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SXSW Review: THE HEART MACHINE

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“The Heart Machine”
Directed by Zachary Wigon
Starring John Gallagher Jr., Kate Lyn Sheil, David Call, Libby Woodbridge, Louisa Krause, Halley Wegryn Gross, RJ Brown
Drama, Thriller
85 Mins 
United States

Would you fall in love in the wild, wild west of romance that is online dating? What if you believe that your betrothed were living in a foreign country only to discover that they are instead a mere stone’s throw away? Would you get jealous? Angry? Violent? Director and writer Zachary Wigon provides his surreptitious take on the ‘romance as app’ generation in what can only be described as a romantic thriller in The Heart Machine. Read More

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SXSW Review: SEQUOIA

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“Sequoia”
Directed by Andy Landen
Starring Aly Michalka, Dustin Milligan, Sophi Bairley, Todd Lowe, Joey Lauren Adams, Demetri Martin
Comedy, Drama, Romance
86 Mins
United States

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Coming to terms with your own mortality is not something that a 20something should have to do. But disease has a will of its own. Instead of drifting off to sleep in some cushy bed at a ripe old age or being blindsided by a simple, but nonetheless devastating, twist of change, disease is the worst of fates because you have to live with the knowledge of what’s to come. Anyone with cancer or AIDS can look at where they’ll be a few months or maybe years down the line, how their humanity and agency will be whittled away until they are a shell of what they once were. This hellish circumstance demands a timeline marked with fates worse than fading away physically. It involves the slow death of self; the disappearance of what gives you meaning into a vacuous machine of needs, a pill-popping potato of tubes and drips. For the self-sufficient young adult, there is no crueler sentence.

In this Kevorkian-as-criminal age, people in this demoralized position are faced with only two options: sticking it out until the bitter end or taking their own lives. In both impossible cases, there is no dignity. We live in a generation where the ailing must suffer for their sufferings, where shame accompanies pain, where people who just want to crawl up like a dog under a shed and close their eyes are seen as criminals by the merciless laws of the gun-totting right. Instead, the victimized are strong-armed into dying penniless and in excruciating pain. After all, that’s the American way.

Sequoia tells the story of Riley (Aly Michalka), a 23-year old with irreversible oral cancer. Laid out with news that she’s entered the fourth and final stage of her affliction and faced with the reality that the next step in the process involves sawing off  her lower jaw (even though the odds would still be 80% against her favor), Riley has decided to take her own life in the serenity of Sequoia National Park. She muddles up a few bottles of sleeping pills, spikes her water with it, and waits for the white light.

Along the way, she runs into Christian-on-a-mission Ogden (Dustin Milligan) who becomes an unlikely confidante. In the spirit of good Christian spirit, he agrees to accompany Riley through her final day after her plans with her younger, helplessly punk rock sister Van (Sophi Bairley) fall through. Ogden soon knows that Riley’s  slurped down her deadly cocktail but the moral dilemma to follow overcomes him. Likewise, audience members are prompted to ask themselves where they side here. Is there a right choice or just a shitty situation no matter how the dice fall? Likely the latter, but again, that’s up to you.

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Back at the homestead, Van crashes her dad’s car and is forced to spill the beans to her and Riley’s separated and heedless parental unit. Dad, Oscar (Todd Lowe), swallows the news like a sack of potatoes, choking on the idea of losing his daughter so imminently, while Mom, Bev (Joey Lauren Adams), aided by new psychologist boyfriend and resident douche Steve (Demetri Martin) shrugs it off as a cry for attention. Their little girl is going to off herself, Oscar pleads. They have to do something.

Instead of trying to come to terms with Riley’s lucid justification for suicide, they rush across the state to her side to try and stop her from fulfilling her one tragic wish. There’s no intellectual vigil to hold, no meditative stasis, their gut reaction is the instinctual response of an animal whose young is in danger. They protect witlessly, they defend without thought for what they’re fighting for. 

Disease is the death of possibility, it’s being teether to an IV. It’s watching medical bills skyrocket past reasonable sums, the only will that you’ll then be able to pass on. It’s bearing witness to the forlorn faces of loved ones trying to remain strong for you. Suicide may be an escape but to call it cowardly in this circumstance is simple-minded and borderline pigheaded. Let’s just say that if there is a God turning those who have decided to take their own lives rather than rot from the inside out, I would love to give him a piece of my mind.

