TIFF 2017

At the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival I was fortunate to be able to see my three most anticipated films -which turned out to be my three favorites. What that says about me, who knows: Bruno Dumont has grown on me tremendously (as I think he does on most people), I’ve admired Andrei Zvyagintsev since 2004 when I saw The Return on a whim in a cinema in New York knowing nothing about it, and Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani seem to have sensibilities similar to my own when in comes to mid-century genre cinema (it was tiresome listening to industry people refer to this as ‘elevated genre’ throughout the festival though). I knew what to expect, and they delivered. The real surprises for me, though, have always been with the Vanguard and Wavelengths programs. TIFF eliminated Vanguard this year, which left us with ‘elevated genre’ films or works that often straddle the line between ‘arthouse’ and exploitation awkwardly placed in the Discovery and Contemporary World Cinema programs. As a result, I noticed many more walkouts than in previous years: people who thought they were getting a nice pastoral Quebecois drama and instead got a zombie film, and so on. TIFF also missed some opportunities in that they did not screen the new films by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Sharunas Bartas, Antoinette Zwirchmayr, and Philippe Grandrieux.

The following are ranked.

Jeannette: L’enfance de Jeanne d’Arc by Bruno Dumont. I saw my first Dumont maybe 15 years ago (L’humanité) and I hated it. Twentynine Palms was the next one and I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not. I eventually saw Hadewijch, Hors Satan, and others. In my experience he’s a director who grows on you as you get to know him. Jeannette lands in all the ways I’ve come expect from Dumont: the ‘ordinary’ (at times grotesque) appearance of the performers, the body language vis-a-vis the landscape, the desolate landscapes themselves, the affectations, the deadpan humor, etc. Another current in Dumont’s cinema is that he, despite being an atheist, takes organized religion -particularly Catholicism- seriously, and while he may critique it he never portrays it in an ironic sense. All these things make Dumont, I think, eligible for comparison to Pier Paolo Pasolini.

This is a stagelike film to say the least, a kind of minstrel show set to anachronic doom metal that on the surface probably registers as silly but matches Joan’s passio if the viewer is to believe what Joan allegedly claimed (the headbanging could easily be interpreted as ablution or baptism). I feel like Ken Russell or Straub and Huillet would have enjoyed it. I kind of loved it, but you probably shouldn’t let this be your first Dumont. Not to be the dickhead who says the audience I was in ‘didn’t get the movie,’ but the audience I was in didn’t get this movie. About a third of the audience walked out by the end and another third laughed at it, so I have to wonder how familiar they were with the director. The awkward singing/dancing, the discordant music, et al are intentional. Dumont has been making films for decades; he knows what he’s doing.

Loveless by Andrei Zvyagintsev. A Russian variation on Scenes from a Marriage. In a way it kind of reminds me of L’avventura in how it observes the characters’ response to a disappearance -which is largely informed by their bourgeois status (those apartments looked pretty nice) and, in this lot’s case, bitterness. Everybody wants to get married, nobody wants to be married. Everybody wants to have children, nobody wants to raise them. Several things happening at once having to do with Russian society/institutions (police bureaucracy, volunteer search and rescue, the effects of the country’s belated entrance to capitalism/consumer culture, etc.) viewed in the micro narratively and on the periphery, but suffice it to say that this is easily the darkest and most upsetting film Zvyagintsev has made. The use of Arvo Pärt’s music is perfect.

Laissez bronzer les cadavres by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. These two get better with each film they make. Takes its cue ostensibly from Italian westerns but actually operates in the register of the canonical crime films of Duvivier, Clouzot, and Melville (this is by far the rawest and most violent film they’ve made to date). You could easily see Jean Gabin or Jean-Paul Belmondo in these roles had it been made 60 years ago. And as with their previous films, the sex-violence dynamic roasts just under the surface and emerges in painterly digressions. Solid genre film. Delivers. Also, Elina Löwensohn and Marc Barbé together after twenty years in another film with bizarre lighting.

Wasteland No. 1: Ardent, Verdant by Jodie Mack. I had only ever watched Mack’s films on a laptop and now I want to see all of them projected. Completely different experience.

