Out of Sight: NO SUDDEN MOVE

Steven Soderbergh’s small and satisfying No Sudden Move gets by on style and the sheer propulsive pleasure of plot. His filmmaking is so slick and precise that he can serve both at once. He’s a master of aesthetic detail — here a 50’s period piece shot with vintage anamorphic lensing and modern digital sheen — and of storytelling. Together the images pop with meaningful blocking and striking compositions, while the tight compelling story unfolds and unfolds and unfolds. The screenplay sets up an Elmore Leonard-style schemes-within-schemes Detroit crime caper that locates that town’s mid-century power structures: cops, cars companies, and mobsters. Then it watches as one little scam grows out of control simply because it pops off and cuts across all three lines of influence. We start with low-level criminals (Don Cheadle, Benicio del Toro, Kieran Culkin) hired to help watch the family of an accountant (David Harbour) as he’s forced at gunpoint to go to the office and take some car component designs out of a safe. It’s not so simple. The intelligence of Ed Solomon’s screenplay, beyond the clever wit to the dialogue and clockwork connections between people, is to catch all the characters in the middle of their own complicated lives, with unexpected interpersonal variables and cross-conflicts. This is just one more thing to throw a wrench into so many plans. Soon we have murder and infidelities and home invasion and bags of money and calls up the chain of command. Everyone needs to get their hands on this problem, ostensibly to solve it to their liking, but really to try to come out a little richer. 

Along the way, we get a little wiser to the corruption floating through Detroit at the time, and Soderbergh sharply draws our attention to the futility behind the characters’ competing goals. They scurry around, and there’s always someone higher up to swoop in to wave a gun, to make new deals, or to propose a better scam on top of the other scams. It’s the kind of crime picture that can introduce new big name actors to step in with a complication an hour or an hour and a half into the proceedings and it feels like yet another pleasurable twist. The large, well-cast ensemble — also including Brendan Fraser, Julia Fox, Jon Hamm, Amy Seimetz, Noah Jupe, Frankie Shaw, Bill Duke, and more surprises throughout — expertly navigates the twists and turns by being locked in on their own particular duties and struggles. Some show marvelous in-over-their-heads exasperation, while others are rattled and sidelined, and still more think they’re in total control. Maybe. Maybe not. Some are too smart for their own good; others can’t even grasp how behind they are. There’s no sudden move out of this when the motor city’s most corrupt are out to stop forward progress. This trust-no-one caper is briskly, crisply entertaining on a scene by scene level as it adds up to yet another of Soderbergh’s pleasurable genre experiments, and a recapitulation of his oft returned-to maxim: “When the person in charge won't get to the bottom of something, it's usually because they are at the bottom of that something.”

Creatures of the Fright: ALIEN: COVENANT

The dictates of blockbuster franchising have taken Alien, Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece of a claustrophobic spaceship creature feature, and expanded its grim point of view. Each iteration sends a crew of humans into space never to return, devoured inevitably by the memorable, acid-dripping, body horror-manifesting, otherworldly beasties. Through sheer repetition and accumulation of incident, this is now a rigorously cold and isolating perspective for a popular film series. It says humans are capable of great things – space travel and sci-fi tech and all that stuff – but that we will invariably mess it up. We’re doomed, essentially. Our species will bump up against our cognitive and sociological limitations to die alone in the cold emptiness of outer space. Fitting that the franchise which began with the tagline “In space, no one can hear you scream,” has only made the sentiment darker, sadder, and more disturbing.

After largely enjoyable sequels helmed by a rotating director’s chair of popcorn auteurs (James Cameron, David Fincher, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Paul W.S. Anderson), Scott took control once more with the 2012 prequel Prometheus. That brilliantly austere film asked big philosophical questions about creation and existence in cold frames and cool designs while still managing a pulpy monster movie sending an all-star cast to their memorable dooms. A direct sequel to the prequel, Alien: Covenant doesn’t manage the balance quite as well, but Scott is a consummate craftsman, able to navigate complex sequences and ambitious design for an intelligently crafted picture. It may just be another Hollywood spectacle riffing on images from once original concepts long since passed into brand deposits. But would that all such productions be made with such considered design and calculated awe. Here is a movie made by filmmakers at the height of their powers, executed with tension and dread, heightened by a sense of the eerie and sublime. At one point, it packs a mind-bending epic into a short, evocative flashback – images of spinning spaceships raining Black Death on an old future world – wrapped in 19th century poetry intoned by an inscrutably villainous android. Talk about handsome pulp.

