Bored to Death: INFERNO

There are worse movies than Inferno, movies so inept, confused, ill-considered, or offensive they’re impossible to defend let alone sit through. But that makes it all the more depressing to realize Inferno is the only thing a movie can be that’s worse than bad. It is boring. I don’t mean to say it is slow or off-putting or strange or lazy. No, it is just deafeningly empty from the first frame to the last, completely devoid of interest or entertainment. If it was a bad movie it could at least kick up ludicrous silliness or something so mind-bogglingly tone deaf it’d be worth unpacking. Here we simply have a movie with no real reason to exist, incapable of making an argument for itself. It merely is, playing out with all the excitement and urgency of a talented group of Hollywood craftspeople signing off on a contractual obligation. It’s the kind of movie so tediously uninteresting you wonder if it was possible everyone was sleepwalking behind the scenes, or maybe trading sightseeing tips for their European downtime on Sony’s dime.

Clearly a commercial commitment, Sony couldn’t indefinitely sit on the rights to Dan Brown’s successful books about Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, not after director Ron Howard and star Tom Hanks turned them into two good-sized hits already. The Da Vinci Code (2006) and Angels & Demons (2009) were not great thrillers, but at least they had their pulpy fun pretending their plot mechanics were wrapped in learning, with history lectures and Catholic conspiracy. Any movies that can feature both lengthy art appreciation monologues and Paul Bettany as a self-flagellating albino monk (in the first) or Ewan McGregor as a Cardinal parachuting out of an exploding helicopter (in the second) can’t be all bad. These were fairly self-serious works, B-movies impressed by their own footnotes and inflated with big budgets and big stars. Still, nothing prepared me for how exhausted and joyless Inferno was. Compared to this new film, its predecessors are models of humble, slight, and economical filmmaking. This one stumbles through an endless bleary plot without a single second of rooting interest, believable stakes, or photographic interest. 

It starts with Langdon (Hanks) waking up in a Florence hospital suffering amnesia from a head wound. His doctor (Felicity Jones) tells him he was attacked. Confused and suffering hallucinogenic flashes of horror imagery – the movie takes glum grotesqueries as humdrum – Langdon flees with his caretaker after a policewoman opens fire on them. Now he must remember why he’s now wrapped up in a globetrotting art-adjacent adventure, racing to prevent an apocalyptic event. Because he’s done sort of thing twice before he’s well equipped to get up to speed as he fumbles around the scrambled passages of his mind. Maybe it has something to do with the visual representation of Dante’s Inferno he finds in his pocket, and which has been altered to include clues to a hidden cache of plague virus that would wipe out 95% of the world’s population if unleashed. You can see why the World Health Organization, which this movie imagines operates as an international SWAT team, is hot on their trail. The mystery is why they think Langdon has something to do with it.

I can forgive many an incredulously strained plot, but see if you can follow this. Say you were a brilliant but eccentric sociopathic billionaire scientist with a goal of reversing the world’s overpopulation with your custom-made plague. You’ve hidden it in a bag that’ll blow up on a certain day and time. Would you: A.) tell no one, sit back quietly, and let it do its thing; or B.) throw yourself off a building, leaving behind an elaborate set of art-history scavenger hunt clues leading to your biological weapon of mass destruction? I get when Langdon is investigating a conspiracy with historical roots why sussing out clues in paintings and monuments is a helpful strategy, but why would Inferno’s villain (Ben Foster) create new clues on old art? If he was really intent on kickstarting the apocalypse, why leave room for a professor to figure it out and stop you? There’s little motivation behind anyone’s behavior in this movie, including WHO agents (Sidse Babett Knudsen and Omar Sy) and a mysterious fixer whose office is aboard a freighter in the Adriatic (Irrfan Khan). They change sides a couple times each for seemingly no reason other than cheap surprise.

