Deerskin

Rated: MA15+Deerskin

Directed and Written by: Quentin Dupieux

Photography, Editing: Quentin Dupieux

Art and Set Direction: Joan Le Boru

Sound: Guillaume Le Braz, Alexis Place, Gadou Naudin, Cyril Holtz

Starring: Jean Dujardin, Adele Haenel

French with English subtitles

‘I swear never to wear a jacket as long as I live.’

Deerskin first introduces Georges (Jean Dujardin) wearing a green jacket with three plastic buttons.  He parks on the wrong side of the petrol bowser.  And looking at his reflection in the car window he frowns at what he sees.  Then he flushes the jacket in the public toilet.

Yep, Georges is losing it.

The music flares.

And I think to myself, I already like this movie.

The film is character driven and continues to follow Georges.  But there’s another character in this movie.  A jacket.  We meet the beast.  The new jacket: 100% Deerskin.

The way the film flashes to a live deer in the wilderness seals it somehow.  Just how cool the jacket is.  But It’s not. It’s made from the skin of this beautiful innocent animal (see previous flash to said deer in the wilderness).  And, it’s got… fringes.  But Georges LOVES it: ‘Style de tueur (Killer style),’ he says, looking in the mirror.

It just makes me grin.

After that Georges keeps driving.

‘You’re no-where Georges.  You no longer exist.’  That’s what his ex-wife tells him, over the phone.

Georges ends up in the bar of a small village, where he meets the barmaid, Denise (Adele Haenel).  She’s been burnt by love too.  But Georges is a brand-new man in his deerskin jacket.  He tells Denise he’s a film maker.

It makes sense to say he’s a film maker.  He’s been recording film all day, so it’s kinda the same.  ‘No it’s not,’ says the jacket.

Instead of getting to know an available woman, Georges gets to know the jacket as his relationship with this 100% deerskin jacket becomes the subject of Georges’ movie to be.

Killer style indeed.

Director and writer Quentin Dupieux says, ‘I wanted to film insanity.’

And Georges has lost it.  But wow, he’s really enthusiastic about it.

The way Georges insanity is shown is somehow shocking and hilarious.

It’s the same dark humour used in, The Lobster, but less confronting even though there’s more killing…  And this whole jacket business is just so ticklish.

Jean Dujardin (who plays Georges in the film) explains it’s Quentin’s use of space that creates the comedy, ‘It’s in those moments of hesitation that the comedy and drama blend. You’re right on the borderline. All those scenes, for example, in which Georges demands money, or can’t pay. Quentin takes the time to stretch out the sense of malaise, to allow for some lingering doubt. Is Georges going to turn violent? Weep? Laugh? You never know what will happen. Time stands still for a moment, and those little agonies make me want to die laughing.’

Then there’s Georges dream in life – for him, it’s all about wearing this deerskin jacket.  To be the only person wearing… a jacket.  It doesn’t make sense.  But from the perspective of Georges, as he makes a film about his dream, it kinda does.

The character Denise gets it.  She reckons the jacket is like a shell to protect the wearer from the outside world.

I think it’s because Georges hates who he used to be, wearing that green blazer with the three plastic buttons.

Or perhaps Deerskin is just a weirdo movie that’s put together in a way that somehow makes sense.

Whether you analyse the layers or not, I was thoroughly absorbed and entertained from start to finish.

Like Denise says, ‘I’m into it.’

The Vigil

Rated: MA15+The Vigil

Directed and Written by: Keith Thomas

Produced by: J. D. Lifshitz & Raphael Margules of BoulderLight Pictures and Adam Margules

Cinematographer: Zach Kuperstein

Score: Micael Yezerski

Starring: Dave Davis, Menashe Lustig, Malky Goldman, Lynn Cohen, Fred Melamed, Ronald Cohen, Nati Rabinowitz, Moshe Lobel, Efraim Miller, Lea Kalisch and Ethan Stone.

