Month: June 2024

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Run Sweetheart Run (2020)

In the world of director Shana Feste’s Run Sweetheart Run (2020) men are despicable acolytes of evil, mindless servants of the demon misogyny.

Personally, I’m not sure it plays the way she intended.

Single mother Cherie (Ella Balinska) is having a bad day. She made a complaint about a senior colleague’s inappropriate comments, and is now getting the corporate smooth-down. Then, while some sweaty guy gets handsy with her on a bus, her boss calls. Apparently she screwed up and double-booked his evening. His solution for this calendar blunder, she should go in his stead.

Later that evening a nervous and menstruating Cherie arrives at the palatial home of the ever so charming, somewhat coy, Ethan (Pilou Asbaek). They talk, flirt over sushi, then he convinces her to join him for a nightcap. As she ignores her instincts and accepts his invitation, Ethan breaks the fourth wall. In the time it takes her to cross the threshold and go inside, he glance at the camera. His smirk says a lot, not least “I’m about to do something horrible but you can’t watch…” accompanied by the glee of knowing “…there’s nothing you can do to stop me”.

A beat later, all cuts and bloody, Cherie is running down the street barefoot. When she finally gets someone to help her, they reluctantly call the police. But the police-men are more concerned with arresting her for public intoxication than anything that’s been done to her. Banged up and desperate for a tampon, some clumsy exposition from a cellmate warns, “the same thing happened to my bestie”. She advises her to run, find the First Lady.

Then Ethan is let into her cell. As he casually toys with her, tells her he’s going to enjoy chasing her, it’s clear he’s more than some rich psychopath.

As the plot kicks in, and Cherie does her best to escape Ethan, we slowly realise he’s some kind of supernatural entity, a demon, and he’s using the smell of her menstrual blood to track her. As is usual in these things, anyone who helps Cherie is killed, but Feste does something interesting by keeping most of the violence off screen. We see the aftermath, the dead bodies, the blood, but not the act. This rule gets broken but the violence is in the cut, the ejaculation, the splat of carnage on screen.

When Cherie gets desperate enough, and finally takes notice of the very art directed posters that have peppered her route since the start, she calls the First Lady (Shohreh Aghdashloo). Here more clumsy exposition reveals misogyny is a a battle between good and evil, angels and the devil, and Cherie is the only one to survive this close to morning. The First Lady wants to use Cherie as bait to lure the devil, put an end to his misogynistic reign forever, by burning Ethan in daylight.

This final act throws up all kinds of problems. For example, why didn’t the warrior women who surround the First Lady help Cherie earlier. But that’s a niggle compared to the choice to reduce misogyny to a demon. To focus it onto a single entity fundamentally misunderstands the nature of power. It gives the hatred of women a focal point, a single cause. Destroy the demon, kill Ethan, and women will no longer be victimised.

The thing is, misogyny isn’t one thing, it’s a system. It’s in the way people think, how we live. It’s the institutions that structure our lives. It’s in the language. It is the language. It is everything. The sum total of all culture. It cannot be usurped, got rid of, simply by ridding the world of one thing. The structures that create it still remain. All that happens when the women of Run Sweetheart Run kill the demon misogyny is a like for like swap with its binary, misogyny gets replaced with misandry. Some might say it’s about time, but that misses the point. The same organising principle that subjugates women controls us all. Changing the polarisation doesn’t change the need for misery in the system, only who is miserable.

In the end Run Sweetheart Run feels simplistic, which isn’t a surprise. These days people want simple answers to complicated questions. But simple answers offer no insights or solutions. It’s just more of the system it wants to kill.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8656686/

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Lies We Tell (2023)

Watching Lies We Tell (2023) feels like discovering treasure buried in your back garden, nothing grand, a few vintage pennies, but treasure all the same.

Based on the obscure 1864 novel Uncle Silas by Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu, the film opens with a voiceover. Watch anything based on a book and you’ll hear it. It’s the filmmakers way of getting the book’s voice into the film. Here the eighteen-year-old Maud (Agnes O’Casey) offers a short treatise on human nature, on becoming either a monster or an angel.

Following the death of her beloved father, Maud has inherited a vast fortune and Knowl, the family mansion somewhere in the green of Ireland. Still legally a minor, and of the fairer sex, a clutch of executors have control of the estate until she reaches the age of her majority, three years hence.

Against advice, determined to honour the terms of her father’s will, she welcomes to Knowl, as her guardian, her disgraced uncle Silas (David Wilmot). He brings with him a son, a daughter, her governess, and his many debts.

An air of civilised contempt quickly establishes between Maud and her uncle, as Silas tries to bring Maud and her money under his control. First he suggests a marriage to his son. When that doesn’t work he turns her servants against her and confines her. Knowl becomes a haunted house, its vast barracks of rooms a prison bathed in candlelight. When that fails he threatens to have her committed, for her nerves, and subjected to cold water therapy, waterboarding by another name.