Good Luck by Ben Russell. “It’s always night here.” “You’ve put blood on the earth.” Flashlights, tunnels, mud. The roar of power tools, landscapes decimated by chemicals and machines, a rendition of ‘Heart of Gold’ thousands of feet underground. Immersive cinema in 16mm.

Rose Gold by Sara Cwynar. I think I’d like to see the longer version of this that existed in the beginning but no longer does, since this apparently began as a longer text and was condensed to the point of a schizophrenic dialogue. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty don’t lend themselves to brevity. It looks really nice though, kind of twee maybe, but it resembles Sacha Vierny’s color cinematography from the 50s-60s: Chant du styrène, Muriel, et al.

Phantasiesätze by Dane Komljen. Made me think of the last ten minutes of L’eclisse. Unsettling primarily because of the music; without it you’d have something resembling Emigholz’s architecture films.

Dragonfly Eyes by Xu Bing. To my mind a film that is as much about process as it is about content, and by extension the unseen/’unremarkable’ content. I kept picturing the editors spending countless hours watching nothing happen in surveillance footage only for something completely out of the ordinary to happen, apropos of nothing that’s happened beforehand. Exemplifies the adage of cinema as “life with the boring parts edited out” but also the idea that images of destruction -a plane crash, a roof collapsing, a mudslide, street violence, etc.- are cut from the same cloth.

Thelma by Joachim Trier. If Daphne du Maurier wrote a two-part episode of the The X-Files. Takes its cue from a lot of American models from the 1970s –The Exorcist and Carrie specifically- but is done in a classic, old-fashioned, ‘psychic thriller’ mould -like The Eyes of Laura Mars or Audrey Rose. Loved the first half, though after the business with the broken window you begin to see where it’s all going. The third act is satisfying nevertheless, and I can see a lot of people enjoying this.

Valley of Shadows by Jonas Matzow Gulbrandsen. Narratively goes nowhere because it doesn’t really come from anywhere and has nowhere to go. I get it -it’s about the boy’s grieving process/’aesthetic autonomy,’ folklore, journey into memory, slow burn, contemplative, mythic, etc. I love fog and bare trees; we all do. It was shot on 35mm and it looks nice, but so what? Music by Preisner is nice too in and of itself in a new-agey/world-music way I guess, though it’s literally all over the movie and occasionally takes you out of it. Wanted to see more of the myth/folklore story elements. Can’t entirely hate it though…

Samui Song by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang. Straightforward noir suspense thriller stuff with only the occasional inkling that Ratanaruang directed it. It’s almost too conventional? It tries on some (pointless?) meta/ambiguity at the end that didn’t do much for me.

Les affamés by Robin Aubert. Everything you need to know about this is contained in the first two scenes: The first is a field in the middle of nowhere covered in a mist, some figures slowly emerge, Unsettling-Low-Vibration-Noise™ swells. The second begins abruptly with a loud noise, startling you with car engines, then shows a zombie running after and screaming at a victim.

I liked parts of this, like the mound/cairn structures (which in the end constitute the only real horror or mystery to the story), scenes where characters stare out at nothing in the woods, and the pastoral setting (the director apparently used his own ranch and horses). The rest is just an exercise in CGI splatter and gore. The constant zombie yelling became annoying after a while. The attempts at humor weren’t great (though my audience was cackling away so what do I know); I would’ve 86ed the whole arc with the guy in the military uniform because it’s stupid from start to finish.

Revenge by Coralie Fargeat. It’s entertaining enough as an exploitation film I suppose. The color schemes are kind of nice, as is the Phoenix/Lazarus imagery (though incredibly on the nose). But genre filmmakers today really need to take their Ritalin and get over this cartoonish MTV aesthetic that still seems to be everywhere even after 15 years. It’s not exciting. It’s boring.

Also, since it’s inevitable that this will come up in conversation: You would think that this film would have distinguished itself somehow in that it was written and directed by a woman (and whoever buys/distributes this commercially will undoubtedly use that to sell it to the public) but that can’t really be the case if the female writer/director apes all the genre conventions/cliches established by and for men -instead of subverting them in some way, in any way. Practically half the film is comprised of shots of the girl’s half-naked body…oh but it’s supposedly ‘feminist’ because instead of simply portraying a scantily-clothed woman, it portrays a “strong”/armed scantily-clothed woman. Retarded.

