So here's the thing,
Despite being significantly shortened, I thought the 2024 Film Festival really was terribly strong. And now, with the 2025 festival starting in a few days, it's time to finally post my thoughts about last year's films.
The usual disclaimers - these comments were written within a day or so of seeing the films, so they reflect my immediate responses to seeing the films. (Certainly the me who wrote about The Substance would not have expected that film to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar!) They were also written very quickly without much opportunity for finessing my words, so a lot of the writing is fairly rough.
[Comments on the 22 films I saw at the 2024 film festival after the jump...]
Birdeater
Louie and Irene are a young couple engaged to be married. But Irene is struggling with the wedding preparation, so Louie decides to take her away from everything and invite her to join him and his friends - along with his friend's fiancée as some extra female company for Irene - on his stag-do, at a cabin in the middle of nowhere. Irene is also unaware that Louie is planning a surprise wedding for them during the evening. But when some ketamine enters the party, things go very badly.
So I'm genuinely struggling to work out how I feel about the film. There's a lot that I really liked about the movie, but also quite a bit that just did not work for me. The opening of the film is really rather effective - a blood-red-filtered shot of looming trees with ominous tremolo strings. Smash cut to a bright sunny shot of Louie sitting at the beach looking in Irene's direction, clearly infatuated with this girl he doesn't know. They hook up, and before long we find ourselves in this intriguing relationship montage in which something doesn't quite feel right - it manages to effectively communicate that there is something seriously toxic in this relationship, although it's a few minutes before it becomes clear exactly what. And then the film leaves us with a lot of questions - he's giving her sedatives, which would suggest he's a bad guy, but she's choosing to take the drugs willingly, so how do I feel about that? And then there are mysterious references to something terrible that she did to him, and the scarring from that incident is clearly prominent, so perhaps he's the one in danger from her, and perhaps everything he's doing is entirely reasonable given that backstory.
So the film is quite unambiguously an exploration of emotional abuse, with an extremely effective portrait of the ways people can prey on the emotions of vulnerable people to exercise control over them. There are moments in the film that are positively chilling, as terrifying as any horror film. But there's a rather effective way that the film brushes past these moments, distracting the audience with a great deal of humour, especially from the antics of the typical Aussie larrikin friend, who people tolerate since they were friends as kids but who no-one seems to actually like. But even in the scenes of boys-will-be-boys stag-do stupidity, there's an ever present sense of genuine malice and threat in the way these guys relate to each other. And the way the film constantly swings between these two poles, between being silly and playful and being ominous and scary, is one of the things I loved about the film. It leaves you on edge, because you never know what type of film this is going to be from one minute to the next - I suspect much like the experience of having an abusive spouse.
But there was some choices that definitely did not work for me. Personally, I feel the main mistake the film makes is to leave the backstory (about what Irene did to Louie) ambiguous for far too long into the film. It turned the central relationship into a puzzle I was trying to solve, trying to work out where the differing lines of fault lie in this terrible relationship, trying to imagine what it is that has kept these two together. Once we do find out what happened between the two, the relationship made a lot of sense, and so I wonder whether it was an error to leave those questions out there for most of the runtime to take away from the focus of the film.
But also there's the extended drug-influenced experience that the characters go on, which very quickly becomes wearying and unengaging. And sure, this was a deliberate choice that did effectively communicate the exhausting nightmare these characters are trapped in, but it's so unpleasant that I just wanted the sequence over. There's one part that I did find interesting - a bizarre sequence involving a travelling adult entertainer with a bedroom setup in the back of her van that felt vaguely Lynchian in an intriguing manner - but for the most part it was just awful. The other fundamental issue with this sequence was that it separated the central couple from each other, which meant we barely got to see Irene in the climax of the film - a problem since she's so vital to the resolution of the film. I was almost surprised to remember that she was part of the film when she reappeared - it's not a good thing when you can forget about the existence of one of your two main characters.
But on the whole it is intriguing and extremely suspenseful, and for the most part did hold its audience until the final moments.
[HIGHLIGHT TO READ HOPEFULLY VAGUE SPOILERS]
The film leaves us hanging on a cliffhanger ending with no resolution, as a character is put in a position to make a choice. But while I was initially unsure whether this works in the context of the film, the more I think about it the more I like the decision as a portrait of the emotional space of an abuse victim. After all, we have all heard the stories about how difficult it is to leave an abusive situation - every day, people make the choice to leave an abusive situation, and every day people return to their abusive partners. To give us a definitive ending would be to give us a misleading ending. Even if the character makes one choice, that doesn't mean they've made that choice for good - but that's how it would feel in the context of a film with a definitive end point. Similarly, if the character makes the opposite decision, that gives finality to the idea that this character is in this place forever, when the character could easily make the opposite decision tomorrow. Instead, the unresolved ending leaves us in those space that is more reflective of the experience of the types of people being portrayed here.
All in all, maybe I like the film. Or maybe not. I simply do not know.
Peeping Tom
Back in 1960, two well-respected English filmmakers, whose careers dated back to the silent era, both decided to risk their reputations by making a couple of nasty little horror films, both early examples of what would become known as the slasher film. Alfred Hitchcock gave the world Psycho, which proved an instant success. Meanwhile Michael Powell, having recently ended his partnership with Emeric Pressburger, largely damaged his career with Peeping Tom, a film that has only in recent years been recognised as the classic it is.
Call Boehm stars as Mark, an aspiring filmmaker and serial killer, filming his murders as he commits them, trying to capture the moment when his victims face their inevitable death, as part of a larger documentary he's working on. At the same time, he finds himself reluctantly pressured into a relationship with his downstairs neighbor, much to the disapproval of her blind mother who is suspicious of the young man who she hears running his film projector every night.
While the film is, for modern audiences, reasonably tame, you can really see why this film would have been so controversial at the time. British films at the time set a distinctive tone, completely different to how Hollywood movies of the era felt. There's a cosiness, a comfort to them, that feels very much a reflection of the character of a nation defined by the image of the English gentlemen. And then you get a film like this, which has a distinct unpleasantness to it - it's not graphic, but the film is always very clear about what is happening, and the idea of some of those moments really does get under your skin. And yet this unpleasantness is caught within a film that still has that same cosiness and comfort that you expect from an a British film - it feels disorienting to be watching a film that looks and feels so comfortable and nice, and yet that is dominated by this strain of cruelty. It just leaves the audience feeling uncomfortable. But I feel that's a deliberate part of the film. There's a newsagent shop in the film, where young girls can go to buy sweets, while older gentleman can buy under-the-counter pornography or visit the upstairs brothel. The film seems to be saying that the comfortable English culture has a hidden industry turning young women into images that can be used and abused by men who hide their actions under a veneer of respectability. In that sense, Mark's use of his female victims in pursuit of his own art is merely an extension of this hidden but endemic world of exploitation.
As always happens when you have a film centred around filmmaking and a filmmaker, the film is unmistakably about the drive to create art. In particular, there's a real focus on the filmmaker's drive for perfection, the amount of effort involved in taking an image that you've visualized and trying to execute it perfectly on the screen. We see it in the film set on which Mark works as a focus puller - there may be an edict from the studio demanding that directors rely on the first and only take, but if the director feels he needs 53 takes to get the right performance of his actress fainting, that's what he needs to do to get the perfect image. Similarly, you don't get the sense that Mark is some sort of serial killer with some driving compulsion to commit murder for murder's sake - it's just that as an artist, he has a vision for his film, and this requires that these women die in order to achieve his vision. Indeed, there's a moment where he realises the footage he has of his most recent murder isn't right, is not what he'd imagined, and he seems genuinely regretful that he has to take another life in an attempt to capture the image he needs. The film seems to be saying that this is what it is to be a filmmaker - to be haunted by images that you need to try to capture, to feel a drive to recreate those images somehow on film, even if those images seem impossible to photograph (because you can photograph anything if you know how), and to focus singlemindedly on achieving your vision without any consideration of those around you.
I find myself fascinated by the decision to cast Carl Bohm in the lead role. It's a major plot point in the film that Mark was born, raised, and has lived his entire life in London - and yet the character is portrayed by a German actor who is clearly working (and not succeeding) to suppress his natural German accent, so it feels like unusual casting. Now, perhaps it is simply because Powell felt Bohm was right for the role - he's handsome, and has a great physical presence that can feel both threatening and childlike depending on the moment. But also I did feel that suppressed accent did add to the film and the performance. Firstly, it adds a alien feel to the character - this impossible-to-place accent makes Mark feel apart from the culture around him, rather than feeling a part of that culture, giving a sense of mystery to the man. But also there's a notable strain to the performance that to me comes from Bohm suppressing his natural way of speaking - it forces a degree of effort into the performance, which is perfect for this character who has been tortured since childhood, who has become extremely insular, and who does have to force himself in his engagements with the wider world.
Above all, one of the things I really loved about the film was that it's not Psycho. Now, I adore Psycho, it's an incredible film, it's one of my favourites, and perhaps it's just over-familiarity with that film, but Psycho almost feels like a comfortable film. I showed my mother Psycho; I can't imagine showing her this film. Nearly 65 years after release, Peeping Tom still feels like a genuinely dangerous film - and the fact that it feels like that without ever putting anything horrific on screen is genuinely impressive. It's a remarkable piece of filmmaking, and what a joy it is that the film's reputation has been restored to the high place it deserves.
