A record of the titles I watched in 2024.
The Instigators (2024)
Doug Liman’s heist gone bad film The Instigators (2024) is an alright buddy movie that spices up machine-gun dialogue with a smattering of over the top of action. Written by Chuck MacLea and Casey Affleck, I came away wondering if criminality is a consequence of, or integral to, this thing we call capitalism?
The film’s closing song, Something in the Air by Thunderclap Newman, acts as a parenthesis to the previous hundred minutes, and urges you to think of the titular instigators as revolutionaries. “Call out the instigators, Because there’s something in the air, We’ve got to get together sooner or later, Because the revolution’s here” was written in 1969 by John Keen, and produced by Pete Townsend of The Who.
Apparently the song reflects the social and political upheavals that dominated the late nineteen-sixties. Certainly the generation born just after the Second World War, boomers, were coming of age during the latter half of that decade, and their youthful rejection of old values was “in the air”. But to these ears Something in the Air sounds more like whimsical self-aggrandising than a revolutionary call to arms. The forces created by that generation’s explosive push for equality and individual freedoms, crashed against their complete abdication of responsibility (it’s baked into their mantra “tune in, turn on, drop out”) and ceded whatever gains they made to the reactionary forces they railed against. Their revolution did little more than turn YIPPIES into YUPPIES and set us on track for fifty or more years of neoliberalism.
That realisation has me wondering, when Thunderclap Newman calls out the instigators “Because the revolution’s here” who did they expect to come running? The popular imagination frames sixties radicals as an organised army of firebrands ready to change the world. The reality was a little less romantic. If you’ve “got to get together sooner or later” you’re a disorganised rabble, and a disorganised revolution is little more than a riot, and as we saw recently around the United Kingdom, riots get suppressed, violently. Boomers, for all their talk of change, didn’t have the stomach for that kind of revolutionary violence. Most people don’t. You know who does? Criminals.
Criminals, by definition, reject the laws the rest of us are coerced into obeying. They’re not cowed by state-sanctioned violence that keeps us in our place. Calling out the instigators, is calling on criminals to start trouble, to start a revolution. The thing is, I don’t think the criminal class are that politically motivated. In fact, I’d argue, criminality is more of a manifestation, a distorted reflection, of the self-interest that underpin the wider society. You could say, criminals are just capitalists who got caught.
It should also be understood, authority routinely criminalises once acceptable behaviours to counter “revolutionary” change. Just Stop Oil protester Roger Hallam was recently sent to prison for conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. He got four years for planning to cause an inconvenience to the wider economy. That’s not the same as rejecting law and order, that’s society shifting the goalposts to win an argument.
Liman’s instigators are two screw-up children of the peace generation, ex-marine Rory (Matt Damon) and ex-convict Cobby (Casey Affleck). Both men have issues, their lives a byproduct of the post-boomer, neoliberal, malaise. Rory is in therapy, presumably to treat the traumas suffered during his time in the military, but it could just as easily be his life. Like so many men of his generation, society makes him feel like a failure. Unable to pay what he owes in child support, he’s too embarrassed to face his son. Cobby is a different kind of failure. He has nothing to his name but a smart-bike and a motor-mouth. He did time to protect his junkie brother, taking the blame for his brother’s crime, so he wouldn’t face a third conviction. Habitual offender laws in the United States mean Cobby’s brother would’ve been lamped with a really long sentence.
The instigators are set to work by a local mob boss (Michael Stuhlbarg). He wants Scalvo (Jack Harlow), Rory and Cobby to rob the incumbent mayor’s election campaign. He has insider information that corrupt Mayor Miccelli (Ron Perlman) collects cash, millions in donations, for a seat at his table. The plan is to sneak into the convention centre and empty the safe of Miccelli’s money. They expect to find a safe stuffed with envelopes of untraceable cash, instead they find it empty.
That failure conspires with the crew’s incompetence to get them lost in the conference centre. Wandering the halls they stumble on the Mayor and his cronies, so Scalvo decides “they need to leave with something” and tries to rob the Mayor. In the shootout that follows the Police Chief and Scalvo are killed, and Cobby is wounded.
