A young girl grows up enduring unthinkable physical and mental abuse. She escapes, and returns to take her revenge.
Sounds like a pretty standard revenge slasher film no? Well it’s actually some of the most extreme cinema I’ve ever seen, and the plot isn’t bad either. Writer-Director Pascal Laugier’s story maintains it’s mystery while also touching on interesting philosophy and social commentary.
What happens to our angst about the afterlife in a society without religion?
Among a class without morals?
What do guilt and faith have in common?
Why young women in particular?
Is pain cinematic?
Is pain spiritual?
I have no idea what technique Laugier was using to cover scenes, for 90% of the film, the camera is moving in some way parallel to the action, either on a small crane, or with a handheld system, keeping your eyes darting over all sides of the screen because you can never guess where the next knife / fist / shotgun blast is gonna come from. Shot mainly on long lenses for a realistic documentary feel, our awareness of what’s around us is also restricted by them.
Despite this franetic style of coverage, if you pay a bit of attention, the shot choices are actually very methodical. Which it has to be to communicate in such an unconventional way.
A fact that would be easy to overlook if you were only considering the editing, which takes a hard left from what you might expect. Laugier only chooses the best takes for performance, and moment-to-moment clarity with very little time for wide shots. Even a simple dinner scene is only shot with focus-pulled close ups and over the shoulders. This style allows time to be compressed or extended with near absolute freedom without you really noticing. If Martyrs had less tension, less horrifying imagery, or worse sound design, then it’d be exhausting to follow, thankfully I couldn’t look away.
All this probably sound a bit uninviting, like I’m describing how great my first experience of heroin was, but if you enjoy the Jason Bourne films, they’re pretty similar in style. Actually Bourne is a lot more choppy, and in some ways less impressive because action in general has only one point of focus at a time, whereas Horror has to manage a point of focus, and another one just out of sight, or in view of the audience but not who we’re following.
This is similarity is why Martyrs can jump between Horror and Slasher conventions with impunity, because Slashers are more action-oriented.
I do have issues with this film, but I must say it’s not really built to be perfect, or to answer any questions, it’s meant to get a rise out of you, to get you thinking and to push certain aspects of cinema as far as it possibly can, which is a lot of fun, even if it can be hard to watch. I had similar feelings about Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, another film from the edgy French Extremists.
The framing of Anna and Lucie’s friendship in the first 20 minutes or so is inelegant, and doesn’t illuminate anything special about their characters or relationship. The villain’s exposition in the middle just appears out of nowhere, although for the rest of the film she is important, nothing about her beliefs is hinted at beforehand. The ending could have had more interesting directions.
My favourite moment about an hour and a half in, a revelation with just two lines and a single camera movement:
Martyrs isn’t online anywhere (legal), but you can see The Passion of Joan of Arc on Vimeo. Hint hint they’re quite similar.
I haven’t written about the film on ideaskip, but it’s good.
Also the way Martyrs links Horror with femininity can be debated. There are certainly points in it’s favour and also points way way against it.
Charley is a fifteen year old living in rural Portland, sporadically cared for by his aimless and flippant dad in semi-poverty. He comes across a Horse Racetrack and decides to start working there. Things are looking up, he’s naturally good with the horses. He’s also getting money for the first time, despite lying about his age to the slightly cantankerous horse trainer Del, played by Steve Buscemi. That’s until Charley’s father sustains a grievous injury and the world begins to slowly crumble beneath him.
This is Andrew Haigh’s much anticipated follow up to a film which caught me completely by surprise last year. 45 Years, the Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtney fronted kitchen-sink drama all about memory and regret in old age doesn’t exactly sound like an attractive way to spend 90 minutes. But it’s astounding emotional intelligence and fantastic script make it a piece of work that’ll stay with me for a long time, you should really check it out if you haven’t already.
Although it’s an adapted Screenplay, Lean on Pete continues Andrew Haigh’s streak of remarkable intelligence in casting and directing actors. Young lad Charlie Plummer doesn’t say much, the character lets others speak around him. Not in a distant or calculating way, that’s just how he is, which makes his relationship with his favourite horse, ‘Lean on Pete’ feel all the more honest.
We don’t see much, but it’s clear his father is not emotionally available, and might have even been abusive at some points, but it’s a tribute to Haigh and the novelist Willy Vlautin that their relationship also feels very loving. It’s the kind of relationship where you can imagine the young Charley forced into becoming the provider. Part of Charley’s coming-of-age is his shrinking faith in adults, but part of his arrested development is the remaining need for a parental figure that will stick around.
You can compare Lean on Pete to François Truffaut’s ‘The 400 Blows’ pretty accurately, except unlike Antoine, Charley is at a stage of adolescence where he can convincingly pass as both 14 and 18, and that’s true emotionally as well. On the one hand people on the street can wrinkle their noses at the young homeless man, on the other he is scared of the new, unfamiliar towns and landscapes he’s got to travel through and survive in.
