Parents Just Don't Understand: MOM AND DAD

It doesn’t come together with the sick jangled joy of writer-director Brian Taylor’s best films (grubby, manically entertaining action efforts Crank and Gamer, which he made as half of Neveldine/Taylor), but his first solo effort, sloppy, nervy horror film Mom and Dad, packs a perverse punch. It’s a novel take on the zombie subgenre, exploding suburbia not with a metaphor for materialism or racism, but a gross inversion of the helicopter parent. Now the folks aren’t invested all-consumingly in their children’s every move, but are activated through mysterious signals in snowy TV channels to want to kill them. This leads to several bracing, darkly comic set-pieces, starting with a twisted pick-up at the local high school, middle-aged suburbanites rioting at the bus line to attack their kids. They climb fences, and chase the fleeing teens across the football field, bewildered police launching tear gas to no effect as backpacks are flung and apple-cheeked youngsters are tackled by suddenly-malevolent paternal bulk. Worst (but also best, in its way) is a sequence set in a maternity ward. The screaming, crying, gasping, blood-curdling, darkly funny stretch, shot in quick cuts of queasy shaking shots and scored to Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love,” is the only horror movie scene in ages to have me looking away from the screen, wiggling my knees, and whispering “no, no, no” under my breath for the duration.

Rather than indulge in the concept’s epic potential, Taylor keeps the focus narrow on one particular family. A teen bad girl (Anne Winters) and her innocent younger brother (Zackary Arthur) find their usual days of ducking their parents’ mid-life crises upended by the sudden murderous intent. Granted, Dad (Nicolas Cage) had already sledgehammered a pool table while singing “The Hokey Poky” three weeks prior, so they weren’t exactly a picture of normalcy to begin with. (An early scene of Cage playfully tickling his kid is shot with wiggly intensity despite the benign intent.) Still, when Mom (Selma Blair) joins in on the homicidal gleefulness, it’s hard not to feel the kids’ panic while they’re huddling together, at a loss for what to do in the face of this insanity. The performances are all perfectly committed, but none more so than Cage and Blair who sink in with convincingly unhinged violent persistence. Taylor’s manic pace and uneven whirlwind tone never quite hooks into the dread of the concept – outside the hospital scenes – and ramps up the intensity so quickly that it’s not until the climax kicks the whole thing into a next-level dark comic scramble that it really becomes something extra special. At 83 minutes, it somehow still feels too long. Perhaps a film tighter and more clever could’ve done more, but what’s here is cheap, grimy, bloody, occasionally funny, often upsetting, and always wonderfully demented. It’s just the right amount of interestingly bad and almost good to make a fine minor cult classic someday.

Family Plot: THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER

Yorgos Lanthimos is out to mess you up. Even if you haven’t squirmed through the Grecian filmmaker’s international breakthrough Dogtooth – an intensely disturbing story of siblings unknowingly held captive by their own parents – or gritted your teeth through The Lobster – a cruel fantasy comedy that many seemed to like, but lost me as it ground a good fanciful premise into pessimistic repetition – you’d know right off that the writer-director of The Killing of a Sacred Deer wants to provoke intense reactions. The film sits on a black screen, soft and dramatic classical music playing underneath. Then: a smash cut to an extreme close-up of open heart surgery. I gasped. Then I squirmed as the shot holds. Then I looked away, repulsed but grinning. Oh, Lanthimos, at it again, up to his audience provoking jolts, his unflinching camera staring. After this startling opening statement, the build up to the next disturbing disruption is a long, soft timpani roll of suspense, the score doing its best to rumble under the imposing blocking and unflinching austere framing which turns every normal Cincinnati street and gleaming hospital corridor into a close cousin of Kubrick’s Overlook hotel. The film is a sustained creepy thriller with tension slowly simmering and clasping underneath every scene. Empty space and cavernous silence in the cold sets and pulsing grainy cinematography leaves room for disquieting suspicions as unfathomable escalating moral and karmic confusion ripples across an already-brittle family’s life.

