what would otherwise be cliché’s into uncomfortable moments to unpackage.

In fact, it’s because Kate is presented as competent in the context of what she’s signed up to do that otherwise passive scenes on her part are absolutely dread inducing. For example, as opposed to a conventional car chase scene with professionals chasing after one another, a traffic jam scene where assailants can be in any car and the protagonist is a fish out of water is much more dreadful. Because Kate is established as capable, the film is able to emphasize just how unforgiving the reality of the cartel violence and dealing with them can be; the rules of war don’t do anything in guerilla situations. Thus, her position gives impetus not only to the primary questions of the film but allow the visceral moments to have genuine stakes associated with them.

Put together with the parallel storylines and the near-perfect pacing of the narrative, Sicario certainly merits a comparison to the Coen brothers’ masterpiece, No Country For Old Men, a neo-Western following multiple characters who hunt and are being hunted by one another. Like No Country, Sicario presents a dark vision of an age without values, where the values of older days have seemingly faded away to the gusts of apathy and violence. While Sicario may not be as ambitious in terms of its narrative construction and direction, it certainly evokes a similar feeling of wandering through a foreign land where sense and reason have vacated the premises.

However, Sicario does match No Country when it comes to its visuals. Serving as director of photography on both films, Roger Deakins gives Villeneuve’s vision the room it needs to breath and fully take hold. Dust in the air, shadowy environments, and ever-present sources of reflection reveal the complexity inherent in seemingly straight-forward situations by introducing a visual opacity which accentuates the themes. Nothing is what it seems and it’s within the shadows cast by projections that the “truth” can be ascertained; there’s a space between words and the paradigms they operate within.

Consequently, this makes Sicario a must-see experience for any fan of cinema ranging from the casual fan looking for an exciting time to the cinephile looking for something heftier to sink their teeth into. While veterans of cartel thrillers might be less surprised by plot twists, the sheer culmination of skill including, but not limited to, Deakins camera work, the late Jóhann Jóhannsson’s adrenaline-pumping propulsive score, Blunt’s humanistic yet confident performance, and of course, Villeneuve’s brilliant ability to put all these elements together makes this an experience no one should miss. If nothing else, the final few moments of the film exemplify how dedication to craft can elevate even a small movement into a grand gesture.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	Sicario is the rare movie that offers a totally engrossing time from start to finish across different types of moviegoers. With its propulsive narrative, fantastic acting, bloody and well-executed set-pieces, and its dark and foreboding score, the experience stays entertaining the whole time. However, it’s use of Emily Blunt in the role of the main character gives the movie a humanity and a vantage point that transforms it into a meditation on violence and the reality of the rule of law. It’s heady without being alienating and even more engaging as a result.
Rating	10/10
Grade	S

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2010s, 2013, Drama, Grade, Horror, mystery, Past, psychological, Review, review-movie, S+, Thriller, Year

Film Review: Enemy – 2013

September 28, 2021 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	Denis Villeneuve
Principal Cast	Jake Gyllenhaal as Adam Bell / Anthony Claire Mélanie Laurent as Mary Sarah Gadon as Helen Claire Isabella Rossellini as the Mother
Release Date	2013
Language(s)	English
Running Time	90 minutes
Report Card	Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary

The camera tracks left over a muddied yellow cityscape while composers Bensi and Jurrinan’s eerie and foreboding score plays; discordant strings turn into synth-like drones that get under the skin. A beep emerges; the voicemail message accompanying it feels less intrusion and more accompaniment to the score – the soundscape is unified in its discordant elements. A woman’s voice (Isabella Rossellini) can be heard. She talks to her son and thanks him for showing him her new apartment. She mentions concern over his living conditions and asks for him to call back while the camera cuts to Adam (Jake Gyllenhaal), her son, sitting in a musty car. His eyes reflected in the car’s rear-view mirror show an inertia – he looks unenthused and out of it. The mother’s words gain some power as her son’s disposition indicates a lack of vitality.

She tells him she loves him and the film cuts to a pregnant woman, Helen, who sits basked in a yellow haze of light and shadow. Another mother in response to the son. A pattern established, but what does it mean? The screen turns black as if in response and the following words appear on the screen in yellow font: “”Chaos is order yet undeciphered.” This is Enemy’s calling card; the story is a puzzle that entices the viewer to engage in dialogue. Patterns are present and meanings are given but their connections aren’t immediately apparent. Thus, order is only present for those willing to decipher – a great way to prime the viewer to not only pay attention but to stay invested to even the most minor of details.

The words fade into a black background out which a pair of hands appear in close view. We cut to a wider shot and see a man who looks like Adam but exudes a more confident presence along with another man walking down a dimly lit hallway where the yellow lights emit a sickly feeling in the area. This “potential” Adam^[1]I use potential in quotes here because the nature of which character this is isn’t made definite and is certainly meant to be presented as up for interpretation at the start. For my full … Continue reading opens the door and enters the room as the unnerving score gets more intrusive and for good reason. It turns out that the characters have entered a dimly lit room filled with smoke and mirrors where hordes of men gather around women performing sexual acts. This mise-en-scène gives the setting a surreal feeling – the perverse room feels apart from a “normal” world. The women’s moans and squeals of enjoyment accentuate the unease generated by the score – the sounds of ecstasy take on the sign of omen as they become infected by the score.

Suddenly, two women adorned in a silky robes and long heels comes out and the crowd’s attention becomes focused. Their initial “holy” appearance, at least comparatively, and the way they command the energy of the room evokes the feeling of sacred ritual – the climax approaches. One of the women carries a covered tray which she places in the center of the room. Meanwhile the other one disrobes in the background as the “potential” Adam places his fingers over his face, almost as if trying to cover it, and leaves room only for his eyes to peer through – four fingers on each side of his face wrapping around from the bottom-up. The tray is picked up and a spider walks out from the center of it. However, as it tries to get away, it’s followed by the now fully disrobed women who follows it around the table. Her pursuit is shown via the reflection of the table – a mirror image.

Eventually she corners and stands menacingly over the creature, revealed only by her silhouette. She places her robe over the spider as if about to crush the creature while the room watches with baited breath. Is this what the men came to see? A nude woman threatening to kill a spider? A leg positioned over a creature possessing 8 legs? We cut back to the “potential” Adam in the same position as before. Now the 8 fingers reaching around his face form part of an inverted image: a spider made of hands reaching around the face in contrast to the feet reaching to the spider proper.

Adam (Jake Gyllenhaal) teaches about patterns.

We see a view of the city again before the film cuts to Adam teaching a college classroom. He starts his lecture on control by stating that: “Every dictatorship has one obsession. And that’s it. So, in Ancient Rome, they gave the people bread and circuses. They kept the populace busy with entertainment, but other dictatorships use other strategies to control ideas. How do they do that? Lower education. They limit culture. Censor information. They censor any means of individual expression. And it’s important to remember this, that this is a pattern that repeats itself throughout history. ” He finishes his lecture and the students leave.

He gets on a bus that traverses the city via cable transport that travels along lines that extend from building to building like a web of control. The spider’s influence is everywhere it seems. Adam gets into his disheveled looking apartment where he exists in lethargic state. His dissatisfaction is apparent as he expresses frustration in the movement of his hands while grading his students’ papers. He brings his hands up to his face as if to pray right as his girlfriend, Mary (Mélanie Laurent), shows up. She attempts to converse with him, but he refuses to answer. Instead, he focuses on just engaging in sex with her.

Then, the pattern repeats. He’s back in his classroom, giving the same lecture as above, gets on the web-linked train, grades papers at home, has sex with Mary and back to it again. He’s stuck in a loop that leaves him out of joint. Finally, the pattern breaks. As Adam sits in the teacher’s lounge, one of his co-workers asks him whether or not he goes to the movies and if he’s a “movie guy”. Adam indicates he doesn’t go out a lot and doesn’t like movies. This would also make sense given his lecture content – entertainment is a strategy used to control people so he stays away from it.

His coworker persists and mentions that one can watch a movie at home and that renting can work just as good as going out theatres. In response to this persistence, Adam requests a recommendation for something cheerful to which his coworker recommends Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way” The odd title initially strikes both us and Adam as a philosophical statement until he clarifies the flick is a local film which Adam should check out. Thus, the initial pattern is disrupted. A desire has presented itself within the inert world of Adam’s.

He comes back home after having rented the movie. As he dejectedly rests his head against his right palm, Mary appears and tries to coax him into coming to bed with her even mentioning how “drunk” she is. She plays with his face and tries to awaken something sensual in him but he’s unmoved. In one fluid movement, the camera tracks horizontally Mary as she leaves Adam alone, receding into the darkness and leaving the light on him. He finishes the last paper and opens up his laptop to start and finish the movie. Once again, the camera moves horizontally, demonstrating the passing of time and location. The movie is done and Mary is fast asleep. Adam gets up and looks perturbed, but tries to distract himself by having sex with sleeping Mary. He gets on top of her, but the time is passed and she’s no longer interested. She asks him to stop, gets out of bed, and changes. He asks what’s wrong and she lets him know she’ll call tomorrow. The pattern has now fully broken down and with it comes the first signs of horror.

A bellboy makes his way to help a guest.

The score becomes intimidating as it starts to pound as pattern of the film fully breaks down – now the screen has transported the viewer to within the Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way. This is Adam’s’ dream and his unconscious, now stirred out of the monotony of his “everyday”, presents the dream to move Adam.

A woman in a red dress and black hat stands at a hotel’s reception and is received by two staff without hats. One of the men calls a bell boy with a red hat to help the woman with her two bags. He retrieves two bags from the floor and follows the woman along. As the two walk, a group of men and women sitting close-by stare at the black-hatted woman. A woman wearing a yellow hat courting a man wearing a red-tie with a spider-web pattern on it is terrified at the presence of this woman in the black hat who continues to walk along. The bell boy and woman then run into another man with a hat, who takes his hat off, and then proceeds to talk with the woman. It’s at this point that bell boy’s face is finally revealed and the visage looks exactly like Adam sans a beard. The dream breaks – the realization has been made.