An old wives tale says that if you touch a baby bird, the mother will abandon it, leaving it to starve to death. Of course the anecdote is bogus, an invention of moms who don’t want their children poking around at nasty birds. In the animal kingdom, animals are irrevocably tied to their offspring (that is when they’re not busy eating them). No matter how many feathers may be ruffled on your young, most will battle against all odds until the bitter end. Old feuds fade, past wrongs erased, in the moment of trigger pulling, there is only the need to save your young. Ironically enough, at least in Riley’s case, this parental instinct becomes more a curse than anything. Instead of just letting her go the way she wants, they demand to keep her around, jaw or no.

Writer Andrew Rothschild said the idea for Sequoia came from a nightmarish period where he had himself convinced he was riddled with cancer. Thankfully, he did not. All his  worrying was for naught. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case, a truth that Riley knows only too well. His helplessly affecting story is much a commentary on the US health care system as it is a solemn ballad to those who took their lives for just cause. It’s heartbreak city but at least it tries to laugh its way to the end of the highway.

With Rothchild’s tenderly biting words married to Michalka’s soul-melting performance, director Andy Landen proves there’s still a place for storytellers with a unwavering voice and a powerful message. He makes Sequoia painfully honest and emotionally gutting, wistful but never sentimental. Watching it unfold is like listening to your mom tell the baby bird story. Michalka plays the baby bird perfectly, putting in an absolutely devastating performance, marked equally with wry deathbed humor and a kind of frankness only someone on their way out the door can offer. Disheveled and morose though she may be, baby momma still brings the worm in the end, but at what cost?

A-

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SXSW Review: CREEP

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“Creep”
Directed by Patrick Brice
Starring Patrick Brice, Mark Duplass
Comedy, Horror, Romance
82 Mins
United States

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Mark Duplass has had quite a run in the fledgling stages of his career. From small roles in the likes of Oscar baity films, such as Zero Dark Thirty and, le sigh, Parkland, to larger roles in unsung indie hits Humpday and Safety Not Guaranteed, and simply as the reliably affable straight man, Pete, on The League, it’s easy to admit that Duplass has got range. He dips his toes in the pools of all different genres and mediums, working as an accomplished dramatic actor and solid comedian to boot. It’s then such a surprise that perhaps the greatest work he’s done is in a found little footage horror movie called Creep.

Captured in what has become the oh so familiar first person POV framework, Patrick Brice takes on dual responsibility as the film’s lead and director. He is our window into the events to unfold, a fluctuating moral guide through a stew of character grays. Brice is Aaron, a videographer gun-for-hire who responds to a mysterious Craigslist ad claiming it will take one day of his time and pay a cool grand. Up in the mountains, he meets a Joseph, a man with claims of imminent death, making a farewell video for his unborn son.

No matter how valiant his intentions sound on paper, Joseph (Duplass) is an unreliable character from the get go. From his startling first appearance to the unsavory wolf mask, ironically called Peach Fuzz, he keeps stuffed in his closet, he’s a hard guy to get a read on. But that’s half the fun. Throttling between waxing on his own mortality and jumping from behind a doorway to startle Patrick (and by extension us), one thing is for certain: Joseph’s a weird dude. He’s always quick on his toes to offer some soundbite explanation for his abnormal actions but his backstory is about as reliable and consistent as Heath Ledger‘s Joker.

Brice and Duplass love playing with the idea of the unreliable narrator as they fill the film with palpable moments of transitioning allegiances. There are times when Duplass feels like the titular creep, other times when it’s Brice. There’s even some fleeting moments where we turn the mirror on ourselves to see if we’re the ones prescribing oddness to an otherwise savory and sweet situation. Could there actually be nothing wrong at all (save our unsavory expectations?) What am I talking about, this is a movie called Creep, of course some creeping is bound to go down. And go down it does.

When a film backs itself into a corner like Creep does about sixty minutes in, it usually becomes increasingly reliant on familiar tropes. The fringes of possibility become a picket fence and the audience is able to pick off the thread count like floating sheep. There are only so many ways to wrap things up in a horror movie and we usually know which of those endings will transpire when we’ve got about thirty minutes to go. But when Creep seems like its reaches the last track, it smartly changes things up, transforming from what may have dissolved into an unsatisfying slasher into a whole new type of paranoid tension machine.

