Sinners: WAKE UP DEAD MAN

Rian Johnson’s third Benoit Blanc mystery, Wake Up Dead Man, is the least immediately appealing. Compared to the autumnal glow of Knives Out or the summery vibes of Glass Onion, with their pleasing puzzle-box structures to match, this new movie is darker, meaner, scarier, and heavier. It’s set largely in a rural Catholic Church in the middle of the woods during a muddy spring trending toward dark and stormy nights of weather and of the soul. That’ll also guarantee it’ll be the one that simpatico audience members will forever be saying, “you know which one’s actually the best?” I won’t be one of them, but I’ll know where they’re coming from. Here’s where the clever froth of the first two gets weightier, losing none of the sharp social satire while gaining a theological dimension. Its honest wrestling with faith and duty and denial of surface pleasures will resonate with people who tire of cozy mysteries and need that dark chocolate genre packaging of the Gothic. There’s a scene where Blanc asserts his doubts as the clouds blot out the sun, and as his innocent interlocutor loses himself in a spiritual rebuttal the sun returns full force through the stained-glass window behind him. Johnson’s playing in the light and dark more overtly here. The movie’s clearly got souls, not just lives, on the line in yet another expertly organized murder mystery plot. 

The small congregation’s charismatic right-wing Monsignor (Josh Brolin) has been murdered in a seemingly impossible way, and the new, more progressive, priest (Josh O’Connor) finds himself tagging along with Blanc (Daniel Craig) as he tries to untangle the suspects. We have a tense lawyer (Kerry Washington), a drunk doctor (Jeremy Renner), a wannabe influencer (Daryl McCormack), a wheelchair-bound cellist (Cailee Spaeny), a washed up sci-fi novelist (Andrew Scott), a recovering alcoholic groundskeeper (Thomas Haden Church) and a scarily strict devout old woman (Glenn Close). The sort of broken people drawn to such a cultish devotion to a cruel man of the cloth are all likely culprits. And the religiosity of the setting matching the apparent irreconcilable facts of the case lend toward much talk of potential supernatural solutions. The movie’s verging on horror at times, and even though it doesn’t tip over into total fantasy, this picture has the series’ gnarliest and creepiest sights. The ensemble of suspects aren’t as finely drawn, and get none of the snappy punchlines we’ve come to expect from this series. They’re all guilty as sin of something, though almost none are guilty of murder. And the intensity of their beliefs means they’re all sweating it out under the glare of their crooked faiths. The tangle of violence and betrayal is weightier than ever. Even Blanc is subdued in the face of it, though his honeyed southern accent remains a delight. Johnson’s clearly finding something dark and searching in our current cultural moment and gets to use the elements of such a dependable genre’s scaffolding to express them. 

Resurrection: ALIEN: ROMULUS

As a frightened character inserts a crackling electric prod into a dripping alien egg sac, I found myself thinking that Alien: Romulus will please those who love to read Freudian symbolism into these pictures. But then again, there’s something to please all sorts of Alien fans in this movie—a gripping little exercise in style and craftsmanship while playing the series’ greatest hits. It’s set between Ridley Scott’s original sci-fi horror Alien, in which long-haul space-trucker Sigourney Weaver barely escapes a close call with a nasty extraterrestrial infestation, and James Cameron’s slam-bang sequel of action escalation, Aliens. And so it naturally borrows from each of those in appearance and mood, while layering on nods and winks and tracing along motifs and plot threads from other prequels, sequels, and spin-offs. The leads are a group of young miners (capably led by Cailee Spaeny and Isabela Merced, and David Jonsson with a tricky robotic role-and-a-half). They’re stuck on a far-flung planet under an onerous corporate contract when they decide to heist a derelict company space craft drifting by. Once there they discover, oops, it was a secret research station abandoned upon getting overrun by the face-hugging, acid-bleeding, ruthlessly predatory Xenomorph Aliens we’d expect from this series. The following is mostly predictable, but done up with enough fine shorthand performances and cool effects and ominous sounds and a big score that it rattles and shakes with patient entertainments until it hits a surprising new gear in its finale.