Haigh and his cinematographer Magnus Jønck capture a huge sky turning into night giving Charley a tiny scale. I also like the way Haigh avoids filming women front on until the end, because they are maternal figures Charley lacks.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the narrative has the same drive at the beginning as it does by the end. Maybe because the characters are too fleeting or not as interesting or relevant to the story. There is a portion towards the end where the character lives on the streets for a bit which I think is under-developed. It doesn’t quite have the same satisfying unity as 45 years. There is some subtext I think is lacking, I think Charley’s character might be less trusting by the end.
Although it’s not perfect, there are some moments of absolute joy in this film. It’s an interesting look into rural Horsey American culture, not as relentlessly depressing as ‘The Rider’ and as I write, it’s on Amazon! So give it a watch.
But if you haven’t already, 45 Years is the one to go for first, no doubt.
For a quick summary, just read everything in bold.
Failing couple, Dani and Christian travel with their friends to Sweden for a special festival, ‘Midsommar’. A long-held tradition which takes place in a commune unknown to the wider world. After the group arrives, things generally take a turn for the worse.
Dani, is suffering badly from the tragic deaths of her parents and sister just six months prior, her boyfriend Christian has effectively dipped out of the relationship. He’s unable to support her emotionally, and his friends don’t seem to do a great job of that either. She is left alone.
I’ve heard second hand, that people think this film feels like it’s split in two. One half is the trip and the other before, when Dani, Christian and his friends are getting drinks or hanging out in their apartment. Everything seems much more real. The delivery feels awkward in an accurate and intelligent way. There is a scene near the beginning where Dani and Christian have an ‘almost argument’ written very well because it sets out what Dani’s motivation is elegantly and realistically. Ari Aster (director) implied this came from personal experience, which I can totally see. I can also appreciate the extended metaphor he uses to describe their relationship but.
Unless I’m missing something, Midsommar just isn’t that good.
The commune or cult or however you want to describe it is a refreshing cinematic idea for the horror genre, nearly everything is shot in the daytime, which is absolutely brave because it’s harder to make things scary in sunlight. The soundtrack is also relatively sparse, a lot of the music appears to come from members of the commune singing on camera, the soundtrack itself is orchestral and doesn’t appear to use any human sounds. Another gamble, because intense sound design can go a long way in horror.
The production design is amazing, lots of people have clearly put a lot of work into researching and hand-painting these medieval looking illustrations, the geography of the location was clearly and methodically mapped out, even the way lunch tables and cutlery is arranged has special intent, which is great because scenes with food are always the best.
The camera works well with the brightness, the saturation, the movement the environment. It’s a big change from Aster’s previous film ‘Hereditary’ to shoot mostly outdoors, because one of his big visual motifs is to shoot rooms as cross sections.
I find myself complimenting individual parts of the film because they themselves are fantastic, there is clearly a very talented production team behind this. But I found the experience of watching this film lacking a lot. The story itself is predictable to the point of being comedic. And there are comedy elements, Will Poulter is pretty great. But when you start off a story with this huge trauma – the death of three members of Dani’s family, and take it seriously, I’m less likely to engage with more farcical comedy/slasher goings on.
Some parts are clearly meant to tread the same uneasy territory Hereditary did. Voluntary self-mutilation and suicide are fucking scary! There is a scene at a cliff-side which was the highlight of the film for me because it really demonstrated the uncompromising philosophy of the commune. The dialogue also has a naturalistic intent, Dani and Christian’s relationship is believable and awkward, and so is Dani’s relationship with the rest of the group. So I don’t think they should be so easy to pick off, or that they should have no redeeming qualities.
Even though a lot of Dani’s experience is meant to be trippy and unreliable, the camera always remains relatively static and distant. Even as reality morphs and twists around her, I still feel like a spectator.
I was all ready to believe this way of living existed, and I still am interested in how it operates, but about the half-way mark that stream of information about it stops. Afterwards, there is a constant introduction of new rituals with no basis in any rules or myth we have been introduced to. This could be read as comment on social pressure and the need for a ‘family’ but maybe for the sake of making the story tighter, Aster could have recontextualised rituals we are already familiar with for the later stages of the film.
It’s predictable because Dani only makes one friend, and they are part of the commune. There is no reason to be interested because everything goes to plan, there is no hope of escape. Dani’s friend isn’t at all troubled and Dani makes no other allies. The trajectory is always pointing steadily towards the end, I don’t feel very strongly about it at all.
There are very few actual individuals in the cult. Although sure, there can be a hive mind which takes over, there are no hints of internal conflict – no power-brokers – no naughty children – no runaways – no weak link. It feels less like a community, more like a hive mind. I see no families or friendship groups, people are enjoying themselves but not in a very natural way. Because of this, the staging always feels planned rather than dynamic, it doesn’t quite feel like people live in these spaces.