From his backlit framing to the long, empty, awkward silences that fill the air like smog, Brice plants all the seeds of doubt required to make his audience want to stand up and shout “Don’t go in there!” at the screen. Thankfully, his characters are rarely dumb enough to go the way of the slasher victim. It may not subvert the horror genre, but at least it doesn’t sink down to its level. And though Brice does his fair share of leaning on genre mainstays to milk some frights, he remains true to his characters throughout and they’re what made it interesting in the first place.

B-

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SXSW Review: FORT TILDEN

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“Fort Tilden”
Directed by Sarah Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers
Starring Bridey Elliott, Clare McNulty, Neil Casey, Becky Yamamoto, Desireé Nash, Peter Vack, Jeffrey Scaperrotta
Comedy
95 Mins
United States

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Remember when tying your shoes was an impossible chore? When you could only get places at the discretion of your mom’s minivan? When you didn’t know how to cook yourself a meal so you relied on someone else’s feeding hand so that you wouldn’t starve? These, among others, are lessons that Fort Tilden‘s anti-heroines never seemed to learn.

As helpless as they are hapless, twenty-sometihngs Allie and Harper are two Brooklyn tweethearts utterly incapable of caring for themselves or others. Something as simple as meeting new friends at the eponymous Fort Tilden, a hip hideaway on a nearby New York beach, becomes an endeavor the equivalent of trekking to Mordor. Fort Tilden is their weekend Everest. Their prize a pair of swinging dicks to add notches in their paramour belts. How hard can going to the beach be? In this case, damn near impossible. From bikes to cabs, walking to hitching, this five-ish mile trek might as well be uphill both ways through six vertical feet of snow in the middle of a moonless night.  

Unfit for a seemingly painless journey such as this, watching this odd couple mess their way through the “rough” spots of the city is co-writers and directors Sarah Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers’ condemnation of an incomptent age of the e-tarded. Destitude without their iPhones, never able to look three steps into their futures and wholly lost without an aiding stranger, Allie and Harper are the bane of the millenials.

In their wake, a trail of broken hearts, pissed off acquaintances, abandoned responsibilities and poorly made iced coffees. Hansel and Gretel left a trail of bread crumbs to follow home, Allie and Harper could follow the bitter glances and stink of disapproval back to their hipster homestead. Completely unaware of how their selfish acts of careless bravado effect the world around them, they are all but reprehensible in their ever waking action. Smug, apathetic, careless, rude; throw all the negative descriptors you want at these two and it’ll probably stick but, through all of it, they’re honest. At least Harper (Bridey Elliott) is. She’s a heartless bitch but she knows herself. She fully commits to her many, many shortcomings even at the cost of others derision and scorn. At least being honest to oneself is an admirable trait, right?

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In a bind, Harper phones up daddy in her whiniest, whittle baby girl voice, fishing for a direct deposit without ever mentioning the phrase “I need money”. She knows how to wrap people around her little finger and is downright uncomfortable in any relationship where that’s not the case. Even her best friend (though Harper’s too jaded to ever use that term) is measurably her puppet. Although Allie (Clare McNulty) at first seems the more sensitive and sensible of the two, upon getting to know her better, we learn she’s really no better than Harper. She just hasn’t quite committed to her sins in the same way.

Allie feigns sticking to her moral guns (refusing to abandon a borrowed bike, choosing to rescue discarded kittens, flirting around the point in conversations even where the only goal is clearly to benefit herself and Harper) but one ounce of Harper’s callous pressure is all her emotional fulcrum needs for Allie to throw up her hands in defeat. Though Harper is a devoted misanthrope, Allie’s resistance to such makes her the more interesting one.

As the devilish duo, McNulty and Elliot share outstanding chemistry. They’re two sides of one coin, two faces of the same clueless Janus. Their desperation is pathetic, their ineptide a welcome mat for easy laughs but the two performers never pass along an ounce of judgement for their down in the dumps characters, giving them humanity that they might otherwise lack. Their straight-faced comic dynamics look born from years of working with each other so it comes as a bit of a surprise that both these breakout actresses only met during auditions. The success of Fort Tilden rests squarely on their capable shoulders and even through the thick layer of their disagreeableness, they’re fascinating characters through and through.

