Concerted Effort: TRAP

M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap is probably his slightest and most straightforward movie to date. It’s pretty much always exactly what it appears to be, all right on the surface with no surprises. And yet his pacing, rhythm and plot progression is always so idiosyncratically his own that it’s still unexpected in its every development and every preposterous turn of events. More than any Shyamalan before, this one has little logic on a scene to scene basis, with plausibility, or even basic sense, almost completely subsumed by his workings of style, character, and theme. It makes for a minor work, but a vivid and telling one. He’s too good a filmmaker to let something like coherence or context throw him off his game. Forget having a plot hole or two; this movie’s Swiss cheese. But, hey, cheese can be a good treat, too, and my fellow Shyamalan auteurists will still find plenty to appreciate in the movie’s total refusal to be anything but itself. That is to say, it is, like his other recent efforts like Old and Knock at the Cabin, another outlandish premise in which a family is put to an ultimate test of togetherness.

Here we find Josh Hartnett as a doting dad taking his daughter to a pop concert, an event we quickly realize has been infiltrated by an FBI team on the hunt for a serial killer they have good reason to believe is in attendance. The twist lands quickly: Hartnett is that killer. Now he’s stuck surrounded by cops and crowds—and proceeds to plow unstoppably forward, like a shark on the move. He’s cornered, and needs to find his way out by working all the angles. That’s clever enough—and a more conventionally satisfying thriller might’ve milked its central concept more fully. Instead it’s played loosely for a few macabre moments and a lot of cringing comic stings. It never quite makes a full convincing space. The concert itself is a pretty flat affair—Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka plays a pop star simulacrum with songs that are bland and a performance a bit under-characterized and sketchily choreographed. And the variables at play in such a location are utilized rather sparingly as Hartnett eyes every potential escape route without rousing too much suspicion. Holding nearly every scene, he does a fine job of tight, restrained flailing, desperate to keep the ruse of normality from slipping. Then, without building to pop music crescendoes of payoffs, Shyamalan wriggles out of the expected and denies us the simple pleasures with a more eccentrically unexpected series of developments. We might think we’re watching a movie about a killer caught in a trap, but it’s soon clear it’s a movie about the traps we set for ourselves.

Here’s a man whose evil hobby has taken over his life. The unrealistic expectations he’s set for his nice suburban fatherhood persona colliding with his ugly urges threaten to ruin the good family man he could’ve been. He seems like a good dad—smiling, generous, bantering—and yet there’s a victim tied up in his basement. The friction between these halves of his identity is now grinding quickly toward imminent conflagration. The setup as rolled out was pretty far-fetched anyway. As Shyamalan lets it simmer as a twisted character piece instead, and gives a slow-rolling, high-pressure picture of a family life falling apart as it collides with the disjunctions and unexpected connections of stardom and screens and teens and the ways in which people can hide from each other in plain sight. The movie takes on a typically Shyamalanian frisson of pinned-back melodrama and ominous, geometrically composed implications that heighten the unreality of its murmured line readings and precise shell-game theatrics. It may have still left me wishing for the more conventional setups and payoffs the concert setting seemed to promise—but the more bitter interpersonal stakes of its increasingly small turns and odd shifts might end up lingering all the more.

The Other Side: KNOCK AT THE CABIN

There’s an intensity borne from earnestness in the films of M. Night Shyamalan. In his latest, Knock at the Cabin, the world is ending. Multiple cataclysmic events are piling up. One family, on vacation, unaware of the lurking global catastrophes, are about to offered an awful choice with the claim that it’s the only way to stop what’s already starting. No devotee of M. Night Shyamalan will be surprised that Cabin juxtaposes apocalyptic stakes with the sentimentality of familial love. He’s as open-hearted a genre filmmaker as ever there was one, using his total control of the camera for total emotional sincerity in his high-concept stories. This can cause discomfort in some audiences—shrinking back from such nakedly earnest emotional appeals, in which characters plainly pour out their souls. But it makes for such fascinating movies! He believes in his fictions, and in characters succumbing to theirs. At his best, it makes for tightly-controlled, high-concept thrillers wound around moving motivations and implications.