The director is Fede Alvarez, who brings a knack for doing right by a franchise—his Evil Dead remake is one of the better, gnarlier, horror remakes of the last decade—as well as his ability to spin a claustrophobic vice-grip of tension—like his trapped-in-a-house-with-a-mad-blind-man Don’t Breathe. He’s a fine maker of images and can layer visual and sonic effects with a degree of teeth-rattling force, churning out resourceful pulp awe. Romulus looks and sounds sensational with endless dark corridors and shafts of light and creepy crawlies scuttling and scurrying. It’s freshly familiar, so its biggest success is always what keeps it from greatness: it simply can’t stop reminding us of all the other Alien movies. But maybe that’s fitting for a series that features, across its many iterations, evolutionary explorations, genetic manipulation, gene splicing, cloning, and mutations. What it lacks in originality—and I definitely would’ve trimmed its most thuddingly obvious homages—it makes up for in fun throwback appeal. Here’s a movie that’s built out of bits and pieces of the others in its tradition—a big eerie location elegantly framed, a desperate blue-collar ensemble, a ragtag colonial machine-gun set-piece, gooey body-horror eruptions, elaborate gore effects and expertly manipulated CG enhanced puppetry of the new protuberances and pustules on the attack. The whole thing moves with a fine sense of tension and release, slamming down with grave, bleak world-building in each new implication and crisp, legible action as piles on the complications. It’s a minor-key entry, but one built up out of enjoyable resonances. And I certainly found myself in the suspense of hoping the appealing characters could find their way out; it’s new to them, after all.

Point and Shoot: CIVIL WAR

A tense provocation, writer-director Alex Garland’s Civil War has sequences of frightening violence wherein the logic of action movies is turned inside out to make us root for the shooting to stop. Our lead characters are photojournalists courageously and recklessly charging after the action. The bullets fly and we flinch with them as the action charges ahead. We see bloodshed as intimate, personal—bodies hanging in an abandoned car wash, piled in mass graves behind farm houses, pulled apart by machine guns. The movie imagines a near-future America devolved into sectarian warfare, rebel troops amassing outside Washington to take on a fascistic president who has, in his third term, disbanded the FBI and shoots protestors. This isn’t the queasy-making romance of a lost cause, or a wishful thinking, that’s been burbling up with Civil War nostalgia for 150 years. If the United States were actually to fall into an all-out second Civil War it would look like this—balkanized, radicalized, individuated, dangerous and unpredictable. It’d be three backwoods guys with AR-15s guarding their local gas station. It’d be a random militia holed up trying to overpower and execute soldiers. It’d be insurgents storming the capitol.

Garland doesn’t worry overmuch about how we get there. The movie starts years into the conflict as we get the sense the war is drawing close to a climactic point of desperation. Dialogue has some free-floating allusions to past massacres, controversies, and realignments. We get the gist. The screenplay never announces the policy positions of its combatants, although a reasonably intelligent viewer could pin down the overarching particulars of the state of play. Instead, it stirs up its political intensity with immediacy of intent. It communicates clearly and directly, and with great force, ideas about the hell war puts all people through, and of the complicated natures of the specific people who make their mission the witnessing of it. This is a bleak vision of how some people are just waiting for an excuse to revel in chaos, and the movie plays it off with a throughly muddled sense of rooting interests. Of course we want our main characters to survive; that’s movie logic. But by stripping out actual specific policy or parties, we see only the tension between chaos and order. Stopping for speeches or debates that lay out the stakes might serve to soften the walloping dread and loud gunfire of sectarian violence and its rippling collateral damage. It’s a portrait of society in free fall, a little nervous about how plausible it could be.

Garland has often been a filmmaker interested in the fragility of the human body. Look at the time-warping drugs of Dredd or zombified rage that can infect from merely a drop in 28 Days Later. Or see the blurry lines between man and nature in the haunting alien landscapes of Annihilation and between man and machine in Ex Machina. With Civil War, Garland takes that investment in how fragile people are and pushes further into how that fragility is inextricable form the systems and institutions we build. It finds that larger perspective in sticking small and personal amidst the national ramifications. It’s confined to a picture of photographers dutifully witnessing while getting a charge out of following along—and it makes them vulnerable, too. Some (Kirsten Dunst) are disillusioned about the value of their job; her slow bleeding-out of conviction is a marvelously controlled and subtle performance. Others (Wagner Moura) gets a sick thrill out of the danger. Still others (Stephen McKinley Henderson) are tired veterans of the business, while a young newbie (Cailee Spaeny) gets a shock to her system as she enters the fray. All of them are shaken and stretched, with their fragility drawn out to the movie’s sick, cold conclusion that’s as inevitable as its central dialectic: guns and cameras are both point and shoot. The power of a still image is juxtaposed with the moving image—weaponizing a grainy freeze frame silence in the flow of clinical digital filmmaking to feel the etching of history and the foreshortening of context in each stuck frame—as it creates a tension between its creation and the chaos that breeds it. We’re left with the empty pit-of-the-stomach worry, and the wonder at what’s more powerful than fragile people rushing into history with a gun and a camera shooting in tandem—revolution written with or driven by a photo op.

