film reviews, interviews, features | BRWC

Author: Jack Hawkins

  • New Order: LFF Review

    New Order: LFF Review

    Parasite meets The Purge in this shallow Mexican drama from Michel Franco 

    Mexico is a country wracked by violence and corruption. There were 17,439 murders in the first half of 2020, a year in which Mexico was ranked 130th in the corruption index, sharing its position with Guinea, Laos, the Maldives, Mali, Myanmar and Togo. Meanwhile, the country has an OECD income inequality rating of 0.42, one of the worst in the world. All of this comes to a head in New Order, director Michel Franco’s vision of his nation in a free fall of riots and murder. 

    We see flashes of the carnage – dead bodies on the street, rioters throwing green paint – as a wedding party kicks off in an expensive city residence guarded by walls and a security detail. It is a chic compound far removed from the nihilism on the streets, yet we feel it encroaching with palpable menace. 

    A brief narrative unfolds as the guests indulge with drink, drugs and boastful financial chatter. Rolando (Eligio Melendez), a former staff member of the family, arrives at their door pleading for 200,000 pesos to pay for his wife’s emergency heart surgery. He is met with impatience and even outright disdain, yet he finds empathy in Marianne (Naian Gonzalez Norvind), who makes it her mission to secure the funds. However, this is jeopardised when rioters scale the compound’s walls, beating and shooting their way through the house in search of valuables. 

    What follows is about 60 minutes of sadism. None of it has the outrageous gore and splatter of Possessor, but it is nasty and visceral all the same. Franco’s film has a stark authenticity to it and there is a crisp yet muted sheen to the grading of Yves Cape’s cinematography, yet there is little to be digested beyond its absorbing realism and merciless violence. 

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWg9xQPvsI0

    Its scenario is too extreme to reflect Mexico’s problems. This is a vision where rioters are shot en masse, with troops casually finishing them off like some Medieval pikeman. Even if Franco’s vision was subtler, there would have to be far more depth to the narrative and characters for there to be any commentary or satire.

    Where Parasite had wit and nuance, New Order just has gunshots and screaming. It absolutely convinces us of Mexico’s capacity for violence but it does not explore its characters or the country’s issues. 

  • Shirley: Review

    Shirley: Review

    Shirley is a biopic of dubious intent. It is impeccably made – excellent performances, evocative camerawork and absorbing sound design, but to what end? It presents a fictionalised account of Shirley Jackson – the noted author of The Haunting of Hill House – and depicts not her talent but her supposedly twisted arrogance. It is uninvolving work that says very little about its reimagined subject.

    Inspired no doubt by Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the film contrives a warped psychodrama between Shirley (Elisabeth Moss), her husband Stanley Nyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) and a newlywed couple Rose and Fred Nemser (Odessa Young, Logan Lerman).

    Stanley, a gregarious professor at Bennington College, asks Rose if they could help around the house, offering the couple room and board. They accept, realising the opportunities this presents. The whole thing is a ruse, however, for Shirley and Stanley plan on tormenting the couple, driving a wedge between them as they shame Rose for her ‘shotgun wedding’ and Fred for his ‘derivative’ academic abilities.  

    We see that Jackson has serious issues even before the sick campaign against the Nemsers. An agoraphobic, she is rude, haughty and dysfunctional, with a dash of jealousy to boot. She delights in others’ misfortunes and is visibly excited by opportunities to criticise and ridicule. Her personality goes beyond just bad intent, she is mentally ill, and the film skillfully depicts her maladjustment with extreme close-ups and oppressive diegetic sound – the hum of a light, the chirping of crickets. The score, too, reflects her anxieties, with neurotic piano and plucked strings interspersed with sorrowful choir and fraught double bass.

    Stanley appears to be her opposite: sociable, good humoured and enthusiastic. However, he proves to be every bit as nasty and underhand, lavishing Fred with praise only to crush him with a mocking appraisal of his dissertation. “I am insulted by mediocrity”, he proclaims, exuding a most contemptible arrogance. When he’s not pontificating he is a letch, handsy and kissy with a cross-section of the Bennington campus. Shirley, wallowing in her own filth, is too torpid to care.

