Songland: THE HIGH NOTE

The High Note is a fluffily charming movie that wraps you up in the warm pleasures of its plotting, with exactly the right proportion of predictable to surprising that keeps you interested. It’s two showbiz dramas in one — with an aspiring record producer (Dakota Johnson) trying to get a step up while she’s working as personal assistant to a singer (Tracee Ellis Ross) whose star might be on the decline if she doesn’t try something new soon. Then the whole thing is wrapped up in the embrace of a PG-rated vision of the industry, a showbiz fantasy with sparkling talents and pearly teeth, sweet coincidences, fabulous architecture, and, yes, as Aretha Franklin might say, great gowns. It’s the sort of movie where all the struggling assistant needs is the right sympathetic ear and the right moment — and where her thankless low-paying job still keeps her comfortable in a nice apartment. Besides, the star she’s working for is awfully gentle for a demanding celebrity. She has occasional barbs, but theirs is often a prickly friendship at worst. Even her manger (Ice Cube) is too warm to be threatening, even when he glowers at the young woman to stay in her lane when she criticizes a bigwig producer in the recording studio, overstepping her job title. It’s a comfortable drama, enough to invest in without worrying overmuch it’ll swerve into real pain. It’s a movie where the misunderstandings and disagreements feel just real enough to matter, and just light enough that they’ll melt away at the right moments.

It works because the screenplay by Flora Greeson is cozily built out of its mirrored showbiz tales—fading star meets rising talent, and maybe they can both help each other—and then further draws in elements of family dramas—that the leads are talented second-generation stars adds some extra-textual frisson—and romance while keeping things amusing and heartfelt. The younger woman starts falling for a sweet young singer-songwriter (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), with whom she has a Meet Cute discussion about The O.C.’s theme song. It’s one of those sequences so perfectly, simultaneously fresh and cliche that it’s worth a little swoon as the charming grins spring up on the actors’ faces. And the cast is the ultimate reason why the film works. One could imagine all sorts of lesser talents letting the movie potentially get bogged down in its plotty particulars. Instead, Johnson dances across each line reading with her voice flitting across the dialogue, deftly drawing out insecurities and flirtations, talents and frustrations. She moves with casual caution, wanting to do a good job, but also trying to lean in and get a leg up. Ross, too, is strong. She swaggers with a fine balance of down-to-earth and head-in-the-clouds, passionate about her career, but frustrated by limitations she’s feeling. Not the cold distance of a Devil Wears Prada, she’s often friendly, but capable of cutting with harsh angles. It’s a fine pairing. Director Nisha Ganatra (here much better served by this script than last year’s flat Late Night) gives the film a nice glossy shine, and knows how to trust her talented cast’s inherent charms to enliven the scenes. She’ll hold on a smile, let the bass rattle in the music (a well-curated playlist of decent originals and oldies), and let the chemistry brew. The result is invested in the relationships and plot developments, but has the patience to let them breathe a little. It understands the charm of letting Johnson and Ross sing along to “No Scrubs” while flying down a sunny L.A. street in a convertible, and the satisfaction felt when the characters find exactly what they need.

Darkness Falls: IT COMES AT NIGHT

Trey Edward Shults is a young director to watch. His debut feature was an achingly personal one, and all the better for it. Working on a micro-budget, filming in his mother’s home, and starring his real relatives, the tense dysfunctional-family drama Krisha was deeply felt. A worthy addition to the strangely underpopulated Thanksgiving movie genre, it told a shattering story of an estranged, addict aunt coming to dinner. His confident, expressive filmmaking – a shaking, sliding, swooning camera holding tight to its characters, and deftly suggestive aspect ratio futzing - and unblinkingly harrowing emotional directness made for a most impressive film. Now for his sophomore effort It Comes at Night, he confirms his promise with a similarly claustrophobic character study. This one flirts with genre elements, telling yet another post-apocalyptic tale (we certainly get plenty of those these days) with elegant restraint, quiet intimacy, and a creeping sense of dread. Shults demonstrates a firm hand on tone and style, so much so that even the movie’s quietest moments are freighted with an almost unbearable hushed intensity. It’s a rattling, lingering experience even with almost nothing in the way of overt scares.

We find a family living off the grid in the woods. Father (Joel Edgerton), mother (Carmen Ejogo), and son (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) have just buried a beloved grandfather. The process was difficult. They donned gas masks, took his disease-ridden body into the woods in a wheelbarrow, shot him, and burned the corpse. A plague has ravaged the world, and the family does what it must to survive. They have strict routine, rigorous quarantine procedures, and cling to each other in the candle-lit darkness because they’re all they have. They are survivors. Into this precarious situation arrives another family: a young father (Christopher Abbott), mother (Riley Keough), and toddler (Griffin Robert Faulkner). Shults, cloaking the entire film in heavy paranoia of disease and despair, has made a world where the social order has apparently collapsed, where people care only for themselves and their families. Here we can clearly see how compassion can be a liability and a danger. And yet who can see these doomed stragglers and close off help entirely?

In dark, gloomy, slow frames, Shults make such pessimistic moves seem natural, allowing assistance to be proffered in tentative, circumspect, tenuous ways. These new people are never entirely trusted, but with the nightmarish scenario, the tight-lipped lack of exposition and backstory, and the simmering dreams which approach Harrison’s young man at night there’s an open question as to how much we can trust our apparent protagonists, too. This clenched, small, quiet movie rattles with suspicion and dread. The cast to a person demonstrates painful anxiety barely choked back to keep up the usual conversational friendly niceties and demonstrations of familial love and loyalty. When push comes to shove – a dog barking, a gun locked away, sleepless night terrors, and a Red Door that must remained locked adding up to the measured vice-grip tension softly pulling the narrative trajectory towards inevitable crisis and confrontation – who will endure? And what compromise or cruelty will be needed to stay alive? The film is Romero (Night of the Living Dead without the zombies) and Carpenter (The Thing without the alien) filtered through an extra layer of modern art house affect – sterile, withholding, evocative, still. It’s one of those slow-drip horror movies about how the real monsters are the inability to truly know another person’s mind, and the deep cruelty people inflict upon one another. No surprise there, but as Shults narrows the frame, pressing down ever more intensely upon these characters, the movie finds such an intense commitment to these ideas the effect of its mood is hard to shake.