The Vigil has the style of a classic horror, of creaking floorboards and shadows hiding in the dark combined with a different style of story: a Jewish shomer or watchman of the dead, haunted by a monster awakened in a forest during the Holocaust.

Recently moving to ‘Boro’ Park, Brooklyn (a Hasidic community), Yakov (Dave Davis) is adapting to his new life in America.  Having just lost his faith and struggling – having to choose between buying medication or food – the leader of a support group for Jews adapting to their new life says, ‘What matters is that we’re moving forward.’

And underneath all the shadows and monsters, moving forward is the driving theme of the film.

When Yakov is offered the job of shomer, he weighs up his hesitation to return to a life he wants to leave behind versus the offer of money he desperately needs to pay his bills.

All he has to do is sit for five hours and wait for morning.

It only takes fifteen minutes for him to believe he’s losing his mind.

Set over one night, most of The Vigil is set in the house of recently deceased Rubin Lutvak and his wife.  A known recluse, Mr Lutvak was the only surviving member of his family after the Second World War.

It’s all dark and creepy and goes down that path of history and memory so there’s a complete story behind the monster haunting, damned to look back at the past.

Writer and director Keith Thomas has a background as a novelist (The Clarity (2018) and Dahlia Black (2019)) as well as a screenwriter, and he’s taken time to round out the backstory so The Vigil becomes a horror movie, with a difference.

There’s a feeling that this is a unique storyline because the supernatural of the horror is based on Jewish culture and mysticism.  Where four hundred dollars for five hours of time becomes the price of the shomer’s soul, as he becomes haunted by a monster that feeds on the memories of the broken.

And there’s some scares here, I yelped at one point, after being left on the edge with moments where Yakov thinks he can see something, there in the shadows, so I look, not knowing if the mind is playing tricks or if there’s actually something there.

Dave Davis as Yakov is well-cast, believable in his nonchalance and questioning of his sanity.

And the thumping and scratching, the sharp intake of breath and winding soundtrack adds that extra tension, even more during the silence, the pause, the waiting.

The only drawback for me was the portrayal of the monster, those claws not quite convincing.  Not quite as scary as those shadows used to build the suspense.

But overall, The Vigil is worth a watch.

The Wretched

Rated: MA15+The Wretched

Written and Directed by: The Pierce Brothers (Brett Pierce, Drew Pierce)

Produced by: Chang Tseng, Ed Polgardy

Music Composed by: Devin Burrows

Starring: John-Paul Howard, Piper Curda, Zarah Mahler, Azie Tesfai, Kevin Bigley, Blane Crockarell, Jamison Jones.

‘Can’t be lost if we don’t know where we’re going in the first place.’

Opening 35 years ago to a teen girl going to a house to babysit, it’s all pop music and the 80s.  Until she walks down the stairs to the basement…

Fast forward to five days ago and we meet 17-year-old Ben (John-Paul Howard) on his way to visit his dad (Jamison Jones).

Ben’s got a broken arm, his parents are getting divorced and the local kids are mean.  Except Mallory (Piper Curda) – she has a crush.

It’s all a bit teen, even to the spying on the next-door neighbours when they’re about to get it on.

But horrors and teen dramas can be a good mix if the right characters get killed off and the monster’s scary enough.

Enter, the Dark Mother.  A monster of the forest that feeds on the ‘forgotten’, AKA: eats kids.

‘Mum’s acting weird,’ says young next-door neighbour Dillon (Blane Crockarell).

And quite rightly so as the Dark Mother takes possession, creaking, stinking, her flesh rotting, her whispers making ears bleed.

I just didn’t find this Dark Mother particularly scary.

There’s an overreliance on the soundtrack with no real back story to this monster.

The Pierce Brothers (Brett Pierce, Drew Pierce) were inspired by Roald Dahl’s The Witches and the experience of living through their parents’ divorce.  “We cobbled together our favorite aspects of Black Annis, an English legend, and the Boo Hag of the Appalachian Mountains and fused it with our own creepy concepts.”

