Renfield’s name tag. Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) listens attentively. Dracula (Nicholas Cage) gets ready to unleash his bite. Renfield heads to Dracula’s castle. Dracula (Nicholas Cage) hypnotizes. Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) is a familiar which is defined on the screen. Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) stands between the light and Dracula. Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) plans while sitting in the mouth of a monster. The opening sequence sees the film at it’s most kinetic. We proceed from our titular character’s name tag and see him captivated by a speech given by a woman who describes her boss as a monster. This is a self-help group, one whose depressing content is reflected by the hazy, disgusting green lighting which gives the film an iconic, campy texture. Renfield addresses us in a 4th wall-breaking manner and we’re privy to an intense action scene followed by edits of the 1931 Dracula which quickly recount the previous film and establish this film as a sequel. We learn that Renfield is stuck in a toxic cycle that sees him in the world’s worst employer-employee relationship possible.
The film opens on a name tag: Renfield.
The camera slowly pans up from this moniker to its recipient who looks up to a speaker talking about a “monster” whom she can’t seem to get away from. We’re made aware that this is a self-help group of sorts and the crowd of persons there listen fully invested in this monstrous metaphorical dressing of a toxic employer.
The lighting is a sickly, neon green, accentuating the toxicity of the discourse in the environment and highlighting Renfield’s pale, emaciated visage.
This young man then proceeds to address the audience in a fourth-wall breaking speech, explaining to the viewer that he, like the rest of the group, persons who he describes as “decent folks”, is in a “destructive relationship.”
We quickly flash to a supernatural action set-piece, an environment which is lit more “normally” than the self-help group, and a man runs off walls while being assailed and then stares at the screen with his fangs flashing. But before we can feel the bite of the moment, the frame pauses on this monstrous visage and lets the terror sink its teeth.
Renfield quickly shifts gears in order to provide context for the visceral flashback and the film cuts once again, moving to grainy black-and-white footage inspired/edited from Browning and Freund’s iconic 1931 film, Dracula. The pieces come together: we’re watching a sequel and the character addressing is us none other than the iconic Renfield of old, the salesman-turned-assistant to the legendary Dracula.
We see our hero’s doomed journey to the vampiric overlord’s grand manor and are treated to scenes, digitally altered to change the actors of both Dracula and Renfield to the modern actors playing them in this film. This quick summation of the older film is narrated in quirky fashion by our protagonist who takes the words of the weary woman which we previously heard and applies them directly to his own situation thereby literalizing the monstrous metaphor.
He described the process by which he was turned into a “familiar” that includes a quick textual definition which pops onto the screen to explain the terms of his “employment” and dresses up the evil machinations of his master with a modern parlance that belies the situation and injects a wry comedy to the moment.
With the set-up complete, we cut back to the first flash-back and witness as Dracula is manipulated and nearly beaten in battle. But just as he’s about to taste defeat, he looks at Renfield and implores his most loyal employee to help. Renfield is caught in Dracula’s gaze and his silky words, a commentary on the codependence and abusive nature of their relationship. Then, we’re able to witness an absolute bloodbath filled with comic amounts of gore and effects which accentuate the campy nature that the film is aiming at.
Dracula wins the battle but suffers debilitating injuries due to being exposed to the sun and Renfield explains that this is just a cycle repeating. As he explains: “At the peak of his powers, Dracula goes on a full-tilt blood-sucking bender, the good guys show up and do their thing, and then it’s up to me to clean up the mess.”
During this explanation, the two are framed by a circular door, a subtle affirmation of this cyclical explanation, where Renfield stands in the middle, straddling the line between Dracula, the prince of Darkness, and the light emanating from the window, beams which would have killed the evil if not for Renfield’s intervention. The stakes are established: Renfield is not one of the “good guys” but thinks of himself as a “decent” person who is struggling now to make the correct decision.
We cut back to the present day where we learn that as part of his duties, Renfield is tasked with moving Dracula, finding a new locale to store his batty boss, and then help him gain power while waiting for it the inevitable moment where the endeavor goes sour and the entire process has to be started once more. It’s no coincidence that that our unwilling employee is framed in a restaurant with a horrific, monstrous head behind him, consuming him just as he’s consumed by his master’s orders which are oriented around the act of consumption.
Yet, when asked to explain this story to the diegetic audience of the self-help group, Renfield shies away and claims that the group would never be able to understand the specific nature of his trauma; after all, there’s a difference between a cranky boss and a literal demon who yearns for the blood of innocents.
However, in spite of his reluctance to explicitly share within the catharsis offered by the setting, Renfield doesn’t leave the meetings empty handed; he doesn’t give his stories, but he takes his fellow cohorts’ tales of victimhood as signals by which to select targets for Dracula; the morality of the situation gels with him easier knowing that he’s taking out minor “monsters”, the only fitting dish for the heinous gourmand giving him these murderous orders.
Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) punches a head. Teddy is scared of the carnage. Rebecca (Awkwafina) arrests Teddy (Ben Schwartz) Renfield’s mission has him crossing paths with the righteous Rebecca. Thus, the vampire story crosses path the crime genre and the framework of the narrative is established.
Immediately, we see the employee of the century spring into action.
He ingests insects which give him his supernatural powers and proceeds to hunt down a target. In the first of many action set-pieces, we’re able to witness campy and kinetic action induced by the absurd neon lighting flourishes, kinetic yet quirky camera movements, and gratuitous injuries with blood abound. It’s a whole host of fun which is then accentuated by the introduction of the film’s B-Plot, a crime family who has dealings with the same cretins that Renfield finds himself dispatching, and suddenly, our vampire acolyte finds himself facing off with a masked, lumbering foe in raucous aplomb.
The violence of the encounter is felt by the son of the crime family in charge, Teddy Lobo (Ben Schwartz), who swiftly departs the scene of the butchering and ends up being accosted and then arrested by a traffic cop, Rebecca (Awkwafina), desperately searching for a way to apply her skills in a more meaningful manner in her efforts to clean the streets of crime. Thus, the supernatural vampire story becomes inextricably tied to a light, crime narrative.
Renfield takes the bodies to the new abode. Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) sets up the bodies for Dracula (Nicholas Cage). Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) bows while Dracula (Nicholas Cage) sits on his blood throne. Dracula (Nicholas Cage) asserts his dominance in close-up. Renfield drags the bodies to his master’s abode depicted a wide-shot that emphasizes the grandiose nature of the latter. He drags the bodies through a miserably foggy green environment that exacerbates the disgusting feeling. We see Dracula’s bloody red throne which creates a contrast with the green lights which make the milieu pop. The moment ends with Dracula asserting dominance in close-up, his prosthetics in full glory. He forces his liege to re-affirm his commitment to the cause.
It’s with this dichotomy in place, that the film ventures to more ambitious grounds.
We see Renfield drag the corpses from his battle to a decrepit building high in stature, a call-back to the castle shown in the opening flash-back, and he proceeds towards his master’s lair which is lighted by neon greens and reds which accentuate the sickness of the milieu.
It’s here where Dracula, dressed in a disgusting half-formed prosthetic showcasing his lack of power and injured state, dresses Renfield down for not bringing good enough victims, innocents whose blood would truly fuel the dark lord, and proceeds to abuse his liege until the would-be hero re-affirms his role in life and pathetically pledges his allegiance once more.
Teddy goes to his family’s manor. Teddy goes to his mother’s torture lair. Bellafrancesca (Shohreh Aghdashloo) lays down the law for Teddy (Ben Schwartz). Bellafrancesca (Shohreh Aghdashloo) asserts her dominance in close-up. This movement is repeated with the Lobos. Teddy goes to his family’s manor which is depicted in a wide-shot that emphasizes the grandiose nature of his family’s status. He proceeds to his mother’s torture lair which is colored in exaggerated blues and reds, a counterpoint to Dracula’s room’s red and green. The moment ends with Bellafrancesca asserting dominance in close-up. She forces her son to re-affirm his commitment to the cause. Thus, Dracula’s empire serves as an analog to the Lobos and the dark lord becomes transfigured into a godfather.
Meanwhile, the exact same scenario plays out with Teddy. He is freed from the police building, enters his family’s large mansion which is grand and opulent, and then goes to meet his mother, Bellafrancesca (Shohreh Aghdashloo), the leader of the group, who is busy torturing unseen victims behind a screen which leaves only their silhouettes for us to witness. This space is also dressed in distinctive neon lights, red and blue, and she similarly takes her liege, her son qua employee, to task for his failures in maintaining the family name and the fearful deterrence that it ought to evoke in its foes.
He too is forced to re-affirm his dedication to the family’s cause and is told to right the situation which he’s so badly botched, an order which forces him to confront Renfield, the man who got in his way and stopped his goon from carrying out the previous evening’s mission.
Thus, the two genre perspectives are formally married as complimentary sections, and Dracula is rendered as an analog to a Godfather figure, a crime lord in his own right (though his proclivities and activities make the Lobos pale in comparison). This posturing is intriguing and gives the film and its respective narrative an interesting position by which to couch itself within the horror genre as less a rote vampire story and more an examination of the commonplace structure that governs vampire mythos.
Unfortunately, where the film stumbles the most is precisely in this area due to its inability in highlighting the most interesting aspects afforded through this juxtaposition.
Instead of honing in on the idea of Dracula as a crime-lord looking to build his analog to a mafia-like empire and Renfield as the “rat” who threatens to bring it all down, focus is given more so to Renfield’s journey and entanglement with Rebecca, a morally upstanding officer who motivates him in his journey for redemption and who is unfortunately the least interesting and compelling character within the narrative proper.
Her goody-goody schtick gets boring quickly especially once she’s played her role in motivating Renfield to better herself, rendering her mostly superfluous to the narrative. With nothing else to do with her character and no interesting developments in their relationship, the sections between these two characters quickly devolve into quips and ham-fisted attempts at a light romance that undermine the tension, momentum, and obscene fun of the moments involving Dracula and his attempts at becoming a legitimate name in the vein of the Lobos.
It’s a bloody shame because Cage’s Dracula is absolutely a gonzo villain, a madman dripping in menace and condescension. He’s campy and mean-spirited in the best way and elevates the film whenever he appears. The way he rides Renfield and simultaneously reinforces and exposes the toxic, interdependent nature of their relationship, an extension of the help-group’s commentary on bad bosses, is the heart of the film; yet these moments, far and few between, are rarely given their moments to shine in the sun.
This uneven feeling is due to the film’s inability to translate its formal and stylistic tools evenly throughout the film. At a larger level, the care demonstrated in the stylizations of the Dracula vs non-Dracula sections is lop-sided. The intensely neon lit set-pieces, the energetic camera work, the 4th-wall breaking meta-commentary, and the endearing splatter effects all but disappear whenever the vampire mafioso is not present leading to a feeling of relative apathy when we’re stuck dealing with entire chunks of the film which are played closer to the stylings of an inert rom-com, one that is replete with moments of random humor (a diatribe regarding ska music is groan inducing in particular) that have no bearing, clever or otherwise, in regards to anything else going on in the screen; the passion or energy that would help these sections compete with the Dracula moments is simply missing.
Yet, even the Dracula sections feel like they could pack more punch as they lack the kinetic momentum and rapid-fire stylistic flourishes of the opening which neatly utilizes textual interludes and edited flash-backs of the older Dracula film to position the film as a sequel and examination of the lore underpinning it. Instead, the Dracula sections, fun as they are, rely entirely on Cage and Hoult playing out their abusive coupling and carnage candy, a formula which is entertaining but doesn’t have nearly the bite that was initially promised.
