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.

Darn Ya: SMILE

Horror movies love a good supernatural infection, although it plays admittedly extra unsettling after our pandemic experiences. We know all too well how frightening it is to know you might seal your doom without even knowing until it’s too late. You’ve already let it in. That’s been the fright of The Rings and It Follows, even the Things and so many expert chillers past. Now it’s back again in Smile, a fine horror effort from debut director Parker Finn who proves his facility with dread and effective creeping suspense. The film is about a psychiatrist (Sosie Bacon) who witnesses a patient’s suicide and is soon convinced she’s being stalked by an evil entity hoping to drive her to the same fate. This thing’s signature is giving people, both real and hallucinated, stranger and memory, the creepiest smiles—an eerie glowering wide-eyed Kubrick stare combined with a toothy grin. This evil also manifests as distant whispers of her name in the dark of night, and the occasional unlocked door when she’s home alone. (Would you believe her seemingly supportive fiancé, shallow sister, dry therapist, and caring boss don’t believe her?) That’s standard spooky stuff, but done with enough commitment to silences on the soundtrack and empty spaces in the frame to raise the hairs on the back of the neck with regularity. As the lead (with the help of her cop ex-boyfriend (Kyle Gallner, honorary Scream Queen)) starts researching more and finds she’s simply the latest link in a long chain of witnesses to violent death meeting their own a week later, the film’s trajectory is clear. She’s done everything right, and has been infected all the same.

Though using this long-familiar horror trope of curse-stalked protagonists well enough, Smile is also playing with the recent en vogue horror use of the trauma plot. It lets us know the lead hasn’t recovered from her mother’s death decades earlier, and that’s haunting her, too. The movie plays fair with that metaphor and uses it with some degree of subtly, if cynically drawing to a downbeat conclusion. That stuff is more standard fare, but falls flatter than the stock shivers. What does work, though, is the way it hooks into a kind of pandemic-era dread, matched with other recent horror efforts like David Prior’s The Empty Man and David Bruckner’s The Night House. The former’s sinister whispering keys into a feeling of psycho-social contagion, a dreadful subliminal ugliness that’s unleashed without our knowing and yet tugs at the tides of our moods and consciousness, poisoning our communities into ever-darker thoughts. The latter’s grief metaphor is paired with an architectural ambiguity where shifting nighttime shadows become subtle specters in corners and crannies. Though Smile’s the least of these three pictures, its steady frames and looming doom, and its clear-eyed sense of mental unraveling prodding by traumatic events, places it in the same head space. It’s enough for an effective cold chill on a fall night.

Watership Down: THE FINEST HOURS

Like a Norman Rockwell painting poured over The Perfect Storm, The Finest Hours is a sturdy, old-fashioned picture. Based on the true story of a 1952 Coast Guard rescue of a tanker split in two by horrendous winter weather, the film tells its tale in a rather conventional way. We meet a stubborn do-gooder guardsman (Chris Pine) and the sweet girl (Holliday Grainger) who’d like to marry him. Then the storm hits, the tanker is in trouble, and the man’s commanding officer (Eric Bana) sends him out on a small boat with a small crew (Ben Foster, Kyle Gallner, and John Magaro) to do the impossible. Their boat is tossed about by the waves and winds, equipment malfunctions, and the sun sets. Meanwhile, the men on the tanker (over 30 of them, including Casey Affleck and John Ortiz) are struggling to stay afloat, with no way to make contact, and thus no way of knowing if help is even on the way. It’s a simple story, but the story is simply engaging.

A live action Disney movie, it looks and feels more or less like it would if the company made it in 1956, 66, 76, 86, 96, or 2006, modern tech aside. There’s a fine layer of timeless Hollywood gloss over it, and a proficient element of spectacle as special effects buffet the boats out in the storm and softly falling snow coats the coast in a sparkling snow globe lighthouse look. And in the midst of this is a dependable cast playing people who are largely identifiable types, but given just enough personality and interior lives for rooting interest beyond making it out alive, and to suggest a reality beyond the big studio lights on the sets and CG. The situation is inherently dramatic – true life-or-death stakes, with survival hinging on how well these people can do their jobs, and on the whims of nature. The screenplay (by The Fighter’s Eric Johnson, Scott Silver, and Paul Tamasy) is smart not to undercut the proceedings. It crests perilous waves of cliché to find clear sailing to the heartstrings.

