Two for the Road: THE HUNT and BLOODSHOT

With movie theaters closed in the face of a global pandemic, we are about to have a radical transformation of moviegoing for the next few months (at least). Us frequent moviegoers will feel the brunt of it in our habits. Personally speaking, I haven’t gone more than a week without seeing something in a movie theater since George W. Bush was president. This will be quite an adjustment for us all, with only VOD titles and whatever the streaming services upload for our amusement passing for current cinema. Multiplex employees will hopefully continue to get paid by the big chains (deepest shame for those companies that don’t), and if you can buy a gift card or membership to a local independent or nonprofit theater now, that’d be a good investment in making sure they stay around. These are strange times, and they ask much of us. Movies are the least of our worries, but as an already weakened (through competing forms, corporate consolidation, eroding interest, and streaming malaise) aspect of our culture, it’s natural to wonder about their long term viability in the face of all this disruption.

I, for one, will find some small solace in the ability to finally catch up on the unwatched discs my collecting habit has piled up over the years. I’ve already dug into the stacks for some long runtimes I’ve been putting off. Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City (1981) — a finely textured cop drama that accrues more than it unfolds — and Oliver Stone’s The Doors (1991) and Nixon (1995) — divergent and yet complementary fevered midcentury epics, and reason enough to think the name Robert Richardson is one of those talents basically synonymous with cinema — have been recent highlights. Nonetheless, whenever movie theaters open up again, it’ll feel so good to see that big screen light up with a new movie. It almost doesn’t matter what it is. Tears of joy will follow, no doubt. Still, I saw a few movies last week before everything fell apart to social distancing and self-quarantine and working the day job from home. Given the state of world affairs, and the entertainment business, I’ll probably be among the small number who can actually claim to have seen these movies in their original release. Small bragging rights, to be sure.

One was the cursed release of The Hunt, a controversial Blumhouse horror effort that got its initial release scuttled by political forces last September. You see, the premise is that rich liberals have kidnapped a handful of conspiratorial red state folks to hunt them for sport. Some conservatives, the sort who love to play dumb and aggrieved to whip up gullible audience’s anger, claimed the movie was against them, irresponsible, and a totally inappropriate concept. This leaves aside, of course, the fact that the trailers and advertising clearly set up a film in which the hunters were the obvious villains and the heroes the plucky underdogs being hunted. If anything, the voices calling for its removal — up to the highest, dumbest levels of politics — would like this movie, if only because they’d misunderstand it the other way. Not that it’d be entirely their fault. No, director Craig Zobel (of the superior upsetting Compliance) and co-writers Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse (the showrunner and a writer on HBO’s brilliant, sociopolitically sharp Watchmen sequel) have made a movie so sloppily both-sides that it condemns ultimately only the discourse. It asks, aren’t we all angry these days? And never stops to interrogate why. Maybe the unactualized movie about the divide in this country being only superficially between right and left when it’s really between rich and poor that lingers unexamined behind this premise would’ve been better for being clearly stated. Instead we have heads blown off and limbs torn away — sometimes in jokey manners — for maximum splatter impact, and a fine lead performance from Betty Gilpin (Glow) as a Deep South wage slave who — surprise! — is an educated woman capable of taking on the big bad (Hilary Swank). There’s that sort of wishy-washy condescension all over the picture. Some of the action is passably done, but when your ostensible social commentary ends up only saying that people are too mean on Twitter — which, yes, but also, that’s a symptom of a larger problem, not the problem itself — then you need to go back for another rewrite. Instead of being actually provocative, it’s a shallow incitement, and as such, merely boring.

Better is Bloodshot, a dopey small-scale superhero movie of the kind you might’ve seen in the late 90s, maybe catching it between Spawn and Blade. It’s refreshingly throwback in its appeal in that way, proud of its few good visual tricks while mostly playing it safe as a modest mid-sized star vehicle for a man of rumbling stoic charisma. Based on a character from Valiant Comics (one of the competitors to the Big Two of Marvel and DC that arose in the peak comic book era three decades back), it follows a soldier (Vin Diesel) who is killed, then resurrected by a biotech startup. The head of the company (Guy Pearce), a doctor and inventor, is proud to move beyond artificial limbs into this new feat: tiny robotic nanites in the blood that gives his experimental patient nearly unlimited ability to regenerate tissue and bone in the event of injury. The poor muscle man awakes with memory of his death, and soon sets out to get revenge. It’s almost like this super solider idea is what the company had in mind all along (hmmm), as they do nothing to stop the newly alive solider from executing a plan that involves crashing head on into an armored car and walking straight into hundreds of rounds of gunfire from the private army protecting the bad guy (Toby Kebbel). That’s a fun sequence, shot under a red light and cloud of flour, with each digital squib on our hero a curlicue of instant robotic recovery, each blood cloud a swirl reentering and reconstituting him. Alas, as fun as it can be, the whole arc of the movie grows repetitive, as any reasonably alert viewer is miles ahead of the protagonist in figuring out the derivative plot twists, and the action sequences never quite figure out a way around the problem of a character that can’t be injured. Still, the filmmaking of the action is brisk and cut confusingly close, giving enough of a sense of energy and speed-ramped dazzle to approximate excitement. Director Dave Wilson is yet another alum of VFX house Blur, following Tim Miller (Deadpool) and Jeff Fowler (Sonic the Hedgehog) into a feature debut. (It’s the best of the three.) He crafts the central visual ideas well enough as the action becomes a swirl of nanite clouds and shrapnel amid powerful punches. And the character of Bloodshot himself benefits from the soulful stillness of Diesel. He’s unstoppable, but he’s not happy about it. There’s some unshakeable baseline appeal to his star persona in the terse, glum Riddick or Witch Hunter sci-fi mold. What we’re left with is a grindingly competent B-movie, totally forgettable and destined to be a passable time waster on cable or streaming. And yet, as the last theatrical experience I’ll have for a while, I’m fonder of it by the day.

The World's End, Again: Z FOR ZACHARIAH

Here we are again after the end of the world. Some unknown calamity has befallen the earth an unknown time before our story begins. There are few survivors. The world they left behind is contaminated, perhaps irreparably. All that remains is a haunted landscape of abandoned places. We’ve been here before, the post-apocalyptic narrative being one of our most common lately. Maybe we’re preparing ourselves for the worst. Maybe we think we’re already living in the early stages of our own apocalypse and need doomsday prepping. Or maybe we’re captives of a pessimism that’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. (See Tomorrowland for the corrective there, I suppose.) Director Craig Zobel’s Z for Zachariah takes this familiar premise into tiny intimate spaces, finding the subgenre simply a convenient excuse to strip away society and all but a few characters, the better to focus on the slightest and narrowest of interpersonal conflicts.

Zobel’s films are about marginalized characters. Think of his low-level con men in Great World of Sound and fast food workers in Compliance. But you don’t get much more marginal than Margot Robbie in Zachariah who, as the movie begins, may as well be the last person on earth, for all she knows. We see her head into town in a HAZMAT suit, scavenge some essentials, then trudge back to her isolated farmhouse where, miraculously, the radiation levels remain at hospitable levels. This has been her life for who knows how long. She credits her survival on her faith in God, praying and playing the organ in a chapel built on her property. We learn she had a family who left to find other survivors and never returned. It’s just her, a dog, a rifle, and God. Zobel treats her daily existence with a deliberate pace and a bright digital glaze.

Soon enough, another person enters her solitary life. He (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is in almost every way her exact opposite. She’s a young white southern Christian farm girl. He’s a middle-aged black northern big city scientist. He left his relative safety on a quest of curiosity, to find the state of the world since the crisis that decimated it. His trip through contaminated spaces has left him half-dead. They’re surprised to see each other, and form a tentative alliance. She lets him stay on her property, nurses him back to health, and accepts his help with survivalist tasks. Together they forage, farm, and plan ways to improve their lives. They maybe even fall in love a little bit, but it’s also clear they’re not sure how much the affection they feel is more a factor of the slow ebbing of overwhelming loneliness.

This is all well and good, an intimate if schematic character study nestled in picturesque uninhabited lush green natural spaces. Taking inspiration from Robert C. O’Brien’s cult classic sci-fi novel of the same name, the story plays out by running softly along the natural fault lines in the characters’ relationships, letting interactions of tabula rasa impressions drift backwards. Into this dynamic arrives a third character, a man (Chris Pine) who stumbles onto the farm desperate for water and shelter. He, too, has gone looking for survivors. He, too, is accepted into their isolated commune. But now that there are three, petty jealousies encroach. What was a restrained two-hander becomes a spare and wan love triangle, so softly and delicately played it may as well be a slight chill on the breeze. It makes for a much less interesting second half, as overfamiliar as it is uninvolving.

Zobel’s commitment to a slow and steady pace keeps the plot’s thematic interests slowly boiling, despite the obvious directions it’s headed. It’s admirably restrained, feeling no need to adhere to what an audience might expect from post-apocalyptic stories. The problem is just that it’s ultimately all so slight and inert. A finely acted drama, it lacks narrative tension or character insight deeper than first glance assumptions, playing out like a didactic Twilight Zone knockoff with the broad strokes in which characterization is painted never becoming a satisfying larger picture. It’s the sort of film that’s just barely compelling enough in the moment, setting up its variables with reasonable control, but concludes with the distinct feeling of neglecting to add up. Where it ends is hardly worth the trouble getting there. We’ve not only been here before, but it’s been far more satisfying, too.

Do Unto Others: COMPLIANCE

You may recall hearing about this story in the news at the time. In 2004 a prank caller rang up a fast food restaurant and, claiming to be a cop, had the manager bring an employee, a young woman, into the office and hold her there. The caller led the manager through all kinds of degrading actions, including a strip search of this innocent employee, before the deception crumbled. That’s true. Those are the basic facts. Writer-director Craig Zobel’s Compliance is a tough, harrowing film that expertly recounts these events in terrifyingly convincing ordinary detail. The film starts with big white letters filling the screen informing the audience of the story’s veracity. Even so, it’s hard to believe, not because the events within are so implausible, but because you don’t want to believe.