Consequently, the scattered pieces of the film never coagulate into something that quite rises to the amount of blood being spilled. The entanglement of the sub-genres comes off as clunky instead of nuanced and at times it almost feels like one is watching two different films which were forcefully smashed together instead of one compelling piece using its different aspects in an intertextual manner which the initial formal structure of the piece would otherwise suggest.
Thus, while the greatest bits of the film feel in line with the best of director Chris McKay’s work in The Lego BatmanMovie, the lesser sections are at best mildly entertaining and at worst act as bogs that we’re forced to wade through. And though the plot beats eventually congeal into a memorably carnivalesque finale loaded with absurd moments and wonderful comedic beats, it’s hard to shake off the bad blood of the lesser sections holding the film back from rising to its potential.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Renfield attempts to marry the crime and vampire genres but is unable to fully tap into its mixture to examine the idea of Dracula as a godfather-type figure. Yet, the film does endear itself to the audience during its kinetic, carnage-candy moments and the interactions between Dracula and Renfield provide enough bite for audiences who can wade through the less inspired, rom-com sections that the film is unfortunately bogged down by.
Rating
7.9/10
Grade
B
Go to Page 2 for the for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3to view this review’s progress report .
Closeup of Bee and Sophie making out. The focus is on the erotic element. Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) and Bee (Maria Bakalova) passionately kiss. Sophie (Amanda Stenberg) declares her love. Bee (Maria Bakalova) smiles back. We start on a shot of pure passion, lust and love in the center of the frame, which then pulls back to reveal the subjects of these affectations. This couple, Bee and Sophie, is in the throes of amorous passion and are operating on purely basic, animalist drives as they seek to satisfy one another, feeling up each other’s bodies. This is Eden and these Eves are enjoying their time in paradise. Sophie declares her love for Bee while the latter smiles back, pausing in the moment.
The soundscape is littered with the sounds of birds and bees, animalistic noises and the symbols of sexual euphemism come to life, as the camera focuses on a fitting image of a loving, lustful engagement – a gratuitous make-out session – whose noises enter into the cacophony. The frame’s first focus is the encounter, the experience and not the experiencers – an intentional choice that affirms a “living in the moment.”
Then, the camera pulls back to reveal the subjects of this amorous encounter, Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) and Bee (Maria Bakalova), who are caught in the throes of passion, their desire for their respective partner’s body overwhelming any other drive – humans rendered as their basest selves.
From this vantage point, the greenery surrounding the couple in the backdrop shot out-of-focus to render it into a hue of colors, an impressionistic embrace and framing by nature, calls back to the idyllic Eden, this time populated by two Eves.
This paradise continues for a while until Sophie declares her love to Bee, the latter of which smiles back without giving a verbal response.
The title card drops as the duo looks at their phones. Bee looks up Sophie’s friends. The couple drives through mountain ranges.An aerial view of the mansion. The girls find themselves whisked away from a world of instinctive, animal passions to one where technology reigns. Phones serve as a conduit for online personas, disseminating artificial images created by persons to impress others – inauthenticity. The camera reveals both the power of the phone through close-ups and the distance the couple is traveling before we finally see their destination location: a huge mansion. This is Eden no longer.
The enunciation is immediately interrupted by the harsh musical tunings of Slayyyter ‘s “Daddy AF” and we cut to the two characters, previously protected by the lush greens, now encased in a metallic husk, a car, with phones in their hands as opposed to on one another – technological transmutation, a counterpoint to the openings positioning of the human as pure animality freed from anthropocentric constraints.
With the shift to this “hi-tech” humanity, we see new concerns bleed into the environment, replacing the love from before with a sense of worry. Bee looks at her phone with concern, scrolling through it with a sense of dread. Sophie attempts to assuage her, claiming that her friends’ digital personas, profiles Bee is looking over are not as “nihilistic” as portrayed and are indicative of what said friends want others “to think” of them.
Thus, the phone is rendered as a barrier to unfettered love, a portal to false images by which persons can look at others in an artificial, distanced manner.
The camera cuts from the inside of the vehicle to wide shots of the vehicle traversing lush, green mountains before a nice aerial shot reveals a wide-spanning mansion, the location of the get-together that Sophie is taking Bee to, a party with the aforementioned friends that Bee feels the need to research before meeting in an attempt to not make a fool of herself. We’re a far ways from the idyllic Eden where love can find and cultivate itself without regards for the thoughts of outside observers.
Bee (Maria Bakalova) and Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) kiss in front of the greens. Bee (Maria Bakalova) opens up the rear-view mirror. Bee (Maria Bakalova) fixes up her appearance. Bee (Maria Bakalova) dissapears behind the mirror which obscures her. The arrival at the mansion signifies the end of Eden’s powers and protective domain. The couple attempts to kiss again but the same intensity and glow of the greens doesn’t operate the same anywhere. There’s a discrete space interrupting the continuity, one that becomes more explicit as Bee runs back to the car by herself to fix up her image. We’ve moved from nature to civilization, a realm where images born from the ego reign supreme. This is signified by Bee’s entrance into the house. She leaves the car, enters the background of the frame, and is obscured by the mirror in the foreground, the ultimate symbol of this new domain.
The couple gets out and heads to the luxurious abode but Bee hesitates and claims she has to retrieve something from the vehicle. Sophie rushes over, tells her not to dally for too long, and kisses her partner once again. But this attempt to channel the Edenic opening fails. There’s a space here made all the more poignant by the greens around them which are now fully in focus: discreteness generates distance.
Bee goes back to the car and immediately checks her face in the rear-view mirror, touching up her image to ensure that her ensuing meeting with the persons she’s spent time researching will come to joyous fruition. The reflective surface serves as an analog to the phone from earlier, an interface by which the ego can render itself into its most pleasing form.
Satisfied by her appearance, she finally gets out and begins to walk into the abode. The shot frames her in the background with the car’s dashboard and mirror in the foreground. We watch her move towards the house and cut right as she disappears behind the mirror she’s just spent time consulting with: she’s entered the mirror world, the realm of appearances.
David (Pete Davidson) and Emma (Chase Sui Wonders) float. Jordan (Myha’la Herrold) floats. Alice (Rachel Sennott) and Greg (Lee Pace) float. Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) interrupts the space and her wavy reflection disrupts the continuity. The pool becomes a man-made analog to the nature of Eden, humanity’s attempt to capture and compartmentalize nature in a manner which suits them. In this fashion, the pool becomes a type of womb, holding the members of the party in its seemingly protective grasp. This moment of peace is interrupted by Sophie, whose reflection disrupts the flow of the scene and reveals that this seemingly idyllic moment was nothing more than a competition between the members to see who could hold their breath the longest.
Meanwhile, the mansion’s inhabitants peacefully float around in a pool, a man-made approximation of nature, of Eden, that can’t recreate the same idyllic peace but serves as a temporary reprieve, a metaphorical womb of sorts. This moment is interrupted by the presence of Sophie; she appears at the edge of the pool, her image distorted and shifting, and disrupts the reflection of those below. Confrontation looms at the boundary of the water qua mirror, a counterpoint of sorts to Bee’s earlier moment by herself.
The crew comes up and engages with Sophie. Alice (Rachel Sennot) eagerly greets her friend while the rest of the group slowly acclimates to the presence, treating their supposed comrade more like an intrusion, questioning her presence at their get-together. As all the characters pop out, Greg (Lee Pace) pops out of the water and reveals that the paradisal picture was merely a competition ground; the group had been testing the limits of their breathing capacities and he’s won the competition. The game of compare and contrast has already started.
Bee (Maria Bakalova) is framed alone in the house. Bee (Maria Bakalova) meets the group. Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) introduces Bee (Maria Bakalova) to the group. The group and the couple are partitioned in the frame. We see the logic of the outsider continue to develop as Bee is framed alone in the house and outside of it. Her connection to this group, Sophie, is the only bridge to acceptance and she eagerly awaits the group’s response to her newfound presence within their social scene.
While this group converses, Bee enters the house, a moment which showcases the opulence of the manor in a wonderful tracking shot that starts on the ceiling and goes to Bee’s face as she gazes around entranced. A cut shows her framed by the doors of the house, a new entrant to the world of the bourgeoise who finds herself held in its purview. She enters the backyard pool environment and is initially cast alone, her outsider status re-affirmed.
Sophie quickly runs to her partner’s side, wraps her arms around her, and begins to introduce her to the rest of the crowd, stopping on Greg who is revealed to be Alice’s most recent beau, another new entrant to this social scene – seemingly obvious given his age gap compared to the rest of the group. The framing switches from Bee alone to Bee with Sophie to the couple now cast to one side of the frame against the already established group – two worlds primed to collide.
Greg’s immediate reaction to learning that thisis THE Sophie immediately informs us of an undercurrent pervading this social scene, one that has been building since her cohorts first became aware of her appearance. There’s a palpable tension building as we wait to learn what Sophie’s done. Just like Bee, we’re outsiders to this group’s dynamic and must learn how to swim in its ebb and flow.
Quickly, thinly veiled barbs start materializing into larger concerns. The group calls out Sophie for being unresponsive in the group chat. She hasn’t been part of the group’s festivities in some time and her presence is a genuine surprise to everyone else. What exactly does she want?
Alice (Rachel Sennott) gets alcohol. Greg (Lee Pace) uses a sword to cut off the blade. The group embraces the hurricane. David holds the sword and challenges the hurricane to do its worst. Property is rendered part and parcel of a game of gender, tools meant showcase one’s power. David is upset at being shown up by Greg, who uses an antique sword to great effect, gaining the admiration of the women at the house. David’s ego can’t stand such the perceived blow and he immediately grabs the sword and challenges nature itself.
Then, Alice goes to get champagne to celebrate the festivities. David (Pete Davidson), the party’s host, chastises her for taking his “dad’s shit”, revealing this abode and everything within as part of the generational wealth he’s been born into, but he ultimately doesn’t push the matter when she exclaims the presence of their seemingly unavailable friend warrants a toast. In perfect synergy with his partner, Greg then comes out into the fray with an antique sword and slices the bottle open in a wonderful show, a demonstration which upsets David even more than the retrieval of the bottle. He not only repeats his warning to not touch his father’s property but goes so far as to act and grab the weapon away from the only other male presence – class and gender become inextricably tied as masculinity becomes coded, albeit jokingly, as a threat.
The subtle interactions of the group reveal their individual relationships to one another and to wealth itself which help inform both us and Bee of the underlying dynamics at work, an interplay which has become more complex as an unseen member, Max (Conner O’Malley) is disclosed to be missing due to alluded antagonisms. Additionally, the group realizes that they too are unfamiliar with the new Sophie who surprises everyone with her announcement of sobriety. Suddenly, the reason for the toast itself, a gesture meant to include Sophie within the festivities with aplomb, is undermined and leaves the group searching for something new to celebrate.
In a sick joke, as if we needed any more proof of the group’s opulence, they choose to then dedicate their drinks to the impending hurricane; a devastating event for commoners becomes a time for celebration for those who are capable of sheltering away from such tragedy. But nature cares not for wealth, and the imposing presence of the hurricane makes good on its promise and forces the group to go inside even as David takes the time, with sword in hand, to challenge the natural phenomena before giving up and throwing the sword on the floor thereby confirming that his concerns over its damages at the hands of Greg were based in pride and antagonism: property is only valuable as an extension of one’s image – a succinct take on the purpose of class.