It borders on corny, but it never quite gets there, kept afloat by its forward momentum and reliably sturdy construction. Who’d have thought Craig Gillespie, the director of the Ryan-Gosling-in-love-with-a-RealDoll movie Lars and the Real Girl and the fun Fright Night remake, would turn into a decent helmer for Disney based-on-a-true-story fare? With Finest Hours he improves on his dull sports movie Million Dollar Arm, this time telling an interesting and compelling narrative with good clarity for its process and perspective. We follow each boat’s progress through the storm, cutting between them, and some judicious glimpses of those fretting on the shore, hoping against hope that their guys will make it back alive. There’s a chaste romance at stake, and a couple dozen souls stranded in a rapidly failing craft. That’s plenty heart-tugging drama to get invested in, and a cast willing to play it earnestly.

The sequences on the listing half-tanker are the strongest, Javier Aguirresarobe’s camera and Tatiana S. Riegel’s editing crisply following a committed cast of character actors chewing on accents and sloshing around a convincingly dangerous waterlogged set, coming to terms with the long odds confronting them. The film is full of towering waves, howling winds, groaning bulkheads, straining chains, swinging beams, straining rudders, whirring propellers, and spasms of sparks and smoke. Gillespie focuses on these tactile details, in sharp, routine frames constructed to show off the heroic efforts taken by various crewmembers to save as many lives as they can. It’s a film that feels the movement of the bobbing waves, the strain on an engine as a boat takes on weight, and the taxing whir of overpowered pumps slowly letting water creep higher up the engine room. It’s an engaging film of sturdy craftsmanship, the sort of feel-good inspirational fact-based family film I’m glad Disney hasn’t entirely given up on making in the shadow of their mega-blockbuster fantasies.

School Daze: DEAR WHITE PEOPLE

Dear White People is an invigorating film, a sharp campus comedy that’s a powerful work of cultural observation and critique. With his debut feature, writer-director Justin Simien proves himself a fresh and vital new voice. The film understands the huge rush of intellectual sparring, the stimulation of smart talk and intellectual experimentation. A clever dissection of identity politics, it is pointed and complicated, as cool, empathetic, and impassioned as it is dryly funny. Set on a fictional Ivy League campus, it’s an unsparing look at campus politics and race relations, but creates such a wonderful cast of original characters that it’s also a sweet character study about people simply trying to assert their race, gender, sexuality, and class and finding themselves tied up in ideological knots, feeling outside pressure to conform to their stereotypes.

We meet several students whose plotlines crisscross throughout the course of the film, each representing a fascinating, vibrant, and thrillingly contradictory collection of viewpoints. It’s smartly constructed so that they’re characters first, their ideas second, but one is inextricable from the other. There’s the impassioned black student activist (Tessa Thompson) who writes tracts, makes student films (her “Rebirth of a Nation,” for example), holds demonstrations, and hosts a campus radio show called “Dear White People.” It’s filled with barbs like, “Dear White People, the minimum requirement of black friends needed to not seem racist has just been raised.” Her secret white boyfriend (Justin Dobies) tells her she should “hold up a mirror, not drop an ideological piano” on her audience. Her supporters at the black student union (led by Marque Richardson) agitate for her to push their agenda forward. Other black students, like an econ major and striving reality show aspirant (Teyonah Parris), call her “blacker-than-thou” and a “bougie Lisa Bonet wannabe.”

A more neutral party is the aimless gay sophomore (Tyler James Williams) whose afro and skin color get him a job at the school newspaper, since they all feel too white to write about this controversy. Still others, like the handsome president (Brandon P. Bell) of the historically all-black dorm about to be gutted by a “housing randomization act,” who happens to be son of the Dean of Students (Dennis Haysbert), doesn’t see what all the fuss is about. He starts to feel the activist heat when she decides to take his place. The film’s perceptive in its creation of a variety of roles for black actors, speaking from a multiplicity of experiences and backgrounds.

But this is also a movie about white people. The black student activists, but especially the radio show, annoy the white frat bros (led by Kyle Gallner) who think the hardest thing to be in American society is an educated white man. The head bro is the son of the college’s president (Peter Syvertsen) who is somehow sure racism is over, not knowing that his son’s frat party is poised to be flagrantly racist, complete with white students in blackface. They think meaning it as a joke makes it somehow okay. We sit with them and understand their perspective, even though the conclusions they draw are deeply flawed. A prologue showed us news coverage of said party before flashing back to the beginning of the fall semester, so we know it’s happening. The film is clever in slowly teasing out the campus culture that allows it to bubble up in the first place.