Cinematographer Brian Lannin makes good use of the rustic settings and concrete jungles, sun blasting the scenes when needed, adding an extra layer of disorientation and distress to the affairs. The snappy, ruthless screenplay  works best when Allie and Harper fail at the most benign tasks but never betrays Bliss and Rogers affinity for their love-to-hate-em characters. And this is part and parcel of what makes Tilden pop.

B

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SXSW Review: ARLO AND JULIE

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“Arlo and Julie”
Directed by Steve Mimms
Starring Alex Dobrenko, Ashley Spillers, Sam Eidson, Chris Doubek, Mallory Culbert, Hugo Vargas-Zesati 
Comedy
United States

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Anyone who’s ever put a jigsaw puzzle together before understands the acute stages of puzzle insanity. At first, it’s an exciting endeavor, like diving into a new George R.R. Martin tome or deciding that you’re gonna start hitting the gym again. After about twenty minutes of turning over white pieces, you already feel the first tinge of frustration, that beading realization of what you’ve just committed to. Finally, you’ve put together the exterior, that beautiful border to encapsulate all, fencing in that headless herd of jigsaw madness. Cue feelings of adequacy, and perhaps even ecstasy. Then comes the middle bits, the monotony of a sea of monochromatic shades, so unanimously uniform that you may as well piece them together blindfolded. Eventually, parties become frustrated, tensions rise and deep-seated issues simmer up between you and your in-it-to-win-it puzzle partner. Maybe you shout, cry, give it all up. Maybe even a table gets flipped. But what happens when a puzzle gets so out of control that it takes over your life? That’s exactly the question Steve Mimms asks in Arlo and Julie.

The answer? Well if you’re Arlo and Julie, you allow the obsession to take the helm, survive only on the sustenance of delivery pizza, let your career and relationships all but descend into shambles and pace in front of the parcel box waiting for the mailman like a dog for its master. “Mail?” you may ask. Well this cryptic puzzle – a triptych of muted oranges, reds and yellows – randomly starts showing up in the mail, arriving in increasingly larger sealed packets from Mexico. At first one piece is enclosed, then two, four, eight, sixteen and on and on until Arlo and Julie are faced with thousands of little cardboard zigs and zags and dozens of man hours needed to put it all together.

As the puzzle outgrows their cozy dining room table, secrets within their relationship come to light with both eventually wondering how well they know the other party. At first, their puzzly plight is admirable and Mimms’ uncertain direction leaves the floor open for what could be a vast highway of possibilities. Suspenseful elements slip in under the radar, adding a touch of foreboding to the otherwise squarely indie film proceedings. While we wade in the darkness wondering what all these little pieces will eventually add up to, it’s the two titular characters who must keep us entertained, and by the end are the only real components that make it worthwhile.

Julie, played by a geeky chic Ashley Spillers, is defiantly bohemian, perhaps so much so that she doesn’t even know it. Her smooshy facial expressions, shaggy bob and frumpy natural beauty all help to make her relatable. Her gorging on pizza makes her lovable. Spillers plays her well, offering a character you’d expect from an 80s Woody Allen flick with some real depth behind her quirk. Her partner Arlo (Alex Dobrenko) is a bit of a misanthropic dweeb. His mind always in the past (he’s writing what he believes is the great untold biography of Ulysses S. Grant), he’s got the inflated ego to fit his aspiring writer hat but it also makes him a bit of a challenge to really assimilate with. He’s a bit of a flippant kook, his conflated ideas of relevancy definitively hipster. Arlo is a guy you can only take in small doses but beneath his moppy-headed think box is a manchild who’s a bit mystified with the world at large, who treats love like a bit of a puzzle itself.

Cute and quaint, Arlo and Julie might be one of the better second-tier Woody Allen movies that Woody Allen never made. It’s mumblecore deadpan meets Austin angst, big city stressing in the near desert. The dialogue culled from a workshop on the neurotic and maladjusted, everything always feels an arm length from reality. The first two acts throw in enough quirk to keep the adventure light enough and often engaging. With some coincidentally staged entrances and exits, the screenplay seems cooked up by a career playwright. The staged contrivances kind of work but aren’t consistent enough to really sell the stage as a whole.