But the idea behind the monster doesn’t translate.  Adding some history into the film would have given the Dark Mother more meaning, giving the scares more meat.  Instead, she’s a mystery in the film, where all Ben can figure is that it exists.

But it’s not all bad.

The story itself has some twists, and the pacing of the drama is just right.

The dad character adds a playful tone to the otherwise taking-life-way-too-seriously son, Ben:

‘The TV doesn’t have a HDMI port,’ says Ben.

The Dad replies, ‘Did you plug it in?’

Yet there’s no circling back to that 35 years ago beginning of the film, so why start there?

The film lived out its own journey of, can’t be lost if it doesn’t know where it’s going…

All the symbolism was there but then the narrative got too caught up in the teen drama so the drama was better executed than the horror of the dark monster.

Certainly not the worst horror I’ve seen but the few moments of, OK, that just happened, didn’t lift the tension to any genuine scares.

Monos

Rated: MA 15+Monos

Directed by: Alejandro Landes

Written by: Alexis Dos Santos, Alejandro Landes

Starring: Julianne Nicholson, Moises Arias, Sofia Buenaventura, Julian Giraldo, Karen Quintero, Laura Castrillón, Deiby Rueda, Sneider Castro, Paul Cubides.

Monos has been hailed as Lord of the Flies meets Apocalypse Now and with so many obvious parallels I couldn’t help but wonder if this would be a film I had already seen.

As Monos opens, the camera swoops in on a remote outpost atop a mountain, where a band of war orphans shelter in an abandoned bunker. From a distance the terrain is visually arresting and close-up the environment alternates between a muddy and wind-whipped wasteland overhung by great, boiling clouds and a private Shangri-La for the group of underage guerrillas. That is, until the encroaching conflict pushes the squad and their hostage down into the cover of the jungle below.

While Apocalypse Now also tracks an expedition into the tangled depths of the jungle, the primordial setting a mirror to the battle-ravaged psyche of a U.S. colonel gone rogue, Alejandro Landes’s film goes even deeper, beneath the skin to where the blood fizzes and thrums. In the swarming wilderness, birdlike tongue clicks identify the group to itself and a lone giggle rises up into the indifferent skies. With the ever-present helicopter rotors pulsing overhead, echoing both Apocalypse Now and the strains of a thumping heart, Mica Levi’s music score builds into a vast and panoramic soundscape that is at the same time utterly intimate.

Landes’s camera, too, continues this dance between near and far. On one level, telling the story in the traditional way with characters and dialogue and, on another, the soaring camerawork abstracting the experience. Unlike the two earlier films, each viewed through the prism of a single character, Monos is seen through the eyes of its several victims. While this approach does invoke the visceral experience, it also opens up a psychological distance that may not be to everyone’s taste. At the same time, this cinematic distancing also tilts the focus of the film ever so slightly.

Where Lord of the Flies and Apocalypse Now tell intensely human stories that arise from the social and political context of their times, Monos more directly addresses the context. At the outset, these child soldiers playing blind man’s bluff, indulging in communal pashing sessions and so gleefully spraying the slopes around them with machine gun fire enjoy an almost unfettered degree of freedom, but underlying it all are the unspoken fears that come with the threat of adult punishments and all-to-real consequences.

It is a culture shaped by its paramilitary status, but it is also a society populated by those young enough not to have preconceived notions of what a society should be. While the stories told by the two earlier films have emerged from highly organised social structures that they implicitly critique, there is no sense here that these teenagers have ever known a safe haven beyond their earliest years.

As the war encircles them, their micro-society does not so much fall apart as an already harsh regime mutates, morphing into an entity where those that wield the power will do absolutely anything to preserve their fiefdom and those on the receiving end will, equally, risk everything to get out.

Monos is both lyrical and shocking, an experience felt at the level of tissue and bone, and a story playing out, somewhere. Now.

