Fatal Attraction: STRANGE DARLING and BLINK TWICE

JT Mollner’s Strange Darling is a dark, nasty, self-satisfied little thriller. Its commitment to squirming through discomfort and violence—teasing a line between adult play and assault in frank ways—is often gripping. But its empty-headed reversals and surprises grow pretty vile when taken in total. It opens with a man hunting a woman. He chases her down a country road with a rifle and then stalks through forest and field as she tries to hide. Even to suggest that all is not as it seems would be unfair to the movie, which tells its story in 6 chapters deliberately scrambled so as to hide its transparently obvious twist. That it works at all is a testament to a crackling filmic look, and the actors who inhabit it. The man is Kyle Gallner, who is such a reliable horror presence. (The Haunting in Connecticut, Jennifer’s Body, the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, Red State, Scream 5, Smile…is he an honorary Scream Queen?) Here he’s able to dial up the intensity of his menacing gaze, while retaining the possibility of a wounded frustration, even embarrassment, to instantly slip back into his eyes. The woman (Willa Fitzgerald, of the short-lived Scream TV show) is similarly slippery, in a blind panic in some chapters, while we soon enough get a flashback look at the rough-housing she’s hoping for when she first picks up the guy in a bar. Its self-consciously a movie about gender stereotypes and the possibility of sexual violence, about safe-words and mind-games. But as the movie’s scatter-shot timeline clicks into place, it’s a pretty straightforward, predictable movie, for all its bloodshed and self-impressed flourishes. That leaves the final stretch awfully tedious, then just awful as its final twists of the knife turn on some mean-spirited gags. It is a lot of effort spent on getting nowhere.

A lively contrast to such tediousness is Blink Twice. Zoe Kravitz makes a fine feature debut as director in a Jordan Peele mode—a high concept thriller with social commentary on its mind. The results here may not be as layered and complex as Peele wears so casually and confidently—it’s too surface level flimsy for that, and even the not-as-it-seems is more or less as it seems. But the film is stylishly photographed with glamour shots and prickly shadows, and is cut with a razor-wire jumpiness. It’s easy to buy into its stakes and watch invested in what happens next. The plot is set in motion quickly, trapping characters in a bad situation that gets its tense charge from contemporary conversations about navigating identity, power, and consent. It follows a cater waiter (Naomi Ackie) who catches the eye of a billionaire (Channing Tatum) whose fundraising dinner she’s working. He invites her and a friend (Alia Shawkat) to be in a group of pretty ladies joining his pals (Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment) for a vacation on his private island. Sounds fun, she thinks, with apparently no negative associations with the words: billionaire’s island. (It made me want to rewrite a famous 30 Rock quote: never go with a billionaire to a second location.) Days spent lounging poolside, eating gourmet meals, and drinking constantly refilled cocktails are a kind of pleasure for quite some time. So is the flirty atmosphere with the super-rich host. She thinks he might actually be falling for her. Why, then, is there this ominous feeling of something ugly beneath the tropical fun? One of the other pretty guests (Adria Arjona) finds herself with tears welling up in her eyes as she finally admits that it’s all fun, “except…not.” The nefarious intent of their hosts comes tumbling out in torrents of revelations and the climactic conflagration is the kind of violent eruption that’s the inevitable result of escalating bad vibes. Kravitz gives the movie a breezy, on-edge shimmer and lets the sickening implications land not as flip twists, but with their due weight.

Just the Start: NYMPHOMANIAC: VOL. I

It’s difficult not to be aware that writer-director Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Vol. I is half of a movie. Even if you didn’t hear that the Danish provocateur’s latest film ran nearly four hours at its festival debuts and has been cut into two parts for American release, or didn’t understand the title, you’d realize there’s more to the story when the film fades to black, plot and theme left tantalizingly unresolved. Next to the end credits runs a rapid-fire montage of context-free imagery next to the words “from Nymphomaniac: Vol. II.” And so it is hard to come up with a definitive statement one way or the other about the film in its totality, since such a declaration depends partly on where it goes from here. What can be said is that Vol. I is an often dazzling film, intense and thoughtful even as it sets out to shock and amuse with blisteringly matter-of-fact frankness.