    There isn’t much to consider outside of these horrible characters, we certainly see little of Jackson’s talent. This is due, in part, to the inwardness of writing; the depth of an author’s prose does not transfer to the screen like a boxer’s punch or a dancer’s agility. So, like The Shining and Adaptation before it, we see the odd scene of Jackson at her desk, recording her thoughts before they flitter away, but this tells us little about writer’s canon and legacy.

    Indeed, many viewers will leave Shirley with more questions than answers. Are we witnessing fact or fiction here? As someone who knows little of Shirley Jackson, I want to know. The film’s departure from reality, inspired by the non-chronology of Jackson’s texts, is more frustrating than compelling. The Jackson family isn’t happy, either. Laurence Hyman Jackson, Shirley’s son, commented that audiences with no knowledge of his family will “leave thinking my mother was a crazy alcoholic and my father was a mean critic”, adding that the film also failed to portray his mother’s sense of humour. Incidentally, Jackson’s four children are neither featured nor even mentioned in the film, written out of history for some curious reason.

    Again, Shirley is skillfully made. Elisabeth Moss continues her streak of winning performances, while Michael Stulhbarg gives another memorable turn. What results, though, is less than the sum of its parts, with the strange imaginings of Susan Merrel’s novel, on which the script is based, a kind of literary defamation.

  • Relic: Another Review

    Relic: Another Review

    A cursory glance at Relic’s reception shows a split between critics and audiences, with the former praising its ‘expertly crafted atmosphere of dread’ and the latter bemoaning how ‘slow’ and ‘dull’ it is. The audience has got it right this time, for Relic is indeed a trite, laboured debut.

    Co-written and directed by Natalie Erika James, the film tells a story of family crisis in which three generations of women – Edna (Robyn Nevin), the grandmother; Kay (Emily Mortimer), her daughter; and Sam (Bella Heathcote), her granddaughter – struggle with the elder’s psychological decline. Like many films before it, Relic uses horror as a metaphor for illness, yet this ghoulishly indirect treatment of dementia is far less scary than the realism of Still Alice, for example.

    The film begins as a missing person’s case, with Edna nowhere to be found in or out of her rural, white cladded house. It is an evocative location that’s attractively shot by Charlie Sarroff, whose camerawork is graded with a cool, dark tone that gives the film an overcast aura. Indeed, you can almost smell the petrichor as Kay, Sam and townspeople scour the forest for Edna. These opening moments, perhaps 20 minutes long, are Relic’s best.

    When Edna reappears, the film’s modicum of interest plateaus and then slowly declines toward the credits, at which point you’re willing for it to end. The so-called ‘atmosphere of dread’ consists of a lot of wide-eyed, trepidatious slinking, mostly in hallways but also in broom cupboards, and it’s usually caused by mysterious banging noises. It’s all part of a derivative haunted house formula: weird noises, tortured violin strings, moss on the wall – repeat. The only prop Relic gets here is that it doesn’t indulge in cattle prod jump scares.

    As Edna’s behaviour becomes stranger, we question whether it is because of her ostensible dementia or some kind of supernatural element. The aforementioned moss, which manifests on people as well as walls, suggests it may be the latter. However, when the family has this little chemistry, who cares? Kay is too po-faced to have a relationship with anyone; all we get from her is a vague suggestion that she’s shared a difficult relationship with her mother There’s some friendship between Edna and Sam, often at the expense of Kay, but nothing approaching a developed, interesting relationship. This is a reflection not of the performances – which are fine – but the script, which is more interested in plodding attempts at ambience than dialogue between its few characters.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUBx3hukKJ0

    In the climax, this frosty character work gives way to flat metaphor, with labyrinthine corridors representing the confusion of dementia and a fetal, mummified corpse symbolising the infantilisation of old age. It’s presented in a final-form monster climax like that of The Fly, only without all of the drama, heart and horror. Ultimately, Relic has taken the A24-style horror to a point of lifeless inertia, when perhaps it should have considered the transgression of The Exorcist, the detail of Rosemary’s Baby and even the punch of Paranormal Activity.


  • Herself: LFF Review

    Herself: LFF Review

    Herself: LFF Review. By Jack Hawkins.

