Gone Girl: WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD

There was something wrong with Kat’s mother. She cried at strange times. She behaved awkwardly around guests. And one day, when Kat came home from school, her mother was napping in her daughter’s bedroom, all dressed up in gown, heels, and pearls. But Kat was busy finding love with the neighbor boy and hanging out with her friends. They didn’t have time to dwell on such peculiarities. Then, just as Kat was coming into her own, exploring more mature facets of herself as she prepared for graduation and adulthood, her mother disappeared. Now she and her father go about their routines dazed, the case growing cold as life moves on.

The mother’s absence informs the rest of White Bird in a Blizzard. Based on the novel by Laura Kasischke, it’s the latest film from writer-director Gregg Araki, whose work narrows in on emotional displacement in a variety of contexts. His work as an early-90’s indie provocateur has, over the course of his career, been distilled into pure moody energy with his prankish spirit tamed but present. He’s been able to mellow his mischievous impulses into mannered, languid considerations of people who are unmoored, searching for answers about who they are and where they’re going. In the last decade, he’s given us a thoughtful, empathetic child abuse survivor drama (Mysterious Skin), a hilariously spacey pothead comedy (Smiley Face), and a raucous paranormal pre-apocalyptic college sex farce (Kaboom). Talk about range.

In White Bird in a Blizzard, the least of his recent features but interesting all the same, Shailene Woodley stars as a girl who is jolted by her mother (Eva Green) simply vanishing without a trace. She finds her boyfriend (Shiloh Fernandez) pulling away, her dad (Christopher Meloni) putting on a brave face, her best friends (Gabourey Sidibe and Mark Indelicato) ready to talk, a psychiatrist (Angela Bassett) lending a compassionate ear, and a detective (Thomas Jane) investigating the disappearance and creepily flirting with her, too. Woodley moves through her relationships with an open body language that betrays her confidence-covered insecurities quick to appear when she’s pained. It’s another of her fine-tuned emotional teen roles (after The Descendents, The Spectacular Now, and The Fault in Our Stars), and here, in perhaps her most vulnerable performance, she finds a similar core of strength and determination to make the best of a bad situation.

As Kat moves on with her life, Araki threads flashbacks of her mother’s eccentricities into the aftermath of the sudden void. She was loving, sometimes distant, excitable, but prone to melancholy. Green’s performance is wild-eyed scene-chewing, dominating even in its absence. But the absence becomes normalized, just another thing to deal with in a busy teen life, like the haunting dreams of Kat’s mother emerging from a snow storm that repeat with ominous regularity. Araki gives the film, past and present alike, a hazy mood in a locked down camera and cinematographer Sandra Valde-Hansen's near-Sirkian color palate. It’s a period piece – 1988, to be exact – but, though it gets details right, it feels closer to sickly 50’s melodrama, the kind where the rot’s showing through the surface shine. Something is not right here, a dangling unsolved mystery. The initial shock has worn off, but the pain remains.

The film has tender character work in a somnambulant plot. Kat moves forward, the ensemble (fine performances all) relating to her in a variety of mostly normal ways as she finishes high school, chooses a college, and moves away. All the while, the mystery remains, a nagging thought in the back of her mind, and ours. Where did her mother go? There comes a point when Araki’s direction signals the answer so far in advance of the characters learning it that the final scenes feel agonizingly empty, a wait for an underwhelming reveal to make itself fully known.

Until then, though, it’s a minor key work of small gestures and controlled style, nothing overwhelming, but quiet, insinuating, and full of stunned pain, stunted rebellion. Being on the cusp of adulthood is confusing enough under normal circumstances. Here, that confusion is magnified by the missing person mystery, making coming of age an all the more uneasy process.

Dead Again: EVIL DEAD

You’d think evil spirits would get tired of doing the same things over and over for all eternity, but I guess that’s not the case. Where would horror franchises be if that were true? Here’s Evil Dead, a quasi-remake and implied sequel to Sam Raimi’s cult favorite horror film The Evil Dead (filmed on a shoestring budget in the late 70s, released in 1981) and his own quasi-remake/sequel Evil Dead II. The new picture, like those previous ones, takes place at a creaky cabin deep in a Michigan woods. Once again, a group of young people end up there for one reason or another and end up reading from the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, a creepy book with text helpful for activating a demonic spirit which then sets out possessing and/or dismembering the characters one by one in a frenzy of horror violence.

This new film doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, but director Fede Alvarez brings the expected in fine fashion. It plays like the work of a superfan of the original turned giddy with the knowledge that he’s been let loose to make his own version. In a sharply drawn screenplay by Alvarez and Diablo Cody (in what represents her most restrained barbs), the young adults gather for an intervention. On a break from her studies at Michigan State, a sweet addict (Jane Levy) dumps her drugs down the well and swears to her brother (Shiloh Fernandez) and friends (Lou Taylor Pucci, Jessica Lucas, and Elizabeth Blackmore) that this time she’s quitting for real. Cold turkey. What follows can then be seen as a bloody metaphor for the violence of withdrawal symptoms.