While that’s a lot of characters and subplots to juggle and a great thorny tangle of modern identity, Simien keeps the ensemble storylines moving along. He cares about his characters, making sure none become mere punchline, or are artificially weakened to make a political point. It’s a comedy, more of situation and recognition than snap, crackle, pop. But the dialogue is written and performed with a heightened crackling intelligence. And it never feels like Simien has them reading passages from a doctoral thesis. It’s a film about real people dealing with how they define themselves and how others define them, struggling to perform their identities as they live, love, and argue in the forge of identity that college can be.

And that’s what makes conversations about societal expectations, stereotypes, cultural appropriation, “ironic” racism, and code switching all the more powerful. Where else but college do you have the freedom to talk about these ideas and live them at the same time? It’s an authentically collegiate experience, with kids grappling with the big issues while living out a microcosm of the world at large. Some of them want to hold court and get in philosophical debates in the cafeteria. Others just want to study, or hook up, or smoke weed.

This is a fun ensemble comedy with characters I cared about, every major role expertly inhabited by a well-cast performer. It also happens to be one of the most politically vital works of pop filmmaking in quite some time. It takes a long, hard look at the variety of ways we interact with a variety of identities, spotting prejudiced aggressions big and small, in the context of a funny, romantic, sometimes moving entertainment. It’s not often a movie comes along that’s so hugely satisfying and so intoxicatingly intelligent.

Simien is a welcome new voice, using his talents to create one of the smartest, liveliest films of the year. He's a promising first-time director, excited to be playing with technique, with slow zooms, chapter headings, and voice over for emphasis and structure. Perhaps most effective is the way he takes certain confrontations – a conversation between the president and the dean, say – that could be filmed in a simple two shot and instead cuts back and forth between characters speaking in profile towards each other. This emphasizes the disjunction, how quickly honest discussion of race becomes pointless. They’re trapped in their own boxes, talking past each other.

Dear White People is about the hard work of breaking down those boxes, finding barriers where they usually can’t be seen, and especially as people run into differences between the way they want to be seen and how others see them. Identity is more than a collection of signifiers and affectations, no matter how convenient it is for media, corporations, institutions, friends and neighbors to reduce you to them. Here's a movie that says it's okay to love Spike Lee and Taylor Swift. (Whew.) Simien writes wonderfully complicated characters in a film that gives them space to be themselves, to argue and grow. It doesn’t solve problems or wallow in them, but serves them up in the context of a story well told. It’s a powerful, nuanced work of cultural critique that’s also a fun time at the movies. 

Pew Askew: RED STATE

With Kevin Smith’s films it’s always one step forward, two steps back. He’s an auteur utterly incapable of growth along any satisfying career trajectories. There’s a reason why he’s far more beloved for his speaking tours and podcast appearances than for his actual films at this point. Whatever charm he has live and in person – his skills as a conversationalist are considerable – is missing from his finished products. I’ve grown exasperated with him, turning up for each film and finding less and less of what I wish to see, namely a fully enjoyable experience. His 1994 debut feature Clerks, a simple, crude, and cheap black and white affair shows such promise without, you know, being a good movie, that its strange to see a director forever moving sideways.

His talent has curdled. An early sense of precociousness has become precious, self-satisfied, and over-written, one talky comedy following the next. Even films like Chasing Amy and Dogma, his relatively more ambitious attempts to brush up against his own emotional or religious truths, come burdened with dialogue that registers to my ears as utterly false. Smith commonly claims to be far better with dialogue than with visuals. There’s some truth there. His visual sense is strictly perfunctory, impersonal, where his writing drips with his personality. But at least his visuals are not as mannered and stylized as his dialogue which is so flatly similar across every character that to watch a Kevin Smith movie is to experience a cast of puppets all speaking in his voice.

With Red State, though, he shakes things up. He’s attempting to get back to the kind of scrappy indie potential that his filmmaking hasn’t shown in almost twenty years. This isn’t a talky comedy; it’s a talky horror thriller. Three teen guys (Michael Angarano, Nicholas Braun, and Kyle Gallner) drive out to a remote house in the woods where they think they are to find a woman (Melissa Leo) that they met online. In person, she’s older than they expected and her motives are darker than they think. She drugs them and hands them over to the leader of a cult, a creepy, charismatic preacher (Michael Parks). The film pauses to regard this lanky, grizzled man as he delivers to his congregation a lengthy homophobic sermon that culminates in his murdering a bound gay man on the altar while the three teens shiver in a cage nearby.