His films care deeply about the strength of family bonds, the sincerity of belief, and takes seriously the spiritual dimensions of genre dilemmas. Consider the doubting spirituality in Signs, in which a broken man of faith must find within himself the power to protect his family against unknowable otherworldly threat. Or the children held back by the rituals of their protective parents as the community bands together against the evils lurking in the woods beyond in The Village. Or the grounded superhero fictions trembling with violent real-world implications for parents and children in Unbreakable and Glass. Or the way time inevitably pulls parents and children apart even as it binds them together in Old. In Cabin, the family unit—two husbands and an eight-year-old daughter—is besieged by apparent fanatics whose ominous behaviors are said to result from prophetic visions. These harbingers of doom plead with the family to sacrifice for the greater good. Wouldn’t we all like to think we would? But, when told they must choose among their family for a human sacrifice, that choice is immediately difficult to even begin to contemplate.

The upsetting concept is inherently claustrophobic—captives and captors alike stuck in one small cabin while considering one tragic end or another. Shyamalan shoots dialogue in intense close-ups, tightly held on faces in long, lingering looks that fully take in the humanity of all involved. It’s uneasy, a tremulous tension held in the uncertainty of outcome balanced on the certainty of the telling. There’s a quasi-religious fervor to the invaders. Led by Dave Bautista in a rumblingly sensitive performance—is there a better actor working today at looking a muscular threat while speaking in a gentle softness?—these mismatched dangers confess to sharing visions—or are they delusions? They talk with soft-spoken fervor of their mission, and plead for their victims to heed the warning and make the choice. The family is tied up for most of the movie, wrestling with that question. One husband (Ben Aldridge) is resolutely convinced these antagonists are full of it. The other (Jonathan Groff) is afraid they’re starting to sound believable. Their daughter (Kristen Cui) is adorable and instantly sympathetic—sizing up the situation without being precocious. She’s aware of the dangers, sheltered from the worst of it, and willing to trust in her fathers’ resolve. The film rests on the question of who to believe, and, once believed, what must be done. It’s about the strength of a family’s love in the face of the potential apocalypse, and the necessarily painful nature of sacrifice. It’s all written in their eyes.

This is one of Shyamalan’s saddest movies, suffused with an eerie melancholy. Almost immediately, the conflict kicks in and the film knows life can never go back to how it was—for any of them. The suspense is pushed along by escalating violence, but it’s carefully composed bloodshed, more suggested and more unsettling for it. The ritualistic nature of its killings are given a nasty pull of inevitability and gathering force. And yet the fanatics are so matter-of-fact and sorrowful about it—they cry and lament and choke back vomit—that it makes their fantastical story of impending doom all the more believable. It’s hooked into a vivid spirituality that’s a sincere belief in the potential redemptive powers within all of us—for connection, for reconciliation, for transformative love, and for self-sacrifice. That leaves a movie that’s tremendously unresolved, and ends on a note that may or may not allow space for triumph or release, since it’s committed to leaving its characters in traumatized grief no matter the ultimate outcome.

Life's a Beach: OLD

M. Night Shyamalan’s Old has the simple parable power of a Twilight Zone-style conceit, the cheap one-location resourcefulness of a low-fi 50’s sci-fi B-movie, and all the potential stiffness that that could imply. And yet it has an eerie affect through nothing more than suggestion and contemplation of a genuinely horrifying idea if you approach it at the level of earnestness its filmmaker did. What would it be like to live a lifetime in an afternoon? How would your mind race and scramble? How would your anatomy betray you? What would you do with the time given to you? Seeing life dimming as sunset draws near gives you a painfully clear metaphor. The clock is always ticking. So it is with the characters here, a few families and a handful of others driven to a secluded beach by their hosts at the tropical resort where they are vacationing. Once there it’s soon enough clear that the kids are growing up right before their eyes. And then the adults start greying and wrinkling and, well, what else could be happening? They’re aging too fast! Thus goes this nutty thought experiment with Shyamalan’s usual preoccupation with creepy shivers and familial sentimentality. But he’s also here up to subtextual freakiness with squirmy ideas and twisted implications. The movie may not cohere as well as Shyamalan’s best work, but it’s gross and propulsive and never flags in its fluid focus.