In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon
Alex Gibney directs this 3 1/2 hour documentary which structures its telling of Paul Simon's career - his entry into the music world as a schoolboy, his collaboration with Art Garfunkel, and his striking out into solo waters after the end of that partnership, until he hits the success of Graceland - alongside footage of Paul Simon as he works on his most recent album, Seven Psalms. The film was apparently made originally for television, which makes sense since the very long film is very clearly evenly bifurcated into two episodes - one on the Simon and Garfunkel era, and the other on the Paul Simon solo era. But it also works as a single film experience.
Alex Gibney is a strong filmmaker, and he has a lot of great material to work with here, so even at a length of over 200 minutes, the film never lags or loses its audience engagement. There is a wealth of archive material here, and it's pretty much all fascinating to watch. We get to hear so much of his music - perhaps not full songs, just excerpts, but they are still long enough that you do get to enjoy the moment and the performance - and he's such an incredible songwriter that every moment of music, with the full cinema sound system, is an utter delight. Meanwhile the footage of Simon as he works on his new album is intriguing. A friend of mine commented that, whenever you hear that some project about an artist is going to be focused on their new stuff, there's always a bit of weariness at the prospect, but fortunately the album sounds like it's pretty great. I don't think we ever hear any of the tracks put together as one, but we do hear the individual elements, as he works on the guitar riffs, or as he experiments to find interesting sounds, or as he works with a choir. Several times we hear him express the idea, "The ear hunts for irritation", to communicate that, although whatever he's just recorded sounds perfectly good, there's something about it that's nagging at him, that's not quite perfect. It's fascinating to watch him work.
The thing I really appreciate it about the film was its strong focus on the lyrics of Simon's work. Musically his songs are beautiful and catchy and enjoyable, but the songs of his that I really connect to are the ones where there's something about the lyrics that just speak to me - moments where he's being purely confessional, or painting some evocative image, or telling a haunting story. There are lines in The Boxer or You Can Call Me Al that hook into my head with the poetry of his writing. And so it's fantastic how much focus the film forces focus onto those lyrics. As we hear the songs, we see what appear to be the handwritten notes that he used to write the lyrics, at times almost illegible as he's rushing to get a lyric down on paper before he loses it. So you can't just focus on how the music sounds, treating the lyrics almost as another instrument; you can't help but be aware of the fact that he's communicating ideas in these songs, and how beautiful these words are.
Unfortunately at times, the film does feel as though it's not as focused as it could be, or doesn't really know where to spend its time. For instance, I'm very aware of how important Paul Simon is to Saturday Night Live, and the show has clearly played an important part in his life as well - there's a hilarious story about meeting his future wife when she was performing on the show. But it does feel as though you do not need to spend five minutes on the fact that he hosted the second episode - we get to watch him be very funny, sure, but there are better ways they could have spent that time. Personally, I wanted more time hearing what he has to say about his hearing loss in his left ear - what that experience is like for someone whose entire life is built around music. Similarly, there's a point in the film where he does a bit of a breakdown of some of the tracks in Graceland, but they try to squeeze three songs into a handful of minutes, which means they really only have time for him to point out a couple of elements in each track that he likes - I'd have preferred a more full discussion about putting together a single track, so we can really understand how these pieces are constructed.
But these are small quibbles. Ultimately, this was just a wonderful way to spend an afternoon. It was also a reminder that, with the obvious exception of Graceland, I really have not dug deeply enough into Simon's solo work and I need to do that.
Evil Does Not Exist
Takumi is the local odd-job man in a small forested village near Tokyo. Everyone in the village has their life perfectly organised for what they want, until one day, the village is visited by a couple of PR experts representing a company that intends to build a "glamping" resort. The locals are unhappy about the prospect, and express their concerns about the damage this resort will have on the way of life and on the environment.
The film is extremely minimalist and patient, in a way that really impressed me. It's perhaps not quite "slow cinema", but it certainly getting close to that categorisation. If you wanted to, you could cover all of the events in the movie in a 30 or 40 minute short - but that would lose so much of what makes this film special. There is something about this movie that just casts a spell and leaves us completely enthralled. Witness the opening shot, where we find ourselves walking through a forest, looking up at the tree tops, for a good few minutes. From there, we find ourselves watching as Takumi skillfully chops wood, or gathers fresh spring water for the local noodle shop to use. And through all this, it was somehow impossible to look away. It must be 10 minutes, possibly close to 15, before the film's plot actually begins, and before then we're just watching this one guy living his life slowly. But it's beautiful to watch.
And that patience is reflective of the film's entire approach. There's never quite a sense of urgency; instead the film seems to exist in a permanent state of pause. And so we get to enjoy just the moments of people living, whether it be watching the schoolkids playing Red Light, Green Light, or the two PR people passing the time on the drive to the village by having a dryly amusing discussion of their experience on dating apps. None of this could be considered essential to the film, but it was all vital to establishing the tone of the piece, and without these moments this film is not this film.
The high point of the film is certainly the town hall meeting, where the PR people are astonished to find that the village residents are much more knowledgeable and insightful then they anticipated - they certainly did not think they would have an extended discussion about the location of a septic tank. But it's a brilliant scene, because there's such passion and frustration on the part of the villagers who know they are about to be railroaded, and who are desperate to try to stop this from happening. There's a definite cynicism in the film about capitalism exploiting natural resources solely for personal gains - I was amused by the revelation that the project was being rushed largely because of the need to use soon-to-expire pandemic funding, and it's treated as the most obvious thing in the world that this town hall meeting was not held for the purpose of getting the public's view, but just as a token exercise and to look for easy wins they can use to divert attention from the way they are overriding the village's views.
The ending of the film seemed to prove really rather controversial, judging by the comments I overheard as I left the cinema. And I can understand that reaction, but personally I like it a lot. Without going into detail or spoilers, to me the key to the film lies in the title. It's patently absurd to say that evil does not exist - we see evil all around us. It's almost as if there are missing words in that title - Evil Does Not Exist "In Nature", the film seems to want to say. Where evil does come into the world, it's through the interference by humans seeking to abuse the environment for their own purposes, whether it be the company building the glamping resort with no care for the wider impact the resort will have, or the unseen hunters whose gunshots periodically ring out as they target another deer. Nature doesn't care about humans until humans impose on nature, the film seems to say. And in that context, I found the ending extremely satisfying.
Fantastic film. Not for everyone, but if you get on the film's wavelength, then it's utterly enchanting.
The Beast
- It's 2044 and AI rules the world. The only way for a human to get a job that will give your life purpose is to undergo a procedure that cleanses you of all emotions by removing the lingering trauma of past lives. Gabrielle and Louis are two people who meet when they are considering this procedure, but they are afraid of losing their emotions.
- It's 1910, and Gabrielle has this overwhelming fear about a looming catastrophe. One evening she is at a high society party with her husband when she encounters Louis, and the two begin a chaste but potentially scandalous relationship with each other.
- It's 2014, and Louis is an angry incel stalker who has chosen to kill Gabrielle as representative of all the girls who rejected him.
Before the film, we had an introduction to the movie from the man who has taken over running the festival this year. In this, he mentioned that while a lot of people will love the film, a lot of people will certainly hate the film. Unfortunately I probably fell into the "hate it" camp, which was particularly disappointing because it was one of the titles I was most anticipating in the festival.
Ultimately, my issue probably comes down to what I'm supposed to take away from the film. Having recently rewatched Lost Highway, I definitely found myself reminded of that film during the viewing. But the problem is that, while Lynch's films are certainly often ambiguous as to what exactly happened, there's always a core idea that you at least can feel the film is expressing. I just couldn't find that here. I was also frustrated by questions about where the reality lies in the film. Logic would seem to dictate that it's the 2044 setting that is reality, while the earlier time zones are simply projections of events that may have happened that are being brought up during this cleansing process. But in that case, why is it that the core setting around which the entire film is structured felt most unrealistic and dreamlike - even leaving aside the science fiction trappings, that setting simply makes no sense. What is with the weird nightclub changing its identity and its decor every day? What is with the people who keep quoting conversations that were had in Gabrielle's past lives, despite the fact that there is no possible way these people can have any idea about those former conversations? The film was deliberately trying to put the audience in a position where it was unclear what is and is not real. The problem is, I was already in a position of struggling to be sure exactly what I'm supposed to take away from those near future scenes and from the film as a whole, and when you add those moments of unambiguous unreality, it naturally impairs your ability to connect to the core of the film. (To say nothing of those random moments where we seem to glimpse Lea Seydoux as herself on a greenscreen film set filming moments that would later occur in the film.)
The frustrating thing was that there was a lot that I really liked about the film. Lea Seydoux and George Mackay in the two lead roles are fantastic. I particularly enjoyed that tone of repression that seemed to be holding the characters back in whatever time period we were in. And those earlier times are telling stories that are really rather fantastic. There's a pained romanticism in the 1910 sequence that really held the attention, while in 2014 the film is as intense and suspenseful as any horror film. Director Bertrand Bonello, whose work I was unfamiliar with, is clearly a talented filmmaker, and there is so much about the film that is genuinely appealing, that it was deeply frustrating that as a whole I just could not get onto the film's wavelength. And given my pre-film anticipation for the film, that was a real disappointment.