As the title suggests, the film is about a sex addict. We first meet her (Charlotte Gainsbourg) passed out in an alley. A kind older gentleman (Stellan Skarsgård) stops to help. She refuses an ambulance, but agrees to accompany him back to his apartment where he makes her a pot of tea. There’s no sexual tension between them, but there is a mutual human curiosity. She launches into her life story, rattling off anecdote after anecdote. She becomes our complicated, and maybe unreliable, narrator, telling him and us about her family, her friends, and, most of all, her sexual encounters. These she takes special pleasure in lingering over sordid details, making sure to emphasize the role each one plays in forming her shame and self-loathing. The man, to his credit, does not judge her. Her engages her, talks her through her feelings, tries to shift the subject by drawing comparisons to fly fishing, math, and art, Bach, Poe, and Fibonacci. Where this conversation is leading neither seems to know, but the steady hand of directorial vision seems guiding them to some kind of conclusion.

Von Trier’s recent films have directed sharply interior emotional landscapes outward into the world at large. Antichrist, his dark and troubling 2009 film, suggested that profound grief could radiate into the environment, deteriorating and rotting surroundings until chaos reigns. His Melancholia, one of the best films of 2011, was even more overwhelming, finding deep depression so destabilizing and overpowering that nothing less than the end of the world becomes sublime release. But in Nymphomaniac: Vol. I, the woman’s interior desires, a mingling of hunger and disgust, are expressed in the world only insofar as she needs other people to fulfill her needs. In long flashbacks, anecdotes sad and funny, energetic and elegiac illuminate her progression from curious teen to a young woman juggling dozens of encounters a week, leaving a trail of bewildered and exhausted, and sometimes happy, men in her wake.

At the center of the stories, quietly commanding the screen, is young French/English actress Stacy Martin in her acting debut. She has a fresh face and placid features, hesitant innocence and starving desires swirling underneath her smooth skin and big eyes. It’s a marvelous performance, tricky and demanding physically and emotionally. She’s convincing, whether sweetly asking her father (Christian Slater) to tell her one more time her childhood stories, or propositioning a reluctant man on a train (Simon Böer). Composed, she plays slow-burn infatuation with the boss at her first job (Shia LaBeouf) with appealing earnest yearning. She also plays quiet mortification in the film’s biggest and best comedy sequence when her apartment is invaded by her current lover’s wife (Uma Thurman, in a remarkable scene-stealing performance) who confronts them, three towheaded youngsters in tow.

After each of these varied and compelling anecdotal flashbacks, we cut back to the narrator sipping her tea in the present. She seems to be testing her audience, looking at the patient, kind, inquisitive man from over her mug as if to say, “have I shocked you yet? Are you disgusted with me?” So too does Von Trier seem to be goading his audience, right from the assaultive heavy metal that blasts apart aching silence in the opening scene. Throughout the film, by turns explicit and oblique, he varies the presentation. There are shifting aspect ratios and color, sometimes flat, over-lit digital video glow, other times stretching across the wide screen with vivid colors and marvelous grungy grain. One anecdote, a harrowing hospital stay for a supporting character, is filmed in textured black and white, the better to make blood and excrement the same harrowing darkness on pristine white sheets. Von Trier uses archival footage, gynecological diagrams, and wry charts and graphs, placing them over moments both innocuous and filthy. He creates a world that is flexible, and a vivid and playfully dirty dichotomy between education of the mind – books, statistics, research – and education of the body – biology in practice.

At the end, the film finds a fine stopping point, but not a conclusion. It’s tantalizing and thought-provoking – I haven’t really stopped turning it over in my head since I saw it – but naturally feels incomplete. Vol. I sets up a fascinating character study that I’m eager to see resolved. I could’ve sat through the next two hours of it right then and there. Both volumes are available on video on demand as I write this, but I’ll wait and catch the second half on the big screen as well. A film as cinematically vital as this one deserves to be seen that way if possible.