On the one hand, it has the trauma of aging from the view of parents who see their cute offsprings’ entire childhoods fly by. (Don’t wish your life away, the mother ironically warns before the beach.) On the other hand is the perspective of adolescences transmogrifying youngsters in practically a blink, so that a 6-year-old mind is broiling in hormones of a 15-year-old body. That’s messed up. The film never quite pushes as far as it could into depravity — Shyamalan’s just not that kind of horror filmmaker — but it’s plenty unsettling as the paradoxically claustrophobic beachfront becomes the site of a cataloging of all the ways aging can turn your body against you: tumors and dementia and seizures and heart attacks and broken bones and blindness and so on. As the day continues, the adults are in rough shape, and the children are thoroughly rattled. (Alex Wolff and Thomasin McKenzie do good work playing stunted kids caught between ages, foreign in their own bodies.) Looking at them, it’s clear growing old is scary stuff. Sure, the movie has them behave in some clunky ways and dialogue can grow creaky and the progression of events sometimes wobbles. But one could easily hand wave that by asking if you’d handle being trapped in this situation any better. How would you even begin to reason your way out of this dilemma? You’re getting older by the second! I suspect there is a purposeful disconnect from the expected behavior. Do you think Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps and Rufus Swell, among others, would behave this awkwardly and unnaturally, all together and in the same pitch and register, for no reason? They’re lost in the melancholy and confusion of passing time as it rushes past. They hardly recognize what they’ve had before it’s gone.

There’s something bordering on chintzy to the premise and execution, but just when I found myself squinting to comprehend its sometimes-flimsy leaps, Shyamalan would win me back by hooking into the tingling emotions jolting the odd mystery of the piece. By the end, of course there’s a solution to all this. And though it wraps up the events with a tight semi-silly but workable conclusion, it doesn’t exactly satisfy (and also clangs a bit against the tenor of the times — I wonder how it’ll play a decade hence). But the journey there is so persistently off-kilter, adrift from convention, with characters totally at a loss to describe what they’re seeing or to understand a way out. Who can’t relate? And Shyamalan matches the confusion with a sincerity attuned to that state: with long takes falling into jittery handheld shots, 360 degree pans that blur and smear, a lingering on bodies in ways that matter-of-factly clue us into shocking changes by revealing a curvier hip or a freshly bulging belly. The shot framing our group of characters through a decomposed rib cage is typical of the attention to highlighting the potential for decay in all of us, the bars that hold us captive. Even when scripts get thin, Shyamalan remains a filmmaker with a distinct visual sense and a finely honed sense of space and storytelling within the wide screen. To see a movie that could’ve easily been disposable or even unworkable on the page lifted to intriguing and compelling and downright interesting through sheer force of filmmaking makes me wish we had more directors working at this level.

The Wind Will Carry Us: THE HAPPENING

“Then, one spring, a strange blight crept over the area, and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community; mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, and the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was the shadow of death.”
    — Rachel Carson, “Silent Spring”

An early image in The Happening: construction workers casually stepping off towering scaffolding, raining down, plummeting to their deaths. It really sets the stage. We’ve already seen a woman stab herself in the neck, and later will see a man splayed out in a field awaiting an approaching industrial lawn mower. Still elsewhere we will see a cozy suburban street with lush, verdant trees, and corpses hanging through their branches. These are indelibly frightening images, memorably staged and haunting in their lingering impact and implication. Here’s the deal with M. Night Shyamalan’s oft maligned The Happening, which merely had the misfortune of being released at a time when his artistic reputation was on a downswing — a nasty course correction from the “Next Spielberg” hype he’d been getting from his great early films like The Sixth Sense and Signs. That wasn’t fair. But The Happening is a good thriller, and an even better work of deep dread. It’s a vision of society suddenly falling apart, in which a damaging pandemic sweeps across the land and no one knows what to do or how to stop it. No one can weigh the risks, and no leadership emerges to contain the threat. There’s just a primal sense of escape, and even then despair. The characters are running, knowing it has to be futile. And yet they run anyway, even as the world falls down around them, as groups splinter and squabble over how to survive, as conspiracies bubble up as no one has enough information, as people turn cruel, selfish, and violent, sometimes out of desperation or fear, but scarier still, sometimes inexplicably.

When the film first arrived in 2008, and ever since, its loud detractors have scoffed at its twist. Spoiler: plants are emitting toxins that are causing people to kill themselves. Ha, they laugh, isn’t it funny to think nature is the big danger in this movie? But this isn’t a twist. It’s a reveal. (This is the case in more of Shyamalan’s films than his reputation commonly asserts, and leads to uncharitable readings of his other unfairly dismissed efforts, too.) Besides, can’t you do that belittling with every monster? Take the movie at its word, and it is scary, truly scary, to imagine a world of ecological horror, in which humanity is revealed once and for all to be at the mercy of nature and its wrath. Shyamalan sharply sees the terror of our vulnerability to nature’s whims. As our world reckons ever more acutely with the ravages of viral infection and climate change, here is a movie that grows only more unsettling. A scene where the fleeing humans race through a field, the wind whipping through the vegetation, is not about outrunning danger, but the overwhelming hopelessness of thinking you can. It takes something that can be normal and soothing — the noise of wind through leaves on a brisk day — and turns it devastatingly dangerous, an all-encompassing sense that we can’t hide from something we can’t see.