Bee and Sophie make-out once again. David (Pete Davidson) interrupts the moment. Bee (Maria Bakalova) is left alone. Bee (Maria Bakalova) explores the house and is amazed at its affluence. Jordan (Myha’la Herrold) and Bee (Maria Bakalova) are framed apart from one another as the former gives the latter a warning. The realm of capital, a world completely separated from Eden, allows no room for love to flourish as outsiders can interrupt at any moment. Sophie and Bee’s kiss is interrupted by the party’s host and the latter’s exploration of the house is interrupted by another member of the group who issues an ominous warning. This take on civilization is one that cuts to the chase: human society is one built on antagonism first.
Back in the house, our initial couple attempts to engage in another make-out session, this time framed against the backdrop of the mansion, which is quickly interrupted by the party’s host who takes Sophie aside to learn for the latter’s reason for coming to the event. Class dictates new conventions and the show of nature, initially cast as serene at the film’s start, becomes interrupted and commented on by observers. Privacy no longer exists.
This is confirmed when Bee slowly explores the house, entranced by the images of family and grandeur all around her. She’s clearly alienated by this environment but is unable to even take the entirety of the locale in before Jordan (Myha’la Herrold) intercedes, informs Bee of Sophie’s wealth which is comparatively greater to even David’s, and issues a warning to the newest newcomer: “Just be careful, okay? With Sophie. Just… Be Careful.” As she delivers this cautionary comment, the camera slowly pivots and uses the framing of the wall to divide these two parties into separate partitions – new groupings are being formed.
Suddenly, the mysteries of Sophie are turned against Bee as she’s now thrown into the currents of a group-dynamic which she knows nothing about and is forced to accept that she may not know her partner as well as she previously thought. The previous exchanges amongst the group code this interaction in multiple fashions and transform it into a labyrinth to be navigated with caution.
Is this this an analog to David and Greg’s previous confrontation at the pool, a female antagonism opposed to male, wherein Jordan takes on David’s role, Sophie takes on Greg’s role, and Bee, the seemingly poorest of the bunch, comes to be a stand-in for the “sword”, a symbol of power, in this case companionship, which must be controlled as an extension of one’s image?
Or is this an example of class solidarity, an extension of Jordan’s concern with not dropping the incredibly expensive alcohol, a thought which seemingly crossed none of the other party members’ minds, wherein she is looking out for Bee as someone who is also alienated by the displays of affluence? It would certainly make sense of her earlier, unprompted provocation about the stature of Sophie’s wealth.
We’re left to ponder the intent as Jordan happily hops down the hallway, out of sight, leaving only her eerie words behind.
David (Pete Davidson) obsesses zooms onto his face. Bee (Maria Bakalova) calls her mom. Bee looks at the girls was they record a Tik Tok video. The phone is transformed into the object par excellence, a conduit that allows communication between and through persons. It allows the dissemination of personas, curated images made to influence others’ opinions. It allows the creation of capital in the form of social media contributions which can get influence. It also allows communication to flourish between parties not closely to another. This nuance showcases the powers of phones but heavily suggests that they are more a curse than a boon, a tool which controls its wielder as opposed to the other way around.
As the interactions continue to proliferate, the film’s symbol par excellence, the cell-phone, continues to gain functions and becomes cemented as a pivotal tool in each character’s toolbox. It serves as mirror which can allow one to modify their appearance. It can allow for communication with parties not present within the immediate space, allowing for intimate connection. It can combine these functions and be used as a tool for social capital, capturing interactions meant for large-scale consumption vis-à-vis applications like Tik Tok. Director Halina Reijn imbues the object with nuance, an interface wherein all aspects of identity play around in relation to different socialized systems of power, but constantly demonstrates the way this nuance is discarded in favor of projects funded by the ego, affirmations of selfishness at the cost of everything else, a cost which will the film will explore with relish as its run-time continues.
Eventually, the group, including Bee, fall fully under the influence of their drugs and/or drinks of choice and are fully able to interact with one another, the substances operating as catalysts for interaction that previously was too shy to occur organically. It’s a ritual meant to summon the affects of Eden, nature at peace with itself, into a space that’s anything, the abode of capital and egotistical antagonisms that take priority over everything else.
Bee (Maria Bakalova) kisses Sophie. Jordan (Myha’la Herrold) stares at the couple. Greg (Lee Pace) dances with Bee) Alice (Rachel Sennott) pushes Bee (Maria Bakalova) out of the way. Jordan (Myha’la Herrold) dances with Bee (Maria Bakalova).Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) stares at her partner dancing without her. A party scene which should be the birthplace of community becomes a battleground as individuals feel themselves become partitioned from loving couplings that they see as extensions of their property and seek to redress these wrongs.
Each row in the gallery highlights the power of the gaze in these instances, as loving moments between persons are transformed into stages for antagonism by outside perspectives.
Azelia Bank’s iconic “212” starts to play as the group begins to dance with aplomb while losing themselves in its frenetic energy, but as evidenced by the opening’s musical break, we know this is set to fail. The frenetic hand-held montage can’t sustain the same passion evinced by the opening as the constant-cutting showcases the power of the gaze and its violent powers.
Intimate moments of potential connection are ripped apart as persons are repeatedly transformed into outsiders who project their own fears and concerns onto these new dalliances, transforming would-be encounters into battlegrounds where the excluded participants make themselves known and vie for total control of the situation.
Jordan stares with a fervor as Sophie and Bee dance, her warning looming in the distant background.
Alice immediately pushes Sophie aside when the latter dances with the only other outsider in the group, Greg – a move that immediately stops the establishment of solidarity.
Sophie is prodded by David to look at Bee and Jordan dancing and is clearly perturbed by this interaction. Her reaction marks the beginning of the end and she calls the affairs to a stand-still and proposes that the group play a game, the titular “Bodies Bodies Bodies.”
The rules of the game are explained as the group waits. Bee (Maria Bakalova) slaps David (Pete Davidson). David (Pete Davidson) punches Greg (Lee Pace) as the girls watch in horror. Bee (Maria Bakalova) explores the house with her phone’s light. The rules of the game are explained and its ritualistic role as a conduit for violence and debauchery are fully revealed. This is a game where personal grievances can be “fictionalized” and acted out on. When the lights go out and the game truly begins, Bee’s cell-phone, the ultimate tool of fictional identity, lights the way, ominously informing us what’s to come.
The game, a take on popular games like “Mafia” or “Werewolf”, designates one player as a killer and tasks the other players with figuring out their identity before the players are fully eliminated. The players must navigate the house in the dark with a light and the next session of the game can only start when someone finds a deceased member and calls out the game’s title: “Bodies Bodies Bodies.” Thus, the implicit arena of the dance-floor becomes explicit within a game that actively forces the players to ascertain one another’s true intentions and come to meaningful conclusions as violence looms around every corner.
However, this variant of the game starts off with a ritualized ceremony, a credo of sorts, that sees each player take a shot and then slap the player next to them. The symbolic violence and rush of the game is not enough for these people and they need to ramp up the stakes even more to feel something in their insulated, privileged lives.
The ritual goes along well until Bee, the female outsider, refuses to hit David as hard as she’s expected to, obviously taking the trappings of the game as a limiting factor to the violence, choosing to play within the realm of symbols instead of letting such desires sublimate into reality. But David takes her refusal as a window to showcase what should actually be done – the host enforcing the laws of the land – and viciously punches Greg, the male outsider, the party who already emasculated David unknowingly outside with the display of the sword, giving the audience a taste of what’s to come.
Alice quickly calms Greg down and the game begins. The lights are turned out and the players are told to hide amongst the house. Of course, Bee armed with her cell-phone, uses it to navigate the environment, an abode which already alienates her with its affluence, and determines her allegiances, choosing to try and form a companionship with Alice, who runs away from her, and avoid Jordan, who narrowly misses Bee as she hides.
Suddenly, the call is made. The group convenes. The lights turn on.
And as expected, the resulting conversation immediately devolves into personal slights, indictments based on knowledge that one would never know outside of the game, so called “meta-gaming” moments that reveal the antagonisms within the group that had been swirling up for so long up to this moment. We see the formation of in-groups and the way they determine outsiders and see the ruptures becoming to form, conflicts which break out into reality when the next round starts and a body is found again, this time genuinely dead and un-moving. Now, the game will truly begin as it becomes realized in the flesh.
As this violent investigation continues, conflicts which we had only seen parts of rear their ugly heads. Alliances are tested and at each critical juncture new information is revealed which makes ascertaining the assassin increasingly difficult. No one can be trusted and the character’s, stuck using their own knowledge of one another, information which has been coded by all parties to fit their own self-interests, find themselves trapped in a nightmarish environment where anything and everything threatens to take them out.
With the lights fully out due to the storm, this variant of the game, one enforced by the rules of nature proper, never has a moment of proper deliberation with every encounter taking place in absolute darkness, the state of ambiguity. The power saps the utility of the phones, turning them into pure symbols meant to light the way – a perfect tying of form to content.
The set-up lets Reijn ratchet up tension, shooting the majority of the rest of the film in a handheld manner that reinforces the horror tropes one would associate with such a milieu and leads into moments of genuine tension.
However, as the storm rages on, the tight, intricate brushstrokes the film paints itself with, namely the minute point and counter-points related to class and gender, wash away under the pressures of the narrative and become far less focused and poignant, drowning under the pressure.
Ideas on class and gender become far more overarching than they need be and the manner by which the film demonstrates the logic of alienation is cast aside.
The script’s wonderful Gen-Z slang, awash in the tropes and stylings of online vernacular, previously used to reinforce the shallow manners by which the characters’ code themselves as perpetual victims and as better than one another, eventually becomes superficial in end of itself, servicing the film with nothing more than punch-lines that elicit laughs but do very little in taking the aforementioned sub textual machinations to the next level, a move that would evaluate this horror-skinned murder mystery into the realm of a full-blooded classic.
While the broad splatters the film ultimately uses to finish populating its canvas tie together the plotlines in a formally competent and satisfying manner, neatly calling back to some of the larger overtures established at the film’s start, the ultimate reveal, the film’s punch-line so to speak, may alienate viewers looking for something grander underneath the veneer of it all. And while that particular message and related revelation may be the film’s biggest point, a perfect encapsulation of sorts of its characters and the manner by which it treats them, it’s a shame that it seemingly becomes the only fully developed statement delivered when so much groundwork had been laid down to present a more multi-faceted thesis.
Using the film’s pressing scenario as a metaphor, there’s a hurricane waiting to be unleashed on the viewer, but the film settles for a torrent of rain instead, foregoing the other elements that would augment such a phenomenon and generate a storm that would truly stand-out.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Much like the party and game at the heart of it’s story, the film is filled with an abundance of jokes, kinetic scenes, and moments of grandeur that ultimately delivers goods that should satisfy those looking for a fun horror-skinned murder mystery and satire on the parlance of identity politics, but the vacuous nature of this delivery may disappoint those looking for something a bit more profound.
Rating
8.8/10
Grade
B+
Go to Page 2 for the for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3to view this review’s progress report .