Burden

Rated: MBurden

Directed by: Andrew Heckler

Written by: Andrew Heckler

Produced by: Robbie Brenner, Bill Kenwright

Starring: Garrett Hedlund, Forest Whitaker, Tom Wilkinson, Andrea Riseborough, Tess Harper, Crystal Fox, Usher.

‘Perfect love drives out fear.’

Hitting a sledgehammer through a pane of glass introduces Mike Burden (Garrett Hedlund).  He’s having fun with his mates; he’s teaching kids to be nice.  He’s a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

Based on a true story, Burden shows Mike as he tries to see past his loyalty to the KKK and the father figure who raised him: leader of the KKK, Tom Griffin (Tom Wilkinson).

The film follows Mike as he begins to see past hate and resentment when he meets single mum, Judy (Andrea Riseborough) and how her young son doesn’t see colour, his best mate black and the son of an old high-school friend Clarence (Usher Raymond): someone Mike says to a KKK member he can talk to but wouldn’t sit and eat dinner with.

Set in 1996, tension rises in the small town of Laurens, South Carolina when the Klan opens up, The Redneck KKK Museum.

The black community led by Reverend Kennedy (Forest Whitaker) protests against the glorifying of the KKK’s hateful past.

What the film shows and what writer and director, Andrew Heckler has captured is not just a right and wrong side, or a good versus evil – there’s family and community in the Klan and in the flock of Reverend Kennedy.

The film makes the point of how important family is in the Klan, and how kind.  And how hateful.

From the Klan there’s talk of protection and heritage, then there’s the Reverend talking of love thy neighbour, rebuke evil and the fire of love.

With Forest Whitaker you always know there’s going to be some authentic sincerity – used well here as the Reverend navigates his very human feelings of hate for those who lynched his uncle versus his love of God, to want to rise up to lift others.

Love is what saves Mike – from the increasing violence and threat of murder.  It’s his love of Judy and seeing the world through the innocent eyes of her son.  And it’s the embrace of acceptance and understanding from a man he once would have killed because of the colour of his skin.

I admit, I was bracing myself before watching this film, feeling oversensitive with all the protests and racial tension in the world.  I find the violence in true stories harder to watch.  But Burden is more drama than horror or crime.

This is a film about the individual, about Mike letting go of that American Dream.  And if you don’t get it then it’s got to be someone’s fault.

About needing someone, ‘to step on to feel better.’

By turning away from resentment, Mike becomes free.

And at the moment, any message of Be Kind is very welcome.

Be kind peeps.

Vivarium

Rated: MVivarium

Directed by: Lorcan Finnegan

Written by: Garret Shanley

Produced by: Brendan McCarthay & John McDonnell

Co-Producers: Jean-Yves Roubin, Cassandre Warnauts, Alexander Brøndsted, Antonio Tublen

Starring: Imogen Poots & Jesse Eisenberg.

“The idea of owning your own home has become like a faery tale. Insidious advertising promises ‘ideal living’, a fantasy version of reality that we strive towards. It is the bait that leads many into a trap. Once ensnared we work our whole lives to pay off debts. The social contract is a strange and invisible agreement that we flutter towards like moths to a flame.” – Director, Lorcan Finnegan.

Watching a cuckoo bird kick the other baby bird out of its nest and to see the mother feed the imposter – demanding, destroying, killing – sets the tone of the world young couple, Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) and Gemma (Imogen Poots) find themselves trapped: Yonder: You’re Home Right Now.

Walking into a real estate agent’s office, they follow the creepy agent, Martin (Jonathan Aris) to the Yonder housing development, only to find the creepy agent has left and they can’t seem to find their way out – all they can see are perfect clouds and identical green houses lined up, green and the many shades of green, they always end up back at Number 9.

And inside Number 9 is one blue room, the baby room.  The baby boy room.

‘Do you have any children?’

‘No, not yet,’ Gemma replies with a clap.

‘No, not yet,’ mimics creepy Martin – clap.

Vivarium’s a creepy movie with flashes of sci-fi and the drama of a couple stuck in what becomes a living hell.  Where they’re left with a child to raise who speaks like a man.