Misfire: BULLET TO THE HEAD

A trigger-happy shoot-‘em-up that also happens to be casually racist towards its second lead and boring as all get-out, Bullet to the Head represents a sad attempt at recapturing former action star glory for star Sylvester Stallone. The pieces are here for a fine R-rated actioner with often dependable B-movie stylist Walter Hill in the director’s chair and a good enough premise involving an evil developer (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) who wants to bulldoze a slum to put up condominiums and somehow that involves hiring a hit man (Stallone) and then a second hit man (Jason Momoa) to double cross the first one and then a semi-rogue cop (Sung Kang) from out of town shows up to investigate and Christian Slater’s hanging around the villains for some reason. But hold on. I’m already getting ahead of myself by plunging right into the simplistic confusion of the plot. What you really want to know right off the bat is if it’s worth trudging to your nearest multiplex, through a blizzard in all likelihood, simply to catch a glimpse of Stallone’s action movie presence in a non-Expendables form. The answer is no.

When I showed up for a matinee over the weekend, the only other people in the theater were two older guys sitting in the back row. While I sat near the front, waiting for the trailers to start, I heard them talking.

Guy 1: I wonder why there aren’t more people here?

Guy 2: It’s ‘cause Stallone isn’t too popular anymore. Now it’s all about The Rock.

Guy 1: The Rock?

Guy 2: Yeah, Dwayne Johnson.

Guy 1: Oh, the Rock!

Guy 2: Yeah, and Jason Statham, too.

So, there you have it. That’s the state of the modern action star in a nutshell. There are the younger guys (relatively speaking) who get by on their charisma and the occasional good script. And then there’s the old guys trying to make movies that comment ever so slightly on their age while still allowing them to go around kicking just as much butt as they used to. Just a couple weeks ago there was 65-year-old Schwarzenegger as the nearly retired sheriff in The Last Stand who, when kicked through the glass door of a bar, answered a “How are you?” with “Old.” Now in Bullet to the Head, 66-year-old Stallone holds a gun on a man and asks to settle their disagreement quickly because “my arm’s getting tired.” It’s a nice wink to reality, I suppose, as is the scene where the interloping cop ogles a tattoo artist (Sarah Shahi) and mentions her looks to the old man who responds, “She’s my daughter.”

Endless expository dialogue like that gem makes up most of the scenes. Hill fills the New Orleans-set film with local color atmospherics, joylessly bloody violence, and executes every dull twist of Alessandro Camon’s script with sturdy professionalism that does nothing to bring any interest as it slowly and inevitably crawls from one predictable beat to the next. It is as lumbering an anachronism as Stallone himself, a gravely, stiff attempt to revive a sort of slicked back, pumped up, flippantly bombastic violence machine of a movie of a kind that was none too enjoyable in the first place. The Expendables movies manage to more or less pull off this trick by A) inviting the next generation (Statham, Hemsworth, Adkins) to join the macho 80’s reunion and B) having a decent sense of how silly the whole thing is in the first place.

Bullet to the Head is self-serious blunt force cheese that follows its lead’s lead, a character who grimly shoots down anyone and everyone who is a threat or who has wronged him, always knowing the right place to go, always a step ahead, and always acting like a jerk about it. He’s constantly firing condescending, usually racist, remarks at Kang as punchline punctuations. He’s constantly cruel and we’re supposed to cheer. After blasting away a helpless captive, Kang says that one isn’t to do stuff like that. Stallone’s response? “I just did.” It’s not funny, but also not surprising. But in a movie with so much backwards, reductive, dusty dumbness to rankle and irritate, its biggest crime is how boring and predictable it is. I went into the theater wide awake in the middle of the day and I soon felt myself wishing I could take a nap and wake up after the movie was over. It would’ve been a more productive use of my time.