Fleeing that scene with little more than trinkets (including a bracelet engraved with the combination of the Mayor’s City Hall safe) Rory and Cobby are on the run, chased not only by the entire police force but also by the Mayor’s enforcer Frank Toomey (Ving Rhames). As if that wasn’t bad enough, when their boss hears about the murder of the Chief, he sends someone to silence them.
Rory and Cobby aren’t bad people, they’re just playing a shitty hand, a hand that has them running from one bad choice to the next, until Toomey corners them in a bar and retrieves the Mayor’s bracelet. Escaping that corner is explosive, but rather than doing the sensible thing and fleeing north to Canada, they decide to actually rob the Mayor, by sneaking into the City Hall. Cobby has memorised the numbers on the bracelet, and quickly gets them into his safe. When they’re discovered every gun in the city is fired at them. To escape the shooting gallery they Robin Hood the cash, push the safe out of the window, and let the assembled mob get rich quick.
When the pair are finally arrested they have with them two hard-drives, from the Miccelli’s safe, containing details of his secret off-shore accounts. The hard-drives are a get out of jail free card, because when the new Mayor is given a choice, charge Rory and Cobby and have the drives submitted into evidence, or release the instigators and take over the accounts, one corrupt Mayor is replaced with another, and the boys are set free.
It’s hard not to feel weary, even betrayed, by the truth of the instigator’s world, and how it’s organised. Nothing really matters. All you do is survive. The law won’t protect you against the lawless because in this world’s twisted morality, criminals are the least hypocritical players. At least they’re honest about being criminals. As I said earlier, criminals are just the one’s who get caught. The moral I take from that is simple, don’t get caught.
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon (2023–)
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon (2023–) tries to introduce a spark of faith, of religiosity, to The Walking Dead. When Daryl (Norman Reedus), arguably the best character in TWD universe, washes up on the gloomy shores of France, all he wants is to find a way home, back to the States, back to the people he cares about, but as is always the story for Daryl, he needs to realise his worth, not just to himself but to the people he meets in France.
Daryl can never escape the traumas of his childhood. Neglected and abused by those who should’ve cared for him, it wasn’t until society collapsed, and the world became overwhelmingly vicious, that Daryl was able to find his place. His tolerance for the pain and discomfort of this new world made him resilient when others crumbled, and allowed him to keep those he cares about alive for longer. But this past abuse has taken its toll on his self-worth. When Carol, mid-way through season three of TWD, tells Beth (Emily Kinney) “he has his code”, what she’s referring to is the unflinching loyalty he has to those he cares about, even when that loyalty is misplaced or hurts him. His brother Earl is the prime example. But under his rough demeanour and unrefined manners Daryl is a righteous man. It’s why, when he meets the nun Isabelle (Clemence Poesy) in France, he agrees to help her get her nephew Laurent (Louis Puech Scigliuzzi) first to Paris, then to the Nest and the Union of Hope. Isabelle is an interesting mirror of Daryl, more sophisticated, but equally damaged, not only by the apocalypse but by her life before the hungry ones. The spark between the two is palpable and ripe to teach Daryl his worth.
Another thing this iteration makes me very conscious of are the bad guys. Antagonists within TWD universe are always authoritarian dictators, each seeking to impose their uncompromising will on survivors. It’s the binary that Rick is always battling. There’s Woodbury’s Governor (David Morrissey), the Saviour’s’ Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), and the Civic Republic of Philadelphia’s Major Beale.
In Daryl Dixon this same authoritarian antagonist appears first as Codron (Romain Levi), a local militia leader determined to revenge the death of his brother by killing Daryl. Then, when the group reaches Paris, it’s the leader of the nationalists Pouvoir. I understand why their leader Genet (Anne Charrier) wants Daryl dead, he resisted and won, but I struggle to see why she wants to create a Sixth Republic. Her ambition to punish the elites she blames for the plague, to me at least, feels like class struggle from another time, the world before walkers.
Also, why are Pouvoir collecting walkers from the States and shipping them to France? It’s a plot device that gets Daryl to France, and pits him against Genet, but it’s also absurd, as in illogical. An equally strange development are the jacked-up zombies, shot up with stimulants, even more aggressive, and able to move fast. What external threat reasoned their creation? Finally, there’s also Daryl’s vision of the messianic Laurent in the tunnels below Paris, surrounded by walkers that just pass him by. Collectively it all feels like something from The Asylum’s Walking Dead rip-off Z Nation, and out of place in the actual Walking Dead.