Unfortunately it’s not scary. Which is strange because Aster probably took inspiration from one of my favourite horror films ever.
So why is The Wicker Man from ’73 effective?
You believe the protagonist, devout Scottish Catholic Sgt. Howie both wants to be there and doesn’t want to be there. He’s bound first by his duty and religion, then by EVERYBODY who lives on the island.
You believe that he could escape, all the way up to his “appointment with the Wicker Man”.
You believe a place like this could exist. The people are individual and seem almost normal, they live modest lives. Folk traditions like this exist, and have existed in the UK and Scotland for hundreds of years.
What you need to know about their beliefs is delivered through songs! That’s right, it’s a fucking musical!
(Something Midsommar is unable to do because all the songs are in goddamn Swedish)
I admittedly might be missing something integral to the whole thing. To some extent, I don’t like being critical to films which are non-franchise and well made like this, because a part of you always asks
“Then why did all of these people put so much work into it?” and why are the reviews so good?
Anna and Joseph are about to announce themselves happily engaged to eachother, to an audience of well-to-do friends and family in their equally glamorous apartment, a stone’s throw away from Central Park in New York City. Downstairs, a small boy of about ten years old watches the throng of party goers approaching the lift with recognition, his name is Sean, and he died ten years ago.
Sean was Anna’s husband, he collapsed under a bridge in Central Park and died of a heart attack. He was married to Anna, but he was reborn.
It’s Jonathan Glazer back at it again boyos. I tell you I have a soft spot for this guy but he doesn’t make it easy for himself with a story like this. Let’s pray he he’ll be able to make another film after his masterpiece Under The Skin, which I’ve talked about a bit. It’s a formative film for me like few have ever been.
So what I hoped for and expected coming into this was a very well shot cocktail of Heneke, Todd Solonz, maybe throw in some Lanthimos in there too, these are all guys who have played around with themes like class and incest and depression, infidelity too. From what I’ve seen from Solonz, he likes to bring humour into fucked up family situations like this one, often where characters are really their own worst enemies due to their selfishness, or their mental health or social illiteracy. Expect a re-watch of ‘Happiness’ at some point. But with Glazer’s second feature film, for which he also wrote the script with Milo Addica & Jean-Claude Carrière (author of the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) I see no, or at least very little attempt to inject realism, comedy, or satire or anything much else.
Seriously.
I have no problem with the story, it works on a functional level, but the way intentions and emotions are expressed are extremely flat. Although Nicole Kidman, as our main character, Anna can make literally anything watchable, at times it’s actually uncomfortable watching her struggle to get there.
It’s only because I love the premise, and all the fantastic, interesting ideas you can get out of this that I was wishing for some spark of ingenuity from Glazer. Interactions between characters have no colour, there is no subtext or backstory beyond what is totally essential, there is no attention paid to the mundanities of how relationships and families work. No one ever makes a pot of tea to make things a bit less awkward, nobody ever talks about what might be important to only themselves and nobody looks away from who happens to be speaking.
The boy who plays Sean either can’t, or wasn’t allowed to act, he just doesn’t emote. This works well at first, but his monotone does not make sense towards the later stages. Every single scene either revolves around Anna or Sean, and the boy just isn’t a strong enough actor to support that heft. It would be a monumentally hard task for the most talented child actor to pull off, they would need to imagine or invent life experiences they haven’t had time in their life for, and physically behave in the same way as a 30+ year old man.
Likewise with the dialogue, scenes are cut so short there is almost no point to them the have no breathing room because as soon as something interesting is about to happen, the music fades up.
(Mostly) Alexandre Desplat’s score does not match the tone of what’s going on at all. Because of the mix of trombones, flutes plus the New York setting, it felt more like a heartwarming Christmas movie.
But I’ll tell you what I do like, I like the ambiguity Glazer places on both Sean’s identity, and Anna and Sean’s relationship. Sean is neither a child nor an adult, at one moment he’s measured and intelligent, the other he’s playing on the monkey bars and swing which is quite unnerving.
In the end I think this film is more about grief. And that’s powerful, how would it feel to be confronted by a personification of both your lost husband and your lost son? How would that role even work? Anna would be torn between behaving maternally, when the kid has already been raised by his own mother, and behaving like a couple. But wouldn’t it be like having a relationship with a memory of someone you knew? It would be so hard to form new experiences with someone like a child, or a man trapped inside a child.
For Sean too, he’d probably feel more like a vessel for their memories rather than a person, a new person in some respects. Whether he is truly adult or child it doesn’t matter for the purposes of the story. In either case, would he not suffer some pretty gnarly body dysmorphia? On the one hand he wants to be with Anna, on the other he must detest what he’s become. Could private interactions play out as if they were a couple, how would they change, would they be physically distant, how would routines form?