The film follows a predictable pattern, first introducing a large crew on a colonization mission to a distant planet. Something goes wrong mid-flight and they awake to hear a distress call slightly off their course. They check it out, and are immediately imperiled by mysterious creatures who latch on to their anatomies and don’t let go – not just the series’ famous facehuggers, but spores that bore into nostrils and ear drums, and embryonic aliens birthed by splitting men in two with geysers of gore. The screenplay by John Logan and Dante Harper does not ask much of its famous faces, but the welcome likes of Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demian Bichir, Jussie Smollett, Carmen Ejogo, and Amy Seimetz go a long way to selling the weary professionalism and increasingly frazzled nature of deep space dilemmas slowly morphing into all-out survivalist horror. Best is Michael Fassbender as the crew’s android Walter, a kindly protective useful thing, and David, the older model abandoned on a dead world with a human survivor (Noomi Rapace) after the events of the previous film. He’s now becoming something of a mad scientist with an ego to match. The dual role plays between a new, perfectly manicured robot built to serve and an old robot who has unsettlingly developed eccentricities and long shaggy hair. Any movie that can stop dead in its tracks for twin androids to practice playing the recorder and maintain the film’s core creepiness is alright in my book.

Scott designs the movie with a tension between the wild sci-fi scope of his gods’ and monsters, intelligent design, dark, space epic and the tiny, drooling, chamber piece horror as the characters are confronted with the terror of the unknown. We see in the robots and spaceships – and the long, loving, detailed effects shots of the technology in action – hints of Kubrick’s 2001 and Scott’s own Blade Runner, but he’s mostly riffing on his own franchise at this point, feeding plots and images back into the ouroboric endeavor of big-screen mythmaking. We’ve been here before, but never exactly like this. It has humans capable of traveling into the unknown only to be brought down by their own hubris, caught between forces beyond their control – nature – and those which they begat – technology. The universe doesn’t care. Either way, they’ll die. It’s the exact opposite of his last feature, The Martian, which said all outer space problems can be solved through science, teamwork, and determination. Here he’s ensured his flagship franchise is an entertaining and deeply pessimistic one, encompassing killer robots, drooling monsters, ancient aliens, and intergalactic genocide. The deliberate one-by-one slasher pace set against the backdrop of vast mysterious vistas and beguiling futurist detail this time finds its cast a mere facet of the production design, a routine but ponderous formula that works well enough again.

House Hunters: YOU'RE NEXT

You’re Next is an “…and then all but one dies” horror movie. In this case a couple celebrates their 35th wedding anniversary by inviting their grown children and their significant others to spend the weekend…and then all but one dies. The deaths involve stabbings mainly, although a few other forms of bodily harm are deployed. The killers are the creeps in animal masks – pure white rubber things – who are otherwise completely dressed in black and lurking around outside this dark evening. They interrupt the festivities during dinner, conveniently interrupting a burgeoning tiff between two of the brothers, by shooting arrows from a crossbow into the dining room. What an anniversary present, huh? The movie proceeds in much the way you’d expect, with dark corridors and ominous noises and threatening shapes that move into the back of the frame out of focus before mysteriously disappearing before causing harm. The better to scare us later, I guess.

The hows and whys of the whole ordeal come to light by the film’s end, however unconvincingly and forced. By then I had pretty much stopped caring, but almost appreciated the movie’s dedication to placing payoffs before setup to a certain extent, except in the case of agonizingly obvious setups that take forever to pay off. When it comes to grading horror movies, a certain amount of arbitrary physical response factors into the final judgment. You’re Next is trying so hard to scare, with a trembling score that kicks up every time we’re supposed to be on the edge of our seats and portentous framing that lingers compulsively on sharp objects and doors ajar. It’s so repetitively insistent on its scariness and suspense that I found myself worn out from a lack of response on my part. I sat there with the hair on the back of my neck firmly flat, the flesh of my arms resolutely unmarked by goosebumps, my heart rate steady, my spine without even the slightest tingle.

There’s something to be said for the ritualistic appeal of horror movies, even if they don’t make for an entertaining experience in and of themselves. Here we have the cold open kills, followed by a smash cut to setup as the characters gather in a big house in the country. It starts out as something of a bland family dramedy if it weren’t for the score going about its ominous business in the background and the camera prone to slinking off to find the odd bits of foreshadowing placed in corners of its attention. There’s the freshly retired father (Rob Moran) and anxious mother (Re-Animator’s Barbara Crampton, a living reminder of better horror films past). There’s an English professor son (A.J. Bowen) and his ex-student-turned-girlfriend (Step Up 3D’s Sharni Vinson). There’s a daughter (Upstream Color’s Amy Seimetz), her boyfriend (talented horror director Ti West), two more sons (Joe Swanberg, Nicholas Tucci) and their respective girlfriends (Sarah Myers and Wendy Glenn). Things are gently tense, like a bad family reunion you wouldn’t want to go to, especially since they aren’t your family and you don’t know anyone there or why they’re so prickly with each other.