In Shyamalan’s vision, characters’ personal problems pale against the enormity and the unknowability of this scenario. So when the central relationship conflict between Mark Wahlberg (admittedly he’s not quite right for the role of a science teacher, but sells confusion and stress) and Zooey Deschanel (whose wide-eyed confusion matches the situation with the right befuddlement) doesn’t quite work, it’s at least partially because of course the larger trauma is overpoweringly the main concern. (And this is hardly the only effective horror movie with an undercooked subplot.) More evocative is John Leguizamo, who brings palpable real tension and pain when confronted with a danger he can’t confront, a situation he can’t control, for the benefit of himself and his family. All through the film are these sometimes absurd (the lions!), sometimes peculiar (the lemon drink!), sometimes recessive, quickly-sketched observations of all manner of people reacting to the unknowable dilemma. Some grow hysterical. Some say stupid things. Some go boldly in the wrong direction. Some are suspicious others want what little they have. Some have selfishness that brings others doom. Maybe they should try wearing masks? (You should.)

Shyamalan’s filmmaking remains controlled here. His camera is typically patient, with the great Tak Fujimoto’s cinematography catching the horror precisely, as shocking for elisions as it is for gore—think a chain of suicides the camera follows just out of frame, following instead the dropped gun as it passes from person to person. The suspense is set against James Newton Howard’s score going evocatively wild with simmering, swirling strings right out of a 1950’s sci-fi chiller. Maybe this is a Day the Earth Stood Still, scarier for having no interlocutor from the heavens to translate the moral. It's exactly as straight-faced a B-movie idea as that, flatly earnest about its points, using its concept to draw big fundamental horror about how little holds our modern human society together when you get down to it. When the film reaches its conclusion, a genre beat with ostensible safety leaving hints of the real danger lurking and lingering, ready to explode again, it’s totally clear this is a movie about how humanity’s short-term thinking and short-term memory will inevitably doom us. Even when nature fights back—revealing how we are literally killing ourselves by ignoring its warnings—we will too quickly race back to normal, inviting the danger’s resurgence.

Breakable: SPLIT

Split is a movie fractured between victims and victimizers. It has a trio of kidnapped girls trapped in a nondescript basement, cowering and terrified and unsure how to fight back and escape. It also follows the kidnapper, an imposing and intimidating man of few words who is also his own victim, as multiple personalities share his mind, some good and trying to push him to do the right thing, others bad, using his body for evil. They all fear The Beast. The movie awaits his arrival, a new, scary personality that will banish all the others and take the body for his own nefarious animalistic purposes. As an M. Night Shyamalan movie, it takes on a fractured quality as well. It’s somewhere between the expensive, expansive, gorgeously designed studio pictures of his early career – masterful thoughtful chillers like The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village – and the nastier, scrappier B-movie he’s now making for Blumhouse, starting with found-footage lark The Visit. His movies are quiet, contemplative, and restrained. But now they’ve taken on a grotesque crowd-pleasing edge, this one taking the time occasionally to linger on young bodies in tight undergarments and bloody bites taken out of abdomens. But what joins these impulses is a patience, and a willingness to sit the majority of its runtime in a serious, overwhelming, portentous feeling of impending doom. Cutting between the basement, the man, his therapist, and flashbacks from the lead girl, each gathers its own sick pit of despair, and the only resolution for these damaged characters will be to embrace their damage, and make their pain an asset.

In this way, the unusually structured screenplay goes askew from the predictable, leaning away from simple dichotomies or the expected suspense. It’s not so much about who will escape and who will die. It’s not particularly interested, even, in what will make the violence erupt, though genre dictates it must. Instead, Shyamalan, drifting away from these threads so often it deflates the suspense, makes a strikingly directed film like a high-gloss scuzzy character study. It’s about a man (James McAvoy) struggling with his identity, lashing out with frightening intensity as the eerily composed kidnapper, scolding himself as a matronly planner of this evil, regressing into creepily charming childlike naivete as a perpetual kid personality stuck along for the ride. This is hardly convincing representation of mental illness, but as metaphor for a confused, lonely, traumatized creep desperately trying to pull his life together and make sense of his purpose, it has a cockeyed compelling energy. Add to it the girls he takes – two best friends (Haley Lu Richardson and Jessica Sula) and a distant acquaintance (Anya Taylor-Joy) snatched from the parking lot of a teenager’s birthday party – trying to figure him out to stay safe, and it’s startling to see how differentiated McAvoy makes the personalities. When’s he’s the harmless youngster, it’s so convincing the immediate tension deescalates, leaving only the worry another facet of his mind will suddenly reappear. 