Adam wakes up in dread and slowly walks out of his bedroom to see his laptop, still on, waiting in his chair as if taunting him to peer closer. He picks up the computer and starts to fast forward, pause, and scan Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way for the disturbance he saw in his dream – the presence of his doppelgänger.

Fittingly, upon finding his “repetition”, he begins his next lecture on something new – Hegel. Adam explains that Hegel claimed that “the greatest world events happen twice” and then Karl Marx added that “the first time it was tragedy, and the second time it was a farce.” Taken together, the statements mean that the repetition of an original event, confirms it not merely as contingency but as necessary. In other words, it’s the instantiation of a pattern – chaos which becomes ordered through a repetition which confirms a “truth” established previously. If this is the case, then what patterns does Adam’s movie actor doppelgänger reveal about his patterns – his “truth”? Adam becomes obsessed with finding out precisely that and thus, Enemy can proceed with gusto.

With its doppelgänger set-up, surrealistic set-pieces, and expressed interest in acting as a puzzle to the viewer, it’s no surprise that Enemy falls in a line of films that includes the likes of: Persona, Fight Club, Lost Highway. Like these films, Enemy employs a dream-like logic in its construction to guide the viewer through a matrix of desire and fantasy in such fashion as to engender a desire in the viewer to delve deeper. For all the answers director Denis Villeneuve withholds, he never leaves the viewer feeling frustrated that only “nonsense” is occurring.

He does this by both employing segments of the film absent of Adam and his duplicate to help establish baselines that the audience can use to decipher what can or cannot be the case and also by priming the audience to pay attention to patterns, some easily discernible and others more hidden. Thus, Enemy becomes whatever the audience makes of it – it’s a game that constantly plays back giving the film and enigmatic pulse that gnaws at the viewers curiosity. There’s always another movement, another scene, another pattern waiting to be found to make sense of what came before. Consequently, the mysteries of the film feel solid enough to grasp, so the viewer can traverse strands of Enemy’s web even if they can’t see the web in its entirety.

Because Villeneuve meticulously stages the film in parallel movements, both within scenes and between them, there’s always a constant series of moving answers and questions. As new patterns are formed, new questions can be raised which opens previous and future scenes up to more nuanced interpretations. This is all purposeful, as evidenced by a scene that occurs midway in the film that quite literally represents a particular breakpoint in the film – it’s proof of the intention driving every one of the film’s decisions. Even if one can’t immediately notice each point and it’s counterpoint, it’s doppelgänger so to speak, they can certainly feel it in the structure of the film which reinforces and builds upon symbols and feelings at a subconscious level, priming the audience one way or another.

In particular, this parallel movement sets the viewer up for moments of genuine psychological fear. Patterns induce a level of comfort and the disruption of those patterns creates a level of anxiety. As evidenced by the intrusion of the film within the film, the seemingly random interruption of a “normal occurrence” jolts ones senses. Because the film clues the viewer to notice the patterns, the moments of deviations, the farces to come, are horrific.

Furthermore, the constant presence of the spider and its web in the mise-en-scène evokes the unease of the opening scene of sexual violence while creating webs of meaning between groupings of ideas. The music that accompanies it stays a constant force throughout the film, punctuating every moment with its anxiety inducing drone. There’s never a moment of respite as the senses are assaulted with an impending sense that something obscene is happening. In particular, Villenevue’s dedication to the sickly yellow lighting and color choice accentuates the feeling of misery the characters seem to be experiencing. The color lets the shadows of the dark “shine” through against the yellow, letting the feeling of the unknown pervade in moments of unease. The result is a psychological horror that uses its surrealistic base not just as a method of presenting unnerving images but as a method of probing the viewer’s unconsciousness to pick up on the undercurrents of terror lying just beneath the veneer of the apparent narrative. It’s precisely because of this that the ending of the film hits as hard and shocks as much as it does. It’s a finale that fully crystallizes the tensions and sense of unease that the film spends most of its run-time building, simultaneously tying the strands of the film together while disorienting the viewer.

At the heart of this disorienting feeling is Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays both Adam and his double within the film. Both characters occupy almost every scene, and their intermingling journey serves as the source of the narrative’s momentum. Having one actor play two characters is hard enough, but Villenevue’s story requires that the duo be similar enough to provoke the feeling of unease at the idea of a duplicate, but at the same time be different enough so that the viewer is easily able to identify which character is present in which scene. Jarring cuts which feature jumps between the characters would be wholly incomprehensible if not for Gyllenhaal’s ability to push the smallest subtleties in the characters’ dispositions to help the audience keep track of what storyline is headed in which direction. The genius of the performance lies not in just the distinctions, but the manner in which those performances give birth to even more performances – acts within acts as the two selves vie for control of the situation. Gyllenhaal has to walk a tight rope to let the nuances of Enemy settle and disturb and because he does so, in what I think is his career best performance, he lets the movie rise to its potential.

Currently, Enemy sports the lowest audience and critic scores on both Rotten Tomatoes ^[2]Denis Villeneuve. Rotten Tomatoes. (n.d.). Retrieved September 25, 2021, from https://www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/denis-villeneuve. and Metacritic ^[3] Denis Villeneuve. Metacritic. (n.d.). Retrieved September 25, 2021, from https://www.metacritic.com/person/denis-villeneuve.. This makes sense when comparing the film to his most popular outputs, Arrival and Sicario, which both feature energetic narratives where there’s a constant sense of propulsion driving everything towards a certain point. Enemy is very much the opposite, choosing instead to assault the audience with patterns whose boundaries bleed into and out of one another. Instead of presenting a straight-forward journey, Enemy presents a closed loop circling around a mystery it beckons the audience towards solving. For those viewers that prefer fully comprehensive narratives that need less discernment on their part, Villenevue’s surreal adventure might prove to be too frustrating an experience to find satisfaction in. However, those viewers looking for a cerebral experience should accept Enemy’s invitation to find order in chaos and take the plunge into the spider’s web of meaning.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	Enemy is one part tense psychological horror and another part a puzzle challenging the viewer to put the pieces together. Fans of Villeneuve’s more straightforward ventures à la Sicario might be put off by the matrix of patterns that is Enemy, but those who enjoy his technical style and dedication to creating immersive worlds will definitely appreciate, if not love, this more opaque demonstration of his craft.
Rating	10/10
Grade	S+

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2000s, 2008, Action, Adventure, D+, Grade, Marvel, Past, Review, review-movie, Science Fiction, Superhero, Year

Film Review: Thor – 2011

September 14, 2021 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	Kenneth Branagh
Principal Cast	Chris Hemsworth as Thor Tom Hiddleston as Loki Anthony Hopkins as Odin Idris Elba as Heimdall Colm Feore as Laufey Natalie Portman as Jane Foster Stellan Skarsgård as Erik Selvig
Release Date	2011
Language(s)	English
Running Time	114 minutes
Report Card	Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary

Thor (Chris Hemsworth), God of Thunder and son of Odin (Anthony Perkins), is banished by his father and stripped of his mighty hammer Mjöllnir for having attempted an invasion of the Frost Giant’s home of Jotunheim in retaliation to the giant’s interruption of his own crowning ceremony. Now instead of being the next king, he is cast aside from his home of Asgard; his purpose is now lost and none of his friends are are able to stop Odin’s judgement. Heimdall (Idris Elba), both Thor’s friend and the guardian of the bifröst , a bridge capable of transporting anyone to any location, is forced to send the power God of thunder away. Thus, Thor is transported to the planet of Earth, where he immediately makes contact with Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), a young astrophysicist who had been following weather fluctuations, which unbeknownst to her had been tied to the use of bifröst.

The narrative is ambitious; on one hand it’s an attempt to tell the tale of Thor’s succession with epic familial stakes and on another hand it’s an attempt to meld the fantastical worlds present in the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) with the scientific excursions demonstrated so far in Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk in order to create a bridge to more complex directions. Unfortunately, that ambition can’t make up for the film’s inability to meld the worlds of Asgard and the Earth off one another in a fluid and mutually beneficial manner. Instead of helping one another, the halves of the movie feel disjointed with another and often times feel like they’re intruding – like they belong in different films.

Establishing shot of Jane and company in Puente Antiguo, New Mexico.

For example, the start of the movie opens on Jane looking for signs of her phenomena. She gets evidence, gets excited, and then drives towards the event where she ends up hitting Thor with her car. She asks where he came from at which point the film cuts to a voice-over by Odin in 965 A.D. where he goes over and explains the history of mankind. The viewer stays with Odin and Asgard for close to 30 minutes before cutting back to Jane and her crash with Thor, which is treated as a comedic moment. The epic intensity and impact of Thor’s exile immediately becomes the butt of a joke and the rest of the story follows; moments of intensity in the Asgardian moments trade off with comedic, fish out of water human moments which makes it impossible for emotional resonance to take hold at any important moments. This dichotomy is most pronounced in Patrick Doyle’s score which flips from seemingly epic to screw-ball comedy whenever the Asgardian plot threads meet up with the human ones.

Alas, the pitiful characterization of anyone not named Thor and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) hardly helps; the hollow Asgardian and human entourages that are meant to be foils for one another and Thor’s allies only serve to waste screen-time that could have been better spent. That’s the key reason why Iron Man, which also starts with its hero in a low point before cutting back to how he got there, is able to get the audience invested in what’s to come; everyone’s relationship to Tony Stark is established and we get a good sense of who he is, why he is the way he is, and how the people close to him deal with his personality quirks. Thor on the other hand does nothing like this for its titular character. Thor’s closest friends get no development: it’s impossible to tell them apart from one another let alone how they matter to Thor. Likewise, how Thor came to be his pompous and belligerent self and managed to inspire so much faith from those around him is less so explained and more just asserted.

This lack of grounding makes Thor’s subsequent meeting with Jane and her allies less relevant. Instead of being able to serve as ways to humanize Thor and help him grow into a hero worthy of redemption, thereby combining the two halves of the story, they seemingly transport him to a whole other narrative instead. Instead of epic, we get a meet-cute that reduces Thor, the God of Thunder, to a walking set of goofy abs and transforms Jane, an scientist devoted to her research, to a woman smitten by schoolgirl love. It’s precisely because these two worlds don’t line up with each other thematically that the movie then has to waste additional time introducing a whole other villain and sub-plot to help Thor get from point A to point B.