By the time the arrows start flying and the blood starts flowing, the movie lurches into action. Having unconvincingly set up the family dynamics, we now watch as each and every character is terrified, threatened, assaulted, and eventually killed in ways that are awfully generic as far as horror kills go. The one marginally clever kill, right near the end, is gross and unexpected. When one character asks where’s so-and-so, another responds by flatly describing the implement of death. The response? “Oh? Okay.” There’s a comical flatness to the proceedings, with little sense of escalation. One character – Vinson’s – jumps into action so quickly, ordering people around, strategizing the best way to fight back and stay alive, that the movie’s almost over before we get a tossed off explanation for her eerily helpful survivalist skills. Another character spends longer than you’d think wandering around with an arrow stuck in his back. The way the characters react is largely laughable, sometimes on purpose, but just as often to suit the convenience of the strained plotting.

Directed by Adam Wingard and written by Simon Barrett, the movie had its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2011, building up some good word of mouth on the festival circuit before being bought and shelved by Lionsgate. The company has finally seen fit to release it now in a dubiously complimentary late-August release date. In the meantime Wingard and Barrett collaborated on short horror contributions to the punishing omnibus films V/H/S and The ABCs of Death. The years of wait are a mixed blessing for You’re Next, building anticipation that could easily leave an audience wondering what all the fuss was about. I found myself wondering, what with these fresh voices and a cast culled from their friends and colleagues from the festival circuit, why this was the best the filmmakers could come up with. It’s a thin, rote horror movie that goes about getting its attempts at scares in the same old way with the same old bloody tired tools. By the time the movie drags itself through its lame twists and the full extent of the attackers’ plot is known, I wasn’t surprised or entertained. I was simply wondering why the characters went to all that trouble. Surely there was an easier way.

Color Wield: UPSTREAM COLOR

Reader, it will do neither of us any good if I pretend here that I have anything approaching a definitive understanding of Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color. It’s a deliberate, persistent befuddlement, the work of a puzzlemaster carefully, solemnly revealing each and every piece without once letting us glimpse the overall design. Characters speak as if in a trance, if they speak at all. Images, full of carefully obscured import slowly pile up into a collection of textures of sound and image, color and emotion. It’s as intriguing as it is irritating. Carruth’s first film, the similarly complicated and elusive Primer, made for a mere $7,000 and meeting some acclaim upon release in 2004 before becoming something of a modern cult classic, is a sci-fi time travel film of pretzeling timelines told with simple staging and cold strings of jargon that exert a push and pull of mystery and confusion. I find it invigorating. With Upstream Color, however, I felt no pull, only push.

None of that is to say this film is particularly punishing or unspeakably incomprehensible. The narrative makes some sort of intuitive sense, even as the edits, each and every cut, appear to line up more with mood and music than narrative coherence. The first movement of the plot – for that’s what it feels like, less of a conventional narrative arc, but rather swirling movements of story and emotion – starts when a young, professional woman (Amy Seimetz) is cornered in a dark alley. Her attacker (Thiago Martins) pumps wriggling worms down her throat, creatures that must have some effect since she’s left a shell of herself, intently following her attacker’s confounding, hypnotic orders to solve puzzles, write Walden on paper chains, and sip ice water. This quietly terrifying section summons up great mystery and great expectations.

The next movement, which occurs after further complications I have skipped over in the effort to avoid springing all of the film’s puzzling developments, finds Seimetz, in a performance of powerfully rattled normalcy, some time after the attack. She seems to have no recollection of what has happened to her. On the train she meets a man (Carruth himself) and feels drawn to him. He’s drawn to her as well. They strike up a hesitant courtship, drawn into each other’s worlds with a romantic connection tinged with conspiratorial sparks unacknowledged. Did the hypnotic man with the worms attack him too? Their scenes together are intercut with the routine of a pig farmer (Andrew Sensenig) who, as a hobby, takes a large microphone out into the woods and records interesting sounds to later speed up, slow down, and play on large speakers he places face down in a field for some inscrutable reason.

There are images and sensations in Upstream Color that I’ll not soon forget. I’ll remember the woman lying on a bed, her limbs wriggling like the worms that are, well, worming around inside her. I’ll remember the man and the woman telling stories of their childhoods in a montage that slowly blends their stories into one intimate, mildly hostile jumble. I’ll remember a burlap bag of piglets floating away. I’ll remember the man with the microphone solemnly looking out over the pigsty, watching the animals interact with each other. I’ll remember the couple huddled fully clothed in a dry bathtub, terrified that something – or maybe, worse yet, nothing – is out to get them.

But while all that memorable and intriguing material is all well and good, by the time the film arrives at its climactic scene of rapturous reunion (of a sort) I found myself unsatisfied. This incredibly simple plot in event and feeling is told with maximum obfuscation and artful complexity, but that’s largely for the sake of hiding its thinness for as long as possible. If the film merely continued on as a kind of dream, a trance of hypnotic imagery continually sliding past complete cohesion in perpetuity, it’d be better off. Alas, as a film it must eventually end and in drawing to a close, its conclusion reveals the whole enterprise to be nothing more than a mood, the wavelength upon which I could never quite get. Carruth is an exceptionally promising director. I’m glad he’s out there experimenting with structure, even if, to my mind, it doesn’t pay off nearly as well here as it did in Primer. I can only hope we don’t have to wait nearly a decade for his next film.