Shyamalan – with sharp cinematographer Michael Gioulakis (of the similarly confident widescreen creepy It Follows) – glides the camera down dark hallways, or parks at direct bird’s-eye-view angles to take in the tableaus his designs. A man darts out of the dark, into the searing spotlight of a streetlamp, only to disappear again. The slow opening of a car door suddenly reveals a girl’s presence with the dinging of the alarm alerting the villain that it’s ajar. Shyamalan milks moments for maximum suspense, giving over lengthy scenes to Taylor-Joy’s backstory, a wounding story of trauma with a slow-boil reveal that’s borderline distasteful and deeply disturbing, all the more so for its casual reality and horror exposition backdrop. It starts like one of those explaining-the-final-girl’s-hidden-beast-killing-skills flashbacks, but becomes something far more chilling in its emotional underpinnings, especially when the movie leaves her story’s emotional journey so tense and unresolved. The other prong of the tale – therapist Betty Buckley, whose intense professional interest in her unusual client is nonetheless too slow to stop the story before it starts – is given over to origin-story babbling, overexplaining the fractured state of his mind, and the ability for it to manifest convincingly different physicality as he appears to almost shrink into smaller, meeker personas and expand into larger, domineering ones. Yet it’s of a piece with the movie’s stressed and distressed characters, crumbling under the weight of bearing burdens with which they’ve been cursed.  

This is hardly Shyamalan’s best film, but it carries provocative ideas and confident filmmaking. He once more rides the line between inadvertent silliness and ponderous philosophizing, maintaining a satisfying balance through a mix of controlled, assured blocking – sinister rack focus, suspenseful tracking shots, simmering long takes – and coaxing tremendously full-bodied performances from serious performers giving it full attention with nary a condescending wink. If you’re on his wavelength, you’ll know how effective his techniques remain. Here is the work of a filmmaker flexing his style, noodling around a grabbing high concept to moderate effect. It lacks the artful intent of his best work, and the eager genre thrills of his most misunderstood (charming fantasy misfires Lady in the Water, Last Airbender and After Earth, and ersatz R-rated Twilight Zone episode The Happening). But it has his low-key eccentric personality and no-nonsense visual control, and again proves a big screen Shyamalan experience should always be something of an event.

Old Folks Home: THE VISIT

M. Night Shyamalan has proven himself a masterful visual storyteller several times over. From his breakthrough The Sixth Sense, which sold its famous big twist in a wordless reveal, to Signs and The Village, which kept their monsters almost entirely out of the frame, he’s shown a facility with long takes and precise composition, playing with background and foreground information and use of focus. Such patience, which he’s put to great effect even in big digital spectacles like After Earth, is rare in mainstream filmmaking these days. His latest film, The Visit, is a found footage horror movie, at first glance a form antithetical to his visual precision. But he uses it for all it’s worth, making its shaking and self-aware status assets instead of impediments. The carefully casual cinematography is used to highlight the importance of what’s seen and what’s not seen, how people perform for a camera and for each other, and how scary it can be to not have access to full information about a situation or a person.

The movie we’re watching is a documentary a 15-year-old girl (Olivia DeJonge) is making about her estranged grandparents. She and her 13-year-old brother (Ed Oxenbould) are meeting them for the first time, their mother (Kathryn Hahn) having had an angry severing of ties before their births. A precocious film buff thinking she’s on the verge of creating a moving story of family reunion, she conscripts her brother to be an assistant cameraman. So that’s how cinematographer Maryse Alberti convincingly explains two angles on the happenings as they head off to their grandparents’ remote Pennsylvania farmhouse to spend a week. She lectures her brother on the importance of mise-en-scène, on allowing the frame to suggest more beyond what it literally sees, on making sure they only film that which they’re directly involved with. (Consequently, the movie’s the best-looking, well-considered example of its type.) He’s happy to help, but also admits, “Who gives a crap about cinematic standards?”

