Blue Steal: REBEL RIDGE

Those of us with a taste for patiently proportioned action filmmaking, of the sort that’s all the more satisfying for a long fuse, will find much to enjoy with Rebel Ridge. Here’s a blood-boiler of a thriller, percolating with righteous anger as it stokes a steady sense of tension and suspense. Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier is good at this sort of thing—a slow and steady escalation of inevitable conflict. His fine-tuned Blue Ruin, with a fumbling amateur quest for vengeance, or Green Room, with a rock band besieged by neo-Nazis, show a gripping sense of tightly contained menace and looming doom. He brings those skills to Rebel Ridge, in which a perfectly unjust situation gets only more complicated the more those in power feel emboldened to do their dirty work in broad daylight, try to stamp it out instead of doing the right thing. It leaves a man without power no choice but to grab on for dear life and hope for real justice to prevail. The inciting incident finds a good man (Aaron Pierre), a black veteran, stopped by small-town police (David Denman and Emory Cohen) on his way to bail his cousin out of jail. Seeing a fat stack of cash in his backpack, his life savings, the cops take it and scoff at his protestations of innocence. Evidence, they say. Suspected criminal proceeds. Civil forfeiture. He can fill out a form to dispute the confiscation and hope for the best. Highway robbery. The more he tries to get his money back, the more the cops harass him, intimidate him, insinuate he’d be arrested or worse if he even thinks about pursuing this further.

The movie is smart about the ways in which a police force can get high on their immunity and act with impunity, even as their posturing bravado and barking orders barely cover their hair-trigger tempers and easily bruised egos. (Chief Don Johnson is perfectly enraging as a man used to getting his way through mere intimation of power.) And it’s smart, too, about the logic of a crooked cop’s traffic stop escalation, and the ways in which an officer can feel totally safe to pull a gun out and shoot an unarmed man without fear of retribution. This simmering in the background of the film’s slow-growing crescendo gives an edge of danger—even as potentially sympathetic “good cops”—let alone a local courthouse clerk (AnnaSophia Robb), who has her own dangers—are slow to do the right thing out of reasonable fear of their own colleagues. What gives the movie a satisfying kick beyond the social justice angle is its commitment to grubby genre simplicity—a good match of intentions. These cops messed with the wrong guy. Like a low-key, slightly more realistic Walking Tall or First Blood or Jack Reacher, this veteran is more than ready to stand up for himself. The movie’s look and mood is as clean and clear and simple as its setup, holding close on Pierre’s intense eyes and powerful stance, negotiating the frame to maximize the physicality of the blocking. It holds steady in stillness until—wham!—firearms are aimed and fists are clenched. It exercises such admirable restraint—even in its well-earned action finale never turning into a mindless blood-lust—that each punch or gunshot lands with considerable force.

Grave Humor: BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE

Now here’s a welcome surprise—a belated sequel that’s more a cause for celebration than for cynicism. The movie is Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a late-arriving sequel to 1988’s Beetlejuice. (It’s fun that there are few ways to discuss that fact without summoning the eponymous ghoul.) And, contrary to current trends in legacy sequels, this isn’t some lengthy, ponderous brand extension. It’s just more Beetlejuice, which finds the characters from the original simply experiencing more Beetlejuice in their lives.The movie doesn’t meaningfully add to a mythos (though we get a stylish origin-story black-and-white foreign-language flashback to the ‘Juice’s death). It’s simply gleefully and grotesquely itself—a cheerfully mean comedy about the afterlife careening into one family’s actual life. Here’s Winona Ryder’s Goth teen all grown up—and now with her own disaffected daughter (Jenna Ortega—a perfect Burton performer with her wide eyes and flat affect). They’re called back to the family ghost house by the matriarch (Catherine O’Hara) upon the death of her husband. (Extra-textually a gigglingly gorily appropriate killing-off.) There, wouldn’t you know it, they just might need the horn-dog demonic Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) to work a Faustian bargain to fix their problems. The result is an energetic throwback, both to the original and to a time when sequels were content to just serve up more of the same.