It’s tempting to see the comment of young couples getting trapped into these model houses (the point made by director, Lorcan Finnegan), but to also be trapped into having a family, to be fed upon until left as a dry husk…  But raising a family gives back as much as it takes (I’m generalising here).  A Cuckoo bird?  It just takes.

It’s like a survival story where I’d be trying the same things to escape those endless fake green houses and the screaming not-boy.

“I am not your mother,” says Gemma.  Yet she continues to feed him, wash him, put him to bed.

The bulk of the story is the relationship between Tom and Gemma, the tidy build of pressure as time outside of the normal world takes from them more than physical labour or starvation, it’s the psychological toll of living somewhere else that destroys.  The monotony poisons, as the cuckoo bird takes what’s left.

“That’s nature, that’s just the way things are.”

A bleak film, but thoroughly absorbing.

Come to Daddy

Rated: MA15+Come to Daddy

Directed by: Ant Timpson

Based on an Idea by: Ant Timpson

Story by: Toby Harvard

Starring: Elijah Wood, Stephen McHattie, Garfield Wilson, Madeleine Sami, Martin Donovan, Michael Smiley, Simon Chin, Ona Grauer, Ryan Beil.

Based on the idea from William Shakespeare, ‘The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children,’ Come to Daddy has city boy, Norval (Elijah Wood) dragging a silver suitcase through the woods to visit a father who abandoned him when he was five years old.

Dragging his suitcase, he loses his hat.

It’s the beginning of his exposure as being, ‘Full of shit.’

He knocks on the door, ‘Dad, it’s me.  Norval.’

And I wondered how many layers there would be to Norval, to the story, as the mystery of this, Dad becomes more obscure.

What we get is a violent kooky comedy that skirts the line between mystery and weird, the screenplay like a story written by a uni student with father issues.  Which is fine, but it translated like a bad dream rather than a story for a movie because of the many red herrings.

Elija Wood as Norval does a lot of the heavy lifting, being the only ‘normal’ character in the film.

Including a cop describing liars as having ‘raisin eyes’, and a coroner who has ‘no filter’ and no real role in the film.  But I guess that’s true to life, the random strangers that make an appearance, then exit.

I don’t want to give too much away as there are unexpected turns making the film feel original.

But there are more strange moments as the mystery of this unpredictable and alcoholic father are revealed, that don’t quite add up, taking away the already tenuous grasp on that suspension of reality.

To add to that strangeness of gore and obscure, the scenery and setting is beautiful; the beach house, a stilted house overlooking the sea, my favourite part of the film, and aptly described by Norval as, ‘A UFO from the 1960s’.  Cool, right?

And some moments are kinda cool and funny – I say skirting, because the film doesn’t completely cross the line into the bizarre, but there just isn’t enough to stack-up making, Come to Daddy more puzzling than surprising.

Easter Movie List

Nat’s Ten Delightful Movies to Watch Over Easter

JoJo Rabbit

 

Thunder Road

 

Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Paddington 2

Johnny English Strikes Again!

Abominable

 

The Royal Tenenbaums

 

Dean Spanley

 

The Guard

 

Top End Wedding

Dark Waters

Rated: MDark Waters

Directed by: Todd Havnes

Written by: Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan

Based on The New York Times Magazine article, “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare,” by Nathaniel Rich

Produced by: Mark Ruffalo, Pamela Koffler, Christine Vachon

Starring: Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway, Tim Robbins, Bill Camp, Victor Garber, Mare Winningham, William Jackson Harper, Bill Pullman.

Better living through chemistry – that’s the catch phrase from big chem company, DuPont.

For decades the company has been sticking Teflon onto everything: carpet, teeth whitener; it’s the stuff that makes fry pans, non-stick.  The stuff is everywhere, making DuPont one billion a year in pure profit.

When Rob Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) makes partner at a prestigious Cincinnati law firm, it’s everything he and his wife Sarah (Anne Hathaway) have worked for.