The camera tracks through the forest. It goes through a lake, evoking classic horror imagery. It comes face to face with Teresa (Mirabai Pease) The agent of the shot is revealed to be a drone. The film opens with the “spectral” tracking/P.O.V shot made iconic in the first Evil Dead, suggesting the presence of a malevolent paranormal force. It’s not until its first apparent “victim” screams that the ruse is revealed for what it is. The ghost we thought we were perceiving is nothing more than a drone, expensive technology in lieu of the paranormal.
We open with the Evil Dead Franchise’s iconic shot, a spectral point-of-view (P.O.V.) tracking shot, which pushes and bends through the environment in search of an unsuspecting person who will be made the victim of this malignant force, referred to as a deadite, viewing them. The score becomes increasingly unnerving as the camera moves, signaling a terrifying presence. As the soundscape continues to become more disturbing, the camera finishes traversing through a forest and zooms over a lake, traditional horror iconography to be sure, before coming face-to-face with an unsuspecting woman, Teresa (Mirabai Pease), who immediately recoils upon contact.
Based on all the clues, we’re convinced that she’s been destroyed by this otherworldly, cosmic presence. However, a cut to a wide shot reveals that the P.O.V. we were following was not that of a deadite but that of a drone being flown by Teresa’s acquaintance, Caleb (Richard Crouchley), who takes great pleasure in the manner by which he elicited fear from his camera’s subject and captured it on frame. In this manner, the film’s opening subtly equates the supernatural gaze with that of the upper class looking for entertainment at the sake of someone else’s misery.
Teresa (Mirabai Pease) goes towards the distorted cabin. Teresa (Mirabai Pease) is reflected in the clock. The focus shifts from the clock to Teresa’s’ (Mirabai Pease) reflection. A split diopeter of Teresa (Mirabai Pease) and flies. Teresa (Mirabai Pease) enters the room and is framed against the clock once more. Teresa talks to Jessica, whose face is kept hidden from the audience. Teresa’s traversal is littered with a litany of seemingly small, yet effective directing choices that set the mood for the upcoming terror. The cabin she walks to, in addition to evoking the iconography of the franchise, looks wonderfully twisted. When she enters the abode, a looming clock takes center frame and a nice focus re-rack lets us know that Teresa’s time is up. A quick split diopeter of her and trapped insects cements this mood. As she begins to enter the room where Jessica lies, she’s once positioned with respect to the clock, this time next to it as opposed to within its structure. Most importantly, Jessica’s visage is kept hidden even as Teresa continues to talk to her, allowing the tension to ratchet up to the clock’s beating.
Upset at being made a fool of, Teresa walks away from the pier and goes towards a cabin for comfort. The distorted composition along with the context of the genre (and franchise) immediately informs us that this is where things will go wrong. Director Lee Cronin ensures of as much with a series of wonderful aesthetic choices.
When Teresa enters the cabin, we see her reflection in the glass of a clock, whose foreboding ticks slowly encroach and dominate the soundscape. The camera’s focus shifts and her reflection within the domain of the clock becomes a focal point. Her time will run out; this much is certain. The film cuts to a wonderful split-diopeter, one of many that punctuate the film, which emphasizes that this space is malevolent; Teresa is akin to a fly in a trap, waiting to die. As she enters the inner-most room, she is once again positioned in reference to the clock and its sounds fade out as the barrier to the room is opened; the moment is almost here.
She calls out to the room’s inhabitant, Caleb’s partner, Jessica (Anna-Maree Thomas), but Cronin deftly avoids revealing the latter’s visage; she remains covered in a shroud of mystery.
Text from Wuthering Heights. Jessica sits up. Teresa (Mirabai Pease) begs Jessica to stop. Jessica (Anna-Maree Thomas) vomits. The film wonderfully sustains tension by dragging out Jessica’s ultimate reveal. We go from close-up sections of Wuthering Heights which set the tone and infuse the mood with a gothic eeriness, hear Jessica speak while being unable to observe her mouth as she does so, exacerbating the horrific nature of what she’s doing, and are finally shown her visage as she begins to profusely vomit a putrid, white stream.
Jessica remains mostly unresponsive to Teresa’s banter, slightly chucking when the former makes a violent joke in response to Caleb. The lack of discourse prompts Teresa to read a book, Wuthering Heights, to pass the time. However, this solitary literature session is interrupted by the previously silent occupant, who sits up on her bed and begins to recite the text on the page – text which the camera cuts to in order to reinforce both the terror of the words being recited along with the action – without any prompts. The sound of the clock violently stops while Jessica’s voice becomes increasingly distorted, causing Teresa to beg for the phenomenon to stop. Time is up.
It’s at this point that Cronin lets us see Jessica’s face, but almost instantly, the demonic sounding girl falls to the floor and begins to vomit a grotesque, vile bile while shuddering violently. Teresa, unaware of what’s to come, tries to help but is caught off guard when Jessica reveals her helplessness was but a ruse; she proceeds to violently scalp her friend by pulling the former’s ponytail with great force.
Teresa’s POV as she stumbles towards the lake. Teresa (Mirabai Pease) informs Caleb (Richard Crouchley) of what’s happened. Jessica (Anna-Maree Thomas) goes towards the drone and drops Teresa’s scalp. Jessica (Anna-Maree Thomas) stares at the couple, and the audience, before engaging in drone violence. Teresa (Mirabai Pease) is shocked at Caleb’s dismembered head. Jessica (Anna-Maree Thomas) rises along with the title card. Once the terror begins it proceeds with haste. Cronin expands on the film’s form with a new P.O.V shot, this time from Teresa, before moving to a canted shot which showcases the possessed Jessica’s control of the situation. She is the dominant element in the foreground and then introduces a new space into the frame before then directly confronting the couple and by extension the viewer with a stare towards the camera. Violence ensues and she rises in spectacular fashion, harkening the start of the film proper as the title blooms up alongside her in the background.
We cut to a new P.O.V. shot that stumbles towards the lake and learn that this is Teresa, looking desperately for help. But before she can get Caleb to act, we cut to a canted shot of Jessica entering the frame. The possessed is now fully in control of the situation and the framing emphasizes as much; her body and the effects of her violence – the bloody scalp – dominate the frame. She moves towards the drone and then stares at the camera, gazing directly at her former friends and the audience proper. She smiles. The violence to come will be enjoyable for her, terrifying for her friends, and will be somewhere in the middle for the audience; after all, what else would a viewer going into an Evil Dead movie expect?
She bashes this representative of the faux-spectral P.O.V. shot and proceeds to decapitate her former boyfriend after he tries to save her from the same.
The water in the lake becomes a bloody red and Jessica flies up out of it; there will be no escape. The disturbing soundscape from the opening returns in full force. Then, in a brilliant move, the title card rises up behind her, emerging as furthest back element of the frame in full crimson glory. The film can now properly begin.
Canted shot of Beth (Lily Sullivan) realizing she’s pregnant. Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) advises her kids. Danny (Morgan Davies) plays music. Bridget (Gabrielle Echols) holds up her “Eat the Rich” shirt. Kassie (Nell Fisher) cuts off her doll’s head. The principal cast is quickly introduced afterwards and given just enough characterization to drive the story forwards. Beth realizes she’s pregnant and this impending confrontation with motherhood is treated as horrific vis-a-vis the canted angle choice. Ellie is a tattoo artist who is also dealing with her role as a mother – an immediate counterpoint. Then we see her kids in their environments: Danny is an aspiring musician who grinds out on hi-tech sound system, Kassie is a unique girl who cuts her doll’s head off, and Bridget is a social activist who looks for her “Eat the Rich” shirt.
We cut to black, the sound drops, and we change settings entirely. Like the 2013 attempt at rebooting the franchise, the 2023 iteration draws the viewer in with a small helping of violence, a promise that what’s to come will satisfy their desires, before going to develop the primary cast. Here, our first member, Beth (Lily Sullivan), enters a bathroom and takes a pregnancy test. She sees her result and the frame becomes canted as the camera slowly pushes in on her face; the discovery of her newfound status as potential mother is treated as a horrifying event.
She drives to a dilapidated apartment building as the rains beat down on her. We cut to an apartment inside this structure and are introduced to our other primary characters: Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), a mother who works as a tattoo artist; her older daughter, Bridget (Gabrielle Echols), whose interests lie in political activism; her son, Danny (Morgan Davies), who is having a blast with his state of the art music set-up; her younger daughter, Kassie (Nell Fisher), who seems to be doing her own thing, cutting off the head of a doll as if to remind the viewer of the film they’re watching.
Ellie hears her doorbell. Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) sees no one there. Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) checks the hallway. Beth (Lily Sullivan) is punched by Ellie. Beth’s attempt to scare Ellie sets the tone, albeit in a retroactively comedic fashion. She wants to scare her sister in an endearing move and is socked in the face for her efforts. The film takes this basic conceit – horror in relation to the family – and twists and warps it from this cuter interaction into something bloody and miserable.
As the chaos in the house enfolds, Ellie responds to a ring at the front door and goes to answer. She opens the door and sees no one. She checks a corner. No one. The camera slowly pushes in on her; for just a moment, we’re concerned that the evil from the opening has come here. But right as Ellie turns to go inside, Beth appears from the other side of the door, shots “Boo!”, and gets appropriately punched in the face by her sister. This inoffensive jump-scare, a trick played by one family member by another in an attempt at eliciting fear for entertainment, hearkens back to the opening sequence and sets the stage what’s to follow: the cute moment’s perversion into the grotesque and macabre.
Thus, the principal characters are established and we’re given just enough bits and pieces to ascertain the family dynamic. We learn that Beth has been distant from her sister and niblings in pursuit of her own career. However, in this time, her sister, Ellie, has had to deal with a separation from her own husband and the responsibility of maintaining a household on her own. To make it worse, Beth learns that her sister is set to lose her residence as the building is set to be demolished. This is a condemned environment.
Unfortunately, Ellie’s previous attempts to convey this information to Beth have fallen on deaf ears, as the latter has been so focused on her craft that she has ignored calls for help. The awkward revelation gives Ellie an excuse to send the kids out for food so that the adults can find a way to deal with the alienating tension between them.
Beth realizes her mistake and is upset with her lack of action. Ellie forgives her sister and subsequently attempts to probe the reason for this surprise visit. However, before Beth can reveal that she’s concerned about her potential tangle with motherhood, an earthquake erupts and disrupts the already shoddy environment further, preventing the conversation from going any further.
Danny (Morgan Davies) decides to explore the hole. Danny (Morgan Davies) goes through the vault. Danny (Morgan Davies) is scared by a statue of Christ jumping towards him. Crosses and religious ornaments decorate the space. Danny (Morgan Davies) continues to explore. Danny (Morgan Davies) finds the book. Insects fly off the book. The book of the dead. Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) stares into the screen. Danny’s exploration of the bank makes good on Beth’s earlier light-hearted jump scare. This time it’s the figure of Christ himself who comes out and “warns” this intruder searching for riches to stay away. But Danny refuses to heed this warning and continues to explore in spite of the variety of clear warning signs; this is an Evil Dead movie after all. The damning excursion immediately cuts to Ellie staring at the camera, making explicit the horror to come and clueing us in on who will the be the first victim.
While the adults try and stabilize in the apartment, the children, who are located in the garage, duck for cover. However, the aftermath of the quake reveals the foundations of their apartment building, a bank, lurking underneath. A newly created gap offers a way to untold riches and Danny decides to explore in order to potentially find something of value.