By doing so, it’s also an occasion to find director Tim Burton at long last back at peak Burton—mischievous, macabre, and mocking. (Of course a bureaucratic purgatory is a cartoon nightmare, and there’s plenty of haunted satire to small town life and big city pretensions, too.) He’s his most himself in a way he hasn’t fully unleashed in nearly two decades. Us Burton auteurists forged in the golden days of Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns and Ed Wood and Mars Attacks and Big Fish and Sweeney Todd could still find some glimmers of fun here (Dark Shadows’ Gothic goofiness) and there (Big Eyes’ kitschy exaggeration). But even then it felt like the early edge he had was sanded down and his unbounded imagination suddenly bound. Here he is back in full prickliness and earnest eccentricity again, with wit and vigor. Every kooky corner is chockablock with vintage Burton antics, from the cockeyed production design and physical sets, all stripes and canted angles, to the frantic Elfman score and manic mayhem of all sorts of wild and wiggly gross-out effects. If nothing else, it’s a pleasurable aesthetic experience—so deeply familiar to Burton-heads it’s even comforting in its discomforts.

A riot of old-school techniques—stop-motion animation, puppets, models, animatronics, squibs—are married seamlessly to digital exaggerations and embellishments and put to use for madcap Looney Tunes logic and Fangoria fetishes. Corpses shamble about missing chunks from shark bites, growing moss, bulging with puss and gore. A dead actor (Willem Dafoe) struts about missing the side of his skull so bits of brain show through. A gorgeous dismembered witch (Monica Bellucci) staples herself back together so she can resume sucking souls. (She discards the empty bodies like flaccid water balloons.) The plot piles on these grotesquely cartoony ghostly dilemmas to ping off funny, but sincerely felt, family melodrama, leading to a fine, freaky scurry through a complicated finale that crisscrosses the lands of the living and the dead. This is an eruption of inspiration and imagination all the way, overstuffed and overflowing with a blend of the serious and silly, from a chalk-outline bomb exploding, to a recurring Dostoyevsky motif, a possessed disco song-and-dance number, and a literal Soul Train complete with a Don Cornelius lookalike as conductor to seal the pun. The whole production is on this level of manic entertainment, a delight from beginning to end, a quirky effects comedy about nothing but its style and itself. But what a great self, and one only Burton could bring. It’s nice to see him again at last.

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.

Resurrection: ALIEN: ROMULUS

As a frightened character inserts a crackling electric prod into a dripping alien egg sac, I found myself thinking that Alien: Romulus will please those who love to read Freudian symbolism into these pictures. But then again, there’s something to please all sorts of Alien fans in this movie—a gripping little exercise in style and craftsmanship while playing the series’ greatest hits. It’s set between Ridley Scott’s original sci-fi horror Alien, in which long-haul space-trucker Sigourney Weaver barely escapes a close call with a nasty extraterrestrial infestation, and James Cameron’s slam-bang sequel of action escalation, Aliens. And so it naturally borrows from each of those in appearance and mood, while layering on nods and winks and tracing along motifs and plot threads from other prequels, sequels, and spin-offs. The leads are a group of young miners (capably led by Cailee Spaeny and Isabela Merced, and David Jonsson with a tricky robotic role-and-a-half). They’re stuck on a far-flung planet under an onerous corporate contract when they decide to heist a derelict company space craft drifting by. Once there they discover, oops, it was a secret research station abandoned upon getting overrun by the face-hugging, acid-bleeding, ruthlessly predatory Xenomorph Aliens we’d expect from this series. The following is mostly predictable, but done up with enough fine shorthand performances and cool effects and ominous sounds and a big score that it rattles and shakes with patient entertainments until it hits a surprising new gear in its finale.

The director is Fede Alvarez, who brings a knack for doing right by a franchise—his Evil Dead remake is one of the better, gnarlier, horror remakes of the last decade—as well as his ability to spin a claustrophobic vice-grip of tension—like his trapped-in-a-house-with-a-mad-blind-man Don’t Breathe. He’s a fine maker of images and can layer visual and sonic effects with a degree of teeth-rattling force, churning out resourceful pulp awe. Romulus looks and sounds sensational with endless dark corridors and shafts of light and creepy crawlies scuttling and scurrying. It’s freshly familiar, so its biggest success is always what keeps it from greatness: it simply can’t stop reminding us of all the other Alien movies. But maybe that’s fitting for a series that features, across its many iterations, evolutionary explorations, genetic manipulation, gene splicing, cloning, and mutations. What it lacks in originality—and I definitely would’ve trimmed its most thuddingly obvious homages—it makes up for in fun throwback appeal. Here’s a movie that’s built out of bits and pieces of the others in its tradition—a big eerie location elegantly framed, a desperate blue-collar ensemble, a ragtag colonial machine-gun set-piece, gooey body-horror eruptions, elaborate gore effects and expertly manipulated CG enhanced puppetry of the new protuberances and pustules on the attack. The whole thing moves with a fine sense of tension and release, slamming down with grave, bleak world-building in each new implication and crisp, legible action as piles on the complications. It’s a minor-key entry, but one built up out of enjoyable resonances. And I certainly found myself in the suspense of hoping the appealing characters could find their way out; it’s new to them, after all.