The script only glances over most of this.
Only Glazer’s camera treats him like an adult, pointing up at him while others coo-coo and disrespect him. One of my favourite moments was a point where he is in a bath, having quite an intense conversation with Anna. But as he reveals something, we go from Close Up, to a High Wide shot and instantly the dynamic, as well as our perception of the situation changes, it’s a powerful cinematic device I haven’t seen used this way before.
I saw this one on Amazon so if you have that give it a good ol watch mate.
What do you want me to say? It’s really good, leave me alone.
Miles Morales is a kid from Brooklyn who’s just been accepted into a prestigious boarding school through a scholarship program, but he doesn’t feel like he belongs there. Gravitating back home, he seeks some comfort from his Uncle who takes him exploring through the New York subway to blow off some steam.
He’s bit by a spider yadayadayada.
After experiencing these weird spider-like powers he goes back underground to find the spider that bit him, and BOOM, the actual Spider-man and a giant Green Goblin are having a barney. Spider-man is trying to prevent the Kingpin from creating a ‘Super Collider’ which will open up a parallel universe where his wife and son are still alive. Peter Parker stops it at the very last second, sending a shock-wave across the city and bringing the base crashing down. Now the twist. Peter Parker is helpless when Kingpin, and his backup Scorpion, Tombstone and Prowler find him among the rubble. He dies, but the Super Collider wasn’t destroyed on time, a gateway has been opened, a gateway to the Spider-verse.
Wow that’s a whole lot of plot before the title of the film even makes sense! That’s because from the very start, Spider-verse is introducing and developing character, and creatively reinventing the spider-man origin story – from the ground up. Yes there are callbacks, but not only is the visual style stunning, but the shot choices and editing tell the story efficiently and beautifully.
Peter Ramsey, one of the Directors, worked as a storyboard artist for years on some big films, ‘Minority Report’ and ‘Fight Club’ to name a few. That attentiveness to what is in the frame at (literally) any given moment is plain to see.
Obscuring the line between film and comic books even further – Spider-Verse has no motion blur, if you pause on any frame the lines will be sharp and the colours are vibrant, often playing on that cell-shaded look. Interestingly though, they do use depth of field, a bit like a camera would, by duplicating and reducing the opacity of what’s out of focus.
It’s an interesting problem for animators I guess, to choose which aspects of their film they want to behave realistically. For example the physics of the way characters move or fall, or the way they light a scene. For example on Spider-Verse they chose to vary up the shading on characters, from 3d, to 2d flat colours whenever they’re in costume.
In stop-motion you’d have to work with the camera’s you’re using, but on something like Spider-Verse you have complete freedom, which must be quite daunting, but also exciting because few films choose to experiment in this way, radically altering the look of the world or the characteristics of the digital camera; creating their own rule-book.
Most importantly I rate Spider-verse so highly because it balances relationships which are witty and beautiful and real, with the the fantastical Loony-Toons comedy and vague Sci-Fi we’re already familiar with. Miles’ Mum and Dad do not step across the line from the real world to the fantastic world, they anchor Miles and the story in reality. They remind us that there is always a home to come back to, and that this ‘universe’ is distinct from any other Spider-man story we’ve seen before. I can’t even see Aunt May as a character anymore because Spider-man is so ingrained after 4 sequels and 2 reboots and oh god I don’t even know WHAT is happening anymore what is going to happen to the Venom sequel??????
What I’m trying to say is that I wish big boy studios would invest the same 90-mil they gave to Spider-Verse to new stories we haven’t seen before. What’s tragic is even though Spider-Verse is truly inventive, it still has to spend a good bit of time saying
“No, we’re gonna do this…but in a different way!”
Which means unfortunately the new way is always going to acknowledge and react against the original, which can turn into something quite predictable
Personally, I’d rather have a cinema either full of duds and masterpieces, rather than consistently ‘alright’ superhero films.
But I’ll be banging that drum until the socialist uprising. Maybe ‘Leninist Spider-man’ will be a character in the sequel, who knows.
1977 Dallas Texas, a policeman, Robert Wood, is shot during a routine traffic stop five times with a pistol by an unknown man. His car drives off quickly, leaving the shocked policewoman Teresa Turko behind with her partner, soon to be dead.
This documentary by Errol Morris tells us the story of how a man, Randall Dale Adams, is convicted for first degree murder and the death penalty, and how sixteen year old David Harris was not.
The story is told through static, extended interviews which describe the events in 1977, from all perspectives. Morris chooses to tell the story through the minds of these testimonials by re-staging the events as they’re described. The statements then contradict each other as faulty memories and fabrications collide.
Morris’ visual technique demonstrates how unreliable eyewitness testimony’s can be, especially when they are so heavily relied upon. But this key element also makes the documentary compelling as a story, and crucially as a piece of cinema.