Days of Heaven
These days, there can sometimes be a sense that Terrence Malick is working in a level of self-indulgence, perhaps even self-parody, and so it can be easy to forget how exciting his early works were. Badlands and Days of Heaven were both fantastic films, which pointed to the director's obsessions, but show a level of constraint and discipline that he has struggled with lately. Having previously seen Badlands on the big screen some years ago, it was nice to now enjoy Malick's second film in the same venue and marvel at its incredible beauty.
Richard Gere plays Bill, a hot-headed steel worker who accidentally kills his boss in a fight, and so escapes with his lover Abby and her sister down to Texas. Bill and Abby agree to claim to be brother and sister to avoid attention, and when Bill overhears that the wealthy farm owner they work for is ill and only has a year to live, he convinces Abby to agree to marry the farmer so they can inherit the wealth. But not everyone is convinced by Bill and Abby's claims to a sibling relationship.
The first thing you notice about the film is just how stunning it looks, especially on the big screen. Famously, much of the film was shot at "magic hour", and while that must have been a nightmare to shoot, given the extremely limited time-pressures it imposes, it gives the film an incredible golden aura that amplifies the effect of this vast space of grain.
Malick's particular obsessions about observing nature and reflecting on the way humanity interacts with nature are certainly very present here - the image of this one colossal house rising out of a field of grain is indelible, he seems amused by the sight of a garden gnome in a field of wheat, while in another moment you can feel Malick's awe as you watch a seed germinate and start to grow - but these don't become the overriding force they can often feel like in later years.
The high point of the film is certainly the legendary locust scene, and there's a good reason why this is the scene people think about when this film is referenced. Everything is perfectly executed - the ominous shots of insects turning up in places they shouldn't be; the incredible close-ups of locusts eating the grain, looking like nothing but an alien creature devouring prey; that stunning celebrated shot of Richard Gere standing in the field as a swarm of locusts rises from the field, so beautiful and terrifying; the desperation on the part of the farm workers, going a little insane as they try to beat and catch every locust, ultimately resorting to burning the entire field in order to destroy these creatures; and the way that terror feeds into hysteria that brings about the terrible events that end the film. It's a true miracle of filmmaking.
Above all, it's just fun watching a Malick film with a clear narrative drive. While I have liked some of Malick's recent work, it's amusing to me how his films always wind up just being meditations on the same questions of the way humanity interacts with nature. (Seriously, I liked A Hidden Life, but how does a film about someone standing up to the Nazis become so sedate?) So it's nice to watch something that first and foremost is telling an interesting story, while his pet themes colour the story, rather than overbearing on it.
Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus
In an empty recording studio, Oscar-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, suffering from cancer and in his final few months of life, walks up to a piano, and starts playing music that he's composed from throughout his career. No other instruments, no electronic backing, just one man playing a piano.
I don't think I realised that the film really is just footage of Sakamoto playing the piano - not that I'm complaining; I was just surprised by this. I was perhaps expecting a bit of context about the man or the music, but there is none. We get no talking heads, no interviews, no information about the pieces or why they were written, and until the end credits the only indication we get of what these pieces even are is the occasional glimpse of the titles on top of the sheet music. There are moments where we might find ourselves wanting to ask questions - when Sakamoto is visibly moved at the end of one piece, we may wonder what has brought out this emotion, is he thinking about the time he wrote the music, what it means to him, or is he thinking about his coming death - but we never get that information.
The film was directed by Sakamoto's son, Neo Sora, and making this does feel like an act of incredible love. I found myself thinking about a friend of mine who has a photo on her wall of a pair of swollen hands - the hands of her mother, taken shortly before her passing. And that photo means a lot to my friend, because these were hands that expressed a great deal of love for her. And that's what this film feels like. It's not just about making a film to capture this beautiful music, although it is that. It's about capturing who the man was, about capturing the lines on his face, the creases on his hands, the way his hair moved, the little smiles of satisfaction when he plays something well, the looks of concentration as he focuses on the task at hand. And the black-and-white cinematography really amplifies this, giving contrast that draws attention to his unshaven skin or the various wrinkles in the skin. It's like this film was an effort to capture everything about Sakamoto as he was doing what he loved, so that in years to come the son can have this as a record of his father.
Sakamoto is an artist I'm not that familiar with - the only piece in the film I was able to recognise was Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence - although I have seen quite a few films he worked on. But this was a reminder that he composed some incredibly beautiful music and I do need to dig into his catalogue for myself.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
Iman has just received a promotion to become an investigating judge in the Iranian Revolutionary Court - while it's a great career advancement and opportunity for Iman, people in his position are seen as executioners and are deeply unpopular with the people, so their identities are kept secret and he's given a gun for protection. But when protests break out over mandatory hijab laws and the death in custody of one arrestee, he becomes overwhelmed with the number of people he has to process and have executed. And then when his gun goes missing, these pressures and his paranoia start to take their toll on his relationship with his family.
It really is an intriguing film, a clear response to the recent crackdowns of the Iranian morality police on people just looking to live their life freely - the film ends with social media footage of some of the recent protests. In that context, I was fascinated by the way we see Iman's workplace. The very first shot of the film is unsettling - Iman walking down a hallway at his workplace, past a half-dozen uncanny cardboard cutouts of various people holding their hands across their hearts as an expression of devotion, but what was an unsettling image becomes horrifying every time we return to that location as more and more people line the hallway bound, gagged, blindfolded.
The film is clearly about the mental and emotional toll that it must take to work in one of these positions. Iman certainly seems to be well-intentioned, perhaps even honest at the start - he initially protests about being expected to sign off on a death warrant without being able to review the information available - but he knowingly chooses to continue with this role fully aware of what it means, because it will improve his family's lifestyle. And day by day, these choices deaden Iman. And that is the chilling thing, the notion that someone would be willing to have a person, have many people, murdered just because it would then allow your family to have a more comfortable life, have a home with an extra bedroom. And the burden of dealing with that mental strain clearly builds on the character.
As much as the film is about Iman and the consequences of his work, the fact that his work keeps him away from his family so much means that the film was actually centered on the rest of his family - his wife Najmeh and their teenage daughters Rezvan and Sana. And this becomes an opportunity to explore the social tensions that develop between generations - the mother, blindly believing whatever she's told on the news because it's never occurred to her that the Iranian government might lie, against the children who are outraged at the way the world is and want desperately to fight for its improvement. There's this running subplot in the film where, because of Iman's job, there are all kinds of rules about what the daughters can and cannot do, who they can and cannot associate with, until the conflict literally comes to their door, in the form of a college friend who is injured with buckshot at a protest, before later being disappeared. But you get a sense that one of the reasons why the mother is so set in her ways is just because it's easiest - just don't make waves, accept things the way they are, and you can live with it because things really aren't that bad. And that's one of the fascinating things about the ending - Najmeh find herself just as vilified, just as imperiled as her children, because by not standing up to the forces that would seek to dominate her, she allows it to have that power to dominate her.
I'm somewhat conflicted about the third act of the film, because I think it's possibly a little overblown. The puzzle over what happened to the gun is an interesting driver for Iman's over-the-top actions - losing the gun could lose him his career and his ability to protect his family right at a time when they may be at risk - but I found the resolution to that puzzle a little disappointing, if only because it let him off the hook to a degree. This then meant that the rest of the film needed to force him into bigger, more extreme action in order to paint him again as the clear villain. I can't help wondering if the film would have been better if there had been no clear resolution to that question. But at the same time that third act is supremely entertaining and suspenseful, culminating in an incredible chase sequence in a beautiful ruined city, so I'm not sure I would want that to change.
All in all, it was an extremely enjoyable and challenging film, and one of my favorites of the festival.
Sleep
Firstly, I should note that for some reason I had a minor migraine during the first half of the film. It eventually went away, but I spent that first half with one spot in my vision that just had a distortion making it hard to see. There was even a moment where the soundtrack told me that there was a jump scare, but it elicited no reaction from me because the scare occurred right in the middle of my blind spot and I simply couldn't see it. In addition, it made reading subtitles challenging - I almost had to read them in my periphery - so it's quite possible that there may have been things I missed. With that acknowledged...
Soo-jin and Hyeon-soo are a young, happily married couple about to have their first baby. Until one night, Hyeon-soo starts behaving strangely while asleep - initially making strange comments, before graduating to scratching his face bloody, or eating raw meat and raw eggs complete with shells, or doing even more terrible things. He's eventually diagnosed with a stress-related sleep disorder, and put on drugs, but this doesn't seem to improve anything. And then one day, a medium suggests that Hyeon-soo may actually be possessed by a ghost.