With great visual nods to its predecessors, the film proceeds along its path of narrative escalation. It creeps forward, finding ever gooey, grosser, more violent scenarios with which to shred your nerves. Rare is the horror film of any kind that finds enough inventive terror to fill even a sequence or two. Rarer still is the horror film that climbs higher with every scene, a unity of grueling disturbances that squirms ever tighter. It’s predictable in its rhythms, but uncompromising in its commitment to playing those rhythms as intensely as possible. It’s a film full of creaking floorboards, mirrored medicine cabinets, chances to scream “Don’t go in there!” and seemingly defeated enemies suddenly snapping back into action. But in each case, there’s a satisfying go for broke attitude. If a new Evil Dead had to be made, it may as well be something this satisfying. Even sans Raimi’s deranged slapstick energy, it might as well look this slick and bloody.

Polished cinematography and confident performances stand in the place of the appealing amateurish edges in Raimi’s original film. This new effort is overflowing with practical effects that grow gooier as we near the climax. The characters sustain cringe-worthy injuries and tend to the wounds in ways that made the audience I saw it with squirm in unison. One gnarly scene that puts an electric carving knife to use in an impromptu emergency self-surgery is a particular over-the-top work of prosthetics that one may need to watch through half-closed eyes. Ditto a needle that punctures skin, comes perilously close to an eyeball, and then, inevitably, must be pulled back out. I won’t even being to hint to you what happens to one girl’s tongue. That you will have to brave for yourself.

The film is gory, gross, and unrelentingly suspenseful, scary, even. But it doesn’t get under the skin in the way the best horror movies do. There’s a sense that it’s all happening because that’s what happens in movies like this. That it’s well made and an impressive feat of effects work is undeniable. What ultimately elevates the experience from a shined-up homage is Jane Levy. Stretching acting muscles slightly different from the ones she uses on her ABC sitcom Suburgatory, she gives the kind of horror hero performance that should get more acclaim than it will. It’s a slippery piece of work, slipping in and out of demonic possession, alternating creepily between growling, giggling antagonist and terrified young victim, begging for it all to be over. Without giving it away, the transformation that she goes through in the film’s final sequence is hugely satisfying and indicative of the ways Alvarez has found to work within a standard formula, reference the films from which he draws inspiration, and still find memorable moments all his own.

Village of the Damned: RED RIDING HOOD

If I were to pick just one fairy tale ripe for reinvention in the Twilight mode, it would have to be Red Riding Hood. Werewolves carry with them the mythic trembling of the monstrous hidden within the confines of a normal human. Any story of a secret shape-shifter can easily be adapted into a enthralling metaphor for desire, which has definitely happened in the past with, say, Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 horror benchmark Cat People. But that’s certainly not the case with Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood, which is interested in exactly none of its potentially potent subtext.

In fact this is a movie that is inexplicably unbearable and surprisingly claustrophobic, especially given how often the camera pulls back to find wide vistas. It’s set in an isolated, vaguely European medieval village that has been menaced by a werewolf for years, much to the dismay of its residents, who seem so much like modern actors stomping around as if they’ve just recently wandered in out of a nearby Renaissance Faire. The village itself appears to be a cheapo backlot set with a thin covering of fake snow. An early scene features the menfolk traipsing off into the forest to hunt the beast and so they go scuffing through the wintry landscape with not a single coat amongst them. There goes believability. As if to compensate for the set’s shortcomings, Mandy Walker’s cinematography is visually garish, nothing but soft focus and blurry colors. The better to confuse us with, my dear.

Little red riding hood herself is the gorgeously talented Amanda Seyfried (what big eyes she has) who is only given the chance to tremble a bit. She’s painfully adrift here in screenwriter David Johnson’s stagnant stew of a plot that simply marks time with an uninvolving love triangle between two dull, hot, carefully coiffed, young guys (Shiloh Fernandez and Max Irons). There’s also some sort of inelegantly explained background involving her family which mainly consists of giving truly great actresses Julie Christie and Virginia Madsen absolutely thankless roles.

And just when I had gotten used to the fact that the movie was going to completely waste the skills of three (count ‘em, three!) immensely talented ladies, in rides some small interest in the form of werewolf-hunter Gary Oldman with an entourage of Moorish bodyguards who are pulling a giant metal elephant. How could that go wrong? Let me count the ways. Here’s a movie that is so completely terrible in every way it can’t even make good old-fashioned scenery chewing from such an expert chewer as Gary Oldman even partially enjoyable for more than half a scene.

Of course, the idea of a movie aquiver with sexual tension and secret werewolf intrigue, all taking place within the confines of an uncomfortable small village should have potential to spare. I could see myself enjoying a campy supernatural horror siege Western acted out by a ridiculously capable cast. What I can’t figure out is why Hardwicke (who has yet to make a movie I like) so thoroughly and completely allows every last ounce of this potential to get away from her. Sure, the script is terrible, but her every directorial decision is so misguided and off-putting that I have a hard time believing that this movie was directed at all. It seems to have stumbled off of the backlot onto the screen. It gave me a headache just to keep up with all I that was hating.

For those who are still in a Red Riding Hood kind of mood, I highly recommend listening to this great 1966 song, “Li’l Red Riding Hood” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, which is infinitely better than the movie in question.