Undoubtedly the biggest problem that Mimms runs into is that he only gets limited mileage out of the quirky mystery aspects of the piece. By the third act, the tank is running on empty, all the lingering questions have been abandoned or shoddily answered and the film sputters towards a conclusion that’s slight and saccharine, even if it does fit the mood.

C+

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SXSW Review: SPACE STATION 76

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“Space Station 76”
Directed by Jack Plotnick
Starring Patrick Wilson, Liv Tyler, Matt Bomer, Marisa Coughlan, Jerry O’Connell, Kylie Rogers
Comedy, Drama, Sci-Fi
93 Mins
United States

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The 1970s were an age of looking towards the stars. From Star Wars to Star Trek, it was a decade of endless possibilities, a time that saw instant dinners, laser weaponry and hovercrafts around every corner. It witnessed the culmination of the space race, the end of the Vietnam War, and the birth of a new unchartered epoch in the suburban trenches of Americana. Mimicking the uneasy blend of conservatism and forward-looking gung-ho-manship that defined the generation, with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek, Jack Plotnick has made Space Station 76 a soapy space opera; a smartly satirical smoothie of 70s manifest destiny – ripe with the impractical hopes of intergalactic expansionism – cut with the tedium of suburban ennui.

At the forefront of this final frontier are an unlikely cast of characters, each representative of the many uncertainties and insecurities of the era. There’s the boredom weary housewife, Misty (Marisa Coughlan), who spends her days slurping down Prosacs, “programing” the crew’s meal du jour, and occasionally sleeping around with Steve (Jerry O’Connell). When she’s not confessing her feelings to the on-board robotic psychiatrist, Dr. Bot – whose toy-sized presence and pre-programed wisdoms are always accompanied by fits of laughter – she mopes and gossips. An icon of post-50s feminine guile, her boozy, unscrupulous mannerisms are as sardonically iconic as her down-on-his-luck everyman husband, Ted, played by Matt Bomer.

Having never quite caught a break, and now sporting a clunky robotic arm – a perfectly retro-futuristic brand of low-budget prop – Ted is haunted by his lack of accomplishments, caught in a cycle of self-destructive lethargy lead by his penchant for illegal horticulture and unsure of his place in the world (er, universe). His emotional arc reflects the pathos of those who nervously straddled The Draft, haunted by the withering courage of a fresh faced soldier never to see a day in combat. He’s shaken but for all the wrong reasons.

Enter new co-pilot Jessica (Liv Tyler) who is at her core representative of the shifting winds of the feminism movement, a firmly competent and confident substitute for a traditionally male role. Striking up an affectionate relationship with Ted’s daughter Sunshine (Kylie Rogers, who looks adorable in a nerdtastic pair of specs,) long-gone sparks of tenderness begin to rekindle the purpose in Ted’s life.

Jessica’s maternal instincts juxtaposed against her inhospitable womb is an example of the tragic irony that Plotnick hits on again and again, to such great effect. But it’s Patrick Wilson, who plays Captain Glenn with startling sensitivity, that is the most outstanding of the bunch and the pinnacle of Plotnick’s satirical heights. As the gruff but gay commander, Glenn’s sexuality is a thing of great shame, something he keeps deeply closeted. Glenn’s stern persona is encapsulated in Wilson’s patriarchal mustache, a metaphorical affront to shield others from the shame he buries, a mask to disguise his bleeding soul. The arrival of Jessica, who doggedly seeks the true reason behind Glenn’s last co-pilot (and secret lover’s) sudden reassignment, sets him on a crash course with his own inner demons…and some asteroids.

The stocky sets, “pew pew” sound design and clunky CGI – that look like crafted on a circa 1976 computer – are as kitschy as they come but the human relationships they serve to frame always feel universal and timeless. Through satire, Plotnick has stumbled upon some brave new world. Bold and esoteric, he’s shown that one doesn’t need to look at the future from behind the jaded lens of an iPhone 5, that things may well be all the more interesting if we rewind the clock and only then begin to look forward.