So the film is perfectly entertaining, but certainly not great. A big part of the problem is simply that it takes much, much too long to introduce the idea of a ghost. We spend so much time on what is and is not a symptom of sleep disorders, or which drugs Hyeon-soo should be on, or which protective steps would and would not be appropriate, to the point that by the time we reached the explanation that we all know has been coming, we are over halfway through the film. Now while that can work (The Exorcist famously spends a long time looking for medical explanations before resorting to an exorcist), it simply doesn't have enough tension in those moments to carry that length of time. Meanwhile Soo-jin feels wildly inconsistent in her concern about the risk her husband poses - one minute she's hiding in the bath with her baby, the next she's sleeping next to her husband.
The other big issue is just that the film has a lot of very detailed rules about the behaviors of ghosts when possessing people - souls need to leave within 10 days or they become a ghost, ghosts need to leave within 100 days for reasons, they can do special exorcisms but these only have effect for 49 days, there are certain actions that are always the first thing that a ghost will do upon possessing a person - and Soo-jin is weirdly knowledgeable about all of this. There may be explanations for this - she may have got this information from her superstitious mother or from the medium who diagnosed the problem - but we never learn exactly how she knows this and the upshot is that the climax of the film has a long stretch in which Soo-jin literally presents a PowerPoint presentation to explain all of these rules. (It also weirdly relies on the notion that ghosts cannot lie for some reason.)
This is particularly disappointing because, until that moment, I was really enjoying the climax of the film. The environment in which this sequence takes place is a particularly unsettling location, and one that never got comfortable no matter how much time we spent in that place. After taking much, much too long not being scary, we finally get an ending that seems like it's actually trying to elicit a visceral response, except they then make this choice that inevitably deadens the film.
Ultimately it does have enough fun elements that I liked the film, but unfortunately that's all we can be expected to have with this film. It's an enjoyable movie, but one I will probably forget about tomorrow.
Good One
So this is just an absolute charmer of a film. Sam is a girl in her late-teens, who finds herself on a hiking trip with her father Chris and his best friend, the newly divorced Matt. She definitely feels like the third wheel on this trip, as her father and Matt revert to friendship bonds established long before she was born. And then one night, as everyone is sitting around the campfire, various people say various things that, in a more sober moment, they might have thought better of saying.
One of the things I really like about the film was how little the film seemed interested in drama. I've seen this type of story many times before - something terrible happens early in the film, it breaks out into a massive fight, and for the rest of the film these tensions and resentments hang in the air, constantly threatening to explode. Here, the big event happens on the last night of the trip - by which point there is probably only 20 minutes left of the film - which means that most of the film is spent building up the relationships. And they are fascinating to watch. Sam and Chris have this pleasing father-daughter relationship - there's clear affection between the two, but he doesn't seem to quite know how to relate or interact with her. He's much more comfortable spending time with his closest friend, especially as that friend is a bit of an idiot, which offers plenty of opportunities to poke fun at him - there's a definite level of immaturity between the two, which always leaves the youngest seeming like the adult in the room. And there's a nice relationship between Sam and Matt - obviously they are not close, but she's grown up with Matt her entire life, and so there is an ease and comfort between the two.
And then this event happens, and the mood of the trip shifts ever so slightly, but the tone that hangs over the film is more one of disappointment than catastrophe. She feels let down by these men, in one way or another, and while there's never any massive beat of confrontation, everyone is very clear what they should have done and how they let her down in this moment. It's also a significant point that no-one ever apologises for the way they've wronged her. It's as though they deliberately choose instead to let it be unsaid, because it would be uncomfortable to acknowledge wrongdoing, and because they feel there's almost no need to say "I'm sorry" - you know I'm sorry, so why do I need to say it? And that's how things that need to be said never get said. I get the sense that it's significant that both of these men are divorced - you wonder whether a key issue in those marriage breakdowns was their tendency to look for places to escape to, rather than confront and deal with the issues in the relationship.
Lily Collias is simply fantastic here as Sam. Part of the challenge she has is that she needs to hold the attention, we need to always be aware of her and see her as the main character she is despite the fact that, because she's constantly pushed to the side (and also because she's a teenager), she doesn't really spend much time expressing herself and certainly never gets a chance to really assert herself until the climactic events of the film. Sam needs to be established as a character in the gaps that the other characters leave for, and Collias does admirably here, creating a nuanced and convincing character despite all of these challenges.
My overarching thought as I think back on the film is just how real the movie feels. This does not feel like some scripted drama following a developed three act structure; this genuinely feels as though we are following real people as they try to understand how to deal with actual situations that confront them. It feels entirely natural, while also being a wonderfully crowd-pleasing work. I just had a lot of fun with this one.
Sons
Eva is a female guard working in the low security wing of a prison. She enjoys her work and values the opportunity to help the prisoners get their lives back on track. Until one day she recognises the face of one of the new arrivals to the prison – Mikkel, a transferee who is to be held in maximum security. So Eva decides to request a transfer to work in that wing, which offers her many opportunities to make Mikkel's life a living hell. Until one day, things shift, and all of a sudden Mikkel finds himself in a position of control against Eva.
I was interested in this because Gustav Möller made the excellent The Guilty (not the Jake Gyllenhall remake, which I never saw) a few years ago, and I remember really appreciating the level of tension in that film and the interesting character work. And once again, Möller demonstrates himself to be a fantastic director of thrillers, with an admirable ability to control the suspense in the work. There were moments where you could really feel the entire audience leaning forward, incredibly desperate to know exactly how this film would resolve itself. He understands how to precisely build tension in his work, and it's impressive for someone on only his second film just how skilled he becomes.
But I have a massive, almost insurmountable issue with the film - I just could not believe any of it. At every point I questioned whether a prison system would even work like this. It starts with the fact that Eva even gets moved onto the maximum security block to begin with - any half-functioning prison system would at the absolute least run background checks to assess whether any of its guards have pre-existing connections to people in prison, whether those connections are positive or negative, so they can keep guard away from prisoner. So how is it possible that no-one knows about Eva's connection with Mikkel? For that matter, how is it possible that no one notices that Eva constantly seems to be involved whenever anything happens involving Mikkel? Why does no-one ask if she is targeting him? After all, Mikkel seems to be very vocal about Eva constantly targeting him, so surely that will draw attention to her. And sure, I know you can't just act on the word of a prisoner, but surely a competent manager would decide to keep an eye on the situation, perhaps try to keep the two apart if possible. But no, no-one seems to notice. There is wild inconsistency over whether or not it is even safe for Eva to guard Mikkel - early in the film, she is chastised for even approaching his door to check on him, but later on she's frequently relied on to be the only person guarding him in a position where he could very easily overpower a small woman like her. For that matter, why are they allowing her to guard him with zero other supervision, especially given the events during the inspection? Then there's the wild request that Eva makes towards the end of the film - there are a number of reasons why a female guard might make that request on behalf of a male prisoner, and even if you don't guess the actual reason, the reasons you would come up with would certainly argue against agreeing to the request, nevermind allowing Eva to guard him at that time. None of this makes sense. Perhaps, if there was more time to tell this story, you could give us answers to how this all came about, but in the absence of such an explanation, this simply is absurd.
But that raises another matter. I think this may be a situation where we run up against the storytelling barriers encountered by the constraints of cinema. If you're making a 100 minute movie, there simply is not a lot of time to spare. So while I think we are supposed to view Eva as a positive figure in the low security prison wing, we get so little time with her in that environment that we never really see what she was like before Mikkel - and similarly, when she returns to the low security block later in the film, because we've spent so little time on her with the prisoners on that block, her return makes little impact on us, especially as I personally was unsure which prisoner it was that actually sparked this return visit. Then there is my question about whether or not it's obvious how much Eva is targeting Mikkel - perhaps the issue is that, to save time, we just see the moments where she targets him, which means we don't get a fuller sense of how she comes across as a guard. But because there's not a lot of runtime, they can't waste the time showing us moments where nothing happened between Eva and Mikkel, so perhaps what is obvious to us viewers can never be obvious to the characters in the film.
Unfortunately, I couldn't get past the massive leaps of logic in the script. But Möller is so good is controlling the level of tension between people that I am by no means out on him as a director. I just have to hope that next time the script will be something better.
A Mistake
Had a rather dramatic screening of this drama about medical misadventure. About 20 minutes into the movie, shortly after the scenes of the surgery that became the film's focal point, suddenly we hear a voice, "Is anyone a doctor? This isn't part of the film! Is anyone a doctor?" The lights came on, people rushed to help, and after a few minutes the man who had had the issue was able to be supported to stand and walk out of the cinema. Then, as the lights were going down, someone at the back of the cinema yelled out, "No! There's someone up here that also needs help!" The lights came back on, people rushed up the stairs to help, and eventually that woman was also able to walk down the stairs. After 20 minutes, the film was finally able to resume. But I am reliably informed that there were four ambulances that were sent to respond to the situation, and when they arrived they were reluctant to enter the building until the police turned up, because there had been so many calls to 111 that the emergency dispatcher thought there had been some mass-fatality event. Fortunately everybody was fine, and we got to enjoy the film.
Elizabeth Banks stars as a surgeon working at an Auckland hospital. One day, she rushes a patient with a life-threatening infection into surgery, but several problems arise, culminating in her trainee doctor accidentally piercing a blood vessel. They manage to repair the injury, and the surgery initially seems to have succeeded, but the next day the patient dies in ICU. And so people start looking around and finger pointing, trying to identify who is responsible for this death.