By witnessing this collection of evidence in a particular sequence, we can appreciate for ourselves how slippery fine details can be. As Teresa Turko, the female officer witness I mentioned, struggles to remember the shape of the car’s rear headlights and number plate, we see them dissolve and change, we see the truth change in front of our eyes.
A dramatised documentary like this can obscure the truth, but it can also make it easier to find. At one point, Morris recreates the view of an eyewitness who emphatically pointed to Robert Wood as the killer, then we see that on that dark night, through foggy windows and at that distance, at that speed, it would’ve been near impossible to be sure who he was. But the drama of her accusation is more compelling to the court without the context we’re shown.
The progression of the doc works well too, after Robert’s initial statements Morris cuts to the policemen who describe Robert as ‘psychopathic’ and ‘remorseless’, emphasising his lapse in memory at the specific time of the crime. This all seems compelling. Robert has a distinctively even and measured tone when he talks about the murder, and why would his memory conveniently disappear that exact time? By contrast, David Harris seems much more easy and charming, and he was only sixteen, how could a sixteen year old kill a cop in cold blood?
But when Morris introduces you to a host of new evidence he completely transforms our story from black and murder to a spiderweb of lies, perjury, false memory and systemic issues with Texas/American Justice. He cleverly reveals weak first, then strong, and finally indisputable evidence as a persuasive tool, which fairly represents all sides.
Alongside progenitors like Sarah Koenig’s Serial, The Thin Blue Line has gone down in history as one of few documentaries with a demonstrable impact on the real world. That’s partly down to Errol Morris, as a fastidious, ‘obsessive’, student of this case, but also because art has the power to communicate complex emotions alongside a huge amount of information.
The directions toward truth are often misleading. They depend on emotional as well as physical context, and it’s adorable how bad we are at following them. It’s impossible to totally recover the total truth from any event.
Personally I remember about 5% of what I did yesterday, and that’s alright, I’m a dumb human – I didn’t put my retainers in.
Hello, this is an extract from a recent essay I wrote about Chris Dickens, the Editor for a crazy amount of great Films and TV. The main sources I used are down at the bottom of the page 😉 .
Chris Dickens is now an Oscar Winning Editor for his work with Danny Boyle on Slumdog Millionaire (2008), but he has had a diverse and successful career before and since, on some of my favourite films and TV shows.
With initial visions to be a sculptor, he felt like it would be more important, coming out of Bournemouth Art College, to be employable while also being creative. He secured a job as a post production sound trainee through a university connection, and was employed as a Sound Designer in the early nineties on The Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993) and Comic Strip (1982-2012). Finding that this lacked the creative freedom he wanted (editfestivalchannel, 2010) he moved onto video editing for short documentaries and TV comedies, eventually running up to Spaced (1999-2001) Edgar Wright’s breakthrough sit-com, popular with critics and passionate fans alike.
Wright met Dickens while on his Diploma course at Bournemouth, and Dickens’ career has been helped hugely by their creative relationship. Much of Wright’s frenetic and propulsive combination of action and comedy is built for the edit. On Hot Fuzz (2007), a film with 5,500 cuts, Dickens notes:
He would plan it, but he would also plan for changing it. Therefore you’ve got something that’s got quite a lot of energy and movement, and therefore the edit has more energy and movement and wit –
…
Edgar shoots for the edit, with two and three cameras at times, lots of angles and various styles. He likes to try out different things and often this only makes sense once you actually cut the shots together.
(Hullfish, 2018).
This amount of cutting is not frivolous or lazy, it is baked into film’s DNA, and often designed not to be noticed. Dickens mentions using techniques like hidden split screens to speed up the pace of the film (Peters, 2007).
Hot Fuzz’s Assembly cut was half an hour longer than the finished film, but he believes “If you concentrate on making things work” (ibid.) then the length will not be an issue because you will be conforming to the natural pace of the genre.
We can see echoes of his work on documentaries, and with Wright’s multi-camera shooting style, in films like Goal! The Dream Begins (2005), Slumdog Millionaire (2008) and most recently Rocketman (2019).
Slumdog Millionaire in particular was a challenge to Dickens because of the multiple formats Danny Boyle chose to shoot on. He had to transcode and process 35mm film, a small digital stills camera which could shoot at 12 fps and footage from a Silicon Imaging SI-2K Digital Camera,(Picone, 2015), (Peters, 2015) which was used to shoot on location in the Mumbai slums. What was planned as a more episodic film in the screenplay, became more “fragmented” as the edit reached completion. For example, the ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ segment was shot in full and edited like a real TV show, but Dickens and Boyle discovered after a certain amount of time, they would forget they were watching a film (ibid.). Particularly one shot largely Cinema Verite.
For a film with as many moving parts as Slumdog Millionaire, Chris Dickens does an amazing job telling a simple story in a complicated way, without making it any less clear.