Yet, his exploration, in true Evil Dead fashion, is filled with a litany of symbols and objects that would scream to any other person to “stay out!” In contrast to his aunt’s earlier playful jump-scare, a statue of Jesus Christ literally jumps out from a corner in an attempt to deter him from his ill-founded material pursuits. But Danny persists, ignoring the warning sign of the holy entity, and finds a set of vinyl records before uncovering a grotesque tome, the iconic “Book of the Dead”. This discovery marks the beginning of the end and the film consequently cuts to Ellie staring forward at the camera, letting us know that evil is imminent.
In customary fashion, evil, supernatural hymns are recited, cosmic horrors enter the fray, and our group of characters are forced to find a way to survive against an immensely powerful malevolent force that takes immense pleasure in enacting the sickest, most twisted forms of violence on its victims. From this view, the plotting of this latest entry in the iconic Evil Dead franchise goes mostly as one would expect.
P.O.V shot goes through a lake, evoking classic horror imagery. Spectral P.O.V shot up to the condemned apartment building. Tracking shot of Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland). Disembodied P.O.V shot. The film’s focus is on perspective and it attempts to explore the way one’s vantage point defines violence and explains its effects. There are traditional P.O.V. shots that feel right at home with the franchise’s best, alongside handheld tracking shots, and more subtle uses of P.O.V. shots. The film is constantly reframing things, informing the viewer to pay attention to who’s really in charge of different moments and how those changes in power are matriculated vis-a-vis violence. While some of the more interesting variations on this technique are not as developed as I would like, the effort is more than worthy of praise and study.
However, Cronin distinguishes his rendition of the Evil Dead from the rest of the franchise’s mainstays through his exploration and deconstruction of the spectral P.O.V. shot. If the opening wasn’t enough of a clue, an early conversation between Beth and Kassie draws textual attention to this point of focus, as the former party informs her niece that she doesn’t believe in ghosts because she can’t see them.
Thus, we are made aware that it is the gaze that is relevant and the film serves as an extended analysis of the way that its functions, both in regards to ourselves and within cinema, operate in relation to and through violence of different sorts. We are being asked: In what ways does our perspective of what is and is not violence change based on our perspective in relation to the phenomenon and its effects.
But Michael Haneke’s Funny Games this is not, and the analysis is mostly limited to simplistic thematic domains, namely to traditional thematic overtures regarding the family structure and manner by which it operates a kind of communal barrier. While the film’s set-up includes multiple angles by which to position said discussion and offer nuance into multiple domains, the limited deployment of its techniques ossifies the possibilities inherent within them. The thematic playground the film finds itself playing in is so much smaller than the space its elements give it access to and the way it dances with its cinematographic exploration, though deft, barely scratches the surface of the space it seeks to explore. In other words, the film’s area of focus is compelling and it judiciously utilizes both genre conventions and the franchise’s own history in pursuit of the same, but it limits its purview within artificial-feeling trappings that feel disappointing given the skill on display.
These commitment issues extend to the film’s tone which feels like it’s trying too hard to please all the myriad of fans, all of whom enjoy different aspects of the multi-faceted franchise. At times the film plays it straight and acts like a pot-boiler thriller with terrific pacing and frights abound. Every relevant plot element is neatly set-up à la Checkov’s gun and there’s very little fat as the film moves to its rhythm. The scares are neatly executed with subtle cues, few jump-scares, and mostly excellent sound design which helps accentuate the mean-spirited nature of the visceral horror set-pieces, playing on the ability of the genre to get viewers to imagine such violence’s happening to them. But right as the terror hits a fever pitch, the film will awkwardly toss aside the momentum for strange detours, like slapstick jokes found in Evil Dead II, which completely dissipate the tension and stop the pacing dead in its tracks.
Rises’ reliance on sticking to a formula also prevents it from gaining any new converts or impressing fans who are more so interested in the worldbuilding promised by the franchise. If you’ve seen any of the films before, you’re already going to know where and how the majority of the narrative will proceed which leaves only the spectacle remaining, and while that spectacle is stylized as all hell and is certainly visually evocative, it still does not approach that critical point at which the work feels transformative and wholly its own.
Instead of trying to be a terrifying thriller, a gory spectacle for splatter aficionados, a dark comedy for the horror-jaded, an examination of violence in relation to cinema for the theorists, and wholly honest to the plethora of expectations engendered by the franchise, the film should have given upon the juggling act and truly committed to the most congruent of these elements so that it could transcend itself in the way that certain parts of the film would suggest it would be able to do otherwise. Of course, it’s difficult to criticize a film when the criticism is aimed at its desires to please everyone, a task which it mostly does based on discussion surrounding it, but inevitably, upsetting some in favor of experimentation that pushes the needle forward is the only way to make a long-lasting mark and it’s disappointing when a film this fantastic doesn’t quite live up to that type of potential.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Evil Dead Rises is an ambitious, wonderfully stylized piece of work that deftly utilizes genre trappings and the conventions of the franchise to deliver a filmic experience that should please most of the fans it seeks to impress even if its attempt to do the same inevitably lowers its own artistic ceiling.
Rating
9.5/10
Grade
A+
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
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.
A Little League baseball game is underway. The pitcher, Finney (Mason Thames), winds up and throws the ball. The batter, Bruce (Tristan Pravong), swings and misses. Strike one. The crowd cheers for Finney and he can feel their approval hanging in the balance.
He winds up and throws again. Strike two. The crowd’s encouragement increases. A girl within the crowd stares at Finney with affection. He takes notice; the pressure is on.
The ball leaves his hand on the third throw but this time Bruce is ready for it; the bat connects with the ball and it soars over the gates – a homerun. Suddenly, the momentum flips and Bruce becomes the recipient of the adulation while Finney is relegated to the periphery.
We follow Bruce as he leaves the field, glowing in victory. Edgar Winters’ “Free Ride” plays evoking a feeling of jubilation. But then a black van enters the frame and the color and sound begin to fade leaving an all-consuming void in its wake – the happy façade breaks to reveal the grotesque underbelly.
Mark Korven’s unsettling score complete with a rhythmic pulse and discordant fluctuations starts to play as the title credits start to play – it’s time to enter the dark. This montage is presented in an aesthetic fashion similar to director Scott Derickson’s previous horror film, Sinister, utilizing the grainy texture of film stock proper to accentuate the uncanny series of images. In strong contrast to the opening’s evocation of a cheery 70’s milieu, the decisive switch in aesthetic and tone is a grim reminder of the horrors of the time lurking in wait – kidnappings and missing children on milk cartons, and the like.
It’s from this fractured backdrop that we join Finney once again. He’s revealed to be a prime target of hostile forces all around. From a drunk, violent father at home to bullies at school, Finney is constantly forced into compromising positions where he finds himself wholly at the whims of other parties; even when he’s bailed out of the awful situations he finds himself in, it’s due to the efforts of his friend Robin (Cazarez Mora) and his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) intervening on his behalf. His own sense of agency is sorely lacking.
But when he’s kidnapped by a serial child abductor referred to as the “Grabber” (Ethan Hawke), Finney is forced to abandon his passivity and discover his strengths or die trying. He finds himself trapped in a seemingly isolated and sound-proofed basement structure with no tools in sight sans a broken telephone attached on the wall. Yet, while the phone isn’t plugged into any power source and seems completely busted up, it still rings, serving as an conduit to unseen forces from the beyond who seek to intervene in the seemingly impossible situation.
The supernatural propels the narrative forward, operating on a mostly demonstrative, seldom explained layer that works to supplement the true-crime horror narrative. While the presentation of this material feels like an extension of Sinister in tone and feel, its use is more in line with Derrickson’s earlier supernatural procedural, The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Like that film, otherworldly phenomena – grainy dream-sequences and spectral sightings – are couched within ambiguities which gestures towards multiple different angles of interpretation. This explicative restraint works in the films favor as it lets the characters’ struggles take focus; the supernatural set-pieces are just pieces of connective tissue that characters find themselves working with and through and are not the cause of interest in end of themselves.
The primary source of scares comes from Hawke’s “Grabber”, an masked man teetering on the edge of an emotional meltdown. At one moment he’s coy and wants to play nice. At another he’s downright malicious and one step away from a violent explosion. For every persona, he dons a new mask on, accentuating his instability and giving Hawke ample opportunity to flex his facial muscles in new, menacing configurations. The uncertainty behind what he wants adds to the suffocating feeling as his erratic behavior presents a minefield for Finney to traverse through.
However, while Finney finds himself powerless at the start of the film, he quickly finds himself changing for what the situation calls. His experiences dealing with abuse in more grounded scenarios helps him play the Grabber’s inexplicable games as the latter’s acts just feels like an amplification of the atrocities he’s used to dealing with. Thus, his progression is clearly demarcated; the film uses its opening to demonstrate where Finney struggles and then utilizes the supernatural trappings of his struggle with the Grabber to highlight his growth.
The film does misstep slightly when it comes to wrapping up all the relevant story threads as the manner by which certain narrative parallels made between the domestic and horrific conclude seem incongruous with one another, but the overwhelming momentum of how Finney’s arc culminates more than buoys the issue.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
The Black Phone is Scott Derrickson’s best film as of yet and seems him combining the aesthetic sensibilities and sense of unease from Sinister with the narrative ambiguity and supernatural restraint of The Exorcism of Emily Rose. The result is a tense, supernatural, character-driven story that earns its shocks.
Rating
8.9/10
Grade
A
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
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.
A young woman, Julia (Maika Monroe) and her husband, Francis (Karl Glusman) are in a taxi cab on the way to their new apartment in Bucharest. The driver starts to speak to the couple in Romanian. While Francis is able to respond, Julia stares dumbfounded; she’s not fluent in the slightest. There are no subtitles to help us understand what’s happening so we’re just as alienated as Julia is: this is a completely foreign situation.
Amused by her position, the driver looks at Julia in his rear-view mirror; her reflection takes center focus in the frame. She can see herself being watched, becoming an voyeuristic object, but she herself is unable to get a good look back at the driver. The gaze between the two parties is asymmetrical.
When the couple arrives at the apartment building, this relationship to gazing and being gazed is extended; the buildings in the complex are fitted with large windows which let the tenants look out while persons outside can look back in. Julia notices a person in the window and tries to get a better look but is quickly called inside by Francis.
The apartment manager brings the two to their unit and brings them up to speed with the lay of the land before explaining that their lighting unit doesn’t work at the moment and will be replace. Of course, all of this is communicated in Romanian; Julia is left none the wiser and desperately requires Francis to translate to get in on the conversation. She’s as in the dark as her apartment unit is.
While Francis goes off to work, Julia is left isolated within the complex. Unable to speak to anyone, she finds herself horribly alienated. In her struggle to find a vantage point to orient and hold onto, she starts to gaze out of her window, looking at both the pedestrian traffic and her neighbors standing by their own windows. The act of looking out and observing gives her a sense of control: she can create a narrative about what’s happening around her. These peeping sessions immediately call to heart Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and like its protagonist Mia becomes obsessed with voyeurism. During her sessions, she notices a man in silhouette seemingly gazing back at her. Her private domain starts to unravel due to the presence of the possible return gazer, an issue which only gets exacerbated once she learns of a serial killer loose in the city, a man known as the “Spider” who seems to have a penchant for decapitating young woman.