Imagine if the opening of the film started with Odin’s monologue about the history of Asgard and the 9 realms. We could see Thor, the warriors Three (Ray Stevenson, Tadanobu Asano, Josh Dallas), Lady Sif(Jaimie Alexander), and Loki go around and engage in battles through the realms which would give director Kenneth Branagh an opportunity to distinguish the characters from one another. Thor’s headstrong and impulsive nature could be better established along with the nature of his relationships to his entourage. Each battle would require Heimdall to open the bifröst whose energy signature would be tracked by Jane. At these moments, the movie could have cut momentarily towards Jane trying to tie the nature of the events together becoming more and more fanatically attached to it.

This would make Thor and Jane’s collision with one another and their subsequent relationship would be more believable. Jane’s differences from his usual group would be pronounced and her enthusiasm in following him would stem not from his status as a hunk but rather as living proof of her research. Furthermore, many of the latter sequences of characters explaining their motivations could be removed because hopefully those details would be fleshed out in the opening Asgard section. As the film is now, these additional bits of exposition are needed to flesh out the stakes and move the story along. Removing them would make a leaner and more cohesive overall narrative.

Thor (Chris Hemsworth) is captured by Coulson’s men.

Frustratingly, Branagh demonstrates that he’s more than capable of interweaving between the two storylines in neat movements when he wants, but he chooses not to when it would be opportune. Heimdall, given his role as watcher of the bridge, is shown to be able to pay attention to any event happening in the nine realms. As such, certain scenes reveal that Heimdall is actually seeing them which helps the movie switch from Asgard to human and back with each. However, Branagh rarely uses the Heimdall transition technique. Instead, of utilizing the gatekeeper as a way to swap between parallel plot techniques and introduce a common visual motif, the movie is more than satisfied mentioning and using Heimdall’s skill a few times and then dropping it.

Jane (Natalie Portman) looks at the space phenomena.

This inconsistency in use extends to all the visual flourishes on display. At one moment Branagh will have the camera swoop from the top of Asgard to the bottom in one fluid moment, while at other moments he’ll just cut without abandon to showcase character reactions. Like previously mentioned, canted angles are on full display from start to finish. However, the choice of which scenes are shot with the tilted angles seems completely at random, rendering their selection confusing. Multiple moments will feature the change in angle and a switch back to normal for no other reason than someone fancied them. Consequently, the discord from the visual and audio swaps makes the incongruity between the Asgardian and human storylines all the more palpable. It’s all one big jumbling mess.

Therefore, while Thor isn’t quite the wreckage The Incredible Hulk is, it’s a far cry from the precise and slicked out Iron Man. It provides a plot that has points that are competently expected on their own, but it never once provides the momentum or composition capable of letting those points build off and complement one another. The end result is a grab-bag of decent points swimming around a pool of mainly bland and unmemorable scenes that teases a great film filled with familiar drama and romance but rarely delivers anywhere close on its potential.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	Thor is a series of interesting ideas that fail to meld into a story that can sustain interest for longer than single scenes. The script gives the actors few moments to sell the gravitas of what’s happening – a feeling which is further undermined by the film’s own inability in determining whether or not it wants to be a serious epic of a cutesy rom-com. The end result is a film that lacks any staying power after the fact.
Rating	5.9/10
Grade	D+

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2020s, 2021, A+, Crime, Grade, Horror, mystery, Past, Review, review-movie, slasher, supernatural, Thriller, Year

Film Review: Malignant – 2021

September 11, 2021 The Critic 2 Comments

Director(s)	James Wan
Principal Cast	Annabelle Wallis as Madison /Emily Maye Maddie Hasson as Sydney George Young as Detective Shaw Michole Briana White as Detective Moss
Release Date	2021
Language(s)	English
Running Time	111 minutes
Report Card	Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary

NOTE: This is a new release and the review is based off a theatre viewing. This means the review won’t feature common elements like visual analysis, extended theme analysis, or long-form discussions of the cinematic techniques being used. Once I am able to get a copy of the movie to watch, pause, analyze, and get stills from the review will be updated to match the current site’s standard.

It’s hard to believe that a storyline involving a psychic monster capable of brutally murdering scientists, inept help from the relevant authorities, a woman who has psychic visions of a black-robed murderer who contorts and viciously slices apart its victims, and meticulously crafted murder set pieces is the basis of a James Wan horror movie when it feels like something plucked out of Dario Argento’s giallo playbook, in particular his fever dream film, Phenomena. In other words, the movie is a showcase of spectacle; the point is not the narrative but the audio-visual journey. Extravagance matters more than plot, which functions more as a vehicle for Wan to canvas off of. He’s always been a stylistic director, but Malignant showcases the height of his visual prowess; it’s an absolute treat to behold.

The movie starts with a small taste of things to come as the walls of a institutional facility are drenched with blood. Dr. Florence Weaver (Jacqueline McKenzie) escorts a group, which includes an officer with a gun, towards a room where people are flung out with bloody aplomb. She instructs them to shoot the patient, Gabriel, who is causing all the issues. The group suffers heavy casualties, but the nature of Gabriel along with his powers is left to the viewer’s imagination as the film cuts to twenty-eight years later.

A woman, Madison (Annabelle Wallis ), argues with her husband, Derek (Jake Abel) over the nature of her pregnancies, which seem to always terminate in miscarriages. He viciously attacks her for inability to conceive and beats her against the wall, causing the back of her head to bleed. Madison locks the door to keep safe from her husband, but then nighttime comes and a shadowy assassin makes its presence known. Its form is just a shadow creeping, and Wan teases the audience slowly with its presence before letting the violence continue; the husband is stabbed with no hesitation before Madison herself is thrown on the floor.

She wakes up at the hospital where she reunites with her sister, Sydney (Maddie Hasson). We learn that the siblings haven’t had contact with one another due to Derek’s controlling nature; he stopped Madison from reaching out. Thus, the black-coated figures first kill marks the end of the estrangement between Madison and her sibling and the start of her journey to move past and overcome her trauma at the hands of abuse.

However, later at night, Madison realizes that after this attack she’s now linked to the black-coated figure and can see the murders committed by the figure as they’re happening. These psychic drop-ins, which feel like the pensieve from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, feature the walls around our protagonist dissolving and reforming around her. Within crisp and fluid shots, Madison is transported from wherever she is to the scene of the next assault. Desperate to figure out the reason for this connection, she tasks Detectives Shaw (George Young) and Moss (Michole Briana White) along with Sydney in an race against time before the killer is allowed to strike again.

Wan said he wanted Malignant to be his take on giallo and the film more than delivers a set-up let lets him have fun. ^[1]Navarro, M. (2021, September 1). “My version OF GIALLO”: James wan lets us know what to expect from his new horror Movie ‘Malignant’ [Interview]. Bloody Disgusting! Retrieved … Continue readingThere’s a mysterious killer in possession of a distinctive weapon, brutal murders, a race to figure out the identity of the murderer, and law enforcement characters who are meant to help but who actively inhibit the protagonist while bumbling around. However, penchant of any great gialli, like the ones made by Argento and Bava, is to structure the violence with great care around fluid and dramatic camera moves which transform the macabre into the sensational. Malignant nails all of this and more. The plot moves along at a pace that keeps the audience invested until a reveal 30 minutes before the ending which then ratchets the film into an utterly enthralling cinematic experience that any fan of sensual cinema should watch. It’s entirely unpredictable; even if you guess one element of the way events will unfold, the entirety of the combined threads is something that can only be described as Shymalanesque in the best possible way.

Wan, who has always been stylistically talented, is allowed to push the boundaries on his own patterns. While the movie starts slow with some of his trademark sequences, like a tense overhead tracking shot which follows the characters as they navigate a household à la The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2, it really starts to show its hand once Madison is allowed to “dissolve” into the psychic visions that she’s made to see. The transitions are as evocative as the murders which follow and serve a purpose in delineating the contours of Madison’s psyche. As the film continues and Madison is allowed to explore the connection, its visualization changes in ways to reflect the same.

However, what pushes Malignant over the edge is the vitality and fury by which Wan shoots some of the larger set-pieces, moments which blow out scenes from even movies, including even Wan’s own Aquaman. The camera is an assassin and follows the path of blood and carnage with surgical precession. Every blow is brutal. Every slice is sinister. Every moment is an extension of the dance of the fabulous blood-bath. He lets the impact of the ferocity sit with the audience as the frame sticks on the murders unbroken. There may be a lot of the stereotypical horror movie teasing with the slow set-ups and the disappearing shadows, but the pay-off is bloody, excessive, beautiful, and utterly worth every moment in wait – a carnivalesque celebration of blood and splatter.

The supernatural slasher often takes place in rooms lit by rich reds and glowing greens along with rooms dyed in shades of dark blue and pockets of darkness. Often times, the camera glides from one room to another, swinging between colors in a way to accentuate the visual momentum of the spectacle occurring. Even though some of the needle drop moments feel like they could have been timed to synch up with the emotional intensity of the film a bit better, most of Joseph Bishara’s electric score fulfills what it sets out to do – provide a companion to the visuals that can match their energy. Many of the tracks inject a head-bobbing energy that add a fiery intensity to the scenes. The combination of both elements creates dynamite film-making that serves as proof that some things have to be seen on the big screen to be experienced in their full glory.