We see a move away from the quick cutting style in his collaborations with Richard Ayoade for his inaugural feature Submarine (2010) and and his follow up The Double (2013) both films which continue the tradition of humour from his early career, but bring it to a darker, more existential place. His collaboration with Peter Strickland on Berberian Sound Studio (2012) also runs this dark trend, but also hearkens back to Dickens’ days as a Sound Designer.
In the same way a modern editor may create visual effects for reference, Dickens “loves to intertwine music and sound effects to create a ‘soup’ that is very atmospheric” (Peters, 2015).
This way he has a heightened communication with the incumbent sound designer, and more influence over the cinematic feel of the end product. For Berberian Sound Studio this was extremely important, because of three things: the film is about a Sound Designer working with Foley, a lot of the sound is communicated through diegetic close ups, and the film is about a psychological downward spiral. Foley sound in the film is emotional and part of the story progression, and it also forms part of the auditory ‘Soup’ with the band Broadcast’s mostly ambient instrumentals.
In this clip, one can see how closely picture, SFX and music are interwoven.
In an interview for Mary Queen of Scots, Dickens describes his process when working with dalies, something which can be overwhelming for an inexperienced editor.
I watch everything and it’s like a memory bank. I mark the things I like with a marker and then I remember it in my head. I say, “OK, there are three different types of performance in that and I wonder which one’s best?” So I’ll just go for one.
(Hullfish, 2018)
Here is where an eye for performance and creativity meet organisational skills, and because creativity can sometimes fail, Dickens will try to find one take he likes, and then build outwards from that point (ibid.).
On the one hand he describes, as an editor, to look for performance, but on the other, to always prioritise story, to not “choose a shot because it’s beautiful”(editfestivalchannel, 2010). This might mean completely disregarding the Director or screenwriter’s vision if the necessity to ‘reevaluate, rework and rewrite’ calls for it (mediamonkeymovies2, 2012).
Throughout his career Dickens has worked on projects for no charge, and the reasons for doing so do not change much. He wants to keep building a network of people to work with in future, and also, on a wider scale, he believes free work is how the industry keeps churning. People tend to hire people they know or have been recommended for paid work (HDFilmTools, 2009).
Without people who are willing to work for free, a lot of film-makers wouldn’t be able to access the resources necessary to climb the ladder. He is ‘paying it back’ as his nearly thirty year career was kickstarted by people taking chances on him, giving him the reins to projects he was not technically qualified for.
All of the directors Dickens has worked for have been around his age. Born in the sixties or early seventies, this generation now has a powerful creative influence on British Cinema, so we see a rise in prestige as his career has progressed. It helps that he has ridden a wave of British creatives to ‘break America,’ an achievement helped by his Oscar win. But it also means there is a generational cycle, which arguably depends on an independent film movement which does not exist now as it did in the 90s. Even if accessibility to resources has improved for editors as well as film-makers, this pluralisation means it is more difficult to be noticed, and it is tougher to get a television network or film-studio’s stamp of approval as a newcomer.
Dickens’ big break was the TV show Spaced on Channel 4. It feels like Edgar Wright’s signature style, and in his words would not have been given as much freedom now in 2019. So what would have happened to Edgar Wright’s style if Channel 4 interfered, to the success of the show, to Chris Dickens’ editing career?
A sensitive History professor rents out a film and while watching it, something catches his eye. An extra in the background looks exactly like him. Daniel St Clair is an actor from another side of town, no relation. But his voice is the same as his, they even have the same scar on their left side.
“Why did you come looking for me?”
This relatively compact Thriller from Denis Villeneuve is almost technically flawless in my eyes. The run time races by, the guy makes 90 minutes feels like 50. As usual, Jake Gyllenhaal pulls it out of the bag with two fantastic performances, following in the vein of Jeremy Irons in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, except he performs the confident character scarier, and the feeble one more believably.
It actually brings out the sense of dread which naturally comes from the idea of a twin, the quintessential enemy, who can steal everything you’re worth. Who can replace you if they want, or if they think you want to replace them. More dangerous than any other person, because you have a connection, and they know you inside out. The inevitable battle in Enemy boils down to wit and ruthlessness and this plays out very well, I was bloody hooked.
Even though we follow History Professor Adam Bell through his life and discoveries, we are still shown relatively little about him, or at the very least, we are given nothing to completely free him of our… suspicions. The same goes for his twin, Anthony, an actor. He seems temperamental, and perverted, but could he really be evil?
What’s so tantalising about the whole thing is that you don’t have to answer these questions, you only have to ask. So ask.
“Why is everything so yellow?”
Wow okay we’re starting there? Little boring but alright. Yeah the whole film’s pretty yellow, in the lighting, in the streets. It’s smoggy, oppressive, contributes to the whole paranoia thing a bunch. I like the soundtrack too, it reminds me of the call and response technique from There Will Be Blood’s ‘Open Spaces’ but it’s also very creepy.