Irish to Speak: KNEECAP

Kneecap is one of those movies that teaches you something, although you certainly won’t be seeing this in schools. It introduces the audience to people and a subculture you might not’ve known about, but could be glad to discover. It’s based on a true story from around a decade ago in Northern Ireland about two teenage drug dealers who end up forming a rap group with a high school music teacher. Improbable, perhaps, but not impossible. More unusual is the language in which they rap: authentic indigenous Irish, at a time when the government refuses to acknowledge it as a legitimate language and, indeed, British elements in their country view it with a deep suspicion. These hoodlums run amuck snorting powders and snogging young ladies, but they have a love of their language that expresses itself in swaggering poetry of the sort imported from American hip-hop. The teacher, for his part, loves making beats, and is engaged in the political agitation for making Irish an official language of Northern Ireland. He sees in these boys a chance to bring his two passions together. Besides, he likes getting youthful stupidity back in his life, throwing himself into some of their more juvenile habits as they become intergenerational pals. (There’s a bit of a fun generation gap at play, too, like when he drops references to Dr. Dre or Abbey Road and they sail over the lads’ heads.) Calling themselves Kneecap, they start the underdog road to niche success, drawing the expected controversies any rappers exalting drugs and revolution alike attract. The movie, which stars the band as themselves in surprisingly charismatic and believable performances, ends up following a lot of the usual musical biopic beats. But its style and tone are enlivened by a cultural specificity and a raucous energy. Writer-director Rich Peppiatt takes his cues from their vulgar lyrics and rough-around-the-edges personalities—as well as a rooting in The Troubles that still linger in sociopolitical tensions in their town, from an estranged revolutionary dad (Michael Fassbender) to a girl (Jessica Reynolds) whose British roots give her fling with one of the fellas a naughty charge she loves to cultivate. The movie hops and bounces with a pattering narration, visual jumpiness like Danny Boyle-lite, and little animated filigrees or super-imposed handwritten embellishments, keeping things light and joyful even as the darkness of addiction and sectarian violence bubbles up. It’s basically as if Trainspotting was also A Hard Day’s Night. If it’s not quite as good as that sounds, it’s not for lack of trying. It’s a vibrant, vulgar ode to free speech that ends with a lovely syllogism: language makes stories, and stories make nations. I got a little misty eyed right there, even before the narration even draws its final conclusion.

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.

What Fresh Misery Is This? LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL, IN A VIOLENT NATURE, MAXXXINE, and LONGLEGS

In a recent Facebook post, writer-director Paul Schrader asserted that horror movies resist seriousness and are difficult to use for serious ideas, writing that “for the most part their raison d’être is horror itself.” This he says despite, or maybe because, of his own interesting flawed Cat People remake and Exorcist prequel. Regardless. It’s certainly true that the horror genre is one that easily tips over into empty gestures and routine imagery. Even some of the best somehow milk suspense afresh from the same small bag of tricks. Lights flicker. Frames swell with negative space. The score stings with a tremor of strings or a bleat of brass. Figures suddenly appear. Fog lingers. Grass cracks. Leather gloves stretch and crinkle. Blades shine and snicker-slice through air and flesh alike. Hey, I can like these tools of suspense as much as the next incorrigible horror frequenter. The masters of the form make these same basic moves manipulate responses for something pavlovian, if not pathological, in their ruthless effects. The masterpieces might lean on these, too, but on their way to burrow beneath the skin by turning the unease into an all-consuming nightmare of discomfort and lingering psychological doubt and distress. All that potential to find so many of the buzziest horror films lately are all empty gestures? Or at least they have wide gulfs between good ideas and unsatisfying execution.