Again, it’s fine as just straight-up exploitation and delivers on the splatter/gore, but there’s nothing more to it. Just watch Ms. 45 again -that’s the film to beat in this game.

That’s it. Until next time…

TIFF 2016

I went to Canada for another TIFF adventure. My five favorites are listed first, and the rest are listed alphabetically except Brimstone, which appears last because giant stinking animal turds belong at the back of the parade. My only real criteria for ‘favorite’ would be that the film handles a subject that interests me in a unique way and/or does several or all the things that I love about films in general -the fantastique, an immersive experience, unique production design and photography.

1: Daguerrotype by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Elegant, frightening, tragic, perfect. This film contains nearly everything I love about films. I loved how it uses the notions of ‘horror’ and ‘tragedy’ in different ways: horror in the binary between reality and photographic images of reality (the living creating images of the dead and images of the living that perhaps conjure the dead), tragedy in the film’s binary between art and commerce and between archaism and modernity (Stephane’s obsession with an antiquated photographic medium set against a real estate developer’s efforts to demolish his house, Marie’s greenhouse set against toxic photographic chemical tanks, and so on).

I think one of the reasons Kurosawa’s ghost stories work so well is that he himself seems to believe in ghosts. After the screening he stated that he believes that the careful arrangement of everything in the shots and the shooting of multiple takes -like Stephane’s methods in the film- will somehow produce a kind of psychic or spectral force that imprints itself on the image and image makers. As with almost any Kiyoshi film, the mise-en-scene is so precise that it practically asks the viewer to look in every corner of the frame, not so much to admire the composition but perhaps to see something in the image that the characters might not see. This emerges out of Kurosawa’s tendency to make innocuous spaces -apartment corridors, libraries, parks, offices, city streets, etc.- appear ‘charged’ with another element. That it also generates a sense of unease almost seems like an aside. A perfect example of this is a scene late in the film where Stephane claims to see his deceased wife -who Jean doesn’t see- in the foyer of his house. Jean enters the foyer and walks toward the front doors on the right side of the frame. On the left side of the frame, we see the house’s staircase reflected in a mirror. This staircase is significant to the viewer since this is where Jean presumably saw the ghost of the deceased wife in an earlier scene. Naturally, I was looking to the left of the frame.

2: Burning Mountains That Spew Flame by Samuel Delgado and Helena Giron

Subterranean, chthonian, elemental. When the co-directors were discussing post-screening, they suggested that their portrayal of an ancient belief that volcanic cavities as a network of underground tunnels could be analogous to the region’s ‘underground’ resistance networks. While I didn’t necessarily pick up on this, I was taken entirely by the archaic, almost mythical world they created.

I had seen Delgado and Giron’s Neither God Nor Santa Maria (which was filmed on the same island where Hadzihalilovic filmed Evolution) and enjoyed it for how it implied something supernatural underlying ubiquitous events. With Burning Mountains they go much deeper and immerse the viewer in a kind of mythic netherworld. They combine still and moving images, antiquated and contemporary images, diegetic images on film and imperfections on the actual film surface in a way that clicked with me.

3: I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House by Oz Perkins

A ghost story and a haunted house film done right, in the vein of Shirley Jackson and even Edith Wharton (the title of course suggests Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle). Said Perkins after the screening: “…I’m old fashioned. I like the ghosts in J-Horror and all that, but I really like the ghosts in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyworld. That’s my thing -the ghosts that are fuzzy, that appear from vapor. I’m a sucker for the woman who appears in a kind of mist wearing a wedding dress.”

Because the film is in part about an author, it routinely blurs the line between real and fictional events though its dialogue and narration (Lily is a bumpkin from Pennsylvania, Iris is New England bourgeoisie) and between the two women themselves through their physical appearance. Not only do Ruth Wilson and Erin Boyes bear a strong resemblance to each other, it seems intentional that they both resemble Shirley Jackson.

There are no false scares. If the film makes you jump, it earns it. The ghost effects are original and used sparingly. The scene where Lily finally sees the ghost is perfect: A close-up that holds on Lily’s face for almost a minute as she looks offscreen, screaming but without a voice.

4: Venus Delta by Antoinette Zwirchmayr

Nude figures embracing on the rocky banks of a creek. Extreme close-ups of skin, hair and rocks. No dialogue, and the only sound is that of the creek. It created a world I’d like to spend some time in.