Thus, the apartment becomes an identarian pressure cooker with the voyeuristic entanglement serving as the boiling force pushing things to their brink. Julia is forced to wait within its domains while waiting for her tenuous link in the form of her husband to show up. All the while, she doesn’t know if she’s safe in her own apartment as she feels the gaze of her “watcher” staring down upon her. Her attempts to venture out of the apartment navigate the city alone only push her further into the heart of darkness as she finds herself assaulted by a culture and language she struggles to comprehend all while dealing with the paranoid suspicion that her watcher is following her on the streets as well.
Director Chloe Okuno takes great pains to keep the viewer firmly on the side of Julia; we follow her perspective almost fully from start to finish, gaining access to knowledge at the same time as her and dealing with the inability to reconcile the series of unexplainable events. This identification makes even simple traversal sequences in public areas tense as every passerby threatens to become her neighbor or, even worse, the “Spider” himself.
As Mia tries to get to the bottom of the situation, her body, in particular her face, becomes obfuscated by the mise-en-scène: fences, stairs, and shadowy lighting cues provide her cover, hiding her in plain sight. At its best, this architectural paranoia recalls Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy, namely The Tenant, in the way it reveals the uncertainty looming behind every corner: if Mia can hide herself so effectively in the crevices of the city she barely knows, then the “watcher” can just as easily be in all the same dark, unseen spaces, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce.
This unease only continues to grow as the film progresses, forcing both the viewer and Mia to confront the truth hiding behind the terrors. This journey is what makes the film engaging; the narrative is nothing more than a vehicle to let it take place. Consequently, even when the narrative seems to veer towards more conventional story beats, the underlying tension stemming from Mia’s arc and our investment in it is more than capable of keeping the film consistently engaging.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
The Watcher takes a seemingly simply story involving a woman and the serial killer she thinks is stalking her and elevates it into a pure piece of paranoia wherein every dark crevice contains within it the possibility of unruly violence. By stripping the story down to its basest elements and relying on filmmaking instead of narrative to reinforce the alienation and trepidation of the protagonist, newcomer director Chloe Okuno is able to tell tale that’s gripping from start to finish even when it feels like you know where it’s going.
Rating
9.8/10
Grade
A+
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
The film explains the role of dolls. Nurses explain how they came upon Annabelle. Annabelle gazes into the camera. …and fades to black…The gargoyle’s face is posed next to the title. Location and time card. Father Perez (Tony Amendola) extols the virtues of sacrifice. John (Ward Horton) and Mia (Annabelle Wallis) sit in the congregation listening. The opening is slightly disjointed in how it jumps from exposition to plot proper, but it establishes the film’s main narrative: an evil presence wants to attack a newly wed couple with a baby on the way.
The film opens with text explaining the multifaceted function of dolls: they can be toys, collectibles, or conduits for demonic activity. Then, the opening from The Conjuring plays as a group of nurses explain the havoc they faced at the hands of a demonic doll named Annabelle – the opening exposition immediately comes to head. The camera pushes into the doll’s unnerving face before cutting to black.
From the black, we cut to a church and the camera pans from the glass windows to a demonic gargoyle visage. The blood red title card drops in and reinforces a malevolent feeling indicating that Annabelle’s presence is very much present in this holy domain.
A location card reveals that the film has jumped back a year in the past. While Father Perez (Tony Amendola) extols the virtues of sacrifice in his sermon, the camera moves to the congregation onto a young expecting couple, John (Ward Horton) and Mia (Annabelle Wallis) Form.
While the order of this opening sequence isn’t as crisp as it should be – it jumps from a piece of written exposition that adds very little to a scene of exposition from another film to then yet another location card before finally getting to the primary characters – the basic roadmap for the narrative is established: the demonic presence associated with Annabelle is after this newly established family with a baby on the way.
Someone is watching Mia (Annabelle Wallis). News coverage of the Manson Murders plays on the television. The camera highlights the dangerous proximity between Mia’s fingers and the blade in the sewing machine. Annabelle gazes down at the Form family from her newfound position. Annabelle’s presence is gradually built up to. There’s confirmation of a stalker, coverage of the Manson Murders, implications of a bloody accident, and then the doll herself. Evil seems to be oozing around the Form family.
An eerie point-of-view from behind a mesh-structure raises the stakes: something is already following Mia. The couple gets back to their home where Mia chastises John for not locking the door. Changing times and unease in the air means even the tranquility of the suburbs is no longer a guarantee. A news report on the Manson murders starts to play further entrenching the feeling of malevolence: there’s something evil bubbling. The tension ratchets as the camera cuts to close-up shots of Mia sewing, implying an accident to come – a burst in the bubble.
Suddenly, John calls out and asks for Mia to turn off the television; he thinks the distressing news might influence the fetus within the womb and wants to ensure its safety. Consequently, Mia turns off the television and machine, bringing a temporary calm. The coast seems clear and the feeling improves as John calls Mia to give her a gift.
But as it’s revealed that his present is none other than Annabelle, our mood immediately dissipates. Mia’s elated because she’s a doll collector and places the doll proudly on a shelf with her other figures, but we know that this is only the beginning of something awful to come. The camera moves closer to Annabelle’s visage and the cheerful sounds of the couple’s celebration become distorted by a discordant ringing. Evil has found a place to roost.
The camera moves from Mia (Annabelle Wallis) , who is comfortably asleep……to a view of violence happening next door. The Form’s neighbors are brutally murdered. Mia (Annabelle Wallis) waits for John’s response. Mia (Annabelle Wallis) calls the police while home intruders come into her house. The female killer (Tree O’Toole) lies slumped next to the Annabelle doll. Her blood is absorbed into Annabelle’s eye. The news footage of the home invasion dissolves into the image of ……an ultrasound test. The “bubble” pops as violence enters the fray, arriving at the neighbor’s house before quickly entering the Forms’ residence. Malevolent forces break through and threaten the unborn child, both literally in the form of a knife wound and symbolically in the rupturing of the previously safe space.
The young couple turns in for the night, and the camera slowly moves up from their sleeping bodies towards their bedroom window, showcasing a bout of brutal violence happening in their neighbor’s house – the bubble forming up till now has finally popped and given way to a malevolent storm. The disturbance wakes Mia who asks John to check out the situation; he comes out in shock and tells her to call the police.
The camera follows Mia in one singular motion as she runs in through her front door to get to the phone; yet in her haste, she forgets to lock up and the killers from next door enter in the background without her knowing; the trappings of the Manson murders come to the forefront as the home invasion proceeds. The male killer stabs Mia’s stomach – evil has now penetrated the domestic barrier and threatens to take the unborn.
Though the police make their way just in time to save the couple from death, they’re unable to stop the corrupting influence of the demonic realm. The killers may be dead, but their presence has only accelerated the haunting to come. Blood from the female killer drips down to the Annabelle doll’s face and streams into its eye before being absorbed. The demonic presence grows stronger and, much to John’s chagrin, has clearly started to permeate their unborn child’s existence. Even though John and Mia tried to stop the evils of their worlds from permeating into their lives, malevolent forces have found a way in; like the Manson murders from earlier, the violence the couple experiences are broadcast on television. But instead of being turned off and put out of sight and mind, the static image dissolves into an ultrasound view of Mia’s stomach demonstrating just how entrenched in the darkness the Form family is. Now they find themselves in a true battle against a demonic force looking to take everything from them.
Thus, Annabelle positions itself to be an exploration of motherhood and the loss of domestic stability in a similar vein to Rosemary’s Baby. From the Manson murders to the home invasion proper, the film stresses that the domestic family structure is under attack. The domain of motherhood which furnishes love and guidance is no longer safe as acrimonious forces threaten to intervene and corrupt, bringing despair instead of peace.
However, just like the opening sequence, the film often stumbles in getting from one point to the next. Instead of focusing on Mia’s relationship to motherhood and the way she tries to orient herself within a fractured domestic space, the film opts to bracket its maternal discussion within a more abstract, religious good versus evil framing. This faith-based orientation might’ve worked if the story spent time to develop its characters motivations along these lines, but in the frenzied attempt to get all the different beats set-up, director John R. Leonetti and screen-writer Gary Dauberman forget that it’s the characters relationship with themes that makes them poignant not the ideas themselves, especially not in the basic manner the story opts to present them.
Unfortunately, the characters are underdeveloped and their motivations are stated in such a straight-forward and unfelt manner that it becomes impossible to take the haunting as seriously as the story seems to want to. While this disconnect between thematic aspirations and actualities is minimal to start with, it balloons to extreme proportions by the end of the film: the themes (and characters) cannibalize one another and undermine the finale in its totality, transforming a potentially cathartic ending into nothing more than a farce.
Mia (Annabelle Wallis) stares at Annabelle in a chair. Annabelle’s presence makes itself known as Mia (Annabelle Wallis) walks away. Mia (Annabelle Wallis) questions the Annabelle doll on what the latter wants. Leonetti constantly utilizes compositions which frame Mia and Annabelle against one another. Their antagonism is the most interesting part of the film and should have been the driving force – it’s clearly where the film excels.
It’s a shame because Annabelle has all the components to tell a gripping tale capable of exploring the Mia’s relationship to motherhood. Leonetti constantly employs compositions that stress the ever-growing battle between Mia and Annabelle for control of the Form family – it’s clearly the tale that he wants to tell and proves he’s more than capable of.
Evaluated independently outside of the context of the overarching narrative, the sequences between these two parties are done competently at a technical level. At their best, these scenes evoke the same polished put-togetherness feeling present in James Wan’s supernatural outings, utilizing deft camera movements and drawn-out set-ups made up of multiple moving parts to generate moments of palpable tension. However, unlike Wan’s work, where the sequences naturally build into one another and propel momentum to the finish line, each interesting movement in Annabelle operates in its own discrete space, leaving little impact on the work as a whole as it stutters to its ending.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Annabelle is demonstrative proof that less is more as its over bloated story undermines its themes, emotional beats, and technically-executed horror sequences. The story about a mother trying to protect her soon-to-be born child should be compelling given the proper set-up, but the film’s decision to veer away from this core story in order to add unneeded depth only complicates and weakens it. While there are great moments within the film, they never get to shine because the overarching structure of the narrative renders them emotionally and thematically sterile soon after.
Rating
6.7/10
Grade
C
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
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.
The title sequence opens on a canvas made of flesh which evokes the grandeur of the cosmos in the way its “markings” stretch across the screen. Skin is transformed into a metaphysically evocative work of art. This presence of the otherworldly within the human sets up the film’s fundamental question: what delineates humanity from that which it is not?
The answer to the question starts with a young boy, Brecken (Sozos Sotiris), fishing for materials on the banks of the ocean. These bits and pieces of non-organic junk are put in a bucket for storage. As Brecken engages in this task, his mother (Lihi Kornowski) yells at him to not consume any found material – a strange request given the nature of what he’s collecting.
Yet, her warning proves to be fruitful as it’s revealed that Brecken has evolved the capacity to consume plastics as easily as any other type of foodstuff. He sits in the bathroom and excretes an acid from his mouth and slowly chews a bucket sitting next to the toilet as nonchalantly as one would eat a sandwich at the dinner table; the perversion of the traditional eating situation – food being replaced with plastic and a dining area replaced with a bathroom – both confirms Brecken’s behavior while raising questions as to what it suggests: the ability to consume and digest plastics with ease represents such a significant difference from what humans are capable of that it raises the question of Brecken’s relationship to humanity.