Inferno is a movie that’ll test a lot of assumptions. Think between Ron Howard directing and David Koepp writing they could surely cobble together a half-interesting story? Think national treasure Tom Hanks could reliably deploy his star power? Think a supporting cast of fine actors could bring something to the table? Think some solid, reliable Hollywood craft – cinematography from occasional Howard collaborator Salvatore Totino, score from the busy Hans Zimmer – could at least render a movie watchable? Prepare to be disappointed. It’s an entire movie of people going through the motions. It can’t even make stunning locales in Florence, Venice, and Istanbul look like the good museum-hopping travelogue thriller it could’ve been. The movie is cramped and ugly – maybe the better to emphasize its villain’s complaint about too many people? – and the way the plot unfolds around an amnesiac hero is treated for mere confusion. This only serves to hobble what should be a swaggering Hanks by making him squint and stagger while reading clues to the other characters, dragged along by the boring plot without clear drive or goals of his own. He can’t remember why he’s there or why he should care, and I could relate. The only reason to see this movie is if you want a dark room in which you could nap for a couple hours.

Love Streams: THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY

I appreciate Peter Strickland’s horror-adjacent mood pieces without quite loving them for the same reason I’ll always prefer a live butterfly to one pinned behind glass. His films are lushly appointed, handsomely crafted, and stuck airlessly behind a distancing layer, framed, mounted, and gathering dust. Sure, the patterns are intricate, lovely to regard and interesting to contemplate. But what I’d give to see it stretch out and flap its wings once in a while! Strickland’s a master of sustained atmosphere, as his latest, The Duke of Burgundy, percolates with unspoken tensions as characters explore the emotional terrains in which they find themselves. It’s fascinating as an exercise in style, and an acting workout, but interests me more theoretically than in actuality.

The film takes place almost entirely in the country home of a woman (Sidse Babett Knudsen) who studies butterflies and moths for a living. The walls of her office are covered in their framed forms, stuck there making a perfect metaphor for anyone trying to write about a film that looks great but just never clicked for them. As the film starts, she scolds her maid (Chiara D’Anna) for arriving late, then for slacking off on the job, then punishes her by forcing her to perform a series of intimate exchanges. They aren’t merely maid and taskmaster. They’re lovers engaging in a kinky roleplay, living out their scripted scenarios day after day. Over the course of the film, Strickland repeats their routine, allowing the replications to accrue small shifts, opening up differences between them and their desires.

Spaces between the performances are close and subtle, trading on the intimacies of a relationship deeply felt in the specificities to reveal the slight differences between their expectations that threaten to push them apart. This is a film about a relationship between people with particular needs, but the particularities contain wider truths. In their roleplay is a literalized expression of negotiations and trade offs in romantic entanglements of any kind. Relationships are about discovering how best to be the person your partner needs without sacrificing your needs in the process. It’s about the balance between control and release needed to make their relationship, or any, work. Here we see a woman who gets revved up by, say, being bound in a trunk at the foot of her partner’s bed, then whispers in the middle of the night that she needs to be let out. There are few characters – and no men – in this movie, a decision that nicely restricts the emotional range to a tight focus on one compelling pair and their decisions.

Those midnight whispers floating out of the darkness with ghostly sibilance are part of what gives Strickand’s controlled mood and style its horror-adjacent qualities. The lifecycle of the relationship on display is sharply defined and methodically studied, much like the creatures they study are categorized by their behaviors and fixed biological impulses, signals and responses. But it drifts into dreamy creepiness at times, especially in hazy overlapping dissolves, and in a knockout nightmare that comes near the end and culminates with a series of shots looking like a giallo guest-directed by Stan Brakhage. Throughout the film there’s something so precise, so clinical about the precision of the staging, the pronounced sound design that makes shifting fabric, pouring water, or a purring cat loud and strong in the mix. Combined with Nicholas D. Knowland’s sumptuous cinematography’s rich colors and artful framing, it’s like a straight Bergman drama borrowed the atmosphere of a 1970’s Jean Rollin softcore horror picture.

This sounds like a premise that could easily be campy or smutty (or both). But here it’s refreshing to find what are such tricky areas handled seriously and sincerely. This is a film of strong acting and exquisite craftsmanship in pursuit of teasing genre nods and fully articulated subtleties. I saw that, and appreciated it, without ever quite getting on its wavelength. Like Strickland’s last film, the Foley-artist walking-nightmare movie Berberian Sound Studio (which puts these qualities into a marginally pulpier context), The Duke of Burgundy is surface beauty disturbed by rough undercurrents. Strickland is a writer-director making films of strong aesthetic choices, intoxicating style evoking interesting ideas. They’re too good to ignore, but they’ve yet to win me over. He’s great at making and sustaining a tightly controlled mood, but after a while luxuriating in the suffocating style, my interest starts to drift. They’re striking, but static.