My hope is the choices for season one will all become clearer in the coming episodes. Daryl deserves some real adventures.
The Watchers (2024)
The Watchers (2024) suffers from a distinct lack of enigma. The opening act is intriguing enough but this initial promise gradually dissipates, gets diluted by the desire to explain too much.
Mina (Dakota Fanning) is haunted by the death of her mother in a car accident. Running from the trauma, she flees her home in the States, landing in the west of Ireland, where she works in a pet shop.
When a pet bird needs delivering to a customer in Belfast, Mina agrees to drive it there. Her journey starts on the winding roads of the Irish countryside, then inexplicably goes off-road, taking her into the depths of a dark forest. When the car breaks down, all the electronics, including her phone, flicker and die, she has no choice but to start walking.
Alone, with only the bird for company, it’s not long before the shadows are closing in and she’s lost, sure she’s being stalked by something. Then, in what might be the best image of the film, a door in the forest opens and a white-haired woman gives Mina an ultimatum. She has a count of five to get inside before the door is closed and she’s alone, victim to whatever’s out there. Mina’s frantic sprint, the door locking, is followed by something monstrous slamming into the door, and skittering over a glass fronted bunker, the Coop.
Out of the frying pan and into the fish bowl, Mina becomes one of four subjects, watched by something malevolent in the trees. Trapped by the forest, it’s just too far to walk out, the mysterious creatures return each night to watch them. There’s a certain irony in this dynamic, that has more to do with punishment than curiosity. And it’s the unpicking of this mystery that gradually overwhelms the story. Writer director Ishana Shyamalan, M. Night’s daughter, feels it’s necessary to explain everything. You don’t have to. I would’ve enjoyed it more if I’d joined the dots, rather than having the shape drawn for me.
Sleeping Dogs (2024)
Sleeping Dogs (2024) feels more like an exercise in maintaining screenplay logic than a dynamic piece of storytelling.
Former detective Roy Freeman (Russell Crowe) has Alzheimer’s. The routines of his life are catalogued as lengths of tape, notes stuck to every surfaces of his apartment, each a reminder he can no longer trust himself.
Alzheimer’s played a major part in season three of True Detective (2014- ). There it felt integral to the story. Here it feels deployed, introduced so other parts of the plot can make sense. The most obvious example is the experimental treatment for Roy’s Alzheimer’s. Doctors have inserted electrodes into his brain, to both halt his decline and help him regain his memories. Without this contrivance the plot doesn’t work. Roy wouldn’t agree to meet the death row inmate, a man he helped convict for the murder of Dr. Joseph Wieder (Marton Csokas). He certainly wouldn’t consider the man’s protestations of innocence, or agree to reexamine his case, but because of the treatment he does and he can.
As Roy goes back over his files, and starts to question anyone connected to the case, another clumsy plot device gets deployed. He is given a manuscript written by Richard Finn (Harry Greenwood), one-time assistant to the murder victim. As events in the manuscript are recounted, it not only explains the complicated relationship between Finn, Wieder, and Finn’s girlfriend Laura Baines (Karen Gillan), their personal and professional jealousies, it also offers up and points the finger at Baines as a possible killer. Without this map Roy wouldn’t go looking for Baines, realise she changed her name and published part Wieder’s work as her own, nor would he reconnect with Jimmy Remis (Tommy Flanagan), his partner when he was a detective.
The relationships and connections that unfold strain the shreds of credibility, especially when we get to the closing few minutes of the film. I was left wondering why any of them cared enough to take the actions they did? Jimmy’s loyalty to Roy is understandable, but how they both connect to Baines lacks the motivation for what follows. It’s as if the film confuses plot with story, leaving information where emotion should land.
On the plus side Crowe is watchable enough, as are most of the cast, but nothing can make up for the fancies of the screenplay.
No One Will Save You (2023)
At first glance No One Will Save You (2023) is a standard alien invasion movie, but beyond the obvious, surviving the takeover of the planet plot, the story is actually about dissociation caused by trauma.
Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) lives an isolated life that has the feel of a fairytale. Alone in a massive house, she spends her time sewing dresses, then selling what she makes to customers by post. The point is, she’s alone, happy to sip wine under an umbrella by her pond, while penning letters to her friend Maude. On the surface it’s idyllic, as if she’s a character in a Disney film, minus the animated birds flitting about helping.
But it quickly becomes apparent Brynn’s life is a little more complicated, there’s something darker in her isolation. When delivering packages to the mailbox in town, she does her best to avoid the locals, and it would seem they do their best to avoid her. My initial impression was, she’s a ghost, people can’t see her, or when they do she’s a strange apparition, hence the puzzled angry looks. It might also explain why she doesn’t get to speak.
There can’t be more than three lines of dialogue in the whole film. There are grunts and sighs of exertion but nothing you’d consider an exchange of words. The real reason for Brynn’s selective mutism is revealed in the third act but this lack of talking is intriguing. It starts out as a byproduct of Brynn’s isolation, then morphs into a filmic gimmick, she has no voice, finally landing as a mirror of the alien’s sonic clicks and pops.
The second act is a game of escape and evade between Brynn and an assortment of aliens that chase her, determined to feed her some kind of mind controlling parasite. Although the aliens come in a variety of sizes, they all share the familiar asexual grey, long limbed, bulbous black eyes, seen in so many abduction films. There’s a certain nostalgia in the way they look, an aesthetic that grips the rest of the film. This nostalgia is how Brynn dissociates from her actions in the past, it’s a place where there’s forgiveness for the unforgivable. Another reason perhaps for the feeling we have by the end, we’re in Brynn’s subconscious, in some kind of pacifying construct.
Nostalgia is a lie, a false remembering of the past, but used as a language the way writer director Brian Duffield does here, it creates something of an enigma, and allows Brynn to resolve her trauma, her need to be forgiven, with the suitably sentimental end.
Blood (2022)
Written by Will Honley and directed by Brad Anderson, the understated Blood (2022) takes vampire lore along a dirt track cut in the undergrowth by maternal love and hardened by addiction.
Jess (Michelle Monaghan), a nurse at the local hospital, is in the throes of an acrimonious divorce. Her soon to be ex-husband Patrick (Skeet Ulrich), is using her addiction to OxyContin, as leverage to get custody of their two kids, Owen (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong) and Tyler (Skylar Morgan Jones).
Now clean, and desperately trying to start over, Jess and her children move into the ancestral home, a rundown farmhouse on the outskirts of town. It’s hard not to see the once bucolic setting is a metaphor for her addiction. The old pictures decorating the walls show the house in healthier times, when the furniture was cleaner, and the pond out back was so full you could take a boat out fishing. These days the wallpaper is peeling, the inherited furniture is tatty, and the pond is sick. A quagmire of stinking mud and rotting carcasses, surround a diseased tree that looks possessed.
As they unpack and get settled the family dog, the annoyingly named Pippin, gets spooked by something in the surrounding woods, and chases into the shadows after it. Lost for a day or so, a changed Pippin returns. Snapping and snarling the deranged beast attacks Owen, biting chunks from the boy, before Jess beats it to death.
Rushed to hospital, the doctors save Owen, but his condition repeatedly rallies and relapses, only showing signs of recovery when, during a particularly violent fit, he pulls himself free of the machines monitoring his vitals, and sucks down a bag of blood, gulping on claret like an alcoholic falling off the wagon.
As Owen’s condition improves, his need for blood escalates, and Jess if forced to take ever more desperate measures to keep him healthy. At first it’s stealing blood from hospital supplies. Then feeding him the blood of animals. But when that causes him to fit, she resorts to the forced exsanguination of a terminally ill woman, kidnapped from the hospital carpark. But nothing can keep up with Owen’s use. And when supplies run low Jess starts feeding him her own blood. Weak and fatigued Patrick accuses her of using again, and takes custody of the children, with devastating effects.
By stripping away the supernatural elements of vampire lore, and concentrating on the domestic, Honley and Anderson create an even more desperate set of choices for Jess. Her son’s addiction is her addiction and only when she faces it, beats it, can she save her family.
The Outwaters (2022)
The Outwaters (2022) feels more like an art film from days of materialist filmmaking than a piece of narrative cinema.