This is all adequate sloppy scariness, unsettling and squirmy. It’s not typical Smith, visually static and uninspired. I particularly liked a shot in which a church-basement’s gun closet slowly reveals its contents as a cross-shaped fluorescent light flickers to life overhead. Smith’s camera jumps and leaps with similarly disrupted editing. As the teens attempt to escape and get caught up in a bigger calamity, the story Smith tells takes wild, provocative leaps in tone and content. His characters speak in distinguishable dialogue, giving a chance for individual actors to stand out, like when John Goodman thunders onto the scene as an ATF agent who gets pulled in to investigate. Moving around the margins are less successful caricatures that are of little use for the film, like a buffoonish sheriff (Stephen Root) who seems to be only a pawn for Smith’s larger political aims, a satirical intent that never fully materializes.

Smith is trying so much new here. The film is as alive with promise as anything he’s ever done. And yet, and yet, this still isn’t a good movie. When it debuted at Sundance in the middle of a Smith-fueled media-circus, the critical condemnation was swift and furious. He called the film a game-changer, a film so good he felt ready to retire, but this haphazard mess is anything but a game-changer. It’s a radical departure in style and tone for Smith but it’s not any better a horror film than his other films are comedies. Its wild leaps feel schematic when they come to land; the twists are harsh, flippant rug pulling and mindless blood lust. The film’s potential slowly drains away so that by the end it feels like its been written, manipulated, into a corner from which only a shrug can escape. What makes Red State particularly disappointing is the way it’s so close to being Smith’s best film, and yet so terribly far away. It’s a film that sets out to skewer unquestioningly held beliefs that is ironically preachy and ultimately only satisfying for audiences already initiated into the cult of Kevin Smith.

Another New Nightmare: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET

The main raison d’etre of the Nightmare on Elm Street remake is theoretically the casting of a mid-comeback Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger, the series’ dream-haunting serial killer. In practice, the great actor has been given significantly less than nothing to do with the role; he settles into a pattern of twitches and growls that are matched with equally tiring glares and stares of the ominous variety. To make matters worse, the changes to the character could have led to a film with interesting ideas to share, if the filmmakers had any clear way of saying them, if the makers even realized the existence of such ideas.

In the original 1984 semi-classic from Wes Craven, Krueger was a serial killer who met his demise at the hands of an angry mob of grieving, outraged citizens. He subsequently haunts the dreams of a collection of teens through the course of the film. Now that’s it is 2010, that’s just too simple a premise, I guess. Now Krueger was a pedophile who was killed by a group of angry parents. Years later, he haunts the dreams of his victims, now teens and young adults. That could be a powerful message for a horror movie; one that casts a stark light on the ways child abuse can leave an intense impact on the victims’ lives, one that says the damage some are capable of committing against the most innocent among us is the real nightmare. But first-time feature director Samuel Bayer and his team are content to leave the idea as a dully formed and dumbly wielded bludgeon of sensationalism in an otherwise dull, painfully adequate horror film.

If you find sudden appearances that are synchronized with loud blats or clangs on the soundtrack the height of scariness, then by all means you will be terrified by this remake which cycles through the memorable images of the original with all the energy of a boring routine and all the imagination of a checklist. The claw in the bathtub? Check. The bulging wallpaper? Check. The soupy carpet? Check. The slow-mo jump rope? The menacing boiler rooms? The levitating girl? The bloody body bag in the school hall? Check, check, check, check. They’re all accounted for, but in worse shape than before.

Craven’s original has a sluggish, dreamlike quality. Watching for the first time, I was never quite sure when we were in or out of a dream. The characters and the threat to their lives are revealed efficiently and creepily and the odd incongruous jolts of creepy imagery are genuinely shocking. I loved the quietly creeping mood of the film that slowly overwhelms. I loved the hall monitor’s sudden transformation, the stairs that melt underfoot, and the unpredictable, shifting Krueger. The remake gets this all wrong. The pace isn’t dreamlike; it’s just sleepy. It’s not creepy or shocking, just rote. Information is doled out in entirely inefficient ways. If I hadn’t seen the original it would have been quite late in the film before I even figured out what the exact nature of the threat was.

It’s a frustration, I suppose. This is a film that couldn’t even hurdle my very low expectations. There’s an attractive young cast who are quite excellent at moping with suitably tired expressions including Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara, Katie Cassidy, Thomas Dekker, and Kellan Lutz. They are asked to do so little, they may as well be living statues. The movie really lets down its cast and its audience, but above all, the movie lets down Haley, who, from behind ugly, uninspired makeup, is just as unneeded as the film itself.