While there are some plot issues here and there, the muscular film-making put on display by Wan is more than worth witnessing for fans of the genre and for those people looking for a off-the-walls story to have fun with. It’s more than just stylistic homage. Malignant is a celebration of sheer and utter excess in the best of ways. It’s the best of Wan’s artillery amplified to the next level – truly bravura filmmaking.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	Since his horror debut with Saw, Wan has put out some of the most well-loved horror classics. Insidious galvanized a new-age of horror fans and The Conjuring confirmed that his arrival was no fluke. Malignant is a confirmation of the director’s potential and showcases some of the highest highs in his oeuvre as of yet.
Rating	9.0/10
Grade	A

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2000s, 2008, Action, Adventure, F, Grade, Marvel, Past, Review, review-movie, Science Fiction, Superhero, Year

Film Review: The Incredible Hulk – 2008

September 9, 2021 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	Louis Leterrier
Principal Cast	Edward Norton as Bruce Banner/The Hulk (Voice by Lou Ferrigno) Liv Tyler as Betty Ross William Hurt as General Ross Tim Roth as Emil Blonsky / Abomination
Release Date	2008
Language(s)	English
Running Time	112 minutes
Report Card	Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary

Bruce Banner (Edward Norton) tests his Gamma treatment on himself.

The movie starts with a montage set to Craig Armstrong’s epic and triumphant score which almost tricks the viewer into thinking that the title sequence is doing something special. In reality, the 3-minute introduction sequence is a formal nightmare and makes the themes and ideas of the story hard to decipher at first. Instead of setting the film’s pace and giving it a unique voice, the introduction feels like a cheap way of getting to the “real” story.

First, the initial images of the montage make it feel like this recollection of memories is from Bruce Banner’s (Edward Norton) fragmented point-of-view. As such, the repetition of certain key scenes – namely Bruce’s partner, Betty (Liv Tyler) being injured after he transformed into the Hulk – should suggest Bruce’s pre-occupation. The scenes are even tinted in green suggesting they might be an effect of the Hulk’s influence on Banner’s brain.

However, at the halfway point of the introduction, scenes that are clearly not from Bruce’s point-of-view enter. For example, General Ross is seen looking for Bruce at one point and maps along with relevant documentation prop up on the screen to reinforce that Bruce is being hunted. Given that he’s on the run, it seems impossible that he’d be privy to this information which begs the question: why are these moments in the montage?

One could chalk it up to just quick storytelling, but the sequence ends in such a way as if to suggest that it is in fact Banner recalling his past. The montage ends as the camera pushes in on Betty’s injury before suddenly cutting to a metronome, an item featured in the montage intermittently at random moments, which Banner grabs and stops. He sits center frame and then a counter appears next to him indicating it’s been 158 days since his last “incident.” Is this counter his mental barometer now perhaps because days to him only exist if he’s not the Hulk or is it a mechanism of the movie to inform the audience of the time between transformations? Because of the sloppy nature of the montage, this determination is impossible make.

The second issue with the introduction is also an issue I expect a few readers to run into: the characters and events depicted in the montage require prior context to have any chance of being relevant to the viewer. Given that Ang Lee’s Hulk came out in 2003, it’s reasonable that Marvel and screen-writer Zak Pen wanted to avoid re-hashing the origin story and chose to truncate it; the issue is the emotional core of the story being told in The Incredible Hulk is contingent on understanding the Hulk’s origin. This issue is even more pronounced because even though The Incredible Hulk could work as a spiritual sequel to Lee’s film, there are enough differences in how Bruce gets and relates to his “Hulk” power that would justify time spent explaining the nuance to the audience.

It’s especially confusing how this movie got approved given how clear Iron Man, the first installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) , ended up being for audiences unfamiliar with the character. Coming right off the heels of one of the best super-hero movies was always going to be rough, but The Incredible Hulk doesn’t make the situation any easier for itself. The issue with the film isn’t even just the botched origin story. Unlike Marvel’s reboot of Spiderman in the form of Homecoming, which truncated the origin story which had been told twice before in the 21st century, The Incredible Hulk doesn’t try and tell a story that can ride its own coattails and get the audience invested with or without previous interest.

Betty (Liv Tyler) and Bruce (Edward Norton) reunite in the rain.

For example, one of the primary driving forces behind Banner’s desire to control his Hulk state is his desire to eventually get back with Betty. This motivation is his primary purpose for any and all action within the story, outside of some vague ethical concerns about his research which are never explained. The movie tells us as much with the montage which features a moment where Banner flashbacks within the sequence qua memory recall to an even more intimate encounter with her.

Yet, when the couple finally get to talking and meeting with one another there’s absolutely no chemistry between them. Their conversations devolve to quips, useless chitter-chatter, and verbal reminders that they love each other. They’re seeing each for the first time in years and the director and screenwriter can’t think of any possible things they would want to mention to one another again? It feels more like they’re acquaintances running into one another than lovers who have been forcibly separated for years on end. The golden rule is to show and not tell, and The Incredible Hulk never shows; instead, it prefers to reiterate what was shown in the montage and use the shallow scaffolding created off those minute impressions to leverage interest in where the story goes. The couple loves each other because they love each other. The push just doesn’t work and the emotions are missing which makes caring during any of the tense sequences that much harder.

Just to give context, within 15 minutes Iron Man manages to explain its protagonist’s, Tony Stark’s motivations, relationships with key persons in the movie, primary character arc, and foreshadow the eventual final battle. In that same time frame, The Incredibly Hulk explains that Bruce has been trying to figure out to control his anger since his incident, that he thinks about Betty a lot, and then just gets to the first chase sequence in a series of many. Even by the end of the movie’s run-time, the amount of information learned doesn’t actually increase by a meaningful margin. The plot is nothing more than a vehicle to get Banner from point A to point B in the hopes for a Hulk transformation and fight.

The Hulk looks menacingly from the shadows.

Now, this approach would work if they either showcased the Hulk in such a way as to develop Bruce’s character and dynamic or, in a more visceral sense, just let their CGI monster go wild in dynamic action set pieces. Instead, Banner’s transformations are always marred by some other visual distraction and/or a color grading that makes it hard to distinguish his figure. He’s on the screen but doesn’t pop out and get to actually show off. Banner makes fun of the iconic purple pants his character normally wears in a meta-comedy moment, but the reason purple is a great color with the Hulk is because it lets his green shine.

This is made all the more frustrating because it’s clear that Leterrier wanted to go for a green aesthetic. Plenty of shots feature green in the set design; the issue is these greens make the contrast between Hulk and the environment even worse and end up crowding the hulking green mammoth out of the frames he should be a star in. There are a few moments where the camera lingers on a Hulk’s face in a close-up and we get to see beautiful contrasts in his face and a rich texture in the colors. Unfortunately, these moments are few and far in between; the movie usually showcases its showstopper poorly.

Thankfully, the movie spends a decent amount of time on developing Emil Blonsky(Tim Roth). We get to know him as a veteran player who takes the mission seriously and early conversations even set him as the soldier to Banner’s scientist. While the movie does very little with Banner’s scientist storyline, choosing both not to investigate why he would test the “Hulk experiment” on himself or what he wanted, it does go deeper into Blonsky’s motivations and ties his eventual transformations to his character’s’ motivations. It doesn’t matter that the character is shallow; Roth is so amped up about being cruel, militaristic, and bloodthirsty beyond reason that we can get behind his character. Woefully, the movie throws away this saving grace in the third act by replacing Roth with a CGI creature; one less performance capable of galvanizing interest in the fights to come.

Banner clicks on a simple Desktop application.

It’s not that the story doesn’t have interesting characters or that it can’t go towards more interesting storylines. It’s just that every story decision feels like the easiest path towards the next plot beat. Case in point, Banner communicates with a secret contact to find a cure to the “Hulk” problem. The way he gets to the contact platform is literally through clicking an application, getting to a chat screen with no place to put in long in information, and then “auto-encrypting” the chat. I don’t expect a complicated encryption process, but I expect the process to be at least be complicated enough for me to believe that the antagonists cannot easily access this information.

However, in this film, the government’s crack-job solution to the messaging platform that Banner has used for apparent YEARS is to put a simple parser out to search for the code names the two are using and then coming upon the duo almost instantly. If the introductory montage didn’t stress that Banner has been sleuthing around the government for years and that the government has been actively pursuing him as per Ross’s command, the laziness wouldn’t be so apparent. Unfortunately, this example of blatantly “rushing” towards the next plot point is one of many. A few can be handled. A litany makes for an unremarkable time. The end result is a skeleton of a espionage movie that never tries to surprise the audience.

Frustratingly, the movie has all the parts necessary to do something intriguing, but it constantly chooses to underutilize them in an attempt to deliver a product that’s “good enough.” It’s a shame because a few tweaks and the movie could have been a psychological navigation of the “Hulk” condition. The opening montage is an attempt at showing how the experiment has fractured Banner’s mind. Imagine if the movie then followed Banner as he tries to figure out a way to control it as opposed to trying to get some mumbo-jumbo cure that acts as nothing more than a MacGuffin. Additionally, the cutaways to distorted green visions, if handled with regards to Banner and the Hulk’s character arcs, could be moments of progression between them. Instead, they’re just quick visuals meant to demonstrate the presence of Banner’s condition – a fact we are well aware of.

Needless to say, the psychological angle was ready and available to dive into, even within the parameters of the script. Some of the movie’s best scenes involve the Hulk showcasing a darker, and more evil disposition. Close-ups of his face showcase an intensity that’s missing from Norton’s face. The movie could have very easily used this juxtaposition to explore even the simplest ideas of good and bad if not something more complex like the Hulk as representative of id and Banner as ego. Furthermore, the movie attempts to use fragmented green-tinted memory recollection sequences as a call-back to the opening montage and as an indication of Banner’s damaged mental state. However, just like the opening, these moments showcase images and details that tells the viewer absolutely nothing of relevance regarding Bruce’s connections or motivations. At the very least, if they presented a warped perspective of scenes, an altered perspective to Bruce’s, these moments could help develop Hulk as a character and juxtapose both sides of the green hero. Instead, the technique is used to just reinforce the same points we already know.

Sadly, there’s a severe lack of effort made at letting the characters and the actors shine through. It’s hard to blame Norton for not getting the audience invested in his character, when all he has to work with are jokes and long chase and walk sequences that are adorned with Armstrong’s rich and emotionally evocative score.

