LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT

 

The first half abstracts itself to such a fragmented degree its noir romance becomes slippery to the point of inscrutable but its that inscrutability that makes it mesmerising. The details are tantalizing: a lost love in a green dress, a broken clock with a photo hidden in its back, a book with a poem that's a spell for making a house spin, a naive ghost who likes a good game of ping pong . The enigmatic languor may be familiar to anyone who's seen Kaili Blues but the suck of this one is how musical it also is, not necessarily the actual music in it, much as there's a lot of that, and a lot of it good, but more in the way it opens itself up, and the way I come to it. When we get to the second half, with its fifty plus minute single take in 3D, everything coheres but in cohering becomes even more abstract and beautiful. It may come on like bells and whistles, sure, and it is a technical marvel, but it’s bells and whistles that actually elevate the work rather than merely garnish it. The ending is a swoony, breathtaking rush. Late to the party but make way for a new favorite.

LAMB

 

Child-rearing as a horror trope has staked its own tiny piece of real estate in the genre but this one is leeched of the grimy weirdness that marks its more prominent neighbors (Eraserhead, Little Otik, It's Alive!) starting off as an emotionally ambiguous push and pull between the bliss of quotidian routine and how claustrophobic all that expanse can get when you're dealing with very insular traumas. Its lack of hurry and matter-of-fact tone and ravishing locales gain slow burn traction with me, and in making the eponymous baby metaphor more cute than creepy, almost always seen in bright daylight at that, the inevitable sliding into folk tale freakishness is all the more potent for it.

FIRST REFORMED

 

Deepens on second watch not least for reminding me how intentionally Bressonian a character Travis Bickle was (ask Schrader, ask Scorsese) but it's the severity of everything, itself a Bressonian quality, that tipped me over into something closer to love than the first time. And by everything, I mean everything, from the stark framing to the apocalyptic melancholia to the craggy despair and desperation of Ethan Hawke's Ernst Toller, all of which feels not only more pronounced now but exacerbated, perhaps by personal circumstance, perhaps by the condition of the world at the moment, that the ending becomes even more cathartic and exhilarating than I remember it.

MONSTER

 

Not like that over-familiar Kurosawa go-to, no, not really, because the story here doesn't shape-shift in the telling and re-telling, just gets slanted at angles, reveals sides to it that were always there, just slightly out of eyeshot, but also profoundly out of reach, given how fortified and calcified the borders of our perspectives tend to be. At first, I thought this was an adaptation of Taiyo Matsumoto's Go Go Monster manga, but they couldn't be more polar as opposites, even if in my head they make sense as the oddest companion pieces. Which is to say that my coming in blind may have been more crucial to my eventual giving over to it and it may be a public service on my part not to talk too much about such boring things as what it's about, except to say that Sakura Ando and the two boys, Soya Kurokawa and Hinata Higari, are presences to behold, and I may be alone in how I read that ending, everybody else seems to think otherwise. It's not lacking for images that grip you and squeeze (the principal's last shot, the muddy window, that culvert at night) but it's really the form the unfurling takes that gives everything dramatic torque and emotional resonance, the soft push and pull of the misdirection, and the way Ryuichi Sakamoto's minimalist and beautiful, yet at some points nearly transcendent, piano figures waft in, atmospheric but also terribly aware, less augmentation, more last piece of the puzzle. Always been a casual Kore-Eda stan, even if his After Life is a desert island film, but this is me crying and gushing. 

TALK TO ME

 

The high concept of this one, no pun intended, is possession as a drug you can drop, which is must admit clever-ish. The places it takes that horrorwise veer from gleefully and spookily tense to been-there-guess-we-can-do-this-again but what got under my skin most is every scene with the injured kangaroo and it's the knotty teenage tensions that tend to be more emotionally suspenseful. But good job for being the first horror movie since the Austrian Goodnight Mommy to make me look away from the screen at one scene. Fresh faces, too, fresher accents

BUTTERFLY KISSES

 

I now know what a butterfly kiss means. Don't trust me when I say that this one is worth your trouble. My love for found footage runs long and deep and to such an unconditional degree, it's borderline irrational. Even the ones I admit are bad are always worth my trouble.  This one takes an over-familiar found footage trope (the box of tapes found in the basement) spins it into another over-familiar found footage trope (the filmmaker who discovers the box of tapes editing them) and spins that into another over-familiar found footage trope (the mockumentary documenting everything) and along the way manages not only to be a sort of meta-commentary on found footage but also one of the spookier ones in the much put-upon subgenre, often unfairly maligned for its deficiencies in terms of narrative and craft which I, on the other hand, see as a new cinematic syntax. I'd go on and on arguing for the subgenre but maybe this is not the place for my fanboy gush, no matter how articulate it could potentially get. Oh, this one gets extra points for throwing resonant shade at clout chasing.

NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU

I was thinking of the Slumber Party Alien Abduction episode of V/H/S 2 the whole time watching this. Always found it unfair to compare one film to another even if this arguably is the same film, but couldn't help myself, sorry. Not going to pick favorites, though. This is its own thing and has It's own perks, not least the silent treatment, quite refreshing to watch an American horror film where none of the characters seem inclined to have a say and quite refreshing, too, to watch an American horror film that indulges the subgenre's hard-on for expository infodump but feels less grating because it's all visual but more than that, emotionally and dramatically justifies it, too. There's a first.

COBWEB

Stays a few steps ahead by pretending it's a few steps behind, This is not the Kim Jee-Won film but rather a mash-up of Parents with Ringu with Barbarian which for a good fun while, makes it make sense. Then it asks its "Sadako" to explain everything and until that point, I'd forgotten this was an American horror film, not least because Bodin is French and the director of Marianne and that show's grasp of transgressive weirdness and ambiguity does leak and seep into some of this. The Rapunzel sequence rescues the film from that expository mishap then gets lazy again with the obligatory "but there's more" end sequence that does feel obligatory. Fun enough.