“What about the spiders?”
Not answering that one.
“Why did you come looking for me?”
Anthony asked, as the aggressor. He wanted to fuck Adam’s wife, to turn the situation around to his advantage for a short term high. He’s clearly the villain. But this little thing called -Protagonist centered morality- means we see all of Anthony’s actions in a disproportionately endearing light, because we see ourselves in him, the film puts us there.
From another perspective he is distant to his partner, an unreliable Professor, he’s even described as a stalker. Naturally Anthony would think Adam’s attempts to contact him are aggressive. He may have gained our trust with his boyish mannerisms but he certainly hasn’t gained Anthony’s, in fact for all he knows, they could mask a darker side to his personality. By naturally taking on the role of the aggressor, Anthony is on some level taking control of a situation out of his grasp by doing what he’s best at, acting and womanizing. We may antagonise Anthony because that’s how he’s positioned, because that’s what he’s destined to be.
“But who’s to say they’re different people?”
Well why couldn’t they be one person manifested as two parts of the same psyche, or two people manifested as two identical psyche’s, you ever think about that?
“Yes.”
Hegel’s ‘Master Slave’ dialectic is stuck out like a big-sore-thumb at the beginning of the movie. Adam briefly mentions the famous theory of a meta-historical cycle of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, brought about by the conflict between the master and the slave.
Now for starters, it’s pretty straightforward to label Adam as the slave here. We know Anthony displays the biggest urge to dominate, and to be defined by his dominance. The phrase “I fucked your mother” does not translate as “I really enjoyed my time with your mother, she’s a wonderful person”, it’s a power move. That’s Anthony all-over.
But if what defines a master and a slave is the need to be recognised as conscious so that they can be ‘self — conscious’ then it doesn’t seem like Anthony really has that need. He’s already a self-made man, he owns a nice flat, has a nice wife. It’s Adam by contrast, who seeks out the ‘other’. So if he is the one with that desire, then surely he’s the master right?
“Like a … sneaky master.”
He’s the History Professor, he knows the story, maybe he that way he could game the system and pretend to be the slave, because he knows in the cycle of history: the slave always wins. And what does it matter if we are talking about one or two people, it’s just fiction!
“One of them has a girlfriend, the other has a pregnant wife you rasclaart.”
And that feeds back into both of their needs for recognition, Adam is recognised as Anthony by Helen, his wife, despite her knowledge that he’s a different person. She wants him to stay, and she is willing to forget because it’s easy. Mary doesn’t recognise Anthony as Adam because he lies to her.
That’s why he’s destined to fail, we identify ourselves through other people, and no one recognises him, that’s a recipe for disaster.
“You haven’t talked about the spiders. I want to know what the spiders mean.”
Oh. Well, you’ll just have to make up your own mind about that.
A lone Pharmaceutical mogul has holds a girl with an unknown power hostage. But as she matures into a woman her power grows, and escape seems near.
What was that you put in my tea again?
We’ve got Helena, a helpless and trapped girl under constant surveillance, and Barry Nyle, a controlling narcissist who torments and spies on her for his – – sexual – – pleasure. He’s the heir to the massive fortune from his father, Dr Mecurio Arboria, discoverer and creator of a wonder drug which creates artificial happiness, that probably did great trade in the run up to this alternatively bleak 1983.
Nyle was first to test the new drug, leading to one hell of a bad trip. It alters his mind irreversibly, reducing the value he places on human life to roughly the same amount as the Blair government 1997-2007. Making him look like a combination of Voldemort and the Borg from Star Trek Discovery.
It’s the the first feature by Greek-Canadian bae Panos Cosmatos, director of the effervescent revenge-slasher Mandy back in 2018.
Both Mandy and Beyond the Black Rainbow are drenched in this dreamy, expressionistic nostalgia, Cosmatos wants to project his emotions with the same intensity a child would experience scary films with scary ideas back in the 1980s and 70s. Nearly every frame is awash with some combination of intense and exaggerated film grain, primary colours, and deliberately unjustifiable light sources, often flaring across the anamorphic lens. All producing a hyper cinematic look.
I’d describe David Lynch’s films and even a film I saw and reviewed recently – ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ as being defined on some level by their atmosphere. But Panos takes it a step further by merging the picture, the music and the story together into one great lump of style.
We’ve seen these stories a thousand times before, but I think the characters are in an independent push-pull relationship with the world of Panos’ films. Either they choose to escape it, or they choose to embrace it. Elena, the hostage, and protagonist in Beyond the Black Rainbow, doesn’t belong in this world, she needs nature and freedom from the powerful Arboria Corporation. Nicholas Cage as ‘Red’ in Mandy, begins contented in domestic life until his wife is kidnapped, and he chooses to seek revenge at any cost.