The film tries so hard to use the score to carry the weight of longer A-to-B sections, but Suspiria this movie is not; The Incredible Hulk lacks the grandiose compositions, cinematography, and editing needed to let Armstrong’s music be appreciated. The visuals are safe and milquetoast and drag down the rich and riveting score which is is never given any time to rest because any dead time has to be filled with it. Music is used used to propel all the emotional momentum in the film because the story proper doesn’t give the actors enough material to imbue their characters with passions that would get us to care about their tribulations. The score attempts to generate that momentum, but the lack of any help from any other cinematic element makes the mission impossible.

Alas, this is why The Incredible Hulk marks the low-point of the MCU. It’s a film that feels and actively shows its status as nothing more than a cog in the machine. There’s no flair in it’s presentation or composition which end up making the hollow and threadbare story look all the more lazy and shoddy when on display. The actors are given such little direction on what their characters motivations are or why those desires are they way the are and this lack of guidance carries over to the narrative which often feels like its being forcefully dragged from place to place. There are brief moments of joy, especially when the Hulk is allowed to be the star of the scene, but these moments are so brief that can’t be used to justify watching the entire movie. It’s a shame for fans of the green behemoth, but you’re better off watching later MCU installments ,Thor Ragnarok especially, or even Lee’s older Hulk for nuanced and/or visually interesting story beats.

REPORT CARD

TLDR	The Incredible Hulk is a movie that exists more to push the MCU along than anything else. Outside of Craig Armstrong’s score and a few neat shots, this chronicle of the green behemoth offers very little in terms of engaging content capable. The story is predictable, lazily told, and emotionally empty. Instead of focusing on the interesting psychological angles presented by the narrative, the movie is more than satisfied with giving just enough information to move to the next point until the whole journey is over. Only MCU completionists or super fans of the Hulk should give this a watch.
Rating	4.3
Grade	F

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1970s, 1973, Grade, Horror, Past, Review, review-movie, S+, supernatural, Thriller, Year

Film Review: The Exorcist – 1973

September 8, 2021 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	William Friedkin
Principal Cast	Ellen Burstyn as Chris MacNeil Linda Blair as Regan MacNeil Jason Miller as Father/Dr. Damien Karras Max von Sydow as Father Merrin Lee J. Cobb as Lieutenant Kinderman
Release Date	1973
Language(s)	English
Running Time	121 minutes

The title card comes in a deep red font surrounded by black.

The film opens with a bright red title card as the Islamic call to prayer is heard in the background. A grayscale image of a desert is shown before its burning red, orange, and yellow hues dominate the screen. The simplicity of the black-and-white image gives way to a hellish haze that burns the natural environment around it. The world isn’t black-and-white and the battle between good and evil has begun.

We see a series of establishing shots – animals walking through a haze and workers digging up a site – before a location card shows up informing us that we’re in Northern Iraq. The presentation makes us feel like we’re watching a documentary. Eventually the camera comes upon and follows a young boy at the site who runs through the grounds. He stops and we see the subject of his search, an older archaeologist and priest named Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), positioned between his legs looking up. The child informs the priest that that something of interest has been dug up.

Despite the fact that the compositions and camera movements are done in a naturalistic, unassuming manner, director William Friedkin is still able to fill the film with evocative frames like this one to set up the narrative. Merrin is trapped by the child and the announcement. He looks up from a lower position suggesting that what’s to come will be a struggle for him, one in which he will be lowered. The fact that the one giving him the message and demarcating him is a child is not a coincidence; it’s just one small demonstration of one The Exorcist’s major strengths: the ability to portray events in documentary like fashion while retaining full control on what each frame entails in a thematic sense. This is how Friedkin transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Merrin (Max von Sydow) finds the Medal of St.Joseph.

Merrin walks through the desert towards the location of the aforementioned discovery and finds a medal of St.Joseph. The medal is out of place in the environment, both geographically and chronologically, calling to question how and why it’s present in the area. The film even calls attention to the discrepancy by having the characters mention that such an artifact doesn’t belong in the area. After puzzling over the medal, Merrin starts to dig and comes upon a sculpting. The sound of the wind gets stronger as he brushes the dust off the figure revealing it to be a statue of Pazuzu. ^[1] While Pazuzu is never mentioned explicitly, it’s clear from the material and discussion on the film that the figure is of Pazuzu. As he stares at the ominous looking head, the sound of buzzing flies becomes more intense.

Once again, the hellish haze of the sun takes control of the screen; this time its presence is brief while it burns not just the desert like before but also a large building in the background; the flames have made their way to civilization. A single bird flies through the frame; the conflict has started to move. The scene dissipates and we cut back to Merrin sitting in a crowded area. It’s clear he’s perturbed by his encounter with Pazuzu as his hands tremble fumbling with his medicine. From the way his eyes glaze out, we know he’s not taking in any of his surroundings; his mind is focused entirely on the presence of malevolence. He gets up and walks through the city before coming upon a blacksmith. The intensity of the flames from their work feels off-putting as they remind us of the intensity of the sun. A simple encounter becomes nefarious as our mind puts the visual cues together; a sub-conscious fear is being laid out.

We see another set of establishing shots – a clock chime, a clock head, recovered statues – before revealing Merrin documenting his dig findings. He picks up the medal and looks at it for a brief moment before picking up the head. Another worker in the building notes that the head is a figure of “Evil against Evil.” This mention is not without purpose; Pazuzu is both a demon associated with the evils of the air and a God invoked by people to protect against other more malicious forces. ^[2]Near eastern antiquities : Mesopotamia. Statuette of the demon Pazuzu with an inscription – Near Eastern Antiquities | Louvre Museum. (n.d.). … Continue reading Thus, we have a symbol of God from a different area juxtaposed against the symbol of a God-Demon from a more local culture being discovered by a Father who is deadly terrified of the latter.

Immediately, the clock behind Merrin stops and our anxieties rise along with him. Because Friedkin disguised the clock parts as part of the establishing shot, our minds were primed to pay attention to the clock without being immediately aware of it. This makes its eventual stoppage more effective because it’s something we’re already thinking about. Friedkin shows us the clock multiple times in a non-innocuous manner, so he conditions us even further to recognize its disparity as off-putting. Combining this with the juxtaposition of the findings amplifies our unease, transforming a small clock pause into a moment of utter panic.

Merrin (Max von Sydow) walks past a group of Muslims praying.

Merrin leaves the establishment as a group of Muslims start to pray – a callback to the call for prayer at the start of the film. Despite being a man of faith, he makes no notice of the group and walks past them. It’s a continuation of the juxtaposition between the figures; orientations towards religions constantly mix and swap in this battle for and of faith. While the anxiety ridden priest makes his way around a corner, the camera cuts to a woman who seems him from up above looking down. The shot itself is nothing out of the ordinary, but it’s inclusion in an already tense movement makes us scared for the elderly priest. The last time someone was looking down on him, the child giving the announcement, he was met with a dark presence.

We cut from the women back down to Merrin who stares down at the ground as he walks past two women. Within seconds of passing them, he is almost ran over by a carriage which approaches from a darkened tunnel. Is this Pazuzu or is it just Merrin’s pre-occupation?

Merrin (Max von Sydow) looks up as a shadow comes over him and a gust of wind threatens to blow off his hat.

An answer is given. Merrin walks down to the dig site and a gust of wind blows threatening to take his hat off. His face is cast in shadows as he looks up. The camera cuts to a statue of Pazuzu looking down upon him, the blinding hot sun appearing right behind the figure. Finally, the confrontation has come to a head. The sounds of dogs fighting and the gusts of wind rage over the soundscape as the two combatants take their stances. The two figures stand apart from each other, Merrin positioned lower looking up, as the scene dissolves into the burning bright sun – a confirmation that the days of a black-and-white world are over. This burning environment dissolves to an establishing shot of Georgetown; the arena of the battle has shifted grounds from Iraq to Washington D.C.

The camera moves from the city to the bedroom of a large mansion. We see Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) writing notes on her bed. On her nightstand is a large black-and-white portrait of her daughter, Regan (Linda Blair). Chris hears loud animal noises coming from her attic and gets up to investigate. She puts on an orange nightgown before checking on Regan, who happens to be asleep in yellow pajamas. The window in Regan’s bedroom is wide open and gusts of wind are blowing through. A black-and-white image that gives way to orange and yellow, gusts of wind, and animal noises are all signs that the conflict we saw in the opening act has made its way here. Once again, Friedkin has managed to tell us what’s going to happen with just the most subtle of elements, using the repetition of visual and auditory cues to highlight the parallels between the evil happenings between both locations.

Extras playing students on the film hold up signs in protests against the Vietnam War, which was hugely unpopular and televised at the time.

The next day comes and we cut to a film materialized within the film; it turns out Chris is a famous movie actor and is on set filming a movie about the Vietnamese war. Extras on set hold up signs indicative of the counter-culture at the time. The Vietnam war was raging and was immensely unpopular to many college aged students at the time. The war was famous for being the first “televised war” and media reporting at the time made it infamous at large. ^[3]Spector, R. H. (2016, April 27). The Vietnam War and the Media. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Vietnam-War-and-the-media-2051426.. In particular, it was a time associated with the hippie movement – a group who was known for its opposition to consumerist bourgeois culture and Christianity. ^[4]Quinn, D. (2019, August 21). The mixed legacy of the 60s hippie movement. The Irish Catholic. https://www.irishcatholic.com/the-mixed-legacy-of-the-60s-hippie-movement/. It’s place in a film about supernatural evil feels out of place. However, this strangeness is called to attention by a crew member who asks the in-movie director, Burke Dennings, if “this scene [is] really essential” and if “[Dennings could] consider on whether or not [the film] can do without it?” Chris then follows up and asks Dennings to explain the student’s motivations for tearing the building down. In both cases, no real answer is given, but the mention of a purpose entices us to give the scene more attention than we would; immediately, we become aware that what we’re about to see has a purpose which allows the sub-text to become imprinted on our psyches.