This is undoubtedly one of the most harrowing films of the year, a constant uncomfortable escalation of tension and dread that plays like a tightening vise. What makes it so intense is how Zobel easily draws us into the realism of the situation. The production design feels so specifically worn-down and ordinary. The greasy yellow uniforms of the employees, the weathered signage littering the kitchen and halls, and the slimy tiles of the backroom ooze with the feeling of commonplace, everyday accoutrements of a minimum-wage customer service job. As the work day begins, the manager (Ann Dowd), a middle-aged woman who struggles to connect with her younger employees, is stressed out by nothing more than looming corporate anger because of an unknown shift worker’s mishandling of the freezer. It’s an ordinary day in an ordinary place.

At the height of the evening rush the phone call comes. The voice on the other end (Pat Healy) introduces himself as Officer Daniels and says that he has a woman in his office complaining that an employee at the restaurant stole money from her purse. The suspect is blonde, he says. “Becky?” replies the manager. “That’s right,” the voice says. It’s a scene of rapidly accumulating unease. The manager’s clearly making a mistake, falling right into his trap that plays out across the screen in much the same way Dorothy is bamboozled by the phony wizard in the sepia tone Kansas of The Wizard of Oz. But the consequences here are far more dangerous.

It’s easy to see how easily the manager falls for it. She’s harried, busy, preoccupied. Once she misses the initial warning signs, once she’s unknowingly taking part in the caller’s deception, it’s harder to back out even as the situation escalates. Becky (Dreama Walker) is brought into the manager’s office and the search begins. First, her purse and phone are taken away and scrutinized at the caller’s request. Then, she turns out her pockets. Then she disrobes. At each escalation, there are hesitations and negotiations between the women and the supposed policeman on the other end of the line. What makes the film so edge-of-the-seat suspenseful is not necessarily that the ending is in doubt – although “how bad will it get?” is certainly an urgent pins-and-needles question – but because the behavior every step of the way is at once believable and inscrutable.

This is a film that has no time for a wide shot. After the film’s opening establishing shots, Zobel and cinematographer Adam Stone hold the camera close. The central horror unfolds in tight medium shots and close-ups, trapping the audience in a position to study the emotions on the actors’ faces. Dowd and Walker have moments where their heads fill the frame and we see doubt, pain, and pleading confusion twitch in their muscles. Zobel observes each and every squirm in ways that faintly recall nothing less than the powerful close-ups of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. This approach to the material wouldn’t work if the performances weren’t so great and precise. Dowd’s painful, and painfully understandable, initial lapse of judgment is bad enough, but the continual creepy descent into powerlessness that Walker goes through, a wringer of humiliations and degradations, is almost physically difficult to watch.

Together, these two actresses navigate these scenes with sharp emotional reflexes. Dowd’s performance grows creepy at times as we watch the growing extent to which she’ll ignore doubt about the situation to penetrate the buzz of regular restaurant duties in her busy mind. But what’s truly terrifying and sorrowful is how completely she allows herself to believe the voice on the phone, even feeling a sense of pride when he congratulates her on all her help. Walker’s performance is just as stunning, a fearlessly emotionally naked performance. Her bright-eyed employee feels so immediately real in her first scenes that by the time she’s held captive by her own boss, it’s no wonder it becomes unbearable to watch. All the while, there’s the buzz of Healy’s voice over the phone. It’s a slippery performance, a work of convincing matter-of-fact sadism, that is spiky and deeply upsetting. Zobel forces the audience to sit uncomfortably with these characters held hostage, played with a sick puppeteer’s skill by nothing more than a thoroughly normal-sounding voice on the other end of the phone. It’s this immediacy that makes the film so powerful an exploration. This is a film that regards the behavior of its characters with precision, refusing to explicitly explain and rarely looking away.

It is an instant legend that many in the audience for the Sundance premiere of Compliance walked out and that a question and answer session afterwards was contentious. I saw the film just a couple of weeks ago in a festival setting and the screening shed nearly a fourth of the audience by the time it was over. This is a film that gets up under the skin with deeply upsetting subject matter, but I don’t think that’s what upsets some so. The visceral discomfort comes not from exploitation of the true story or of the actresses involved, but from the film’s deeply felt empathy with the characters and the situation. That’s not to say Zobel lets any character escape the full implications of their actions, but that he allows the characters to be who they are without cheap demonization. It’s all too easy to sit in a comfortable seat in the dark and scoff at the screen. What’s far more difficult is to watch a terrible situation enacted on the screen and come to think about it seriously in an attempt to arrive at some kind of understanding.

Why did the caller do what he did? We may never know and the film provides no answers. Similarly, there are no easy answers to the behavior of the manager and those she ropes in to help her carry out the caller’s orders, just as it’s not easy to watch an energetic young woman slowly lose power over herself and her situation. But what Zobel provides is a chance to view sensational material from a sober, clinical viewpoint. It’s not easy, but it’s a strong effort, a simple provocation and a work of powerful filmmaking.