It's a rather interesting portrait of the way problems can arise and spiral. I think we've all probably been in situations with something has gone catastrophically wrong, and often when this happens it's because there was some critical failure at each stage of the process, until an error that should not have occurred is made. So here we have the misdiagnosis, we have burnout in the surgical team, we have the gas failing to inflate the body, we have the trainee doctor being both too gentle and then too forceful with the patient, all of these problems building up one by one until the titular mistake becomes inevitable.
But it's also about the desire for clear cut answers in situations where there are none. When something terrible like this happens, it can often be tempting to pick one person to hold responsible, "You made this mistake and now my loved one is dead". And it can be easy to hold that person up for public criticism, publish their name in the paper, have their registration removed, all as part of an effort to hold someone responsible. But in a situation where there is an entire chain of events that leads to the death, there simply is no way to identify one problem in stage that this was the cause. And yet it is so tempting to do that, because as humans we are hardwired to look for an answer, an explanation, something we can hold onto to give us comfort.
I really enjoyed the performances here. Elizabeth Banks brings a lot of nuance to the character - it might have been obvious to play the character just as some arrogant hot-shot, lording their power of life and death, but instead she feels like someone who is extremely good at her job, who is extremely opinionated about what the right thing is to do in any situation, but who has largely walled herself off for her own emotional protection, and it's only in brief moments that we can see the compassionate human underneath. I also loved Simon McBurney's wonderfully squirrelly hospital administrator, who has clearly had his patience tried so much by Elizabeth and who just wants to find the easiest way to resolve any situation, regardless of whether blame is a portioned unfairly - he just wants to be able to say they've done what needs to be done to resolve the situation. Richard Crouchley was also interesting as the trainee doctor trying to cope with the fact that a mistake he made may have killed someone, and really struggling under the burden of that memory.
Unfortunately, while I did enjoy the film, I wasn't fully sold by it. A big part of it comes down to the ending - without being too specific I did find the ending a little bit too easy. The conflict gets extremely heightened and tense as the film progressed, and the idea that it was able to be resolved in that way to me strained credulity, especially because I wasn't entirely clear what the resolution actually was - I could have sworn that everything that happened in that final scene had already happened much earlier in the film, and I couldn't really see where the shift lay that allowed this to be the resolution. I could imagine it being clearer in the novel, but here it felt to me as though something shifted and it wasn't clear what it was.
I also got the sense that there is possibly a bit too much of the source novel in the film. There are two particular plot threads that either don't really go anywhere, while simultaneously they simply feel too on-the-nose. The first sees Elizabeth agreeing to take care of her sister's dog; the way that storyline ends feels intrusively obvious. Secondly, there is a bit of time dedicated to a proposal where the mortality rates for each individual surgeon get released, so people can assess how safe they feel with each doctors. It's an interesting debate, and I can see the merits of the positions on either side of the issue, but it was unclear to me what the broader context was around the decision to release these statistics, and it also seemed as though once they had the argument the film stopped being interested in this plotline. Both of these plot threads feel as though these were probably significant subplots in the novel, which has time to fully set up and explore these story lines, but in the context of a 100-minute film, there's simply not the time to fully integrate these subplots into the film.
But still, it's a solidly made film, talking about some interesting issues, with some excellent performances, and I could quite understand it having fairly broad appeal.
And one last thing - it's a small point, but as a film fan, it is particularly distracting when the main character's name is Elizabeth Taylor. Now, I'm aware that there are many regular people who have the same names as celebrities; that doesn't mean it doesn't jar every time we are reminded of her name. And perhaps that's the name of the character in the novel - but you can change that for the film. At the very least, just minimize the number of times you use the character's full name to avoid drawing attention to it - instead it almost seemed as though they were going out of their way to call her by her full name at every possible opportunity. It really did keep taking me out of the film.
Brief History of a Family
In China, teenage loner Shuo is injured after being hit with a basketball; feeling guilty, the student who threw the ball, Wei, invites Shuo to his place for the afternoon. Wei's family, Mr and Mrs Tu, are comfortably wealthy, which impresses Shuo who comes from an abusive situation. As Shuo spends more and more time at the Tu house, the parents become impressed with him, his drive and determination comparing well in contrast to their own video-game-playing son, and increasingly Shuo seems to become a part of the family - which causes Wei to feel increasingly resentful towards the interloper.
One of the interesting elements at play in this film is the one-child policy that was in place until recently in China. There is a very real sense that part of the reason why Wei is the way he is - lazy, uninterested in his studies, uninterested in fact in anything other than his love of fencing - is because of the one-child policy: we've all heard of the "only child syndrome" but what do you get when you have an entire nation of only-children? But more than that, there's also the issue of what might have been - there's one illuminating moment where the parents refer to their regrets over paths not taken because of the one-child policy, and the fact that they never had a second child. This happens while they are away on holiday with some friends who reveal that they are taking advantage of the new two-child policy to have a second child. But the Tu family don't need to have a second child, because they already see Shuo as their second child.
And this is the interesting thing about the film. We've all seen stories in which characters inveigle there ways into someone else's life - for me, the first thing this film reminded me of was The Talented Mr Ripley; during the Q&A, someone else in the audience mentioned Parasite or (the much inferior) Saltburn - but this feels much less malicious than in this stories. It's clear right from the start how much Shuo admires the lifestyle the Tu family enjoy; the surprising thing is how much Mr and Mrs Tu find themselves needing Shuo. Unlike those other stories, this isn't a story about a person exploiting other people for their own gain - there is an unusual level of reciprocity in this relationship, where both sides have a need that each other fills. And that really is the thing that makes the film distinctive.
Writer-director Lin Jianjie makes a strong debut here. While there are a few of the unnecessary touches that you can often get in a first-time directorial effort - there's a very obvious recurring visual metaphor comparing the family members to cells being studied under a microscope - there is a real understanding of and compassion for these people and the world that they live in. I found his filming style extremely appealing - it's both clean and warm. He also displays a solid amount of wit and economy in his storytelling - the funniest part of the film is probably a wordless fight between the two boys over turning a light off and on; the way the fight escalated with every beat brought a great deal of laughter to the room.
This was a definite highlight, and one I am eager to see again.
Sasquatch Sunset
In the mountains of California live a tribe of four nomadic sasquatches - the tribe leader, his female mate, their young child, and another adult male. They live much as they always have, roaming from place to place, foraging for food, getting high from eating particular plants, building shelter, and avoiding predator animals. The film follows these creatures over the course of the year, as they find their isolated existence and the wonders of nature increasingly encroached on by humanity.
I was wary of seeing this film, simply because I had heard so much about the film's preoccupation with bodily functions. And it is true - there is a lot of time spent watching these creatures as they urinate, deficate, masturbate, and mate - in fact, the general horniness of these creatures seems to be a recurring subject of great interest to the filmmakers. And that is certainly the least enjoyable part of the film. Part of the problem is that these sequences are edited in a way to make them comedic, almost as though the fact of these bodily functions is the joke - we are supposed to find it hilarious that we are watching these creatures peeing or having sex. Personally I was not amused, although many in the audience were. Now, I think it would be possible to reflect these bodily functions in a way that would not make them into an easy laugh. There's a moment where the creatures come across something that indicates the intrusion of humanity into this space, and they respond by urinating and defecating, while the female even sprays her breast milk, to mark their territory. You could have treated this moment seriously and with sadness, portraying it as these animals taking the only response they know to try to ward off an unknown threat, not understanding that humans are not going to be scared of by sasquatch urine - or you could edit together a bunch of very quick cuts of these creatures excreting themselves, with the rapidity of the cuts and the escalation of the excretions playing as a joke. It all feels very sophomoric and immature in those moments.
Which is really sad, because the rest of the film is actually rather effective. We only ever see these four creatures - we may see indications of human encroachment on the area, but we never see any actual humans - and because these four can't speak, the only dialogue is a series of expressive grunts. And yet the film is extremely smart in communicating who each of these animals are, and how they understand the world. They are clearly of limited intelligence - they seem to understand the concept of counting, but have no idea how to actually do it - but they know enough how to function. Yet they are part of a world that has left them behind - we watch as they rhythmically beat the trees, trying to signal to other sasquatch in the area, but no reply comes; they could be the final four of their kind to exist. And the film manages to create an incredible amount of sadness from this state. Every moment of danger, be it the attack of a mountain lion or the shifting of a log that risks trapping one of their tribe, suddenly becomes heightened because every threat to one of them means that these creatures are one step closer to an inevitable extinction.
One of the really smart things done by the Zellner brothers, who wrote and directed the film, is to spend the first 30 or 40 minutes just completely in nature, with no sense of time. For all we know, we could be watching a film that took place hundreds of years ago. And then all of a sudden, we get the first sign of humanity - a red X spraypainted on a tree, and while it's a small thing, it hits these creatures, and us as the audience, with a weight that can only be compared to the arrival of the monolith in 2001. We've spent so much of the film in a completely natural world that by the time humanity arrives it feels almost as alien to us as it does to the creatures. And as the film progresses, while we recognise the trappings of humanity, we also completely understand why they are so bewildered when they come across something as completely unnatural as a road, or when they come across the campsite and have an experience they've never before had and could never even have imagined. By the end, they are in a world that is completely foreign, with only the barest of echoes to remind you of the world they existed in, and it's a truly tragic.