Dennings ignores the crew member and responds to Chris’s question by reiterating her role. He tells her that as a “teacher at the college, [she] doesn’t want the building torn down.” In exasperation this non-answer , Chris exclaims, “C’mon I can read for Christ’s sake.” – the first verbal mention of Christ in the film – and continues her search for a purpose to the scene. Dennings is still unable to provide a reason and jokes around with Chris about the situation – diffusing it and providing entertainment for the throng of people who have come around the shoot to watch it in action. In the audience is a priest adorned in black, Damien Karras (Jason Miller), who smiles along in excitement at the proceedings. The joke diffuses us as well as it does the proxy audience within the film, causing us to drop our guard again; the lingering questions disappear, leaving only their spectral vestiges behind to accumulate in the the recesses of the mind.

Chris (Ellen Burstyn) mentions God as she tells the students to calm down.

Our attention focuses on the scene itself as it begins. Chris, now in character, walks up to the top of the school and tells the students to stop their protests. Once again, she verbally mentions “God” in her exclamations while telling the crowd of extras around her that if they “wanna effect any change [they”] have to do it within the system.” The irony of a wealthy atheist actress playing a teacher working against the counterculture movement while invoking “God” and “the system” is so astoundingly blatant that the fact that Friedkin was able to disguise each element by only subtly drawing a viewer’s attention to it, while simultaneously not compromising the structure of the film proper is proof enough of how textured The Exorcist is at cultivating multifaceted themes. As Chris’s monologue comes to a close, the camera zooms in on a crowd of faces before finding and following the young priest, Karras, as he makes his way to the Church.

The in-movie scene ends and Chris walks back from the set to her mansion. The red, orange, and yellow Autumn leaves around her blow as the wind blows them around her. The iconic theme music, “Tubular Bells” plays, a confirmation to the audience that the sings they’re seeing are a confirmation of the evil that has come to lay siege to the MacNeils. Chris walks by a series of doors, the first of which is yellow and the last of which is red. Children, symbols of innocence, dressed in Halloween costumes run by her. The tradition of wearing costumes on holiday started namely to protect people from evil spirits. Costumes were meant to disguise oneself from evil. Wearing the monsters protected one from monsters – evil against evil. It’s fitting then that the innocent Regan, soon to be possessed, is being affected by Pazuzu of all entities.

Unlike the innocent depictions of costumes on these children, Chris will be forced to deal with the real thing; just like in Iraq, the conflict has started and Chris, just like Father Merrin, will have to come face to face with her nightmares. On the other side of the street, two nun’s walk by. Their presence does not make the sinister soundscape abate. This scene is done in parallel to Merrin’s own walk in the opening; both parties walk by women in veils as evil pursues. Eventually, Chris come to the Church’s gates and sees Father Karras. He starts to talk but both us and Chris are unable to hear as the soundscape is once again interrupted by the sound of the winds. Chris and Karras have not met yet but the seeds for their encounter have been planted.

With this, all the key players have been introduced and The Exorcist can truly begin as Regan MacNeil finds herself in a series of supernatural events that force her mother and self into action in a race to save their lives. The above description of the first 16 minutes is only scratching the surface of the intricate and deeply enigmatic story lying at the heart of the film. Hypnotic suggestions loom around every corner as the movie cuts between sequences in thematic fashion. Consequently, the story’s rythm always feel constant so we’re none the wiser to how much time has passed in between scenes. It’s from these “gaps” that Friedkin puts the mysteries of the film behind. Just like the medal Merrin finds at the start, The Exorcist is littered with minor oddities like repetitions of certain quips and details in the mise en scène like the cover of a magazine that are brought to attention and then pushed to the periphery only to pop up later in the strangest of ways.

Strange cuts and displacements offer an answer one way, while the nature of the narrative suggests others. Based on how a viewer interprets one event, they color the way other events proceed; each of these decisions, culminates in how one processes the ending and subsequently the themes of the movie. Each little detail is placed there with a purpose, waiting to be deciphered in the matrix of meaning afforded by the rich subtext the film employs. The end result is a movie with an infinite permutations of meanings, each justified by an orientation grounded in the film itself.

For example is the film, like Stephen King suggests, about “the entire youth explosion that took place in the late sixties and early seventies”? ^[5] King, S. (2010). Danse macabre. Gallery.The film-making scene in-movie would certainly be evidence to suggest as much. Or is the film about the way we demonize the Other? The use of Pazuzu as opposed to directly invoking the Devil from the start is a choice made for a reason. These are only a few of the questions the movie allows us to ponder. Every detail, no matter how small it is, presents with it another layer of themes by which to interpret the primary conflict and a set of questions along with them. It’s not an exaggeration to say that one could watch the movie on repeat and come to a different conclusion each time.

Regan (Linda Blair) is shaken by her blue bed while dressed in yellow pajamas.

This is due, in no small part, to the way Friedkin repeats motifs, making the connections between seemingly disparate moments seem clear if one is looking. The colors red, yellow, and orange are first introduced at the start of the film and represent the spiritual battle. Whenever the colors prop up in the mise en scène, like in the color of the doorways or the characters clothing, we can already tell something is afoot. This is the color of the fight. In contrast, blues envelop the screen whenever a party is attempting to work against the malicious entities. It makes sense from a color theory perspective; in contrast to the heat feeling generated by the sun’s gradient, the cool and calm feeling of the blues feel like a natural response. Likewise, wind makes its presence apparent preceding scenes of terror, reinforcing Pazuzu’s dominion and area of reach. Animal noises like growls and barks creep into the soundscape reminding us of the buzz of the flies and the fighting of the dogs in Iraq while “Tubular Bells” all but confirms the sinister is going to happen when it turns up.

Damien (Jason Miller) tells Tom (Thomas Bermingham) that he, Damien, has lost his faith.

Furthermore, the film’s lighting and use of shadows hearkens back to German Expressionism movement, and to an effect the noir movement which was deeply influenced by the former movement. Smoke fills many frames, emanating from cigarettes constantly being lit and the freezing cold temperatures of the increasingly chilly gusts of wind, giving them a more textured and gritty look. Lighting is harsh and often shows the dark nooks and corners in characters faces. Shadows encroach on characters visually demonstrating the influence of evil on their lives. Likewise, divinity comes in the form of bright lights which often show up near the spiritually inclined characters.

By sticking to a mostly unassuming style, Friedkin is able to employ all the above stylistic flourishes, call attention to them momentarily, and then sweep that attention under the rug in favor of something else. The end result is a hypnotic film that creeps under the skin without notice. Suggestions become patterns which become motifs that inform how one proceeds down the mine. Our mind is conditioned to associate certain triggers with evil and others with good, ultimately giving the viewer full reign in determining what the film really means.

The documentary like severity by which the subject matter is treated is the reason this subsequent engagement is so powerful and potentially cathartic. Because everything leading up to the supernatural phenomena is so grounded, the inclusion of such events is given a real power. Every single actor, from the main to the side cast, deals with the events of the film with a cold sense of realism forcing us to do the same. While I could spend at least a few paragraphs detailing the meticulous performances on display, I mainly want to draw attention at how well the film humanizes our leads and gets us to care about their well-being. In particular, the mother-daughter relationship between Chris and Regan, played by Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair respectively, is sweet and endearing; their love is palpable. Blair presents her soon-to-be possessed character as innocent, whimsical, and child-like.

This is why her flip to cruel and off-kilter hits so hard; it feels impossible to believe that such a sweet little girl could transform into something so much more sinister. There’s no respite from the macabre cruelty put on display. One isn’t allowed to escape from the violence or allowed to cast it aside; instead, they’re forced to sit and marinate with it, imbuing it with their own personal subjective tendencies. It’s no wonder then that the film elicited such strong reactions when it was released with some more sensitive members fainting in theatres. ^[6]Vanderbilt, M. (2017, August 23). Audiences had some intense reactions to the exorcist in 1973. The A.V. Club. … Continue reading The movie tapped into the cultural zeitgeist at the time and pricks on a litany of unconscious fears and desires ranging from generational to cultural that are bound to generate strong responses even now and it does all that while remaining a conventionally frightening movie that doesn’t cheap up on the spectacle of the scares.

There’s a reason The Exorcist is often the first name mentioned in discussions regarding the greatest horror films of all time^[7]I’m in the camp of critic Mark Kermode who regards The Exorcist as the greatest film of all time. I’m not at that level, but I have the film in my top 30 of all time and it constantly … Continue reading At one level it is as spiritual of an experience as a film by Dreyer or Bergman and then on another level it’s use of spectacle is of the greatest variety providing chills so deep and unsettling that they still serve as a benchmark, along with John Carpenter’s The Thing, on how to utilize practical effects to make horror as real as possible. It is a film that understands true terror lies hidden in the unconscious, so it employs psychological ands subliminal tricks to prime our minds and feelings for the nightmares to follow, but it doesn’t forget that the audience has come to be scared, so it pays off all the tension with the most depraved and upsetting images it can. It’s one of the crown jewels of cinema and is proof the medium’s power at truly probing the corners of one’s mind. Friedkin puts it best in his intro to the film: ” Over the years, I think most people take out of The Exorcist what they bring to it. If you believe the world is a dark and evil place, then The Exorcist will reinforce that. But if you believe that there is a force for good that combats and eventually triumphs over evil, then you will be taking out of the film what we tried to put into it.” ^[8] William Friedkin’s Introduction to The Exorcist. Warner Brothers. (1973) The Exorcist.

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TLDR	The Exorcist is one of the greatest works of cinema, let alone horror cinema, serving spiritual lessons along with nightmares in equal amount. It is a film that treats every frame as an opportunity to set up subliminal scares, demonstrating that the best results require the most delicate of touches. By lulling the audience to the film’s hypnotic, but elliptical, rhythm, Friedkin forces every viewer to engage in a subjective tango with his mangum opus thereby ensuring that no two viewing experiences are totally alike. Multiple events in the film require the viewer to imagine their own scenes of terror in order to get a “whole” perspective on what transpires. If you give yourself wholly to it, The Exorcist will take you on an unbelievable journey that only the cream of the crop of cinema can dare to venture. The choice is yours.
Rating	10/10
Grade	S+

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2010s, 2016, Drama, Grade, Review, review-movie, S+, Science Fiction, Year

Film Review: Arrival – 2016

August 16, 2021 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	Denis Villeneuve
Principal Cast	Amy Adams as Louise Banks Jeremy Renner as Ian Donnelly Forest Whitaker as Colonel Weber
Release Date	2016
Language(s)	English
Running Time	116 minutes
Report Card	Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary

The camera pushes in towards the window qua frame.