5: The Untamed by Amat Escalante

Steals from the best: Blatantly from Zulawski’s Possession and to a lesser extent from Pasolini’s Teorema. Given the film’s subject -lack of social capital for women and homosexuals in Mexico (or anywhere)- it might have worked better had Escalante went more the Pasolini route, at least in connecting the fantastique stuff with social problems.

Sexually explicit relative to most North American films, though what’s interesting is that every sex scene between humans is brief and photographed as phenomena, as if the characters were in a documentary, while the sex scenes between humans and the creature are either photographed in a manner similar to conventional sex scenes or pornography -tracking shots, close-ups, and dramatic lighting- or take place offscreen so as to enhance any erotic component they might contain.

350 MYA by Terra Long

Static shots of the Sahara desert, sparse glimpses at life in Morocco, recollections of the prehistoric Rheic Ocean. I obviously have a thing for non-narrative films that revel in archaism. The title literally means ‘350 million years ago.’

The Bad Batch by Ana Lily Amirpour

My system naturally rejects hipster nonsense like this (it was co-produced by Vice). While I wasn’t enamored with A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, that film at least distinguished itself in a few ways. This doesn’t. I had doubts about this director but now I know I don’t need to bother with her anymore. Competent director -and mediocre writer- with nothing to say.

Blind Sun by Joyce Nashawati

Kafkaesque, Antonioni-ish. A water shortage, a man being followed by shadowy figures, empty streets, an elusive woman, a minimalist beach house. Enjoyed this more for the vibe than the actual storyline.

Christine by Antonio Campos

This is one sad movie. I’ve always hated how people use “the character was unlikeable/unsympathetic/unpleasant” as a criticism when it comes to fiction because I’ve always been of the mind that sympathy or likability isn’t necessary for me to enjoy a film as long as the protagonist is interesting somehow. The protagonist here was interesting to me despite being very abrasive and unpleasant. I was glad the filmmakers explicated the fact that there was really nothing ‘wrong’ with her except depression and maybe shyness. The climax of the film was perfect in that when it happens, the viewer sees it as the protagonist would’ve wanted the viewer to see it (entirely on television screen), so that was nice.

Citizen Jane by Matt Tyrnauer

Not so much a documentary about the conflict between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses in the 1950s but a dramatization of Jacobs’ ideas and the effects of the ‘progressive’ Moses/Le Corbusier ideal on a global scale, so this is perhaps a film just for architecture nerds like me (though I’d recommend Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities to anyone). The film contains a lot of footage of Moses’ urban planning designs (that I had never seen before) that further demonstrate how western architects have roundly misunderstood and/or perverted Le Corbusier’s ideas.

Elle by Paul Verhoeven

Feels so much a part of a long tradition of distinctive artists from outside France working in a French register (a Venn diagram of a French bourgeois drama and the outsider’s own obsessions): Buñuel’s Belle de jour, Zulawski’s L’important c’est d’aimer, Borowczyk’s La marge. It portrays the character’s masochistic tendencies without being explicit about them. Reminds me of the subjects that Wakamatsu explored in his films from late 1960s to the early 1970s, if Wakamatsu had ever worked with a substantial budget. The subplots with the protagonist’s family were at times immaterial and pointless though.

The Handmaiden by Chan-Wook Park

The plot is pretty great, even if it depends on Park ‘withholding evidence’ and replaying the plot with additional information the way De Palma or Egoyan would. It’s admittedly something I’d admire more as film assembly or as a cathartic experience in the artistic sense than as a genuinely emotional experience (I still prefer Lady Vengeance and Stoker over any of his other films). The viewer doesn’t see a love story so much as a conspiracy thriller that results from a love story. It also lends itself to a collapse of conventions of several different film and literary genres -mostly those of the Western heist film, Japanese pink film, sexploitation, surrealist paintings (Magritte’s La reproduction interdite from 1937), and diabolical mysteries by Rampo and Highsmith- in a good way.

I Had Nowhere to Go by Douglas Gordon

I don’t know anything about Douglas Gordon or his art but I liked it. The staring chimp creeped me out. I’m happy I saw this projected because it is by design an immersive experience and will not have its intended effect on a laptop.