His mother takes the transformation as proof of his inhumanity – the evolutionary deviation might as well render him a separate species as far as she’s concerned. Consequently, when he goes to sleep, she takes the opportunity to suffocate and kill him. Now the “creature” has been taken care of. She calls her crime in and coldly mentions that Brecken’s father can deal with the remnants of the monstrosity he bequeathed onto her.
But her disposition to evolution is challenged as the film cuts to Saul (Viggo Mortensen), a pained man, who wakes from a futuristic cocoon-shaped bed complete with tentacular hand-like appendages. He complains to his partner, Caprice (Léa Seydoux), that the bed is not regulating his pain properly and has to get a software update. He goes to eat sitting in a similarly alien chair with appendages that aids him in digestion, but just like with the bed, he struggles and is clearly uncomfortable.
The root of his discomfort stems from a new organ in his body; Saul is someone who’s particular condition causes him to grow new organs periodically which rupture his homeostasis with the machines meant to aid him. However, unlike Brecken’s mother, who takes significant deviation as a sign of an otherness which threatens to obliterate humanity, Saul and Caprice, take these evolutionary shifts as obstacles for humanity to overcome and make their own.
They treat Saul’s condition by removing the organs in live-shows that smash the medical and artistic into a single arena: surgery becomes performance art as Caprice rips into Saul’s flesh in a public arena to remove the effects of his evolutionary changes, thereby rendering both the surgery and the new organ as pieces of art. As she penetrates him, his face contorts in the throws of ecstasy. As the domain of flesh expands, as does the domain of surgery which now positions itself as the new sex. Thus, the evolutionary shift opens the space for new possibilities, allowing humanity to transmute itself through itself.
Both Brecken and Saul’s mutations are a result of Accelerated Evolution Syndrome wherein humanity finds itself quickly mutating in an increasingly ecologically desolate world. The pain thresholds common to persons have disappeared by and large, leaving humanity open to a more explicitly sadomasochistic relationship to their flesh. A desolate environment and the absence of pain render the site of the body the natural next location for investigation: humans turn to themselves as environments to navigate, to find meaning within as the outside world continues to shrink.
Yet, the shifting tectonics of the flesh threatens to rupture the paradigm by which humanity operates – the liminal points of the species are coming apart. As evidenced by Brecken’s mother, the cataclysms generated through evolution threaten to upend humanity all-together. Consequently, the future finds itself in a paradigmatic war to determine the points to suture humanity around. Saul’s unique condition places himself at the center of a network of parties desperately trying to set the syntax by which humanity defines itself. His shows with Caprice bring not only art fans looking to see the literal manifestation of artists reaching from within to create something spectacular but also extremists and government agencies who wish to use the platform to spread their own messages about what human normativity should be.
For director David Cronenberg, none of these questions are new: Crimes of the Future represents a return to the thematic investigations of his earlier body horror works à la eXistenZ. But this latest entry differs not in its manner of presentation, so much as the feelings it evoke in reference to the material. Cronenberg maintains his clinical precision in showing the flesh rendered, but attempts to place the viewer in the same mesmerized, painless state as the inhabitants of the film, showcasing gore and mutilation with such care as to render the grotesque mesmerizing. As organs are removed and examined, one can’t help but continue to stare at the screen as Howard Shore’s hypnotic electric score pulsates in the background inducing a meditative trance. Each cut brings with it not only artfully tempered gore but the opportunity to assess what our flesh and our relationship to it means and opens or closes us up to as a result.
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TLDR
Crimes of the Future sees body-horror master David Cronenberg back in more familiar waters as the story follows an humanity on the precipice of radical change as accelerated mutations in an ecologically compromised world have opened up the possibilities for what the species means and where it can go.The juxtaposition of the body against the fields of art, surgery, ecology, evolution, and politics makes the film’s gory spectacle all the more interesting and forces the viewer to navigate the fleshy contours that demarcate humanity
Rating
10/10
Grade
S
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
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.
A young woman, Harper (Jessie Buckley) comes to an English countryside where she rents a cottage to deal with trauma stemming from her husband’s (Paapa Essiedu) unexpected passing. To get her mind off the situation, she goes on a stroll through the grounds and ends up in a forest ripe with greens all around. She finds herself at the entrance of a tunnel, a dark passage to an unknown location; the hole captivates her and she enters it.
Her voice echoes in the cave, reverberating against itself in cycles. She sings a variety of different tunes, some with only a few notes, against one another, transforming the collective soundscape into an evocative ouroboros-like melody wherein each discrete set of notes fades into the next before eventually returning. But Harper’s song of echoes comes to an end as a silhouetted man appears at the other side of the tunnel. The man breaks the moment’s serenity and gives chase to Harper all the way back to her cottage.
This scene defines and crystallizes the logic of Men, a work in which narrative, visual, and auditory patterns are interwoven against and within one another, generating a complex schema of meaning contingent on how the viewer orients themselves towards the cinematic experience. This act of interpretation places the viewer squarely on Harper’s side; as she navigates a matrix of men, each obnoxious in their own chauvinistic, irritating way, and has to deal with all manners of gaslighting from them, the viewer is forced to make sense of how different story threads suture around one another and come together to form a cohesive narrative, surreal or not.
From the moment Harper meets the residents near her abode, these interpretative decisions start to sprout up: each of the men she meets sports a similar face – an intentional decision as they’re all played by Rory Kinnear. Yet this similarity in appearance is never noted by Harper or any of the characters, leaving its purpose up to interpretation. The viewer gets to determine whether or not the homogeneity is due to Harper’s subjective view of all men being the same or the film’s themes suggesting that the men are so similar that their physical appearances should reflect one another or something else entirely. Each interpretation is suggested by the film as the echoes generated by its elliptical formal choices tie seemingly innocuous details into larger theses that bracket the film in one discrete direction versus another. These choices in perspective have such a compounding effect on the nature of the narrative that a viewer could leave justifiably thinking that the film only portrays one character death, shown in flashback, or showcases multiple character deaths sprinkled throughout the story. However, regardless of which path the viewer and Harper choose to follow, the center of that journey always terminates in man.
Thus, Harper’s journey, whatever the viewer determines it is, elliptically orders itself around the nature of a subject’s relationship to men and the social order oriented around and indexed towards their positions. Regardless of which man Harper finds herself encountering, the same cycle ensues: her attempts at individual peace are interrupted as she’s forced to give attention to the man in question, the nature of that attention being contingent on the above interpretative schema.
The dream-like quality can easily be dismissed as art-house pretension, especially as the subtext sublimates in a visceral body horror that threatens to confuse more than illuminate. But by leaving the viewer in the same fractured and entranced state as its protagonist, Men manages to provoke an empathetic engagement with the subject matter, even if the nature of that engagement differs wildly from viewer to viewer. Far from gaslighting the viewer with obtuse, opaque threads meant to elicit confusion, Men forces the viewer to take responsibility for the narrative they craft from the film itself.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Men is an ambitious piece of film-making that investigates the nature of gaslighting and obfuscation by making the viewer responsible for piecing together the narrative and taking charge of what it means. The unnerving, surreal imagery takes on a new life as its purpose takes on a subjective meaning, letting the horrors take firm root in the mind. Even when the thresholds for explanation wear thin, the experience generated by the emphatic connection with a protagonist going through a similar labyrinth of meaning and construction ensures the feelings of the film still wash over.
Rating
10/10
Grade
S
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
Benedict Cumberbatch as Dr. Stephen Strange Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff / Scarlet Witch Benedict Wong as Wong Xochitl Gomez as America Chavez Rachel McAdamsas Christine
NOTE: This review contains spoilers for: Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, Wandavision.
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.
Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), complete with a brand-new hair and wardrobe style, and a teenager, America (Xochitl Gomez) run down a shimmering bridge in a seemingly cosmic realm. They make a mad dash towards a floating tome in the sky while avoiding the attacks of a cosmic terror chasing after them; the creature blocks the duo’s path to the tome and Strange begins to despair. He turns to America and tells her that due to the level of threat the duo faces, he’ll have to sacrifice her; the creature is after her powers and she can’t control, so sacrificing her and allowing the experienced Doctor Strange to take the powers instead will at least give the “good” guys a fighting chance. America is aghast at the proposed solution, but as Strange reaches over to begin the sacrificial transference, the creature impales him, stopping him in his tracks.
America freaks out in response to the attack and subconsciously uses her power, breaking a star-shaped wormhole in the fabric of reality; both she her and the recently deceased Doctor Strange are up by the force of the portal. The camera rotates 180° as the two are sucked in and the corpse of Doctor Strange takes central focus – a sudden match cut to the Doctor Strange we know. He wakes up in a fright obviously disturbed by his nightmarish vision. His face is reflected in a broken watch face, reflecting the turmoil and lack of cohesion he feels.
He magically changes clothes and adorns a suit and tie – a far cry from his robe. He makes his way to his former lover Christine’s (Rachel McAdams) wedding where he’s accosted by a former colleague on the decisions made during Avengers: Infinity War; Strange is challenged on the possibility of having allowed Thanos’s brutal snap due to ineptitude rather than necessity. But Strange persists that he did what he had to do.
When he goes to congratulate and honestly talk to Christine about her future and their shared time together, he’s once again brought to task for his decision-making process. Christine points out that their relationship would never be able to work even if Stephen wasn’t a sorcerer tasked with protecting the realms because his inability to let other people, herself included, handle or share responsibilities make genuine connection and change impossible to achieve. The nightmarish opening rears its ugly head again as the most recent confirmation of this truth: Doctor Strange cannot trust others to act properly so he has to ensure things go according to his vision and his vision alone.
Before he can think for too long, a monstrous disturbance makes its presence known. Doctor Strange seamlessly transforms on screen via the use of his magical cape and dashes into action with magical aplomb. He reveals the source of the disturbance, an tentacular cosmic creature, who wreaks havoc chasing after none other than America, the girl from Strange’s dream.
Director Sam Raimi, no stranger to super-hero fare, captures the sorcerer’s battle with the creature using his trademark style from the Spider-Man trilogy; Strange and company move deftly through the cityscape as terrified bystanders run around, lending to a chaotic flurry. Raimi cuts to singular shots of the bystanders reacting to the spectacle on display, accentuating the campy aspects of the story while capitalizing on the catharsis inherent to watching a super-hero rescue the innocent. The battle beats may be familiar, but the vitality inherent in their craft makes them a joy to watch. Finally, the battle ends with a gory finish atypical of Marvel fare and more reminiscent of Raimi’s own filmography- a sign of the things to come.
Strange questions America regarding her presence; it’s not everyday figures from dreams burst into reality. But America pops Strange’s bubble and reveals that his vision, far from being a dream, was a reality from another universe, one of many universes spanning the multiverse. America’s unease around him suddenly makes sense; it may have been him from another dimension, but it was still a Dr. Strange that threatened to and attempted to kill a teenager in order to preserve the greater good. But our Strange convinces America to divulge the nature of her troubles and comes to understand that she’s being chased through the multiverse by some entity desperate to use and her control her powers; America has the ability to freely travel the multiverse through her star-shaped portals but presently does not have control over when and where the power manifests.