I have to acknowledge the remarkable acting performances by all four cast members, which includes such names as Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough. Robbed of every vocalisation except for grunts, all four actors are forced to give remarkably expressive performances entirely through their physicality, the way they move and exist in this space, along with the extraordinary soulfulness they bring to their facial performances. And this is where an equal amount of recognition is earned by the makeup people who transform these four actors into these creatures who demonstrate a remarkable amount of emotional nuance. As the film ended, the person sitting behind me commented how much they wished the new Planet of the Apes films had made use of physical makeup for its apes, rather than relying on CGI creations - I had been having much the same thought, because the film really drove home how much makeup technology has advanced since that initial run of Apes films. There is no sign of any separation between actor and makeup, and you find yourself fully convinced by the reality of these creatures.
It seems like an audacious project, to try to convince you of the existence of famously non-existent creatures in order to make an argument about protecting the environment for those creatures that do exist. But I did find that, when the filmmakers aren't indulging their worst instincts, it is actually a rather effective film, and I did enjoy it overall.
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
I am a hard-hearted, unsentimental bastard, so I hardly ever cry in the movies. And this documentary certainly did not shift that needle for me, but it definitely had that effect on a lot of people in the audience.
Mats Steen was a young man in Norway who had been living with a degenerative muscular disease since he was a child. By the time he died, at the age of 25, he had declined to a point where he could only barely move his hands and fingers. But Mats loved gaming; since he couldn't do anything else he would spend 12-plus hours a day on his computer playing video games. After his passing, Mats parents posted a note on his blog about his death, only to be inundated with hundreds of emails from people who had connected with Mats online playing World of Warcraft, and who considered him a good friend. All of a sudden, his parents discovered that he lived an entire life they had no idea about - as his opportunities for human connection in the real world declined and he was forced into greater isolation, his online avatar Ibelin allowed him exist in a world where he could run and jump, make good friends, help people, even fall in love.
A significant part of the film is made up of recreations of his online experience - he left behind tens of thousands of pages of chat logs and records, recording everything he said and did in Warcraft, which were then recreated for the film by animators based on the original models from the game. And it's an effective device, as we understand what Mats got from the game. When we hear how every morning Ibelin would always spend half an hour just running around the kingdom, we understand (even if those who saw him running didn't) that he was just joyous to be in a world where he could move, where running was an option, because he felt so constrained here.
For those of us who don't spend hours playing these types of games, it can seem curious to imagine just how real and strong these connections are. But the film does a good job in convincing us how vital these people can be to each other. We hear about the mother with an autistic son who start gaming to achieve a connection with her son, and how her conversations with Ibelin helped her gain a level of intimacy with her child that might be impossible in the real world - even as they sit close together in the same room, these two are able to tell each other things and demonstrate their love for each other in the Warcraft world that his autism would prevent them from expressing in the real world. We hear about Mats' relationship with the girl he falls for, and how he was able to convince her parents of the value of this online community. And we hear about the hundreds of other people with problems who sought him out for help with one issue or another.
Fortunately this film is not some hagiography. Ibelin could at times be difficult to be around, angrily venting his frustration with his life into the role he was playing in the game - we hear about one point where he alienated himself so much that one of his good friends didn't speak to him for a year. But it also says something about Mats and the importance people placed on their relationship with Ibelin that these outbursts were not fatal to the relationships and that these people were able to rebuild their connection.
Ultimately, this is just a sweet and beautiful documentary, an interesting portrait about the power of technology to help people across the world, in any situation, to connect and have community, to live a rich and fulfilling life in circumstances where that might seem impossible. And it is extremely moving - I may not have cried watching the film, but I certainly understand why people did.
Grafted
Wei is a young woman with a large birthmark on her face. In the impressively traumatizing opening scene, her father, who also bears the same birthmark, tries an experiment on himself to test a potential cure for his disfigurement - but this is a horror film so you can guess how that goes. A few years later, Wei has been continuing her father's research when she gets a scholarship invitation to move from China to study in Auckland. She moves in with her aunt, and her cousin Angela who resents her for bringing in all that weird Chinese stuff, and starts working as a lab assistant for her slimy professor, who is desperately looking for some new idea that will help keep his work funded by the university. And then she makes a breakthrough, discovers a way to instantly bond grafted skin to the host body. Having learned nothing from her father's death, she tests the cure on herself, and her problems all seem over, until an accident occurs...
So as a general experience, it's a fun film. There are some delightfully horrific moments where we find ourselves watching a character taking some action that left the audience audibly repulsed, and that's thoroughly enjoyable.
But I find myself questioning the effectiveness of the script. My initial gut instinct was that this felt like a very early draft that could have used a few more passes, but during the Q&A after the film the producer detailed all of the different stages the script went through, the different writers who worked on it at different times, and you realize the problem is probably that it's been too overworked, they've tried to put so much in that they had to take a bunch of shortcuts to make it all fit. Firstly, there's the transition that Wei makes after her experiment, which just feels unmotivated and much too big a change for a character who for the first half of the film has been very studious and reserved. You really do feel that the Wei we meet would not go to the places we see her go, and even if she did accidentally start down this path, she would certainly have taken a step back at some point before being caught up in these excesses, would realise that there is no end point for her in this path. If I was inclined to be generous, you could argue that the experiment is having an effect on her, but that's just doing extra work for the film since there's nothing actually in the text of the film that I saw to suggest that. Similarly there's an absurd coincidence where layabout cousin Angela's two best friends are both taking the exact same university course as Wei, despite the fact that this course is really rather small - it feels like the height of narrative convenience, as though they started with one character who was in the course and another character who was Angela's friend, couldn't find a convincing way to bridge between the two, so decided to just merge them both into one group in order to get the story to fit.
The other issue I had with the film was that there were times when the film was aiming to do things it's simply was not able to achieve. Given the concept of the film, there was inevitably going to be a real demand for some inventive prosthetics. And a lot of the prosthetics are genuinely impressive - the film ends with a prosthetic creation that became more nightmarish the more you looked at it. But there are other points where it seemed almost as though they didn't quite know how to achieve the effect they wanted - I'm aware that this is a low-budget Kiwi film, and so we're not going to have the effects of a big-budget Hollywood film but, to be blunt, there are times when it looks like they've just smeared strawberry jam over the actor's face. A lot of those moments sadly were completely unconvincing to me. In these moments, the film was definitely relying more on the horror of the concepts being portrayed than on the effectiveness of the gore.
The performances in the film are all extremely enjoyable. I may have issues with the way the character is written, but Joyena Sun is both sympathetic as the studious foreign student trying to find her place in a new country and brings a real sense of glee to the insanity of events in the second half. Jared Turner is entertaining as the sleazy professor, sleeping with the hot blonde students and looking to steal the work of his bright students in order to maintain a reputation based on work he did 20 years earlier. Meanwhile Eden Hart, as that hot blonde student, seems like she's just having a lot of fun, particularly in the last part of the film when she gets to play with completely different characteristics to those she was playing initially.
Ultimately it is a fun ride of a film. Flawed, certainly, but enjoyable nonetheless.
Paris, Texas
It was a real delight to spend Saturday morning revisiting the Palme d'Or winner from 1984, one of the greatest films to come out of the 80s, in a beautiful new restoration.
In the middle of the deserts of Southern Texas, Travis, a ragged-looking man wearing a red cap and a dishevelled and dusty suit and tie, wanders until he collapses from dehydration. His brother Walt is astonished to hear that Travis has turned up - neither he nor his wife Jane have been heard from in four years, and Walt and his wife have been raising Travis' and Jane's son Hunter ever since. So Walt travels down to pick up Travis and bring him back to Los Angeles, where he can reunite with a son who can barely remember his father or his mother. But there is still an empty space in their lives...
The film is just a masterful piece of cinema. Wim Wenders has always been extremely passionate about Americana, and here we see that in full display, with incredible cinematography capturing everything from the grandeur of the American desert and the dusty little towns that hide in this great expense, to the grand cities teeming with people, the little roadside stops with small attractions designed to tempt people to take a break from the journey, or the all-American diner we see recreated in the climactic scene. Wenders looks at these locations with the eye of an enthusiastic foreigner, seeing the things that Americans might see as everyday and ordinary, and instead seeing them as places bursting with potential and excitement, places so wildly different from those he knows in his native Germany. Wenders had already made his love of the American road movie evident in his so-called "Road Trilogy", in which he recreated the form in Germany, but while I don't know that you could strictly call this a road movie, it has enough echoes of the genre that you can believe Wenders will have been thrilled to make those sequences. That love of Americana is also evident in that iconic score by Ry Cooder, with that incredible twanging guitar expressing so much about the vastness of the country, the mournfulness and isolation of the film's central character, and of the hopelessness of his dreams.