Karl Marx City by Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker

I’ve always had a pet fascination with the GDR. It was the most surveilled society in history, which leads to many ironies in this film’s story, such as how Epperlein relied on the secret files intended only for use by the Stasi in order to find information on her father (the footage they captured of the Stasi archive’s insane disorganization is incredible). There is a refrain of Epperlein walking around recording everything with a microphone that is a little on the nose.

This film is also very good at revealing demonstrable effects of larger political decisions on ordinary domestic life. I liked a sequence wherein the filmmakers had reconstructed surveillance footage of three people finding a dagger on a city street. Finding a knife on a sidewalk would be unsettling enough, though the way they respond suggests more: paranoia of being watched, of each other, of where the knife comes from, and so on.

Nocturama by Bertrand Bonello

When asked why he made the terrorists ‘domestic’ and not international, Bonello answered: “Plus interne qu’ils sont, le plus international (‘the more domestic the more international’).”

I usually avoid ‘issue’ films (especially when the issue is obviously the impetus for making the film, but that wasn’t case here), but I appreciated how the film made its points (the ugly symbiosis between youth and capitalist/consumer culture, replaying scenes of violence over and over again as if we’re watching the news, lethal force by police on unarmed suspects) by showing rather than telling, and not in too obvious a way. One could compare this to something like Haneke’s Cache…? I have to wonder what Adorno and Horkheimer would’ve thought of a movie like this.

Personal Shopper by Olivier Assayas

I’m surprised that this won the best director prize at Cannes because it’s directed in such a way that makes it almost routinely frustrating to watch. Every time it seems like the narrative is about to close in on something, it deflates and moves on to something else. As the protagonist says early in the film recalling her encounter with a ghost: “There was definitely something there, but it kept moving away.”

The film interweaves a supernatural story with a murder plot, but in the end the former doesn’t connect at all with the latter (I was frankly disappointed that the murder arc didn’t turn out to be supernatural somehow). Further, the murder plot really doesn’t make any sense.  If the killer is trying to frame the protagonist for the murder -or gaslight the protagonist into thinking she committed the murder, or both- why does he give her so many opportunities to figure out what he’s doing? What’s the point? There are too many coincidences where she happens to not look at her phone for an hour or have it turned off, and thus missing the killer by seconds -several times.

I’ll also admit that unlike what seems to be a very large number of people, I’m not really taken with Kristen Stewart as a performer. Fidgeting, shaking, blinking a lot, etc. doesn’t register with me as ‘great acting.’ It’s irritating and I don’t get it. Rebecca Hall in Christine was a much better instance, I thought, of what Stewart was going for.

Planetarium by Rebecca Zlotowski

The first half is better than the second half. I loved the stage medium performance, screen tests, and the back and forth between what’s performative and what’s ‘real.’ Is Kate mentally or physically ill, is Korben hypnotizing/deluding himself, etc. I also loved the convergence between technology and the supernatural -particularly  spirit photography, Nazi Germany’s use of film media as a propaganda tool, and Hitler’s preoccupation with the occult.

The second half largely ignores what happens in the first and develops into a more conventional domestic drama showing the rise of anti-Semitism among the French -thematically similar to Menschen am Sonntag or Au revoir les enfants. By that point it didn’t matter very much to me since the clothes, wallpaper, silent-film photography, etc. are all so good.

Raw by Julia Ducournau

There isn’t much else to it aside from what happens onscreen. Kind of a missed opportunity, since you can see how the director could have developed the film’s subject -cannibalism among students at a veterinary school- in several ways -an argument for (or against) vegetarianism or the animal rights movement, for example. Instead it’s mostly fallout from New French Extremity.

PS: I was at the midnight screening where two or more patrons were supposedly hospitalized for fainting, but despite what news reports say, this never happened. It’s clearly a publicity stunt because the only ones who made statements to the press were marketing people, there are conflicting versions of what happened (the number of people hospitalized changes depending on the source, “it actually wasn’t fainting but an epileptic response to a scene with strobe lights,” etc.) and the only ‘news organizations’ reporting it are garbage websites like IndieWire and Vulture. Don’t take the bait.

Brimstone by Martin Koolhoven

Completely ridiculous. I’ll die before I watch this again. It’s an exploitation film pretending to be some kind of prestigious art film, and a waste of a great title.