Setting the groundwork for understanding why these kids end up with many fussy shots, and continue to film even when their vacation starts getting creepy, Shyamalan uses the camcorder footage to stage scenes of great visual mystery and uncanny normalcy to directly comment upon our position as viewers. We see what we see because of characters’ decisions. This puts us close to their thoughts, where a zoom or a pan can clue us into the mind of the person behind the scenes. Before the camera, we see people playing roles, pulling faces, trying to be what others expect of them. Behind it, we see curiosities in revealing visual choices. Like the best found footage – The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity, Unfriended – the closeness it affords, and the commonness of its look, comments directly upon the character’s preoccupations. Here we see a girl who thought she could shape her life’s narrative, but realizes her grandparents aren’t following the script she’d had in her head.

When the kids first arrive, Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie) go out of their way to be grandparently stereotypes. They’re excited to meet the youngsters and are eager to fill a role they’ve never before gotten to play, giving tours, playing games, and providing lots of baked goods. Together the four characters have funny and awkward attempts to connect, forcing a family dynamic while gingerly ignoring as best they can the fact they’re total strangers. The charade can’t last long, and the first sad twist is a reveal of encroaching senility. While the kids wander around, hang out, ask questions, and get footage (the movie is perceptive about kids’ aimless free time to be filled with hobbies and wondering) they notice something off about the old folks. It’s not just the strict 9:30 bedtime. The elderly couple is suffering from forgetfulness, confusion, mood swings, sleepwalking, incontinence, violent anger, and maybe dementia or schizophrenia, too.

They’re just old, the kids think. That’s what their mom tells them when they worriedly Skype with her. They should just be careful and make the best of it. It’s only a few more days. Besides, it’ll make for a better documentary. Sliding into mercilessly nasty suspense, the movie accrues creepy details (a locked shed, a child-sized oven, a muddy well) and brilliant misdirection before springing surprise jolts in a finale full of jumpy scares, gross out shocks, perfectly timed violence, and the worst game of Yahtzee ever recorded. Every step of the way, it’s about what’s known and what’s unknown, what we can see for sure and we fear we can’t. While satisfying genre demands, Shyamalan makes good use of his conceit, cleverly pointing out its own mechanics (“This can be the dénouement,” the girl whispers excitedly near the climax) while sitting in unsettling intimate territory. It plays on common fears that older people in your life will inevitably slip away from you and become something you don’t recognize.

The Visit is a movie about the nature of performance, the person you try to be when others are watching. It’s smart about finding the performative aspects of childhood, and family life in general in another of Shyamalan's stories of broken families looking to be made whole. The form is an added wrinkle. The theoretical audience the camera represents is a factor in the leads’ behavior. We see the kids setting up shots, playing for the camera, looking at footage, editing, putting in music, and discussing their creative decisions. The girl hopes it’s not too schmaltzy. The boy wants to rap over the end credits. As the creepiness of their week builds, their posturing falls away. Eventually the camera is left to only capture clear slashes of fright, as characters become not who they want to be seen as, or who they hope to find, but who they really are. Amusing, scary, admirably strange, and expertly button-pushing, this is Shyamalan at his most crowd-pleasing.

Just the Two of Them: AFTER EARTH

In After Earth, a distant father (Will Smith) takes a trip with his estranged son (Jaden Smith) at the urging of his wife (Sophie Okonedo). It’ll be good for them, she thinks. Too bad their transport crashes, leaving them stranded in the wilderness. Too badly hurt to assist in finding help, the father sends his son on the journey, traversing deadly terrain while using technology to remain in contact. This is no ordinary story of a camping trip gone wrong, although that simple emotional core is certainly what the film’s about. These characters are humans a thousand years removed from our time, long after our planet has been abandoned and left for dead. Their spaceship has crash-landed on the quarantined Earth, the most dangerous place in the galaxy, a planet that has evolved to reject its long gone human inhabitants. It’s a thin drama of man versus nature loaded up with appealing sci-fi trappings.

Help for the stranded can only arrive by one of the Smiths activating a beacon flung from the wreckage and subsequently now located miles away. It’s a two-person film for the most part, with father and son Smith bonding while trapped apart by necessity, stuck together on a digital tether. The elder Smith plays not just an expert, but the best member of a futuristic army corps knows as Rangers. He knows all about the tricks of survival, including avoiding nasty, blind alien beasts that can only track humans by smelling their fear. As if this metaphor weren’t subtle enough, one of these beasts is tracking the younger Smith as he makes his way up hillsides, down steep cliffs, avoiding angry monkeys, climbing wildcats, and pterodactyl-sized birds of prey. You see, he must literally learn to control his fear if father and son are to survive. He’s hunted by the metaphor of maturity he must physically overpower to grow up and save the day.