The camera slowly tracks down and forward towards a window staring out at an ocean view while “On the Nature of Daylight” by Max Richter plays in the background. The song evokes feelings of melancholy and beauty and sets the mood for what’s to come. The window is a frame; a center point that demarcates an area while presenting. As the camera goes towards this frame we hear a voiceover by our still unseen protagonist, Louise, who explains that “Memory is a strange thing. It doesn’t work like I thought it did. We are so bound by time, by its order.”

We cut from the frame to Louise (Amy Adams) and her daughter, Hannah. We see Hannah as a child, being delivered into Louise arms. We cut again and see Louise playing with a slightly older Hannah (Jadyn Malone). Hannah plays in the background as her mom watches from the foreground. We match cut to Louise looking down on her daughter who says “I love you.” We match cut to an older Hannah who now says “I hate you.” Finally, we cut to a hospital where we see Louise crying over a deceased Hannah. Louise walks down an seemingly never-ending arcing hospital hallway as the music comes to an end. Louise’s narration continues as she notes that, “… I’m not so sure I believe in beginnings and endings. There are days that define your story beyond your life, like they day they arrived.”

Louise (Amy Adams) stands in front of her whiteboard qua frame.

Accordingly, the movie shifts to “present” time, to a Louise who seems oblivious to the world around her. She walks along as throngs of people around her crowd around televisions. Her energy levels are muted compared to the frenzy around her. She makes her way to the college classroom she teaches linguistics in and notices a severe lack of students. She gets ready to write on the large white board, a canvas in the center of the screen framing things, much like the window in her house.

The students who are present are distracted by their phones ask Louise to put on the television. She acquiesces and reveals a hidden television behind the whiteboard behind her. This television serves as a new central frame – a plane that provides an interpretative jumping off point. For the first time, Louise is focused on the news, and the camera reinforces this by only showing us her reaction; the content of the news report is not shown. We learn, along with her, that alien objects have landed in multiple locations around the world.

Louise (Amy Adams) goes to the window qua frame.

She drives back home and talks to her mom on the phone. She walks towards the center window while her mom mentions some conspiracy fueled news regarding the aliens which Louise says to ignore. She asks how Louise is doing; a fitting question given both Hannah’s death and Louise’s comparatively muted energy levels. Louise responds, “About the same.”

The camera changes positions in response, going from behind Louise to her side. Her unenthused state limits possibilities, something which is driven through as we watch her flipping through television channels in a desperate attempt to find anything not mentioning the aliens. She falls asleep having found no such escape; all the while, the channels, in contrast to Louise’s lack of concern, showcase mass panic and fear happening around the world. It’s only the next day, when she gets to a fully empty classroom, that Louise finally decides to tune in to the alien news the rest of the world has been binging since first contact.

The camera tracks towards Louise. A single window frame is shown.

The camera tracks in slowly, creeping in on Louise before finally dawning on her, like the news she’s avoided up to now. Her office is adorned with a host of window frames – a continuation of the visual motif. Colonel Weber (Forest Whitaker) walks into her office and interrupts her while she catches up. He mentions that her previous translation work in Farsi helped the military with some insurgents, so he thought it prudent to have her translate recordings of the aliens “communicating”. She responds that her efforts certainly did help the Colonel in eradicating the insurgents – knowledge turned into violence – before claiming that she won’t be able to translate without first seeing the creatures. Weber refuses and threatens to leave before being told by Louise that his potential linguistic replacement for her, Danvers, is unable to do the task. Louise challenges Weber to ask Danvers for the Sanskrit word for “war” to confirm her claims.

Unfortunately for Danvers, Louise is right on the money. While his translation defines the word as “an argument”, Louise correctly defines it as a “desire for more cows.” ; an innocuous desire interpreted as violence. Weber thus acquiesces to her demands to see the aliens; you need the best translator if you have any shot of making sense of an otherworldly language. She is introduced to her soon-to-be partner, Ian (Jeremy Renner), and flies with him and Weber to the flying spaceship; an oblong shaped semi-egg shape whose size absolutely dwarfs the military set-up underneath it.

The researchers go to the bottom of the UFO.

After being brought up to speed and procedure, her and Ian are sent into the ship to complete their first mission. The two of them get on a rising platform and are pushed up to the very base of the ship which opens to them. They jump off this base to a wall going perpendicular to it, seemingly breaking the rules of gravity. They make their way to the domain of the aliens; the camera flips upside down marking the moment where they officially enter the boundary to a new domain. Ian and Louise come to face with a large cinematic-feeling frame; a large grey canvas which calls to mind Louise’s window, her whiteboard, and the television screen. Face to face with this newest frame, she’s tasked with figuring out the aliens’ purpose on Earth before global war breaks out.

Despite featuring a “save the Earth from extinction” plotline featuring extra-terrestrials, director Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival positions itself closer to science fiction films like Contact and La Jetee as opposed to Independence Day. The focus of the story is about the intimate way human’s experience their day-to-day while grappling with the dice rolls that life doll’s out in seemingly random fashion. This is why we start the movie experiencing Louise’s happiness and her grief. We see a life come into fruition, grow, and then pass all within a few minutes. We’re hit with a range of emotions evidenced most explicitly in Hannah going from “loving” to “hating” her mother. Like Louise mentions in her opening monologue, life is a series of moments, held together in the frames of our memory ready to be processed. These moments with her daughter stick out and demonstrate to us that intensity, not duration, lends moments their meaning.

Even when the movie moves on the “main” storyline, we’re held away from it. We’re put into Louise’s point of view from start to finish, experiencing her grief with her, and then moving forward in dejected fashion. The story happens organically around us, but we’re only given bits and pieces of information. We’re forced to learn with Louise and because of that we adopt her point of view as our own; she is our frame. This is a technique Villeneuve previously employed in his previous film, Sicario, to help set the audience up for the unexpected. We get so wrapped up in our protagonist’s headspace that the world of the movie catches us off guard in the same it does to them. All the pieces of this surprise are shown to us in plain sight, but we’re focused on what Louise sees: a possibility for dialogue.

Arrival is a meditation on syntax and the way that its encapsulation of content changes meaning. In other words, it’s focused on delving into the “how” of language as much as it is the “what” of language. This is why the movie spends so much of its visual capital on frames; what frame do all of us use more than language? The words we use to express ourselves are made up of characters, and each character represents a sound. These sounds only make sense because of the rules we all agree to follow. The process of determining a syntax and providing translation serves as the main narrative focus which follows Louise and her colleagues as they attempt to frame the aliens’ language in such a way as to avoid war.

Louise represents the side of openness and approaches the aliens as partners in a search for truth. Meanwhile the people and organizations around her approach the aliens as, “an enemy who is wrong, who is armful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat.”^[1] Foucault, Michel. “Polemics, Politics and Problematizations.” Interview by P. Rabinow, May 1984, In Essential Works of Foucault Vol. 1. The New Press, 1998. Every interaction Louise has with the aliens is met with skepticism from outside parties who seem set in their determinations of what’s going on. Thus, the race to determine the proper syntax becomes a battleground between Louise and everyone around her to establish the dominant meaning; the stereotypical sci-fi battle we’ve been conditioned to expect transforms into a language game between an interlocutor and a polemicist .

Her journey towards discovering the syntax is marked by a similar inner journey to dealing with the death of her daughter. As the movie progresses, it cuts to memories of Hannah and Louise; moments framed in time. These moments take on an initial meaning that changes as Louise is able to frame them in a new way. Moments of despair turn into moments of learning; memories transform into potentials for something new turning from traumatic to joyous. These transformations are given weight by Joe Walker’s’ fantastic editing. The match cuts which are used to demonstrate Louise flashing to memories of her daughter back to the present become varied in rhythm. Sometimes the cut is immediate. Sometimes the cut feels like something Satoshi Kon would do; event A happens, we cut to event B before A finishes that reframes A, and then we cut to the conclusion of A. This change in rhythm is directly tied to Louise’s external journey, discovering the language of the aliens, and her internal journey, finding purpose in her life despite Hannah’s passing, demonstrating true synergy between content and form. These strands all come together in a truly sublime fashion by the film’s end.

The lynchpin holding these strands together is the star of the film, Amy Adams, whose performance gives the movie its emotional heft. The way she gets lost in her thoughts gives the match cut edits from past to present and back again a heft; we can feel her consciousness shifting gears as she’s forced to overcome her turmoil. Despite acting against CGI aliens, her sense of engagement makes them feel real. We become attached to the aliens because her character is so enthusiastic about trying to understand them. This investment is what makes the cerebral nature of the film works; we care and are invested in our main character, so we want her to succeed even the parameters of her battle are in a different domain than what we’re used to. Because she’s invested in understanding the aliens, we are as well, which helps us stay engaged even in the slower portions of the movie.

While the movie isn’t as action-packed as some of its contemporaries, that doesn’t mean that its visually distinct. Villeneuve has just moved the focus from being so action-oriented to something more mystical and “other-worldly.” Instead of space lasers or explosions, we get chambers which shift gravity (and show multiple gravitational pulls at once) and wispy clouds of ink which are transformed into alien orthography. The result is a cerebral film which challenges and invites the audience into examining the power of each and every moment. It’s a movie that delves into the human condition in a way that hearkens back to the best of science-fiction , using an encounter with aliens to deconstruct what it means to live a fully realized life.