B

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SXSW Review: HONEYMOON

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“Honeymoon”
Directed by Leigh Janiak
Starring Rose Leslie, Harry Treadaway, Ben Huber, Hanna Brown
Thriller, Horror, Sci-Fi
87 Mins
United States

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In 1954, Colliers Magazine published Jack Finney‘s sci-fi horror serial The Body Snatchers. Since then, this fire starter novella has led to a handful of direct film adaptations (the latest being Oliver Hirschbiegel‘s 2007 The Invasion starring Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman) and dozens of spinoffs (John Carpenter‘s The Thing for instance.) But even more importantly, Finney’s creation all but gave birth to a whole subsection of genre: the infamous body invasion flick. In the years since, many filmmakers have employed this humble little niche market as an elastic stage to claim veritable scares by peddling harrowing practical visual effects and unsettling character shifts (in the best of cases) or CG sight gags and the banal formula of a group’s numbers mysteriously thinning (in the worst of cases). Director and co-writer Leigh Janiak though sees the genre as a chance to explore change on a microscopic scale, to prod just how absolutely horrifying it would be to see the one you love most temporally drained from their own body. Let’s just say, it’s not nice.

With the very talented Rose Leslie (Ygritte from Game of Thrones) and Henry Callaway at her disposal, Janiak prohibits an immense talent for directing her actors into believable territory, even under such inconceivable circumstances. From the opening montage where we meet newlyweds Bea and Paul undergoing matrimonial traditions like cake fighting (even though they forewent a real cake for cinnamon buns) and recounting the events by which they met (bad Indian food, it’s always bad Indian food!) to Rose’s fleeting misguided attempts to protect her husband from her extraterrestrial transformation (“They’ll never find you down here”) and through all the bumping of uglies in between, Leslie and Callaway sell the show as genuine.

Even on the heels of the more outrageous elements, their steadfast performances point to a unshaken understanding of their character’s respective head spaces. For the genre, it’s an uncharacteristically committed pair of performances and with Janiak jamming her cameras right in the midst of their personal space, we feel like we’re right alongside them, an equal victim of some inexplicable emotional violation.  

That is really where the true horror of these kinds of body snatching stories lies. Worse yet than seeing someone shot by a laser beam or abducted by some ethereal blue beam, there’s something infinitely more jarring to standing witness to an individual’s personality being siphoned out of them. Janiak’s film engages this process in stages. After running into what seems like the only other two people living in a ten mile radius, couple Annie and Will (who Bea just so happened to share a summer love with in the way, way back of past childhood flirtations), Janiak presents a first taste of “off-ness”. Annie’s withdrawn, confuzzled and all around off. She’s stage one of a mental virus, the foreshadow of what’s to come.

Shortly after meeting them, Paul wakes in the middle of the night to find the spot in bed next to him abandoned and cold to the touch. With harebrained suspicions of infidelity, he charges from the house only to find Bea naked, disorientated and caked in mud. Upon bringing her inside, a patch of what appears to be bug bites around her crotchal region alarms him. It’s nothing to worry about, she pleads in unconvincing manner. Instead of slamming on the brakes and seeing whatever transformation to come take place overnight, Janiak picks at her plate like a sparrow to birdseed. Like a gas leak from the brainstem, Bea isn’t replaced outright so much as reborn one blink at a time, reinvented with each breathe drawn, re-imagined with every performance of normalcy.

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Watching Bea recite milestone events from her own life into the mirror mimics an earlier scene where she practices a speech to get out of engaging in post-marital carnal relations but in the space between, she’s become more drained – more a shell than the filling. She’s lost another chunk of “Bea.” It’s the hollow spaces between the words, the falsity of her gestures, the empty recitation of loving remarks that imbues Honeymoon with such an eerie tautness. Bea being such an unreliable character, we never know what’s coming next and right up to the very last moments, we never really get a grasp on how much “Bea” is left in Bea after all.

And though Honeymoon may take place at a cabin in the woods, the camp has been left at home. Janiak’s take is fatally humorless, devoutly sobering. Instead of harping on frights, she’s left us with a steamy atmosphere so thick you could cut it with a butter knife and serve it at as a wedding cake. Even the hollowed out bride and groom toppers wouldn’t be missing.  