The story of a father teaching his son the skills that make him the best at what he does takes on a subtext worth noting when it’s a film starring one of the world’s best movie stars and his relatively inexperienced actor son. (That Will Smith receives a story credit here only further underlines this reading.) Will Smith is a charismatic performer, but here drops his charm into static, stoic, minimalist reserve. It’s a measure of his talent that he’s sometimes compelling and often affecting despite holding so much back. Jaden, on the other hand, has much less of a natural screen presence and when he drops down into the same spare acting style to match his father’s acting choices he simply drops emotionally out of the film entirely. He disappears into the spectacle as nothing more than a lethargic action figure going through the motions in what should be a grand boy’s adventure, tromping through flora and fauna, barely staying alive at every turn, but is in reality thinner and simpler than even that would be.

What keeps the film interesting despite its rather thin plotting and a performance that’s featured in nearly every shot so completely underwhelming is the direction by M. Night Shyamalan. Even when, in recent films like his The Last Airbender, his storytelling arguably creeps towards self-serious silliness (though I’d argue that less vociferously than his detractors), he has an incredible eye. Here, he creates an uncommon stillness and patience in this Hollywood spectacle’s visual style.Working with Peter Suschitzky’s cinematography, this is a film that drinks in natural beauty of its sweeping landscapes. Even when the action, such as it is, begins, there is maintained a refreshing sense of steadiness. In the very best scenes here, as in his very best films (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs), Shyamalan builds suspense in simple sequences through nothing more than blocking and crisply edited moments of quiet dread. It’s in his style that the film manages to become something more than its spare, schmaltzy plotting might suggest.

Much of the film plays out in dialogue-free sequences of long shots following the Smiths’ progress. The first scene post-crash finds the younger Smith scrambling through the wreckage in a long take that finds the camera placed behind an emergency flap that’s rhythmically covering the corridor. As we watch the young man assess the situation, the frame is completely covered by the moving spaceship part at regular intervals. It’s the kind of choice that a less visually interesting spectacle would not think to make. As the film progresses through somewhat convincing creature effects and episodic encounters with nature dangers both recognizable and pure sci-fi, the camera remains steady, quiet and interesting. There’s uncommon beauty in some of the film’s passages, especially as consequences are at their most dire and a light dusting of something approaching Herzogian jungle madness descends upon the characters. Still, Shyamalan’s decisions make the film interesting without making it good. It’s the kind of stuff that could potentially elevate good to great, and here brings disposable to notable.

In the Details: DEVIL

The world of Devil is in trouble right from the opening frames. Gliding gray establishing shots of Philadelphia create an immediate sense of unease just by being upside down. The world is off-kilter. Something is very wrong. Narration from a skyscraper’s superstitious security guard (Jacob Vargas) tells us that the Devil can torment the damned while they still live by entering our world through spaces created by suicides. No sooner than the frame reorients itself, a person jumps out of one of the building’s high windows.

Soon after the policeman with a tragic past (Chris Messina) shows up to investigate, the real trouble starts. An elevator mysteriously breaks down leaving five people stuck suspended over twenty stories high. One is a sleazy mattress salesman (Geoffrey Arend). Another (Bokeem Woodbine) is one of the building’s security team, though it’s unfortunately only his second day. Also along for the ride are a spooked young woman (Bojana Novakovic), a suspicious elderly lady (Jenny O’Hara), and a guy with a sketchy beard of stubble (Logan Marshall-Green).

The cast remains stuck there for most of the movie as the plot unravels like Irwin Allen by way of Rod Serling. They aren’t exactly the most compelling bunch of characters, but the way they inevitably turn on each other is tensely exciting. The script by Brian Nelson, from a story concept by M. Night Shyamalan, is efficient, wrapping the whole thing up in a little less than 80 minutes. It turns out the deaths, and ratchets up the suspense, like clockwork. The lights go out. We hear ominous noises, punctuated by shouts and screams and various other sorts of exclamations. When the lights flicker back to life, there is one less person alive in that elevator. Who is the murderer? Spoiler alert: the answer is in the title.

The unconvincing pseudo-religious premise, which had me hopelessly wishing a third-act twist would reveal a real-world solution to the killings, is worn a little too heavily. But director John Erick Dowdle makes sure the proceedings move along quickly and creepily. The cinematography by the great Tak Fujimoto turns out surprisingly varied images, cannily exploiting claustrophobia and acrophobia. The movie has a strong sense of both confinement and extreme height that keeps the sense of danger omnipresent. I was much more unnerved by the feeling of being stuck in an elevator and the potential of a sudden drop than I was by any of the supernatural goofiness that adorns the plot.

