C | A man infiltrates an isolated cult to rescue his sister in turn-of-the-century Wales. Directed by Gareth Evans Starring Dan Stevens, Michael Sheen, and Lucy Boynton Review by Jon Kissel |
Welsh director Gareth Evans’ first three movies, Merantau and the two Raid movies, put him at or near the top of the list for martial arts filmmaking. His work with Indonesian casts are sweaty, bone-crunching monuments to the brutality of feet, fists, and elbows crashing into an opponent, and they put most other action movies, martial arts or not, to shame. They are also some of the most violent movies I’ve ever seen, particularly Raid 2. Evans has moved on from Jakarta-set crime epics to period horror with Apostle, leaving behind almost all of the hand-to-hand combat but keeping the violence and gore. Evans pays tribute to earlier movies about creepy British cults like The Wicker Man or Kill List while putting his own stamp on the subgenre with some eyelid-searing imagery and unique cinematography. A more complex story than his earlier work slows Evans down and reveals the limits of his powers, but Apostle bolsters a director whose visual sense is impeccable even if he might need some help in the writer’s room.
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The tropes of horror movies have to come from somewhere, and it seems like a lot of them come from Sam Raimi’s micro-budget cult classic The Evil Dead. Whether or not this is the first ‘cabin in the woods’ type film, it certainly isn’t the last. The film warns its characters from taking certain actions, warnings that are duly ignored. Behavior makes little to no sense, but as long as it leads to more violence and thrills, who cares. There isn’t the repayment of sexuality with death and dismemberment exactly, though there is a gross scene of exploitation that even Raimi says he regrets. As one of the titans of horror, Raimi is familiar enough with all these tropes that much of the rest of his career has been spent commenting on them, but the film that made his name is played as a straight-ahead, claustrophobic gorefest. Future installments will send his giant-jawed protagonist back to the Middle Ages but Ash Williams’ introduction is your average tale of Sumerian ghosts and the bodies they inhabit, at least until they explode in a shower of creamed corn.
John Carpenter’s The Thing, a body horror paranoid thriller with a bleak ending, could only be pitched more directly at this viewer if it was set during the French Revolution. This is a staple of 80’s genre cinema and remains thoroughly watchable almost 40 years after its release. After several viewings, it still prompts winces and cackles, and remains a great film to watch in a group, peering over at the uninitiated to see how they react at certain perfectly pitched surprises. A commercial and critical flop in its own times, The Thing has enjoyed a reevaluation as a beloved cult classic and spawned imitators in film and video games. Carpenter doesn’t sustain perfection in the run-up to a near-perfect ending, but this is still an all-timer horror movie.
Grief as a motivating theme in horror movies has been a dominant trend, especially amongst the arthouse horror genre of which Midsommar is a part. Directed by Ari Aster, Midsommar is the follow-up to Hereditary, his debut film that opens with a funeral and features a few more before the end credits. Before Aster broke out, he was preceded by The Babadook, Goodnight Mommy, and The Witch, all of which background some unspeakable loss in their characters’ lives and then either compound that trauma or personify it in some terrifying visage. It’s not like this is a new development, as you can’t tell a ghost story without a dead body, but the last several years have accentuated emotional rawness and heightened feelings of dread over horror’s usual jump scares, both tactics that make what’s viewed as a B-genre more meaningful. There’s plenty of meaning to be found on the walls and in the background of Midsommar, a film that combines its thinking on grief with a cult, something that always sparks my interest. Aster doesn’t quite top himself after the intensity of Hereditary, but he’s two-for-two thus far, and just as able to create tension in broad daylight as he was in Hereditary’s pitch black.
Nicolas Winding Refn works at two opposite poles, with raw crime stories at one end and deliberately frosty exercises in audience estrangement at the other. Whether he’s making Drive or Valhalla Rising, there’s always going to be a mostly silent protagonist surrounded by people Refn largely doesn’t like and a lot of red, both in the lighting or as an aftereffect from some grotesque act of violence. For the Danish director’s 10th film, The Neon Demon is a balanced medium between what makes him compelling and frustrating. It tells a coherent story with recognizable people in it, but it also contains surrealist touches that are included because why the hell not. A film set in fashion and modeling is going to have the requisite amount of style and misanthropy, because making fun of the fashion world is low hanging fruit. That I can describe a film with corpse fondling and cannibalism as middle-of-the-road suggests what kind of filmmaker Refn is. |
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