Take the surprise sleeper hit of the spring: Late Night with the Devil. It sets itself up as found footage: a doomed episode of a 1970’s talk show wherein a possessed guest wreaked demonic havoc on live television. That’s an incredible premise, and with character actor David Dastmalchian in the lead role playing a kind of flop sweat Dick Cavett, has some unctuous charms. The way the intimations of real horror build along with the chummy surreality of a bleary-eyed half-imagined midnight talk show, segment by segment, has a nice sick logic to it as well. Where the movie loses me, and keeps it from fully activating its potential, is its craftsmanship. Writer-directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes fumble all the little details—from the too-digital faux-video look, to the vaguely modern phoniness of some performances, to the too-smooth gore effects—and break their own conceit with implausible and unnecessary behind-the-scenes photography and some nightmare-perspective shots in the back stretch cut into what could’ve stayed trapped in the diegetic. The longer it went on like that, the more frustrated I was that such a promising idea was whittled away one distracting choice after the next. It’s like they didn’t have the confidence to fully commit to their own idea.

If you want to give some credit for commitment to the bit, though, look no further than In a Violent Nature. It isn’t much of a movie, but as an excuse to sit in the dark and think about slasher movies, it’s not so bad. It’s basically a knockoff Friday the 13th from Jason’s perspective, or more accurately from a third-person camera following closely behind him. The trance-like pacing includes a lot of tromping around in the woods, the distant sounds of shallow young adults carousing and camping drawing nearer as a hulking brute slowly, steady stomps toward them. The eventual kills are so grotesquely over-the-top, even by the genre’s standards, that one watches them with a sick fascination. It’s not so much about the death on display as clocking where, exactly, the wound makeup and eviscerated dummies are digitally stitched into the shots of real actors, and trying not to vomit through one’s appreciation for all that macabre hard work making it look excessive and real when someone is literally pretzeled inside out and pushed down a ravine. Writer-director Chris Nash makes a patiently punishing movie that makes the audience wait and wait, listening to nothing but the crunch of leaves and twigs underfoot as the killer’s back ambles onward to excessive violence. The plot, such as it is, is bone-deep derivative, and any glimmers of genre critique are quickly squelched out by the flat-faced slasher logic taken too seriously. For however much it had me contemplating why people, myself included, even enjoy this hack-and-stab form, it had my mind wandering to all manner of other films of its kind—both better and worse—rather than focus on the increasingly dull one in front of me.

I had a similar sense of diminishing returns with the summer’s bigger art house horror efforts: Ti West’s MaXXXine and Oz Perkins’ Longlegs. Both from reliable modern auteurs of the genre, they nonetheless fall flat in the way strong starts peter out into predictability. They’re not without their surface charms of style, but they never truly satisfy like their inspirations. West’s film is the third in a trilogy he began with his fun 70s throwback X, in which an indie porn crew is killed off on a remote Texas farm, and then continued with Pearl, a flashback to the beginning of the century where a desperate farm girl hoped for stardom and decided to murder instead. MaXXXine is in a neon-and-synths 80s L.A. and finds the imaginary actress of the title role (Mia Goth) trying to transition from porn to horror. Too bad people she knows are being killed off by a giallo-styled leather-gloved perv. It makes for a rather simplistic movie with a mystery that’s limply deployed and violence sparingly splattered. It also introduces nothing new or nuanced about its character or the doomed death-drive to stardom we haven’t already picked up. By the time we get to the weirdly routine conclusion—in which a detective played by Michelle Monaghan gets one of the funniest exits in recent memory—I was wondering what all the empty pastiche was even supposed to be saying at this point. 

At least Longlegs has some truly terrifying moments punctuating a thick layer of dread. It’s a dimly-lit, coolly framed serial killer procedural that slowly sinks into a satanic spell. Maika Monroe does a good Jodie Foster, and Nicolas Cage brings a typically talented and engaging push-pull between outlandishness and underplayed creepiness. His grotesquely made-up face, shrill vocalizing and halting rhythms puncture the chilly restraint of the filmmaking, warping the texture of the tone and bending the whole movie toward his evil gesticulations. That makes for a great uneasiness at play in every scene, especially when photographed in precision anamorphic tracking shots tied to a figure in the frame. But it’s all so cramped and small, and ultimately way more pedestrian, even in its nightmarish magical realism, that I spent the last third in a shrug. But compared to some of these other horror movies this year, no wonder this one hit the box office with a bit of a jolt.