As Bea and Paul’s deserted woodland homestead becomes an unwelcome chrysalis, we’re left with little more than the remains of an evaporating relationship. Like Bea’s special nightgown (though it’s more hoary than whory) that Paul finds in the woods after her disappearance, there’s chunks inexplicably missing, impossible to recover, chalked up to some pieceless puzzle. But even after everything, there’s still some inkling of connection left, some fleeting memory of what it means to care for each other.

Perhaps that’s her intent after all, to show us something beautiful only to take it away, leaving tatters and fragments of what it meant to be able to connect with someone, to tell them you love them and actually mean it. By the end, “Bea” is reduced to mumbling her twisted version of sweet nothings but I’m still not convinced that all is lost of the well-intending New York butterfly she once was. Even in her harrowing final act, there’s love or at least something masquerading as such.

B+

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SXSW Review: KUMIKO THE TREASURE HUNTER

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“Kumiko the Treasure Hunter”
Directed by David Zellner
Starring Rinko Kikuchi, Nobuyuki Katsube, David Zellner, Nathan Zellner, Shirley Venard
Drama
America

“Based on a true story” the title card blares, half-legible in crusty, bite-sized pixelations of a magnified television screen. One chunky word at a time, each letter pronounced, amplified, stuffed in our faces. Pulled straight from Fargo‘s opening sequence (the lauded Coen Bros film goes on to become a key character in the film) and scattered by tightrope zooms, this intriguing unveiling of Kumiko the Treasure Hunter immediately begs question about the veracity of what we’re going to witness. Read More

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SXSW Review: AMONG THE LIVING

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“Among the Living”
Directed by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury
Starring Beatrice Dalle, Anne Marivin, Nicolas Giraud, Francis, Renaud, Xacharie Chasseriaud, Damien Ferdel
Horror, Thriller
France

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Pitched as a crossroads between Stand By Me and Friday the 13th, Among the Living builds a beautifully unsettling landscape only to take a sledge hammer to it in its run-of-the-mill, slasher-standard third act. It’s a roller coaster of quality, ticking upwards in fitful bumps, building mood and anxiety in the gorgeously photographed, kaleidoscopic backwoods of rural France. Strapped in and nervous, we’re primed for the fall, ready to rocket around unexpected twists and turns, thrown for 360s, tossed into loops and amped to arrive at the end wide-eyed and breathless. When we do reach the precipice and look unto the other side though, the sinking feeling in our stomach is one born of disappointment, not terror. Instead of a winding track, heinous turns and caveats into foggy caves, it’s a one-track rail cruising straight to the end. On this straight and narrow pathway, there’s nothing new, little remarkable and hardly anything exceedingly effective. And while the build up may be right on the money, the climax feels more like a bag of change.

This kids-vs-killer horror works best when serving salty scoops of anticipation – when it’s table setting – and the first scene is absolutely dreadful proof of that fact. Planted mise-en-scène, we start the show scrambling to catch up with the chaos unfolding around us, trying to figure out why knifes are brandished and guns popping off. A man defends his child against his own wife and we know not why or what he did to deserve such a reaction but it prods both our panic center and curiosity hub. It’s the ideal cold open that leaves us questioning how the pieces will fit together.

At first glance, there’s no denying the scene is perfectly set for an unsettling and mentally distressing horror feature to unfold, one that would live up to the mantle of European filmmaking duo Julian Maury and Alexndre Bustillo. Bustillo and Maury have etched out a name as a sort of Crimson Underground of French new wave horror. Their cult favorites, Inside and Livid, too indie to nab a US release, their work is so off the beaten path that you’d be hard pressed to find them on DVD, save ever in an actual theater. So to say their handiwork is a rarity is an understatement, which made my initial anticipation for their latest film that much more.  

Even while I was at the screening, a stranger turned to me and outright asked, “So why are you here?” Like the other uninitiated, I was here on a hunch, attracted by the synopsis and one intriguing promo picture that I’d seen. The stranger gleefully informed me that I was in for a treat. Unlike the kind of “treat” I was expecting, Amongst the Living was more like a can of gummy worms that’d been dropped in the sand. Once the gambit is up, it’s not worth chewing your way through the remains.

Famous for their excessive gore and deadly somber tone, Maury and Bustillo earn an outpouring of deference from their fans but I have to wonder after a showing like this, how many will truly be satisfied. Seeing the thing transform from a genuine creeper into your humdrum slasher is like witnessing a mall parking lot flasher expose himself to you. The sad truth of the matter is in both cases, there’s often not a lot to show.