I don't think it's possible to say too much about how great Harry Dean Stanton is in this role. He was one of the great actors of his era, and this is justly the role for which he is best remembered. There was just such an immense amount of pain in the character - he spends much of the first part of the film mute by choice, as though he's trying to pay penance, trying to atone for the sins he committed and and the pains that he has caused, and he's trying to avoid engaging with anyone in order to avoid causing any more hurt to anyone. But then he connects with his son, and those sequences are just such a delight as he tries to put aside the things he's done, the choices he's made previously, to be what he thinks his son needs him to be. In a film that is often intensely mournful, his relationship with his son is often a real bright spot, whether at the delight of him walking Hunter home from school, or the two of them playing with the walkie talkies while on the lookout for someone. And then there's that ending. It's weird to think how we've introduced to this character as a mute, only for the film to end with this extended, beautiful monologue - one of a pair - in which he pours his heart out about every regret he has. It is truly something to behold, utterly devastating and heartbreaking, delivered with such subtlety of pain.
I don't want to say too much more about the film. To be honest I don't know that I have the words to express what I would want to say about the film. If you've seen the film, you know it's great. If you haven't seen it, then I worry I've already revealed too much. Sufficient to say, it is an absolute masterpiece, a stunning distillation of the power of cinema, a work of utter emotional rawness, and an absolute must-see.
The Teachers' Lounge
Sixth grade teacher Carla Nowak has newly arrived at her school just as a state of thefts is breaking out. Nowak is concerned by the way the investigation is targeting the students and so sets a trap - when money is stolen from her wallet, a video recording strongly suggests that the culprit may be a long-serving member of the administrative staff. Unfortunately the alleged thief has a son in Nowak's class, and despite efforts to support the son, it becomes clear that he is extremely resentful of Nowak for, as he sees it, targeting his mother and accusing her of something she never did. And as events pile up, Nowak questions whether she's done the right thing, and whether the terrible consequences of her actions are appropriate for the crime.
So this is just a fantastic little movie. In many ways it's a very small scale story, but the consequences of these events are massive for the people involved, and so the film treats this story is such. While these events are played completely straight, the emotions are heightened to such a level that the film plays with the intensity of a thriller. You feel genuinely on edge, your paranoia building, your stomach knotting with every development in this story, and when Nowak exhaustedly encourages her class to collectively scream out loud as a cover for her emotional need to just let all of this out, we completely understand her mindset, because we're there with her.
And this sense of rising paranoia is really amplified by the incredible score. Now, to be clear, this is not a pleasant score to listen to. You would never listen to this score as a way to pass time - it would make you much too anxious. But that's exactly why the score is so effective in the film. The insistent, repetitive plucked strings serve to amplify the level of tension, as if the music itself is panicking as much as the film's main character, almost overwhelming the senses with this constant dominating thrum of noise. It's a fantastic example of the use of score as a way of communicating the mindset of a character, and it is excruciatingly effective in creating this sense of the world falling down around Nowak.
The film is extremely interested in the school almost as a closed environment through which the tensions in society can be illustrated in miniature. You have the people in charge, the teachers, whose instinctive response to any negative situation is to start by blaming those below, the defenseless students. The very first scene sees the teachers looking to browbeat a member of the student council, a leader in the class, pressuring him clearly against his will to accuse his classmates, based on nothing more than vague ideas. Eventually, suspicion falls on a young student from an immigrant family, and while there are reasons for accusing this person, you do get the sense that it's certainly possible that racism played a part in the accusation - indeed, while he is eventually cleared, some of the teachers still clearly harbour doubts about that child. There's a real sense of bullying among the teachers, who resent this interloper Nowak for questioning the way they choose to do things. And then once the evidence seems to point in the direction of a staff member, this seems if anything to escalate problems in the student body, because now you have the son of the accused person seeking to deliberately rile up their fellow students in protest. The school playground plays the role of social media, a place where rumours can abound and resistance can foment. In the school newspaper, you have the media, looking with glee to take down a figure without care for the consequences, all the whole taking pride in themselves for being on the right side, until the powers-that-be seek to clamp down. The bullying of students who don't play along calls to mind a cancel culture environment. The film seems to argue that these types of problems are simply inherent to humanity, many of these behaviours are engrained in us from childhood, and those that aren't natural to us are taught to us.
This really was an intriguing, suspenseful, intense, and thoroughly enjoyable time at the movies. Strongly recommended.
The Speedway Murders
In 1978, four teenagers in Speedway, Indiana, went missing after working the closing shift at a Burger Chef restaurant. Despite the police finding the back door open and indications that money had gone missing, they dismissed the disappearances as simply teenagers being teenagers, skipping out on work because they didn't want to clean the restaurant. All the evidence was cleared up and cleaned, ready for the restaurant to open the next day. Two days later, the bodies of the four kids were found in a forest miles away. No one was ever arrested for the crime, although there are lots of theories about who might have done it. Did the group of men who had been robbing a number of fast food restaurants in the area kill the teens after they were recognised? Was it connected to a series of bombings that had been occurring in the area, which themselves might have been connected to the murder of the mother of the girlfriend of the chief suspect? What about the man who claimed to have committed the murders while trying to collect a drug debt from one of the teens? Or was it the man who was a prominent part of the "snake pit", a hippie hangout (and apparent den of iniquity) located at the Indy 500 racecourse. Every theory here seems persuasive; every theory also has massive holes and unanswered problems.
Look, this is a true-crime documentary; you know how these films go. We have the various talking heads - interviews with the family of the victims, with police officers who worked the case, with eye witnesses, with suspects. We hear all the theories and the suspicions, we are convinced by each theory until the problems with those theories are raised. And at the end we are left with no good answers, just a bunch of questions. It was interesting to hear during the post-film Q&A that there were a bunch of other persuasive theories that they didn't even have time to include in the film - it's astonishing to realise that, having watched the documentary, it's very possible that the real killers could have no connection to any of the theories presented here. (Apparently there have been suggestions they adapt this into a longer form documentary; I would certainly be interested.) So ultimately, the uncertainty is the point of the film.
Where the film gets really fascinating is in the reenactments. Initially they superficially seem to be fairly typical - a bunch of young actors costumed to look like the victims, going through the motions of what they probably did that night, closing up the restaurant, mopping, emptying the oil from the fryers, taking rubbish bags out the back door. And then the characters start to discuss the murders themselves. So, intermixed with modern-day interviews and reenactments that seek to recreate what may have happened, we also get these more abstracted moments - the four teens pore over the police file of the case, they present reasons why one theory or another can't work, they make arguments themselves, or, at one chilling point, they stand in a line at the window of the restaurant watching as the van that probably took them drives past. To me, it seemed as though these moments are intended to undercut the reenactments. Whenever you're watching a documentary that features re-enactments, or even a narrative film that dramatises actual events, we may know intellectually that this isn't definitively what actually happened, but emotionally it's hard not to dial in to the version that we see. So by having these sequences in which what we are watching is literally impossible, it undercuts that effect, it drives home the unreality of the reenactments - we know we can't take anything we watch in these reenactments as gospel truth. During the post-film Q&A, I mentioned this as being my impression of the reenactments, and they seemed to agree - they specifically mentioned how many myths had built up around the case, and their desire to dispel them. They pointed in particular to the way people believe that the robber theory must have been the case simply because the MO in this case was the same as the other robberies since they left the restaurant out the back door - but in fact, there is no evidence that they did leave by the back door, they could easily have left out the front, but this is just part of the theory that has been elevated to the point of fact.
But there is one other interesting effect of this re-enactment approach. During one of the interviews, a sister of one of the teens notes that whenever people talk about their theories, the names of their supposed killers gets thrown around freely, while these teens are relegated to just the status of victim. But these weren't just victims; they were real people who had lives that were cut short. So this filming approach becomes a way of giving them agency, giving them a voice, giving them an ability to actually engage with the film, rather than just being a face to watch and feel sorry for. And that's rather effective.
It's a very interesting film about a horrific case that is evidently very well known in the area, but that I had never heard of. Definitely worth seeking out.
Janet Planet
Lacy is an 11-year-old girl, who we first meet secretly calling her mother from summer camp, threatening to commit suicide if her mother doesn't come to pick her up because no-one likes her. Her mother, Janet, is an acupuncturist with a long line of bad boyfriends. And so we spend the summer holidays with Lacy and Janet and a string of people who enter their lives temporarily. Janet's boyfriend at the start of the summer is the migraine-prone Wayne, who has a similarly aged daughter called Sequoia who Lacy enjoys spending time with, but that friendship does not survive the end of their parents' relationship. Next comes Regina, an old friend of Janet's, who moves into their home after leaving a cult. And finally, Janet starts a relationship with the cult leader himself, Avi, who loves to sit and extol all the wonderful things he understands.
This is almost an example of the worst of your typical indie comedy. It's the type of film that is so completely devoid of any weight that you could never use the word drama in connection with it, so it almost gets referred to as a comedy by default, despite having almost nothing amusing about it. (I laughed once - Janet finds a tick in Lacy's hair - and had two halfhearted chuckles - once when Janet explains why she thought Lacy might be a lesbian, and once when Lacy is honest to her piano teacher about how much she practiced.)