In our final shot of Red, Cage is almost indistinguishable from the flaming oranges and reds of his car interior, one with the battered-creased-grainy hellscape of the film world. Our final shot of Elena is an ultra-wide of her crossing the border from Arboria to mundane suburbs. Travelling Beyond the paradox of the Black Rainbow by choosing to ignore it (maybe)
One problem I have with both of these films is that the pacing is too uniform. Not that it is too slow, but that the pace of the scenes and the transitions between them don’t communicate any variation of urgency. Every scene is loaded with the same level of significance. Beyond the Black Rainbow punctuates it’s story with fades to black, and pulsing red which grow old, and slow dissolves to different locations, which aren’t gelled together with any geography.
A lot of tension in chase scenes or time-crunch scenes come from your idea of what the geography is like at different stages. Whether that is subverted or not doesn’t matter, so long as there’s something in your head.
It could be cross cut or established before as in Mission Impossible.
In Beyond the Black Rainbow we just have snapshots of different sets which don’t come up again at any point. Even though they do feel as though they were just plucked off a the set of a 70s space opera. Panos tries to create a mental space outside the frame with many shots going extremely tight on characters faces, but for me it doesn’t work.
He also uses out of focus shots too much, it’s a lot.
But the performances, especially from Michael J Rojers as the evil CEO are excellent. He’s a completely over the top villain which absolutely fits the film, and just scrolling through the film – every shot is visually arresting. Panos is a director with one of the most creative visions out there, and Beyond the Black Rainbow is an ambitious first feature.
A weak and hunted tramp enters the home of a wealthy family and bends them to his will.
“How could it get worse after that?”
Danish director Alex van Warmerdam weaves a tragedy of class and sexual infidelity as a beast of biblical power picks another family to claim as his own. Marina is an artist, guilty of her fortune and privilege thanks to the wealth of her hot-shot husband Richard.
They and their three children seem innocent, but all they hold is enabled and protected by social structures and people they exploit. Doctors, gardeners, teachers, even people they take advantage of through consumption.
This clearly weighs on her mind when Marina chooses to lend a mysterious stranger in need a bath and some food. But next thing you know, one night turns into weeks, and Camiel sits at the dinner table as an equal while the nuclear family turns nuclear.
Warmerdam takes picks up inspiration from fables, biblical stories and myths, as well as some more recent stories in films I’ve seen like Jorgos Lanthimos’ ‘The Killing of a Sacred Deer’, or ‘Cache’ from Micheal Heneke, and I know ‘Funny Games’ touches on some similar themes. For my taste Cache is a standout by far, of the ‘Rich family gets stalked and prank’d real good‘ genre flicks, because it grounds itself in a very palpable, believable reality – missing in Lanthimos’ more satirical stuff.
I think Borgman also strays too far from reality, but that’s not the only reason the film falters. Straight up, the interactions between characters are flat and functional as fuck, and the kid actors do not emote. This is a problem I see in a lot of indie films & Horror films, directors believe if they tell kids to channel a bit of 2×4 they can make the audience fill in their character. No I tell you. Just no. I can’t be bothered. The youngest kid, Isolde, has no lines, or facial muscles (as far as I can tell) yet I’m supposed to believe her character arc from lovable daughter to murderer?
When this flat delivery comes from Camiel I can take it. He has little to no conscience, he’s too clever to worry about emotion. But for normal family members I want a bit more meat on the proverbial bone, the bone of dialogue. Please ship in Russell T Davis to spice things up a bit in future please Warmerdam.
But you can’t just let this film pass you by, there’s plenty of very novel stuff here. For one thing, it’s ostensibly a thriller, and yet we get none of the expected baggage of rising violins and ominous drones. Surroundings are minimal, the house is a slab of concrete within a circle of perfect grass carved out of the forest. There isn’t even a significant colour grade. Nearly all the sounds come from the scene we’re watching, and the camera itself stays pretty neutral. All this I think is a pretty ballsy statement, as if Warmerdam wants to let us find the horror horrifying for ourselves. Or it could be that the film comes from an amoral place, like Camiel Borgman himself.
For him, the events of the film aren’t really consequential. He is only ‘playing’. Films also have the same function, they’re safe way to play with emotions or experiences we would rather keep at arms reach.
There are some unquestionably horrific/uneasy moments in this film. The ideas are occasionally brilliant, and helped by Jan Bijvoet’s very subtle physical performance and line delivery. But for most of the film I was entertained rather than emotionally hooked because of it’s lack of commitment to good character writing, or any commentary on class further than using it as a convenient stage for the story.
– – –
With all this said, I might come back to this in the future or read up on it, there were a few things which went over my head. I also think more can be written about the Foley sound which is used here as an emotional and physical tool to emphasise violence. The absence of sound is also very effective because it is one of the only tools Warmerdam uses to break us away from reality, and communicate Camiel’s power. I really admire that restraint from a director.
ideaskip 