Lanthimos directs his cast into performances of carefully modulated awkwardness and softly tripping monotones, their eerie implacability adding to a sense of wrongness that slowly builds. The film demonstrates its own twisted logic step by step as a surgeon (Colin Farrell), his wife (Nicole Kidman), and two kids (Sunny Suljic and Tomorrowland’s Raffey Cassidy) are slowly, subtly, and increasingly absurdly drawn into the plot of an unusual and insinuating interloper (Barry Keoghan, his quietly menacing face miles from the sweet innocence of his Dunkirk role). The young stranger is the son of a man who died on the operating table. The surgeon has tried to show him sympathy, striking up a vaguely paternal mentorship, maybe out of guilt. Big mistake. The boy wants to make the surgeon hurt. Suddenly, this creepy guy is the nexus of mysterious illness that spreads through the family. The kids are struck with paralysis that’s seemingly incurable, and completely inexplicable to a small army of medical experts. It only gets worse from there, including both inducement to murder and an awkward attempt by the boy to get his mom (Alicia Silverstone, never sadder) to watch Groundhog Day with his victim. With no shortage of disturbing emotions and plot developments roiling under every scene that follows, characters squirm intensely under pressure. Lanthimos keeps the proceedings darkly absurd, austerely terrifying, a deeply eccentric mix of the lurid and placid, the preposterous (a halting nervous laughs masking deep horror) and tense ethical quandaries stirring up grippingly sustained suspense. It’s all the more upsetting for being so inscrutable, for offering up no answers other than a desire to see brittle people break, even as they’re forced to confront their mortality, morality, and contradictions therein.

25 Favorite New-to-Me Movies of 2017

 

25. Land of the Pharaohs (1955, Howard Hawks)

24. White of the Eye (1987, Donald Cammell)

23. Strangers: The Story of a Mother and a Daughter (1979, Milton Katselas)

22. Home of the Brave (1986, Laurie Anderson)

 

21. The Search (1948, Fred Zinnemann)

20. Three Little Words (1950, Richard Thorpe)

19. Jackie's Back! (1999, Robert Townsend)

18. Higher Learning (1995, John Singleton)

17. The Paper (1994, Ron Howard)

16. Home for the Holidays (1995, Jodie Foster)

15. The Watermelon Woman (1996, Cheryl Dunye)

 

14. The Truth About Charlie (2002, Jonathan Demme)

 

13. 48 Hours (1982, Walter Hill)

12. Monster (2003, Patty Jenkins)

11. Paperboys (2001, Mike Mills)

10. Sign o' the Times (1987, Prince)

9. Bones (2001, Ernest Dickerson)

8. The T.A.M.I. Show (1964, Steve Binder)

7. Wagon Master (1950, John Ford)

6. Kundun (1997, Martin Scorsese)

5. Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965, Joseph Cates)

4. High School (1968, Frederick Wiseman)

3. Ruggles of Red Gap (1935, Leo McCarey)

2. Young Mr. Lincoln (1939, John Ford)

1. That Man From Rio (1964, Philippe de Broca)

Fire and Ice: I, TONYA

Yes, I, Tonya, Craig Gillespie's rollicking whiplash darkly comic recreation of Tonya Harding's ice skating career, is a sports movie with an arc of scandal and tragedy. It would have to be, following the inevitable unlikely rise and tabloid-violence fall of an Olympic hopeful. But what the movie is about underneath these grabby trappings is digging into the psychology of a woman in an abusive relationship. She (Margot Robbie) is used to getting hit. Her prickly, chain-smoking, boozy mother (a tough, biting Allison Janney) chips away at her for years with mean-spirited jabs and frequent smacks. When she escapes, as a late teen, into the arms of her first real boyfriend (Sebastian Stan, with a shyly dangerous charisma unseen in his Marvel pictures), he hits her too. "I told myself, my mom hits me and she loves me," Harding tells us with a honey-drip affection in her voice. It's harrowing and sad, a film intermingling the glowing romance she feels with the bruised eyes and raw scrapes of a battered woman. All the while her skating career is taking off, the thrill of her graceful athleticism sitting next to her hard-scrabble poverty as she has to fight classism and snobbery at every step of the way. She sews her own costumes, which are pretty but not quite the pageant-level shine of the fussy rich girls who dominate the sport. It's not just about talent; it's about image. 

By the time Tonya’s handsome dope of an abusive beau -- now her on-again-off-again husband -- gets it in his head, with prompting from a buddy of enormous, stupidly delusional self-confidence (Paul Walter Hauser, with a convincing bovine look), to intimidate Harding's closest rival, the ensuing chaos threatens to snuff out Tonya's life-long dream. By this point Gillespie -- providing a booming jukebox score, overlapping voice over perspectives, and an active, swirling camera with insistent, pushing editing (a very David O. Russell approach for this usually more restrained journeyman) -- has made it clear the whole incident will be no less than the final parting smack of this abusive husband. Steven Rogers’ screenplay skips around between characters’ competing, overlapping versions of events, sometimes even stopping the action to have another character in the scene turn to the camera and say “I never did this.” It creates a swirling triple-axle of tone, allowing Tonya’s pain to be centered in every telling. This neither excuses her complicity, nor lays all blame at her feet. The film overemphatically pushes and prods at the real complexity under the tabloid sensationalism while using it to raucous effect.