I’m not objecting to the film’s content, which includes mass murder, sadistic violence, rape, suicide, incest, pedophilia, and characters who are flogged, burned alive, disemboweled, muzzled, hanged, and fed to hogs. I don’t have a problem with movie violence, or even with the depiction of people suffering or behaving cruelly. My problem is with how the cartoonish mise-en-scene and the bombastic performances undermine the gravity of the subject. I couldn’t take any of it seriously. One might allege that it’s all meant to be some kind of an indictment against religious extremism, and of how men use religion to justify things such as murder, rape, and pedophilia. But how can the viewer take any of it seriously if the director treats these subjects like a circus geek show? And wouldn’t a reasonably intelligent audience already know that about the subject?

You could argue that it’s ‘well-made’ for an exploitation movie. But what exactly are we describing when we describe a film as ‘well-made?’ Production value? The cinematography makes it look like an HBO show. The score is jarring, and whenever there is a swell in minor chords or a sinister-sounding chorus, all it does is annoy and distract. Directing? I can’t think of any scene in the film that doesn’t exist solely as a device to try and shock the audience. The film goes to completely absurd lengths to create the most horrific life imaginable for its protagonist. Because the film portrays a new way for a character to suffer or die every ten minutes or so (a man rapes his daughter, a prepubescent girl is gagged and flogged, a woman is muzzled, a man is hanged in an outhouse, etc.), it feels as of you’re watching a YouTube death reel edited together from a television show. That’s trolling, not filmmaking. Once the audience catches on to what the director is doing -as ours did- the film becomes laughable and boring. Acting? Is the performance by Guy Pearce a ‘good’ one? It depends on how we define ‘good.’ It’s comparable to Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York or Al Pacino in Scarface. Many people believe that those performances are good, while I find them over-the-top, farcical, and annoying. This is a tactless, tone-def film.

Typically I wouldn’t bother to sound off on a film in this way, but it’s obvious that everyone involved thinks they’ve made an ‘important’ film because of its subject, has embarrassingly branded it ‘feminist,’ and is hoping for a wide, prestigious Anglophone release and a push for industry awards.

TIFF 2015

The following are notes on my favorites from the 40th Toronto International Film Festival, lazily ranked. I didn’t get to see as many films as I would’ve liked (I missed the new Kiyoshi Kurosawa and the new Chantal Akerman, for instance), but there are only so many hours in a day and dollars in a pocket…and an opportunity like this doesn’t happen to just anybody of course.

Evolution by Lucile Hadzihalilovic.

Stoic women carrying lanterns along a beach at night, Cycladic island houses out of a de Chirico painting, and a biological Wünderkammer. An aesthetically perfect film in my mind. Going to rewatch asap, along with Epstein’s Le tempestaire and Zwartjes’ Pentimento. I loved everything about this.

Not just a fable about adolescence (“they are delicate after they molt…”) but of how from birth everyone is subject to institutions of a kind -not dissimilar to the ‘civilizing’ processes that Freud and Nietzsche described in Civilization and its Discontents and The Genealogy of Morals, respectively. Uses the conventions of body horror to somehow establish a binary between organic and artificial, biological reproduction and mechanical production. I feel like I’m ruining the magic of this movie by trying to describe in words what it’s ‘about’ (Hadzihalilovic -who had injured herself during editing and was unable to attend the premiere- wrote a letter to the festival alluding to the same thing; that is, in trying to ‘solve the mystery’ or to explain away the ‘meaning’ of the film, we miss the point) so I’ll stop.

The Exquisite Corpus by Peter Tscherkassky.

Film as an act of objectification, and objectification of filmmaking that inherently does so, all the while as it pertains to the body and erotic imagery. Tscherkassky is perhaps my favorite living meta-filmmaker.

February by Osgood Perkins.

Phone calls from beyond, bizarre noises from heating vents, and possession in snowy upstate New York. Visually and sonically perfect. Though this was filmed outside Ottawa it nevertheless captures winter in the region well. Even scenes that are essentially non-sequiturs -such as one where a woman sitting in a car describes an encounter at a supermarket- are unsettling because there is a palpable sense that something is wrong. That sense is present throughout the film. A dark, cold, bloody masterpiece for the genre.