Until a couple of farmers from West Virginia turn up at the office with a box full of video tapes of dead or dying cows.

Rob’s grandmother who lives in the area gave the farmers his name because he’s an environmental attorney.  A corporate environmental defence attorney for the chemical companies.

But what Rob sees when he visits his grandmother is enough to sue DuPont, resulting in a case spanning two decades, a case he continues to fight today.

It’s a classic David and Goliath tale of the small people being knowingly poisoned by the big chem company for profit.

Even with compassion fatigue (after seeing so many of these films and after watching what’s on the news), I was still stunned by the evil of a company that would knowingly lace cigarettes of employees with a toxic, man-made chemical to see what would happen.

It’s a stark tale based on the true story and The New York Times Magazine article, “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare,” by Nathaniel Rich.

Adding to the bleak story is the way the film was shot, in the middle of a bitterly cold winter of snow, flat colourless buildings in a small community filled with sick residents.

Stark and Anne Hathaway cast in a wholly unsuitable role – I just couldn’t believe her performance as the housewife: it’s depressing.

Yet, it’s a movie that starts to answer the question of why so many people seem to be getting cancer these days.

Not that every cancer is accountable to the dreaded man-made PFOA compound.  But this is a story of just one of the ‘forever chemicals’ floating around.  That once in the body can never be processed and eliminated.

It’s not the family or the expose that gives this film momentum – the story here is the truth of the story itself.  And it’s bleak.

 

 

Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears

Rated: MMiss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears

Directed by: Tony Tilse

Produced by: Fiona Eagger

Written by: Deb Cox

Based on the Phryne Fisher Mystery Series of Books by: Kerry Greenwood

Starring: Essie Davis, Nathan Page, Rupert Penry-Jones, Miriam Margolyes, Daniel Lapaine, Jacqueline McKenzie, Izabella Yena, Khaled Naga, Nicole Chamoun, John Waters.

‘Let’s kick off our shoes and watch a movie,’ says Essie Davis at the Melbourne premiere, the setting fitting with the character Phryne Fisher being a Melbourne girl.

And hot on the heels (kicked off) of the highly successful TV, lady detective, crime series, Miss Fisher – one of the most successful television brands in Australia and overseas with episodes from the three series capturing audiences of more than a million each week in Australia with the series debut in France gaining an audience of 3.28 million – here, Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears finds Phryne (Essie Davis) in the streets of 1929 Pakistan after 9pm.  With undesirables.

Still up to her saving-the-world-while-dressed-in-the-latest: bright red dresses and the glittering gold sequined fashion of the 1920s, we find Phryne still has no regard for the rules, ‘That’s because they happen to be written by men.’

Rebellion aside, Miss Fisher is on a new case – imagine a Bedouin tribe flourishing for hundreds to thousands of years that is suddenly buried by an apocalyptic sandstorm that covers up the murder of the entire tribe.

Except one lone girl, Shirin Abbas (Izabella Yena).

‘Don’t worry,’ says Phryne.  ‘I’ll find out who murdered your family.’

Based on the books written by Kerry Greenwood, the film has the same style as the TV series that will keep fans happy (although, some may miss side-kick Dot (Ashleigh Cummings) and hubby, Constable Hugh Collin (Hugo Johnstone-Burt)  making only a brief appearance), yet there’s more room for story and intrigue in the movie-length mystery taking Phryne to Jerusalem back to Australia all the way to the sandy deserts of Pakistan.

And it’s funny: ‘Jack, are you there?’ Miss Fisher asks.

‘No,’ he replies.

Yes, the romance continues between the two crime fighters, adding to the charm of the Miss Fisher franchise that translates to the movie here – along with the old worldly humour, clues circled in red lipstick, the belief curses are real and exchanges like:

‘You’re only trying to butter me up.’

‘Like a crumpet.’

So, ‘Forget the tea, crack open the champagne’: Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears is more of the same, but what’s wrong with that? It’s sweet and fun and deserves to be celebrated.

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