There’s a real joy in watching Maud resist the ever more desperate attempts by Silas to have her submit to him. It’s in the way they talk to each other, sparring with nineteenth-century diction, hostility vailed by politeness. The thing of it is, no matter what he does to her, no mater how foul his actions, or the actions of those under his control, Maud will not be broken. She never allows Silas to remover her agency.

In many ways Maud feels like a very modern woman, but I have a sneaking suspicion that despite so much of the world changing, nothing much has changed. In a similar scenario played out in a contemporary setting, the same impulses would take over.

The writing is great, well paced, with each new horror turning into the next. Equally the direction is subtle, and brave enough to let the performances shine.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10406410/

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Trigger Warning (2024)

Trigger Warning (2024) is another in the long list of films that proves women can be as heroic and tough and ruthless and bloodthirsty as any man.

The father of special forces operative Parker (Jessica Alba) dies when a cave on their property collapses. But when the local police rule his death a suicide, she doesn’t believe her daddy would kill himself, and starts to investigate.

One thing leads to another and, with some off-site computer shenanigans by her colleague, the tech operator Spider (Tone Bell), she discovers a local family, headed by a former senator, are selling munitions from the local army base to a domestic terrorist.

That’s the trigger for Parker to unleash her very special set of skill and do what she must, to thwart the domestic terrorists and more importantly avenge her father. The violence escalates as Alba gets stuck in with her weapon of choice, a knife given to her by daddy, cutting and stabbing with precision and ruthless efficiency. And she doesn’t stop until all the bad guys are dead, and she can go back to her day job with a gun.

It’s not a bad film, technically speaking, but it feels like the television movie version of something like Haywire (2011) or Colombiana (2011), Steven Soderbergh and Olivier Megaton respectively. Also, Colombiana was written by Luc Besson, who set the bar for ruthlessly efficient women with a special set of skills in his film Nikita (1990).

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5834874/

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Glasshouse (2021)

Glasshouse (2021), the feature debut of South African director and co-writer Kelsey Egan, is a dystopian fiction that defied expectations and surprised me. I saw the trailer, actually I watched thirty seconds of the trailer, and dismissed it as a twist on The Beguiled (1971). There are similarities. A wounded stranger is taken in by a family of young women. His presence has a devastating effect on the equilibrium of their world. But there’s more going on than hormonal urgency and a lack of suitable partners post-apocalypse.

The titular glasshouse nestles in an oasis of lush green, hidden among the rocks of an otherwise featureless wasteland. Mother and her three daughters survive with their adolescent brother in guarded isolation, tending to their food garden, hand pollenating their plants, and keeping watch for strangers.

They use these rituals and cobbled together respirators to shield themselves from the devastation of “the shred”, a toxin in the air that destroys people’s memories, making them dangerously violent. Accordingly trespassers are routinely shot on sight, their corpses dismembered, and buried as fertiliser in their garden. There’s no fear in the girls actions, it’s just the order of things.

How long they’ve lived like this is anyone’s guess. Where they sit in history is never revealed. Mother looks like a Victorian lady, corseted dresses and long hair neatly arranged. The young women spend most of their time in an assortment of chemise and bloomers. These white linens against the lush green vegetation gives this dystopia a feeling of nostalgia, like one of those languid Flake adverts from the late nineteen-seventies, a dystopia that looks idyllic.

I won’t spoil the many turns by revealing more, but Egan and co-writer Emma Lungiswa De Wet do a good job of keeping the story and its plot in sync as the stranger unravels the many truths of the family.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13724054/

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Sword of Vengeance (2015)

Sword of Vengeance (2015) is one of those films that walks a fine line between style and substance, a piano wire thin line that can’t help but excises substance.

Set in the wake of the brutal oppressions that followed the victory of William the Bastard at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, a lone fighter arrives in the rain soaked mud of the north, and picks a fight with the local lord. He kills his men and saves the inhabitants of the local Saxon hovel. And, when the enemy of your enemy is your friend, the outsider joins the locals to fight.

The film does have some interesting ideas. The misty washed-out colour palate and epic vistas add an otherworldly poetry to the overused slow-motion. The fight scenes have a certain two-sword brutality to them, blood exiting bodies like ejaculate yanked from a fifteen-year-old boy. But the weight of all this visual style makes for an unsteady journey.

Inevitably it falls off that wire, slicing away the fat and muscle and bone of the story. What’s left is a gaping wound where the story should’ve been.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3622332/

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10×10 (2018)

10×10 (2018) is a tale of the twisted morality born of grief and a desire for vengeance that, for reasons of its own making, ends up feeling contrived.

Lewis (Luke Evans) kidnaps Cathy (Kelly Reilly) from a gym carpark and imprisons her in a ten by ten padded cell. He wants information. She wants to escape. As the battle of wills becomes increasingly desperate, and the tit for tat spites escalate, it seems the only solution is violence.