With no other clue to go on besides some runic enchantments on the tentacle creature from before, Strange sends America to the magical abode of Kamar Taj with Sorceror Supreme Wong (Benedict Wong) and visits Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen), the only magical being he knows of who may be able to understand the runes. Unfortunately, she warns him that the threat chasing after America is far more dangerous and threatening than he could have conceptualized. Strange realizes the stakes of allowing such a creature access to unbridled access to every universe would be catastrophic and is now tasked with protecting America’s power.
As the antagonistic force chasing America comes closer to succeeding, the film is allowed to become stranger and more in line with Raimi’s horror filmography à la The Evil Dead. For the first time in the M.C.U’s franchise history(28 films including this one), it feels like the director has been given reign to exhibit the unexplored territories of comic book movies and Raimi takes full advantage to ramp up the tension and intrigue. The force chasing after America is a behemoth of an antagonist and Raimi captures their presence as monstrous; there are sequences that feel straight out of a slasher film as the enemy pursues America, generating a palpable tension that the franchise has never truly had before.
Canted angles, well-timed jump scares, brutal death sequences, and even the spectral P.O.V shot Raimi created in The Evil Dead are incorporated to underscore the depravity of the threat. The score cuts out at perfect moments to build up the dread and the brutality by which the antagonist carries out their mission always feels like a serious threat. It’s in this commitment to visually reinforcing the terror of the antagonist that Raimi finds a way to counterbalance the campy, goofier sections of the film without incurring a tonal whiplash.
Yet, in spite of the film’s distinct Raimi-isms, it never feels contextually out of place within the grander scheme of the M.C.U because it develops its characters’ arcs in germane fashion relative to what came before. For Doctor Strange, the journey he experiences in Doctor Strange, going from doctor saving lives with medicine to sorcerer saving lives in the trillions with magic, is never broached on again in the other entries of the franchise involving the character. He never has to deal with inability to reconcile with Christine or how the nature of his role as sorcerer runs in direct contrast to his Hippocratic oath; the idea of sacrificing America at the start of the film is reminiscent of the Strange we’ve seen up to now and this story sees him returning to his roots to re-discover just why he’s doing what he’s doing.
Likewise, Wanda’s’ journey from Wandavision picks up soon after the series ends and follows her as she navigates the nature of her powers and the ways they implicate her reasons for acting. Like Stephen, her character has had little time to deal with the depths of her trauma and is given an opportunity to tackle those issues head on while traversing the multiverse. Both characters get to meet alternate versions of themselves who, driven by the same passions, have made slightly different decisions than them resulting in vastly different lives. Through this, the characters are given the opportunity to reflect on themselves in an authentic fashion.
By maneuvering the set-pieces and pivotal story moments around emphatic character moments, Raimi is able to elevate the hobbled narrative that finds itself jumping from one MacGuffin to the next. Because every movement is motivated by or centered around the characters’ decisions, they feel relevant and make the piecemeal story cohesive. While the logic behind the story might be forgettable, the emotional resonance of important character beats persists and makes an Frankeinsteined story wholly engaging.
The biggest proof of this is America who serves as the biggest MacGuffin of all. She’s both the target of the antagonistic forces and Doctor Strange and company. One side definitively wants to kill and take her powers and the other side is willing to protect her but has shown the capacity to act in a more malicious manner. Both sets of characters are in constant pursuit of her and as their convictions come to the surface, the status of her relation to her powers changes. She becomes an external representation of the characters’ arcs and her status as MacGuffin reflects these developments. Consequently, when the character arcs start to come to a close, the film proceeds in domino effect with each arc pushing one another to a close.
While this approach may disappoint fans of the franchise looking for more explosive worldbuilding or rich storytelling, its a refreshing change of pace that should entice those tired of the usual trappings associated with the genre. The character focus is gripping enough to keep the viewer engaged and Raimi’s direction buoys otherwise contrived story moments and makes emotionally rich moments all the more compelling. Fans of the characters and of the horror sensibilities of Raimi will be more than satisfied with this latest superhero outing.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is a much needed breath of fresh air for a genre and a cinematic universe that’s felt stylistically barren for most of its existence. The focus is on delivering an engaging spectacle that grips the viewer. While the story is basic and patchy, the vitality present in the film’s construction make it an absolute delight to watch. The story may be on the lighter side in the grand scheme of the cinematic universe and doesn’t engage in as much fanfare as some viewers might want, but it’s navigation of characters and their respective arcs makes it truly resonant when it needs to be.
Rating
9.4/10
Grade
A
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
Whitman (Tim Morgan) stares at the disfigured man. The disfigured man reveals his disfigurement to the audience and Whitman screams. A stop motion skeletal entity shows up. Whitman (Tim Morgan) continues to scream.The disfigured person starts to mess with a flesh wound on their stomach. Whitman (Tim Morgan) trembles in his sleep. A skeletal creature rips out of a man’s stomach. Dick (Bill MacLeod) and Ranger Stillman (Mike Magri) speak to one another. Winterbeast’s opening sets the stage for the entire movie: it starts with a nightmare sequence that confusingly combines stop-motion and live-action, has delayed acting that undercuts the horror of the moment, and confusingly shifts between perspectives and moments without giving the audience to latch onto.
Sergeant Whitman gazes upon a person smiling on a chair. Despite being privy to the person’s face from the start of the scene, Whitman only reacts in aghast to the deformities on the person’s face when the film cuts to a face reveal for the audience. Out of nowhere, a stop-motion skeleton figure makes its appearance and we cut to Whitman reacting in an increased panic at the spectral entity; there is no effort made to incorporate both the live action and stop-motion visual into one scene and Whitman’s reaction is the only connective tissue letting the viewer know this is all taking place in the same environment. To add to the chaos, the deformed person starts to rip at his own flesh. This disturbing sequence is then revealed to be Whitman’s nightmare as he tosses and turns in bed.
However, instead of easing the viewer in to the story by showing the sleeping character, Whitman, waking up and confirming the vision before getting to their day-to-day, Winterbeast instead chooses to cut to another equally out-of-context nightmarish scene, this time of a skeletal creature coming out of another man’s stomach. Then, the story cuts to two completely different characters, Ranger Stillman (Mike Magri) and Dick (Bill MacLeod), providing the viewer no context by which to ground that which came previously. Whitman eventually shows up to the station and is informed by Stillman, who we learn works for the former, that Dick, an on-goer, found one of Whitman’s other rangers, Bradford (Lissa Breer), abandoned in the mountain and was unable to find another ranger, Tello (David Mica), accompanying her. The group makes plans to investigate the trail the next day.
A woman begins to undress. A tree monster shows up. Tree monster P.O.V shot moving towards the woman’s abode. The tree monster grabs the woman out of her abode and slams her to death against the wall. The first kill sequence demonstrates Winterbeast’s tenacity in getting its monsters on screen. It uses live action, a slasher-styled P.O.V shot, and stop-motion to showcase a tree monster killing a woman; the final shot transforms the woman into a stop-motion representation to have the monster and victim interact, hoping that the viewer will go along with the ride.
Suddenly, the scene changes and we cut to a completely different woman. She gets undressed in her abode when another stop-motion creature, a large tree, enters the area she’s in. A slasher-styled P.O.V shot is used to show the creature approaching the woman. He reaches and grabs her from her room; the film opts to transform the woman into a stop-motion figure to keep visual consistency with the tree-monster. The monster then slams the woman’s body against the wall, seemingly killing her.
This haphazard cutting from and to scenes with whiplash-inducing changes in perspective are par for the course in Winterbeast, a fascinating movie that operates on pure kinetic momentum and nothing more. Continuity in narrative or within scenes matters less than entertaining at every stop along the way which is why the movie constantly meanders from point to point with a loose reverence for earlier narrative threads ; the focus is always getting to the next moment of violence, context be damned. The structure of the movie diverges very little from this opening structure: the characters gather information about, or seemingly about the disappearance and then a different stop-motion creature kills another character, usually unrelated to the story outside of their carnage candy role.
If there is a larger overarching plot, it’s about Whitman and company trying to circumvent a Jaws mayoral-like figure in the form of the town lodge’s owner, Mr. Sheldon (Bob Harlow), who refuses to close the lodge down despite the mystery surrounding the disappearance and the resulting supernatural phenomena. Unfortunately, while the plot synopsis seems like a springboard to jump off of, Winterbeast makes very little use of it. Nothing in the story is built up enough to generate an investment on the part of the viewer. The characters have very little to say to one another in the ways of motivation or traits, the different monsters/creatures that the story utilizes have no coherent overarching identity or relevant differentiable characteristics, and the acting is so far removed from the spectacle that it becomes impossible to care about what’s happening outside of sheer curiosity.
Whitman (Tim Morgan) and Charlie (Charles Majka) talk in a Natives decorated room. Charlie (Charles Majka) emulates the Native statue’s pose behind him. Bradford (Lissa Breer) and Whitman (Tim Morgan) speak about Indian legends as an marquee with “Indian Legends” looms in the background. There’s a strong focus on Native Indians in both the visuals and the narrative that feels like the start of something larger and more coherent to latch onto, but it ultimately ends up going nowhere impactful.
There’s an attempt to couch the mystery within a Native Indian dressing that even goes so far as to suggest one of Whitman’s friend’s, Charlie (Charles Majka), is a stand-in for Natives within the context of the story, but then does nothing to explain or relate any of the violence or the mystery proper to the Natives outside of the most superficial sense of possible; they might as well not have been in the the movie at all which is a shame because the proximity to the Natives is one of the only consistent visuals in the mise-en-scène.
Without any genuine way to relate to the narrative, all the movie has going for it is the spectacle, and the quality of what it has to offer is inconsistent at best. Outside of the general incongruity resulting between treating the pure stop-motion scenes and the live action as part of the same environment, the sound design is severely disorienting. While the movie tries to use its soundtrack in the vein of Halloween to ratchet up the tension and create a feeling of the dread, it fails to evoke the slightest sense of unease ; because the track often noticeably cuts before looping back in on itself during longer scenes, any notion of tension immediately dissipates and the audio becomes farcical. This feeling is exacerbated by poor sound mixing; the score and/or background-noises like the wind or leaves become so loud as to obscure the dialogue or one another, culminating in scenes where the impact of any.
In spite of that, where director Christopher Theis and producer Mark Frizzell’s Winterbeast succeeds is in its sheer dedication to presenting a cinematic “something. Just like Obayashi does in House, they impart such passion to presenting a vision, albeit a vision that seems incomprehensible by most measures, that one can’t help get caught up in at least appreciating the effort. For all its issues, if there’s one thing Winterbeast is not it’s lacking in passion. Where other teams might see the inability to properly incorporate their stop-motion creatures with the live action nature of their shooting and subsequently can the creatures in lieu of something more tame, this movie opts for the full vision, no holds barred. If the people and monsters can’t mingle directly, then P.O.V shots and stop-motion people will have to suffice; it’s better than fully compromising on the spectacle of what-could-be.
REPORT CARD
TLDR
Winterbeast is a movie of pure passion that’s put together with no other purpose than to stay consistently entertaining. It sacrifices narrative coherence, thematic resonance, character development, and even visual continuity to ensure that spectacle upon spectacle can be presented; the movie so fervently goes for broke in trying to do something that in spite of all its failures its not a miserable experience. Echoing the poster tagline, the movie “must be seen to be believed.”
Rating
1.5/10
Grade
F
Go to Page 2 for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis. Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .
