Stuck:BEAST, PREY, ORPHAN: FIRST KILL, and BARBARIAN

To see a thriller lately has been to dip into the psychic ripples of our very early pandemic days of isolation, of survival alone or with our closest family groups. Even as that feeling recedes into our memories, it’s a potent one sitting not too far from the surface, ready to be activated, even if only as a byproduct of standard thriller tropes. Take, for example, Beast, a jungle survival movie in which Idris Elba has to protect his daughters from a wild lion. Its suspense and sympathy rests solely in wondering how they’ll get out of this one. On safari, the girls were meant to grieve their dead mother. Now, they’re stuck in the middle of nowhere with a prowling predator ready to pounce. There’s instant emotional investment playing on that sense of abandonment, with no one on the way to rescue. The family has to stick close, be clever, and do what they can to survive. Director Baltasar Kormákur, whose mountain-climbing Everest and freighter-hopping Contraband and boat-sinking Adrift have proved him a reliable practitioner of travelogue tension, here keeps up the sense of landscape and scale, the better to make the characters feel all the more trapped and alone. The screenplay is economically structured, introducing each element on the way into the jungle that we’ll need to see them out: poachers, a pride rock, an abandoned school, a tranquilizer gun. The fun, then, is seeing Elba as the ultimate family man taken back through those variables, and ultimately willing to run toward a lion and punch it in the face if it means his girls make it out alive.

Also out in the wild is Prey, a spin-off of the Predator series. In this one, the franchise’s usual extraterrestrial big-game hunters land a few hundred years ago in the territory of a Native American tribe. It’s a neat conceit, and one that finds a resourceful young Comanche woman (Amber Midthunder) best situated to puzzle out how to defeat the enemy. Unlike the team of commandos in the first film, or the other groups who’ve encountered this villain since (like L.A. cops in Predator 2, an assortment of stranded killer stereotypes in Predators, and Giger’s Aliens in Alien vs. Predator), this hero quickly runs out of backup. It’s a good thing Midthunder has a solid presence, holding the screen with a smolderingly believable toughness in the face of bewilderment. She’s enough to carry the movie ever so slightly above its thinness. If you remember director Dan Trachtenberg’s first film, the claustrophobic trapped-in-a-bunker-with-a-doomsday-prepper 10 Cloverfield Lane, he’s skilled at stranding a character in a rough spot, twisting the tension, and then resourcefully finding everything at hand to throw at the problem. Here, though, the effects are a little flimsy—simply presented CG blood and dismemberment wears out its welcome sooner than later—and the plot becomes so much running around until the inevitable. That’s true to the spirit of this franchise, though, and at least it’s found an adequately inventive new lane for it to explore.

Then there’s Orphan: First Kill, a much-belated sequel to 2009’s Orphan, which remains among the most emotionally distressing horror movies of this century. That one, from expert pulpmaker Jaume-Collet Serra, found 12-year-old Isabelle Fuhrman playing a manipulative, murdering orphan adopted by a well-intentioned, emotionally-fragile family. The little girl then systematically takes apart their lives—often figuratively, but eventually literally, too. Part of the disquieting fun is seeing the child actress slowly becoming evil beyond her years, finding just the right buttons to press to make her new parents really hurt and truly squirm. But where do you go from there, and after all these years? Director William Brent Bell (who heretofore has given us such deflating horror pictures as The Devil Inside, the found-footage movie that infamously pointed audiences to a URL in lieu of an actual ending) takes the story backwards in a prequel that strains credulity. 

Fuhman returns to play the young lead again, with a pint-sized body double, tons of forced perspective, prosthetics, lifts, and other tricks. Now 25, she’s playing the effort of appearing much younger, so it’s cognitive dissonance running in the other direction. We pick up with her escaping an Estonian mental facility, and then making her way to the States by impersonating the long-missing daughter of wealthy WASPs. It seems to be setting up more of the same, cooped up in a dim mansion in the middle of winter. Luckily Julia Stiles, as the mother, meets the cracked energy of the project with her own tightly-wound wickedness. The whole thing doesn’t quite work, or live up to its predecessor. And how could it, really, with the missing shock of surprise and novelty? But it manages to be suitably strange. I didn’t much like it, but I also won’t forget it.

The best crowd-pleasing horror movie in quite some time, however, is Barbarian. It’s a pleasurable piece of lowbrow appeal. It plays out like a journey down a dark tunnel, with trip-wires springing surprises with such unexpected regularity that it manages to catch you off-guard every time. The premise is an instant grabber. On a dark and stormy night, a nervous young woman (Georgina Campbell) arrives at an Airbnb. (Mistake number one.) There she discovers that the house, the only habitable one in a dilapidated Detroit neighborhood, has been double booked. The man staying there (Bill Skarsgård), recognizing the fear factor, goes out of his way to appear harmless. She enters, reluctantly, on guard, ready to bolt when needed. She just has to figure this out and find a place to stay. That’s already plenty for a suspenseful little movie, a cautious walking-on-eggshells night between two strangers, both gingerly avoiding calling further suspicion or danger upon themselves. But of course there’s something darker going on here. The home’s basement is definitely a place you don’t want to end up. I dare not divulge what happens from there. Even mentioning a third character, played by a recognizable comic character actor given his best role in years, feels like it’d spoil the fun. 