As compelling as the reasons are for Lewis and Cathy’s actions, my question from the off was a niggle about things off screen. Why is this film trying so hard to be American? Everything about it, apart from a few exterior locations, is British? We have a British director, helming a cast of mostly British actors, delivering lines written by a British writer. Yes they’re delivered in American accents, but the plot and its execution wouldn’t be out of place in the 9pm drama slot on ITV.

I know it has a lot to do with funding and markets but I don’t understand the need for the Americanisation. Any reliance the plot has on guns and religious fundamentalism could’ve been Anglicised. Even with a funding net cast to catch the American market, Noel Clarke could’ve written something closer to home. I’m all for writers stepping outside their comfort zone, but it still has to be fresh.

Perhaps the constraints of having it reflect a uniquely British outlook would’ve rescued the story from the obvious solutions it’s happy to fall back on. The UK has more than enough grief, and it’s own special kind for vengeance, that can without doubt transcend borders. As James Joyce is quoted as saying, “In the particular is contained the universal”.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6210996/

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Stray (2019)

Stray (2019) is a worthy addition to that loose category of superpower films that started to emerge in the latter part of the twenty-teens, when the shiny optimism of superhero saves the world, adolescent wish-fulfilment, started to secede to a darker, grittier, worldview.

Much like Freaks (2018) and Brightburn (2019), Stray (2019) is an emergence of superpower story, but here told as a moody neo-noir.

When troubled homicide detective Murphy (Christine Woods) investigates a murder of a woman, burned to thousand year old charcoal, she forms an “unlikely friendship” with the victim’s daughter Nori (Karen Fukuhara). Together they untangle a complicated family history of trauma and betrayal.

The plot drips out nicely, complimented by a moody visual style reminiscent of early Fincher. Equally the story reveals are punchy, helped by its concise eighty-nine minute runtime. If only more films got the note to be this succinct.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6294226/

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The Family Plan (2023)

On the surface The Family Plan (2023) is a benign comedy action film, but if you look closer you’ll see an altogether more sinister message beneath the well executed shenanigans.

Dan Morgan (Mark Wahlberg) is living the American dream, ticking the boxes of a suburban dad, providing for his wife and three children. But Dan has a past, a secret he’s been keeping from his family. He was once a gun for hire, a top notch killer, a paid assassin.

So when the ever-watchful eye of social media reveals his whereabouts, and his former employer send people to kill him, Dan takes his family and runs, to Las Vegas, without telling them they’re being chased. As far as they know, Dan is being uncharacteristically spontaneous and they’re on a much needed vacation.

As the plot thickens, and Dan does his best to keep his family safe, the road-trip becomes a chance to spend quality time with his family. Bonds cemented, when the truth finally comes out, they rally as a family to thwart the bad guys and save each other.

As positive and life-affirming as this ends up being, the flipside of this wholesome message is altogether more malignant. Scratch a little deeper and you’ll realise you’re complicit in a conspiracy. This happy-go-lucky Jason Bourne is an assassin, a serial-killer, escaping his past misdeeds. There’s something really sinister, even immoral, in the myth that Dan can just walk away from his past. There are no consequences. In fact he does well out of his truth, starting a new business selling his expertise as a security consultant.

On one level The Family Plan is escapist fun, on the other, wish fulfilling for the death-dealers that walk among us. Extrapolate out and you’ll quickly realise, it’s Dan’s world we’re all trying to survive.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16431870/

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Infini (2015)

Infini (2015) is a low budget Australian sci-fi horror with big ambitions. Not a perfect film but it has a certain “punching above its weight” charm.

A well armed, unusually good looking, team of military types are transported, digitally streamed, to a mining facility in a distant part of the galaxy. Tasked with stopping a consignment of dangerous ore from reaching Earth, they must also rescue Wit Carmichael the only survivor of an unknown biological, or parasitic, or alien, outbreak.

Writer director Shane Abbess does a good job of keeping the turns coming, although I think if he’d trimmed out ten or fifteen minutes, tightening up some of the action, resisted the compulsion to prolong the fight scenes, and eased off on the twitch-cuts, he could’ve upped the pacing without losing anything from the story.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3327624/

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Nightwatch (1994)

Nightwatch (1994) is a mid-nineties thriller with Hitchcockian ambitions, that keeps the scares grounded in the creepy location and grim excesses of a slasher’s disturbed mind.

While a serial-killer terrorises, murdering and scalping, the women of the Copenhagen night, struggling law student Martin, the baby faced Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, takes a job as the night watchman at the local morgue.

Weaved into the mystery that sees Martin become the prime suspect, writer director Ole Bornedal contrives to muddy the waters of suspicion by starting a game of dare between Martin and his screwup best friend Jens, Kim Bodnia.

It’s a sub-plot designed to season the pot with possible suspects, and introduce some Freudian anxiety about settling down, but it doesn’t really work, in part because Jens’ behaviour towards Martin feels abusive. This could be hindsight informing my view but why would anyone tolerate Jens’ antics. It gets in the way of the films raison d’etre, a Psychoesque slasher film.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110631/