While I loved this, critics hate it, calling it ‘dull’ for some reason. This will eventually be sold to North American teenagers as a typical Hollywood crapfest, they’ll all go see it and hate it to the tune of ‘it wasn’t even scary,’ you know the drill, and the genre will continue to remain a ghetto in North America, because it’s more profitable to ghettoize genre filmmaking than it is to embrace it. But that’s the way of it. I like horror films, and critics don’t.

Fugue by Kerstin Schroedinger.

Unsettling, like the dreams of a sightless person.

The Whispering Star by Sion Sono.

An intergalactic parcel service on a floating train car. Completely different from anything Sono has made and probably my new favorite by him (Strange Circus was the favorite previously). Reminds me of the black-and-white fantastique produced in Japan throughout the ’90s: the retrofitted design of the ship is pretty great. I saw this on the same day as I did High-Rise, and the fact that Sono uses objet trouvé by shooting the ‘deliveries’ in abandoned towns near the Fukushima nuclear power plant -whereas Wheatley’s dystopia is just a fabrication, albeit a good one- lends itself to a more immersive experience, if that’s the right word.

Occidente by Ana Vaz.

Animated photo collages of Iberian and South American monuments, fetishization of Delftware, and a distorted bassoon.

Demon by Marcin Wrona.

Oversold as a horror film but this is actually a solid work of ‘Polish grotesque’ that incorporates elements of Jewish myth, like something out of the fiction of Bruno Schulz (who was actually Jewish) or Stefan Grabinski, and to an extent the films Andrzej Zulawski made while in Poland: The Third Part of the Night and Devil. Original score by Krzysztof Penderecki is too good.

A Fire in My Brain that Separates Us by Benjamin Ramirez Perez.

A film about props -and ghosts- that brings the viewer’s attention to its own artifice. The color schemes and compositions are nearly perfect; I could’ve watched this for hours.

Cemetery of Splendour by Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

A clairvoyant with visions of an ancient palace, visits from centuries-dead royalty, and medicinal dream machines. The ‘color-swell sequence’ is incredible and manages to use color to ‘convey a mood’ without seeming ridiculous. Film as hypnosis.

High-Rise by Ben Wheatley. Based on the novel by J.G. Ballard.

Worth seeing for the simulacrum of ’70s dystopia films and the brutalist structure and digs alone. But it’s just a simulacrum. Delivers on the spectacle but Wheatley’s ‘dark and pessimistic’ vision of humanity seems shapeless and childlike compared to Ballard’s. Ballard at least seemed to understand the effects of the building itself on the residents whereas Wheatley is interested in overtly political statements and easy ‘satire,’ choosing obvious targets like Margaret Thatcher, et al (“Capitalism is evil? Really? Thanks Ben Wheatley! I’m so glad you’re here to straighten all that out for me!”).

I liked it but I didn’t love it. Technically, it delivers: I love the building, the decor, the photography, and the music. Thematically, it doesn’t. Critics and wannabe-critics are in love with the film, calling it a ‘masterpiece.’ I think it’s just alright. Overhyped. I’ll re-read the book.

Body by Malgorzata Szumowska.

Presents numerous themes with which I was on board -a clairvoyant, a possible haunting, primal scream therapy- but doesn’t really explore any of them. The ending feels too easy. It looks great though: Indoor scenes are filmed with a wide-angle lens, making figures standing to the extreme left or right of the frame appear distorted, and there are two scenes where (a figure I presume to be) the protagonist’s dead wife appears out-of-focus through a glass structure.

Victoria by Sebastian Schipper.

Fun to watch as a stunt (and this film is one big stunt). Sokurov’s Russian Ark had something meaningful to say though. I’m glad to have discovered Laia Costa, and the Mephisto Waltz scene is my favorite in the film.

Chevalier by Athina Rachel Tsangari.

This seems very different from any film Tsangari has made. Begrudgingly, I should say that I was a little disappointed. It didn’t have the affected, plastique style of her previous films -aside from the use of locations and the image of the divers emerging from Adriatic. The humor is much more broad and silent film-ish and less distinctive this time. On the other hand, Tsangari as a director laughs with the actors instead of laughing at them (compare to American Psycho -another film directed by a woman about male insecurities- wherein the director merely points her finger and laughs at the actors).