Writer-director Zach Cregger's prior experience in sketch comedy surely honed his flair with unfurling a shock, and selling each zig-zagging sequence’s feints toward conventionality before doubling back with details that are exceedingly gross, compellingly tense, and bleakly funny all at once. Though it’s built out of standard elements—dank corridors and creepy rooms and shambling human monsters out of a Wes Craven picture—its telling is so enjoyably inventive. Even as the style—carefully composed shots and slow, deliberate camera moves—plays it straight, the story runs circles around expectations. Even in the final moments it’s still pulling off surprises, with the sick thrill of a storyteller getting away with getting another one over on you, even after you should know better. Treating even the darkest of scares as pitch-black punchlines makes this a great ride. No matter how unpleasant it gets, it’s fun to be stuck in it and discover where it goes.

JASON BOURNE Again

Matt Damon last played Jason Bourne in 2007, when The Bourne Ultimatum closed out a thrilling, cohesive action trilogy – and the character’s central drive – with the amnesiac rouge black ops agent learning the truth of his identity and exposing associated CIA misdeeds. Director Paul Greengrass said that he thought Bourne’s story was done, saying further sequels starring the character should be called “The Bourne Redundancy.” That’s why the fourth film was The Bourne Legacy, a terrific spinoff focused on a different agent who grows a conscience that puts him at odds with his agency handlers, which found writer-director Tony Gilroy deftly expanding the scope and possibilities for the future of the franchise. But now, somehow, the fifth time around has lured Greengrass and Damon back for more in the bluntly titled Jason Bourne. It’s a step backwards into the series’ comfort zone. Is there a good new story to tell about this character nearly a decade after we left him? Not particularly. But at least it has a decent grinding competency about it, a solid sense of shaky contemporary paranoia, and a couple great action shots.

Bourne, having spent the better part of ten years off the grid and on the run in the farthest overlooked corners of the world, is suddenly pulled back into the world of espionage and globetrotting skullduggery when an old ally (Julia Stiles) tracks him down. She’s uncovered yet another dirty secret about the CIA’s past involvement in his life. So off he goes, leaving his existence of lonely uncommunicativeness and earning money through backwater underground fighting, to once more look determinedly through binoculars, walk with grave purpose through patient multi-step traps and rendezvous, and slowly work his way into confrontation with the suits who conspire against him. Playing like an unnecessary epilogue to an already complete character arc, the new movie nonetheless operates from a baseline competency not unlike its protagonist’s. All superfluous movies should strive for such slick watchability. It’s restrained and methodical and, when all is said and done, accomplishes very little. But everyone involved is too much of a pro to let it be without some entertainment.

Greengrass, who also co-wrote with editor Christopher Rouse, has a handle on the mood of the piece, and is able to sustain mild interest in dependable scenes of great actors plotting and scheming and debating what to do while they glower at screens and bark into cell phones. He has Tommy Lee Jones as the agency’s director playing a sad-eyed cynic, a part that’d be described as a Tommy Lee Jones-like part if a lesser actor had been cast. He wants Bourne hunted down and to do so activates another in the series’ endless supply of covert killers (Vincent Cassel this time). Then there’s Alicia Vikander, the fresh-faced ingénue straight from a string of much better roles (like in Ex Machina, The Man from UNCLE, and an Oscar-winning turn in The Danish Girl). Here she's an ambitious young agent in normcore clothes who is determined to bring Bourne back into the fold instead of leaving him dead in the street. Elsewhere is Riz Ahmed (Nightcrawler, The Night Of, and other projects without the word “night” in the title) as a slick tech CEO whose Silicon Valley startup is entangled in the plot for reasons of token timeliness.

These actors, and Stiles (who doesn’t have enough to do, but that’s true of every movie for nearly 10 years now), go a long way to grounding the thin, insubstantial plot in something like weighty gravitas. They carry scenes of endless exposition by making it believable that these characters would speak to each other in terse jargon-filled exchanges of information. Damon, for his part, shows up after a rigorous workout all muscle, and keeps his head down, mostly silent with a few bursts of interrogation. He’s determination incarnate. Greengrass bookends the film in outbursts of violence and action, the first an escape through a riot in Greece that’s merely hectic, the finale a slam-bang car chase that includes a hijacked armored SWAT van plowing through a traffic jam in a most impressive display of stuntwork. It’s filmed, as you’d expect, in impressionistic smears of chaos cinema, a shaking camera and quick editing that are less precise here than the Bournes have previously been, but it gets the job done.

The least in the series, Jason Bourne is nonetheless a reasonably competent thriller coasting on affection for its predecessors. It’s a pleasure to be back in the recurring ideas and images of these films. The paranoid surveillance plotting can’t undo the comfort food elements of clever prop use in action beats, people snapping orders into headsets, hackers typing furiously, suits staring alternately intently or slack-jawed at screens and case files, Bourne talking on the phone to someone he’s watching through a scope, sudden blasts of gunfire, teeth-rattling car stunts, and Moby’s “Extreme Ways” playing us out into the end credits. The filmmakers’ bid to make the story matter either as a comment on our current world problems – “This could be worse than Snowden,” we hear twice – or to its characters lives – secrets even more closely intertwined with Bourne’s past – mostly falls flat. (That it repeats an inciting incident from The Bourne Supremacy is unfortunate, too.) And in the end the biggest surprise is how long it takes to have so little happen. But there’s that unstoppable competency driving everything along, elevating what could be totally disposable to the realm of passable diversion.