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TLDR	Arrival is a movie that uses the event of an alien first-contact as a jumping off point to examine the way people try and give meaning to their lives. Villeneuve’s direction, Heisserer’s script, and Adams’s acting come together in the form of a gripping cerebral narrative that is as engaging as its typical action-fare counterparts while retaining the inquisitive and thought-provoking elements of the very best of the science-fiction genre. By choosing to focus on the task of translating alien language as opposed to just engaging in some “epic” confrontation with them, Arrival forces us to confront the mysteries within ourselves as we tackle the mysteries of the extraterrestrials that come from beyond.
Rating	10/10
Grade	S+

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1940s, 1943, Crime, Drama, Film Noir, Grade, Review, review-movie, S+, Thriller, Year

Film Review: Shadow of a Doubt – 1943

August 11, 2021 The Critic Leave a comment

Director(s)	Alfred Hitchcock
Principal Cast	Teresa Wright as Charlie Newton Joseph Cotten as Uncle Charlie Henry Travers as Joseph Newton Patricia Collinge as Emma Newton Charles Bates as Roger Newton Edna May Wonacott as Ann Newton Hume Cronyn as Herb Macdonald Carey as Detective Jack Graham Wallace Ford as Detective Fred Saunders
Release Date	1943
Language(s)	English
Running Time	108 minutes
Report Card	Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary

The “Merry Widow Waltz” plays as the title sequence goes on.

The title card opens on a shot of couples waltzing to the “Merry Widow Waltz”. A waltz is characterized as being a triple time^[1]A rhythym characterized by three beats to a bar,so it makes sense that this shot of the couples dancing will be be used 3 more times during the film’s run-time, each occasion marking one of 3 pivotal movements in the narrative: the start of the mystery, the mystery’s reveal, and the final conclusion. This shot dissolves to a view of two detectives eating underneath the Pulaski Skyway in New Jersey. The object of these men’s investigation is unknown.

We cut to children playing in a street – an image of innocence. This tranquility is broken by the next shots: canted images of a doorway followed by a window – a darkness hiding under the innocence. We go to a shot of a young man sleeping in a room. The camera pans to a stack of bills next to him and underneath; he has a lot of money but doesn’t care about it. The door to his room opens. A motherly figure enters and informs that him that two of his “friends” showed up and asked for him. It’s clear from the conversation that this woman has no previous relation to the young man but she dotes on him regardless, treating him like one of the children playing outside. He informs her that the two man who inquired after him have never met him before despite being “friends”. Our censors go off at the oddity but hers do not.

Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) pretends to sleep as the blinds are closed.

Instead, she moves towards the blinds and closes them, insisting that the young strange man get some rest. The darkness envelops the mans face as he pretends to sleep before awaking – a denizen of the shadows react to move. He peers out the window and looks down on the two men who wait for him at the corner. This is a common motif Hitchcock employs to demonstrate power: the one who stands on the high ground comes out on top. The young man moves brazenly past the two detectives demonstrating to us that he is: 1. absolutely unafraid of his pursuers 2. the detectives looking for him don’t know what he looks like. They give chase to him but he gets away. The camera pans from the confused detectives who stumble on the ground up towards the young man who watches them from the upper floor of a nearby building; once again, he’s on top.

He goes to make a telegram to extended family of his in Santa Rosa, California. We learn his name is Charlie (Joseph Cotten) ^[2]I will be referring to him as Uncle Charlie for the rest of the review to make disambiguation easier. We learn that he’s an uncle. But we don’t learn why the detectives are pursuing him.

The traffic cop (Earle S. Dewey) stands as a symbol of the idyllic American life.

We cut from the wanted man on the run to the city of Santa Rosa. A cop monitors the traffic. This is a lawful place; an idyllic American city. The cop dissolves into a shot of a house. Like the transition from the children to the canted entrance to Uncle Charlie the transition from the cop to the house also shows a building in disarray. We cut from a canted back entrance of a house to a young woman, Charlie (Teresa Wright), in the same position we found Uncle Charlie in. Charlie explains to her dad, Joseph (Henry Travers), that she’s tired of her family who seems to be in a rut, especially her mother, Emma ( Patricia Collinge),who she feels is overworked and underappreciated. Desperate for a “miracle” she goes off to send a telegram to the family’s favorite uncle and her namesake, Uncle Charlie, hoping that he can shake things up at the Newton household.

Emma (Patricia Collinge) is trapped by Roger (Charles Bates) and Ann (Edna May Wonacott) who accost her from both sides.

At the same time Charlie, a telephone comes in for the Newtons. The call is picked up by Emma who tries to take the call while being accosted by her younger children, Ann (Edna May Wonacott) and Roger(Charles Bates ). The two children “surround” Emma on both sides. However, as soon as the caller mentions to Emma that her brother, Uncle Charlie has sent a telegram informing the Newton’s that he’s going to be visiting them , the camera pans to a new view of Emma; this time she’s “free” and is framed in a new light. It’s clear that Uncle Charlie means the world to his sister.

Charlie (Teresa Wright) walks home excited that her uncle is coming.

Meanwhile, Charlie makes her way to the telegram store where she learns the same information her mother had. She happily exclaims that her Uncle and her have a psychic connection with one another. As she makes her way home, the shot dissolves to a train going off in the same direction. The noise and smoke plume from the train serve as harbingers of the darkness to come. On the train, we learn that Uncle Charlie is “sick”, apparently so much so that no one on the machine has seen him. Uncle Charlie limps out of the train with the assistance of others but straightens up (un)surprisingly quickly upon seeing his family, namely Charlie, running towards him.

Immediately it’s understandable why the family loves him so. He regales Emma upon seeing her causing her to burst with joy. At dinner he presents every member of the family with gifts. Charlie initially refuses but acquiesces after her uncle places the ring on her right right finger. This placement is not a coincidence; if the left hand’s ringer finger marks a legal marriage, the right hand’s ring finger marks an alliance to prohibited.

Charlie notes that the ring is engraved with a couples initials but enjoys the mystery. Her uncle does not share the sentiment and comments he didn’t know it was marked; his face breaks into horror and the the shot dissolves to our first of the three “waltz” refrains; the “Merry Widow Waltz” mystery is finally afoot. This is made explicit as the camera cuts to Joseph talking to his friend Herb (Hume Cronyn) about their shared interest: murder mysteries their machinations. With all the key players finally introduced – the detectives, Uncle Charlie, Charlie, the rest of the Newton family, and Herb – Hitchcock’s thriller can begin with gusto.

Shadow of a Doubt is a story which examines the idyllic American fantasy and it’s nightmarish underside. In many ways the movie is a precursor to David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, seeking to explore the way two seemingly opposite worlds interact with and feed into the others construction. This is why our introduction to both worlds is so stylized. While Uncle Charlie’s world is one of darkness, Charlie’s is one where there is belief in the rule of law. The ring given to Charlie^[3] Speaking of Blue Velvet, Charlie finding the ring is analogous to Jeffrey finding the detached ear. It’s the start of the journey into the mystery world. What do the initials mean? represents the choice, both metaphorically and literally, she has to make, one where she chooses to marry the fantasy of order and legality or the fantasy of chaos and disregard for law.

This battle for dominant fantasy is reflected in the architecture of the Newton residence, which has both a front and back entrance and which serves as the primary environment the movie takes place in. The front entrance is the domain of the idyllic fantasy, while the back entrance is the domain of the nightmare. Connecting these entrances is the stairway which automatically positions people higher or lower than another. Thus, the “everyday” American house becomes the battlefield for the direction of its soul. As Charlie and her uncle learn more about one another, they swap positions; the cat and mouse game flipping on its head as each party vies for the “top” of the stairs. Eventually the intensity of the battle bleeds out to the city proper, as the characters venture to new locale which reinforce the dichotomy between the two worlds.

This movie, for me, is the first of Hitchcock’s masterpieces combining both his sensibilities as the “master of suspense” with an immaculate use of technique to get his themes across in as many ways as possible. From the opening to the final shot, there is not a single wasted camera movement or out-of-place shot. Multiple scenes demonstrate changes in character disposition purely through changes in lighting long before making those changes noted through dialogue. If my long-winded analysis of the opening 20 minutes above wasn’t proof enough, one only has to look at any scene’s ending image to figure out what the point of that scene was; that’s how methodical the direction is. Every minute detail has at least one counterpoint that is meant to draw contrast in order to constantly draw our attention to story’s thematic question. However, none of these moments are ever done for their own sake; every detail supports multiple narrative threads. What seems to be the point of one scene transforms into the set-up for an even more elaborate plot in the next, giving the movie a fully immersive and connected feeling in spite of plot details that would otherwise immediately draw ire. Instead of questioning the story, one is completely captured by it, desperate to figure out where its end will lead. In fact, Hitchcock intentionally uses ellipses in the story by not fully explaining certain plot threads to force us to imagine scenes in the movie without seeing them; that’s cinematic mastery.

Even if one isn’t captured by the way Hitchcock deconstructs the American fantasy, one certainly can’t help but be caught up by the propulsive energy of the narrative which is in large part helped by commanding performances by both Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotton. Both of their characters have to do a juggling act between personas, light and dark, while showing cracks in their personas depending on what the story calls for. There are multiple scenes involving the two of them as they go from scared to received to enthralled and so on without ever skipping a beat. They play off one another believably like partners in a waltz as their worlds bleed into each others.

The end result is a film that effectively demonstrates the fragility of our notions of peace and the dirty processes that result in the successful deployment of such ideas (think Nolan’s The Dark Knight ) without ever treating itself like an epic. By subtly incorporating the themes and driving ideas behind them in and around every small detail, Hitchcock manages to give the questions he’s asking a more universal feeling; their presence can literally be felt in every movement of the movie. In spite of this, the movie never feels overly “showy”, choosing instead to lull the audience into its rhythm until they’re glued to the screen to the very end.

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TLDR	Shadow of a Doubt is a a thrill ride from start to finish, showcasing some of the finest craft and most impeccable storytelling. Even the smallest moment has meaning in this film-noir qua deconstruction of the American dream. Over 40 years before Lynch’s own masterpiece, Blue Velvet, Hitchcock’s work does much of the traversing between the two fantasies of American life: the beautiful dream and the terrible nightmare. And even now it’s just as powerful a watch.
Rating	10/10
Grade	S+

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