The final moments overreach, as do various moments throughout the movie that border on just plain silly. A security guard talks about how everything in the building is going wrong this day and punctuates this by tossing a piece of toast in the air. It lands jelly side down. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t find wasted toast particularly frightening.

What I do find frightening is how effectively this movie worked on me. It’s silly and inessential, but I can’t deny that it had me shivering for more or less the entire time. Fujimoto’s images got under my skin. Dowdle’s brisk direction of Nelson’s thin script moves along swiftly and keeps things agreeably eerie. This is a dumb little suspenseful horror movie that’s sheer simplicity works.

Air Master: THE LAST AIRBENDER

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender, adapted from a well-regarded Nickelodeon cartoon unseen by me, arrives with breathlessly negative reviews. Going into the theater, I was well prepared to witness a complete debacle, wrongheaded in every decision. Having now seen the film, I can only assume that the wave of overwhelming negativity arose from a combination of Shyamalan’s diminished reputation and the reportedly terrible quickie 3D-conversion cash grab applied in post production. I saw the movie in regular old 2D and I still view Shyamalan as a filmmaker of talent and promise. I admire the earnestness he seems to bring to each new project. The Last Airbender is a flawed movie, to be sure, but it’s not nearly as bad as some – okay, most – are saying. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the bad reviews, just their intensity.

I could talk about all the flaws of the film. I could say that the acting is wooden, the dialogue is weak, the exposition is burdensome and omnipresent, and the rules of the fantasy world are poorly explained. That’s all true, but I’d rather start by talking about what I liked about the film, which has plenty of matinee charm. Shyamalan conjures an interesting fantasy world (even though I assume he lifted it faithfully from the cartoon series). It’s a place where different tribes worship different elements. The special among them, the benders, can control these elements. The plot of the movie concerns the reappearance of, in the form of a young boy, a special bender who can control all of the elements. The fire people, who have long ago slaughtered the air people, rule cruelly over the water, and earth people. This special boy threatens to overthrow the ruling fire people and bring about a more harmonious existence for all of the elements and their people. Naturally, the fire people want to stop him.

It’s in the not-so-grand tradition of the mid-80’s explosion of post-Star Wars fantasy-based copycats like The Beastmaster and Willow. Though, granted, The Last Airbender is better than the former and about on par with the latter. The movie is fairly typical fantasy stuff about tribes and kingdoms, warring factions, Chosen Ones and magical powers. But Shyamalan has a good eye for composing interesting shots and a good sense of pacing. The movie looks good and moves nicely. (It’s even blessed with a very likable score from James Newton Howard). I enjoyed admiring the costumes, creatures, and vehicles, especially a many-legged flying beast and strange steam-powered battleships, which are used by the people of the film’s universe. I liked their powers and the ways in which they are used; tendrils of water and bursts of fire pop nicely in the slick style of the production (at least in 2D). It’s a nicely rendered place that seems consistent with its own rules, and Shyamalan renders it with his typically excellent use of space and focus.

But those rules are also a big problem. Shyamalan doesn’t lay them out clearly or efficiently. Instead, exposition weighs heavy on every scene, coming unceasingly and not often convincing or palatable. It’s enough to give a viewer mental indigestion while trying to process every new back-story, legend, and piece of magical know-how. It all feels just strange enough to need additional decoding and just familiar enough to not need any points belabored. Of course, Shyamalan isn’t helped by having an especially wooden cast of central protagonists any more than the cast is helped by having to recite his creaky dialogue. The young bender at the film’s center, played by newcomer Noah Ringer, fits the look of the part but adds little else, adrift in the condensed silliness. He’s given help by a couple of young water people (Nicola Peltz and Jackson Rathbone) who also do little more than read lines and stare off at the effects. The older members of the cast fare a bit better. I particularly enjoyed the attempts at scenery-chewing villainy from dependable character actors Cliff Curtis and Shaun Toub as well as Dev Patel (of Slumdog Millionaire) and Aasif Mandvi (a current Daily Show correspondent).

On the whole, The Last Airbender is not a film worthy of intense scorn. It’s a pleasant fantasy adventure that’s messy, goofy, and deeply flawed, yes, and it’s probably not as good as its source material, but it’s hardly the worst movie of the year. It’s not even the worst movie in wide release this weekend. I like what Shyamalan’s up to with this film, with his attempt to branch out from small-scale character-driven supernatural thrillers and get into epic mythmaking of a grander design. It works more than it doesn't if you approach it at its level.