C-

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SXSW Review: STARRY EYES

by Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged , , , , , , 3 Comments

“Starry Eyes”
Directed by Kevin Kolsch, Dennis Widmyer
Starring Alex Essoe, Amanda Fuller, Noah Segan, Fabianne Therese, Shane Coffey, Natalie Castillo, Pat Healy, Nick Simmons, Maria Olsen, Louis Dezseran
Horror
United States

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At the risk of emasculating myself, I’ll admit that Starry Eyes was so scary that it made me cry. Not ooey, gooey gobs of terror tears so much as the lone, solitary drop leaking down my face as my jaw was busy sagging half-way to the floor. Still, a tear’s a tear and a tear did floweth. So if this film doesn’t at least creep you out, check your pulse because you’re probably not human or may have already sold your soul to the devil. It’s more likely though that you’ll be sitting in a pile of your own yuck after the screening, tired, sweaty, fearful and all the more afraid of the dark.

Like last year’s very frightening The Conjuring, few to no jump scares are employed as this isn’t the brand of chilling that seeks to sporadically startle you and lap up easy frights. No, director duo Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer‘s plans are far more sinister. They would rather crawl deep inside you, settling in the nook of your cerebral panic center, and plant a seed of horror that’ll grow throughout the movie until explodes into a full blown anxiety attack. And just when everything seems like it possibly couldn’t get any worse, you turn a corner into a whole new realm of terror. A maze of shudders, a labyrinth of gore, Starry Eyes triggers your instinctual fight or flight mode and dares you to stick it out.

Wringing all the best elements of a dark character study with the deeply unsettling nature of the body horror genre, Starry Eyes soars on the wings of star Alex Essoe. As Sarah, Essoe embodies the 20something wanna-be starlet who will go to any lengths in order to achieve her dreams of fame and fortune. Her bedroom walls plastered with the icons of 1940s celebrity, she wants the world, and she wants it now. When a role comes along that would be the perfect launching pad to become the next “it” girl, she goes to anything lengths necessary to land the role, even if that means losing herself.

Essoe’s performance is the bombastic center piece of the film – the gory bride on a red velvet wedding cake, the bouquet of rotting roses on some unmarked grave. Her positively brilliant turn as Sarah reminds us of Natalie Portman‘s Oscar-earning performance in Black Swan and Shelly Duvall‘s massively underrated embodiment of horror in The Shining. She’s at once totally in control and veering from the tracks of sanity. As she makes more and more conceits of character and body, Essoe’s arc becomes unforgettable, an indelible bookmark of Starry Eye’s staying power. Without Essoe’s incredible and unflinching performance, this would be a whole new beast entirely.

There’s one point where we feel like all of the build-up may be for naught, that this would tilt into a cautionary tale that peters rather than commits to its zany over-the-topisms but that’s not the case. Once the third act rounds the corner, it’s an unrelenting marathon of what we – and Sarah – can and will endure. It’s chilling, the stuff of nightmares, but it hurts so good.

The whole selling your soul to the devil thing has been done before and probably in more subtle ways but subtlety is not Kolsch and Widmyer’s game. Rather Starry Eyes is such a horrifying victory for them because of how far they’re willing to take us. This deep down the rabbit hole, everything is so pitch black that we can’t see even the faintest flicker of light and they, in this realm of deprivation, they mine the scares perfectly. It’s unrelenting darkness opens the flood gates, letting the horror flows from what’s onscreen and those other thoughts that exist in our imagination alone. It’s the perfect synthesize of shock, disgust and angst that’ll have audiences turning in their seats and watched through the crooks of hands shielding their faces.

Starry Eyes conjures up quick similarities to Black Swan and Rosemary’s Baby but finds a perfect footing between the two so any similarities feel incidental rather than essential. It may wheel in the same thematic ballpark but, if you can believe it, makes both of those features look like a walk in the park. Both Swan and Baby may leave you unsettled but Starry Eyes will leave you shaken. At any rate, it’s unique and visionary take will all but guarantee a long shelf life among horror buffs and is sure to earn a deserved overnight cult following.

A

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