The film just felt aimless and directionless. If it weren't for the title cards that informed us of the start and end of each of the three temporary relationships, I might not have even noticed that this was the structure of the film at all. Multiple times, I would be watching the film and realise I had literally no memory of the scene that occurred immediately before - while there are the odd moments that I did find memorable, most scenes would just play out in front of me and then fade away as if nothing had happened. The film had a bunch of seemingly interesting characters played by actors I've enjoyed in the past, and I simply could not connect to a single one. There really was no core to the film that I could care about. To be honest, I kinda wish I had hated the film - that at least would be a reaction, would mean the film had brought out something in me to respond to. Instead, I just feel nothing.
The Substance
The official Closing Night screening of the festival - and this certainly was a film that we watched.
Demi Moore plays Elizabeth Sparkle, a former Oscar-winning actress who now hosts a morning aerobics show. But the network feels Elizabeth, now in her 50s, is too old even for that, so fires her and goes on a hunt for a new, young, hot talent to fill her place. And then Elizabeth learns about "the substance", which can create a duplicate of a person based on all the best parts of that person's DNA. The problem is, it's strictly one at a time - while the duplicate is out living life, the original lies comatose on the bathroom floor, and vice versa. They also have to swap every seven days, or else there are terrible effects on the original person. So Elizabeth uses the substance to create a younger, hotter duplicate of herself (played by Margaret Qualley), who under the name of Sue very quickly takes the job of the morning aerobics show, and then becomes one of the network's brightest stars. But Sue doesn't want to sacrifice anything in her quest for fame, and so decides to start stealing time from Elizabeth.
So as a satire, this is extremely not subtle. Ever since the days of Hedy Lamarr, or even earlier, we've had actresses going under the knife to try to hold on to their looks, to just get a few more years of career out of an industry that is focused on youth above all else when it comes to female actors. And often the first couple of bits of plastic surgery will work, people won't register that someone has had work done, but then they will cross the threshold, and suddenly it becomes impossible not to see the work they've had done, because they suddenly simply do not look right. So that's the obvious metaphor here.
And then there's just the overall satire of a Hollywood which could never exist in reality, but which is reflective of the broad viewpoints that underpin the industry - the main network executive is unsubtly named Harvey, and while he may not commit the crimes that Harvey Weinstein did, the male gaze is everywhere in the work he produces for mass consumption, from the aerobics show that is just barely this side of pornography to the heavily promoted New Year's Eve special featuring topless show girls.
The film spends much of its running time positively delighted in just how much it's getting away with. The first scene where Elizabeth takes the substance, and generates the new body that would become Sue, is like a statement of purpose that this film really is going hard for shock value. For me, it was the moment in this scene when there were suddenly two eyeballs in each eye socket that really showed how far the film was going to go in trying to elicit a WTF reaction out of its audience. And it was certainly effective - judging by the number of walkouts in that scene, there was a surprisingly large number of people who came to this film, which was unambiguously promoted as a horror film, and were clearly unprepared for it to be quite this horrific.
And then you get to the ending, and the problem is that it just does not work. The film reaches a natural crescendo point, has a final punchline that would absolutely be a perfect ending for this film and then the film carries on for a further 20 minutes. And nothing in that ending makes any sense - even in this heightened absurdly impossible Hollywood that would put bare-breasted dancers on network television, I can't conceive of a reality where what happens could possibly happen. The only conclusion I can reach is that this must be some kind of fantasy sequence, but there's no real indication of this, nor can I find any meaning in this ending if it's not taken literally. It's just a garish burn-it-all-down move that takes a film that had already been nightmarish and excessive, and just escalates to the point of absurdity.
And that, I think, is the essential problem I had with the film. This is satire that is so far over the edge from reality that it becomes hard to take the message of the film seriously. I couldn't believe in any part of this Hollywood we were seeing as a real place, and so I don't know that it really works as a Hollywood satire - while you can obviously create a heightened world in a satire, there really needs to be something for us to grasp onto as a recognisable anchor point on which the rest of the satire builds, and I simply could not find that anchor.
Look, its a thoroughly entertaining film, and as a piece that combines the high art film with the excess of a grindhouse film, it's effective. But as a Hollywood satire, it's both obvious and unconvincing.
Heavenly Creatures
Back in 1998, I was working on the checkouts at the Kilbirnie Woolworths. One day, this woman handed over a cheque (because it was 1998), and I was astonished to notice the name on the cheque - P Jackson & F Walsh. "Oh my gosh, you're Fran Walsh", I exclaimed. She expressed surprise at my reaction, saying that no-one ever knew who she was. I then enthused to her that "I think Heavenly Creatures is one of the greatest New Zealand films ever made". After revisiting the film in this new 30th anniversary restoration (which as a late addition screened outside of the official festival dates), I would put it even higher - this is the greatest New Zealand film ever made. I honestly cannot think of another film I would put close to it.
Based on the true story of the infamous Parker-Hulme murder case, the film tells the story of the obsessive friendship (maybe more) between two schoolgirls in Christchurch in 1954, Pauline Rieper and Juliet Hulme, and how, when they were confronted by the possibility of being separated, they plotted to murder Pauline's mother.
I think one of the surprising things about the film is where it came in Peter Jackson's career. His previous films, Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles, and Braindead, were all at times incredibly nasty movies, and while there were signs that Jackson was a filmmaker of talent, the notion that the man who made these films would win the Best Director Oscar in just over a decade would have seemed absurd. But it's Heavenly Creatures that marks his transition from disreputable maker of shock films to a filmmaker of quality cinema. During his pre-film introduction, Peter Jackson talked about all the interviews they held with people who had some connection to the crime, and there's a part of me that wonders how those conversations occurred - if I had some connection to the Parker-Hulme murder, and heard that the maker of Braindead was looking to make a film about the case, I might have said No, because there is no way I would ever have expected him to make a film as thoughtful and insightful as this film.
The thing that works about the film is its absolute interest in exploring the mindset of its characters - what really strikes you is just how much these girls were teenagers like any other teenage girl. While in some ways it seems like a different world to have two girls so idolise an opera singer, you realise that within a couple of years this is the exact same way they would be acting about Elvis - these events happened right at that point of cultural transition, but the behaviour is the same whether they are reacting to Mario Lanza, or The Beatles, or some boy band, or whoever teenage girls are interested in now. In Pauline in particular, there is also this overwhelming sense of teenage rebellion - whether it is her constant sullen reaction to anything, or her inexplicable decision to sneak out to have sex with the former boarder, seemingly driven less out of actual desire and more out of a bored interest in just doing something she was told not to. And there is the way teenagers can often feel as though their world is the most important thing there is - they insist they are incredibly talented writers whose genius will be acknowledged one day (and indeed, we now know that Juliet eventually became a successful writer under her new identity), but their proclamations of their undeniable genius fall hollow when we see the fantasy sequences of their imaginings, which are beautifully created in the film, but just seen trite and cliched.
It's also interesting to think about the film in the context of being made in the 1990s, when there was a real attention being given to the concept of social contagion, at the time as it related to eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia, between teenage girls. One girl would develop a problem, and suddenly all of the girls in their friend group would develop these issues, as the girls would feed off each other, draw inspiration from each other, or just do it to be part of the group. Here you have this fascinating portrait of these two girls who really do build each other up to increasing states of hysteria, until it genuinely feels to them as though their lives will end if they are separated.
Watching the film this time, I found myself impressed with the way they handle the murder. I feel like there are two different traps that the film could very easily have fallen into. One would have been to elide over the murder completely or to try to soften it; Honora is such a likable character that ending on her brutal murder could have seemed a risk for the filmmakers, and I could imagine a film that chose to step away at that moment - but to do that would fail to honour Honora and really soften the evil that these two girls displayed. But you also can't linger on the death too much - Honora was beaten over 20 times, and I can certainly imagine a director with a horror pedigree trying to portray that death accurately accidentally crossing into the bloodlust that horror films can sometimes seem to slip into. Instead we get a scene that feels carefully calibrated to achieve the right balance - it's horrific, but not off-putting, and especially on the big screen, with the cinema sound system, the effect is amplified as you feel the sickening impact of every single one of the heavy thuds of the brick. It's exactly as horrible as it needs to be, but no more.
(And a side note - most films at the festival tend to end with a round of applause, particularly when it's a genuinely brilliant film, and also when the filmmaker is in the audience, but it is genuinely weird to have that excited applause maybe 10 seconds after watching a murder take place.)
One of the details that I always find absolutely chilling - possibly more so than the murder - is the moment shortly before, when Pauline offers Honora the last scone at their afternoon tea. I don't know whether this actually happened, whether there is some reference to this particular detail in some court testimony or police interview, or whether this is just from the imagination of Peter Jackson. But it's one of those moments that is just horrifying. You get almost a sense of Pauline taking a smug pride in how generous she was being to give her mother one last treat before the subsequent events. If anything, there is something about that final moment of kindness that makes her seem even more evil. Even after spending two hours with these girls they still constantly surprise us with just how incomprehensible these events really were.
Heavenly Creatures is a genuine masterpiece, a perfect piece of cinema, that approaches a terrible and disturbing story with compassion and sympathy, and it's such a joy (albeit an uncomfortable one) to revisit the film.
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