I’m sure I’ve watched the same concept in a different context, probably at the London Filmmaker’s Co-op before it merged with London Video Arts and became LUX. I have indistinct memories of sitting in a classroom sized warehouse with boarded up windows, as details of a landscape, picked out with a spotlight, flicker on screen.
What narrative there is gets framed as found footage, or more accurately found memory cards. The unedited footage details the disappearance of four people who travelled into the Mojave Desert to shoot a music video. But the desert is not a friendly place. First unearthly sounds haunt the night, then the silhouette of a man holding an axe appears on the horizon.
The second half of the film is an escalating chaos of abstract images, jump cuts and strange camera angles, revealing frantic glimpses of the desert as a bloody crime scene, accompanied by a soundtrack of screams and distressed atmospherics, all designed to overwhelm the viewer.
The film’s lead Robbie Banfitch also produced, wrote, directed, edited, and designed the sound for the film. For me, this takes the idea of subjective filmmaking, inherent in all first person found footage movies, to new levels of subjectiveness. His is the kind of multi-disciplinary approach more favoured by gallery artists.
This in turn makes me wonder about context. How you understand the film depends on where you see it. Screened in a cinema it’s one thing, shown in a room at Tate Modern it’s something else, and streamed to your television makes it something altogether different. Unfortunately I’m not sure watching it at home was really the place to see it for the first time. In this context it’s hard not to accuse Banfitch of being chaotic and a little self-indulgent.
The Mill (2023)
The Mill (2023) feels like a latter day episode of The Twilight Zone (1959-), one that’s trying to alert us to the soul sucking purgatory of corporate life. The thing is, we all know these jobs are a pointless hell.
Corporate cog in the Mallard Corporation Joe (Lil Rel Howery) wakes up in an open air cell. High walls enclose a sandy floor with a millstone set in the middle. It’s Joe’s job to push this wheel in circles, notching up revolutions, day after day, so he can earn his way back to his pregnant wife and see his son born.
But as the demands of the Mallard algorithms become increasingly unachievable, Joe is pushed to his limits and beyond. Tormented by adverts promoting Mallard products, forced to survive on canteen food pushed through a hatch in the door, he becomes increasingly antagonistic to the company holding him, and tries everything he can to escape.
Director Sean King O’Grady and writer Jeffrey David Thomas do an okay job of realising the premise, but a single location that keeps Howery on screen for most of the film is a tough ask. There are two ways to handle this kind of constraint. You can either keep the dialogue to a minimum, have the character work things out and follow that struggle, or contrive the disembodied voice of someone in an adjacent cell. That way Joe has someone to talk to. The problem is, this disembodied voice serves no other function, he’s only there to explain what’s happening, and for me it’s a weak choice.
It would be wrong to call this an allegory, even a heavy handed one, because there is no hidden meaning. It’s clear from the off it has the Sisyphean demands of corporate culture firmly in its sights. Company targets and group quotas, individual effort and personal growth, are just corporate catchphrases to hide slavery, and who wants that?
The Conference (2023)
The Conference (2023) is a Swedish comedy horror that swims in a lake filled by the tributaries of Severance (2006) and Death Wish (1974 and 2018). It’s a film of two impulses, desire and wrath, a warning to greed, unfettered ambition will be checked by vengeance.
When an assortment of municipal workers, whose only connection is the office they share, retreat to a remote lakeside camp to finalise plans for a new shopping mall, it doesn’t take long for the cracks to show. As they suffer through some old fashioned team building exercises, one half of the group uncovers the corruption of the other, exposing a litany of false promises and dodgy deals, forged signatures and stolen farms.
But it’s not the threat of being found out or rule of law that puts pay to the venality, instead it’s the wrath of a local who metes out justice, seeks vengeance for this corruption by killing as many camp residents as possible.
Director Patrik Eklund does a good job of keeping the splatter gushing, as the mysterious murderer dons the mask from a Swedish charcoal burner costume, and sets about killing and maiming some really unlikable characters. There’s something funny about the oversized vinyl head, the mascot for the new mall, black eyes and permanent grin, chasing people through the forrest.
I’m not sure I’d watch it again, but it was fun while it lasted.
You must be logged in to post a comment.