Promising Young Women: SHIVA BABYand THE CRAFT: LEGACY

Shiva Baby is so drenched in social anxiety — not to mention family obligations, professional frustrations, and sexual tension — that one could practically wring it out. The whole endeavor has a palpable feeling of discomfort, the camerawork close and ever-so-slightly trembling, the score spare stabbing strings, the dialogue surface pleasant, subtextually jabbing small talk of needling relatives gossiping and hesitant strangers networking. It takes place almost entirely at a shiva for a distant relative (someone’s second wife’s sister—that sort of thing) of our protagonist, a college senior (Rachel Sennott) whose various worlds are about to uncomfortably collide. Her future looks uncertain, graduating without good prospects, to the dismay of her mother (Polly Draper) who tells her to let the other mourners think she has interviews lined up. Her father (Fred Melamed) still pays her bills since her babysitting job is so erratically scheduled. And neither know that her alleged babysitting job is a cover story for her real meager source of income: meeting men on a sugar daddy app and getting some easy money for a good time. We start the movie at the end of her latest hookup with an older man (Danny Deferrari), the better to recognize him when he enters the house. Small world. His wife (Dianna Agron) and baby are meeting him there, too. The walls are closing in.

There’s a constant sense of teetering on the edge of potential embarrassment, and Sennott capably plays the squirm, blundering forward though her insecurities and realizing only too late each escalating cringe. The tension rises as she’s bolstered by craft that keeps her tightly framed and blocking that presses her into corners or into uncomfortable exposure. In this small gathering the rooms were already full of elderly family friends (like Jackie Hoffman) prying nicely or passive aggressively into her personal life, and her childhood best friend and first romantic partner (Molly Gordon) makes eyes at her, too. Now it's only more complicated. Writer-director Emma Seligman, in a striking debut feature, has the confidence to sustain this small, well-tuned picture — a mere 70-some minutes and just a wisp of plotting to carry it — by signaling the largely interior stakes through small gestures and flushes of discomfort. The movie’s all about eye lines and furtive glances, the cold sweat of conversational awkwardness and the tension between polite fictions and outright deceptions. All the while, the whole thing plays out like a prelude to a panic attack, emotionally edging right up to the brink of a psychological catastrophe that never quite erupts. It feels like an achingly real emotional state.

You never know where you’ll find that. For instance, I just caught up with writer-director Zoe Lister-Jones' The Craft: Legacy. Who’d have thought the couple decades belated sequel/remake of the cult teen coven classic would have some emotional truth in it? I didn’t. But there it is anyway. There’s a scene in the middle, a sort of Breakfast Club misfit confession circle, in which the star teen girls who dabble in witchcraft as a form of self-empowerment — but dangers lurk, because of course they do — talk with a former bullying boy from their school. He tearfully admits his closeted bisexuality and earnestly confesses to feeling stifled by gender norms. It’s a real bolt of interesting emotional valences that changes the temperature of the scene and resonates throughout the rest of the picture. The whole thing is an amiable teen flick, with lockers and house parties and cute montages and, befitting its horror roots, a bit of dark sinister intentions lingering underneath. There are a few good creepy moments, and fine parallel plots about our new-in-town lead girl (Cailee Spaeny) getting to know her new friends and her latent powers, and her single mother (Michelle Monaghan) finding a new beau, a masculinist self-help guru and maybe-cult-leader (David Duchovny). (Some shades of The Lost Boys, there, perhaps.)

So there’s decent contrast drawn between the girl-power witches and dark forces of misogyny, and there’s the usual stuff about crushes and classes and learning to grow into oneself inherent in the teen movie of any genre. It’s a consistent through line of inquiry connecting the boy’s troubles and the girls’, a frank admission that societal expectations can hurt everyone, even those who are theoretically built up by them. Even if the movie never quite leans all the way into horror — though there’s a bit with a figure in a mirror in a darkened bedroom that’s quite spooky — and there are fleeting moments where it feels like one of those featherlight Netflix Original buzzword Mad Libs pictures, the whole project has a consistent and pleasant earnestness about its characters that makes for a modestly enjoyable effort as it coasts to its routine conclusion.