    After Mamma Mia!, The Iron Lady, and then Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, director Phyllida Lloyd has said that she ‘doesn’t want to make another blockbuster!’ To realise this, she has directed her first piece of social realism, joining peers such as Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank), Clio Barnard (The Selfish Giant) and Sarah Gavron (Rocks). Frankly, emotional manipulation causes Herself to fall short of those titles, but it certainly isn’t without merit.

    The story concerns Sandra (Clare Dunne), an Irish mother of two girls who vows to build her own home after leaving her abusive partner Gary (Ian Lloyd Anderson). The script wastes no time in establishing this, opening with a short and nasty scene of domestic violence in which Gary knocks her to the ground and stomps on her hand, causing nerve damage. Weeks later, we see Sandra and her girls Emma (Ruby O’Hara) and Molly (Molly McCann) – both great performers –living in a hotel room.

    The following 20 minutes are sure to make you feel terrible. Sandra has no friends and no family beyond the girls; she counts only Jo (Cathy Belton), a women’s charity worker, as a support system. A freelance cleaner, most of Sandra’s interactions are with employers who show her casual disrespect. Indeed, almost everyone treats with Sandra with an unlikely degree of impatience and contempt. It is the first sign that Herself is contriving to evoke maximum sympathy from the audience, to jerk tears and wrench hearts. Yet the strength of Dunne’s performance – and the general grounding of Sandra’s desperate situation – is enough keep you interested.

    After viewing a particularly rancid flat offered for a laughable €1000pcm, Sandra’s outlook is bleak. It seems her life will consist of a hotel room, a slavish job and the shadow of her loathsome husband. However, the narrative changes course when she reads of houses that can be built for €35,000. Having no Internet connection of her own, Sandra conducts secret research on the laptop of employer, Peggy (Harriet Walker), a cantankerous doctor recovering from a hip injury. Such skulduggery will surely see her out the door, but when Peggy discovers Sandra’s trail of search terms, she is revealed to be more benevolent than battle-axe, offering Sandra a patch of land and a generous repayment scheme to build her home.

    Again, the film’s emotional intent is obvious during all of this but it’s hard to resist Sandra’s good fortune, especially when the performances are this strong.  The film is visceral when it needs to be, too, depicting Sandra’s posttraumatic stress with a thumping, disorientating heartbeat as she struggles to collect herself. Don’t expect easy answers or perfect resolutions, either, because you won’t get them, especially in one shock moment. But then, alas, is the schmaltz and outright naffness, especially a building montage set to the tune of David Guetta’s ‘Titanium’, which reminds one of being stuck in a minicab or queuing at a McDonald’s restaurant.

    Some will be more receptive to Herself’s engineered emotion than others, but Phyllida Lloyd must be happy either way, because with both small names and a small budget, she has clearly succeeded in not making another blockbuster. Unfortunately, though, cheese and contrivance will prevent an otherwise very watchable drama from joining the new women-led oeuvre of social realism.

    3/5 (positive)

  • Neon Days: Review

    Neon Days: Review

    By Jack Hawkins.

    Only some kind of psychopath would enjoy trashing a low-budget debut feature; gleefully punching down would reveal no empathy for a young filmmaker’s stress and self-doubt. Neon Days, however, is a film that cannot escape harsh criticism. 

    The story follows Jake (Justin Duncan), an introverted skate rink worker who enters therapy to fix his social problems, namely an anxiety around girls. He resembles the angsty stock character that’s resonated with many a young men – from Travis Bickle to Peter Parker – but Jake doesn’t make you feel much at all. He’s a rather lumpen presence in fact, his awkwardness contrived and choreographed. But the modesty of performances is not the immediate concern. Rather, it is the aesthetic, which is that of an intermediate student film.

    The grading, or lack thereof, gives everything an amateurish, digital appearance. And then there’s the staging of it all. A bar scene, for example, appears to have been lit by a gaffer holding a 10,000 lumen torch, such is the scorching glare on the actors’ foreheads. Further problems are found in the acoustics. The boom mic sounds as if it’s been submerged in water and the insufferable score resembles the cheap synth of an 8-bit video game. The bursts of indie music are likely to trigger one’s gag reflex, too. 

    The technical and aesthetic shortcomings are swiftly joined by weaknesses of script and characterisation. We’re told that Jake’s therapist, Sean (Eric Hanson), is a ‘seasoned’ professional, yet he behaves like a caddish uncle. Sean suggests that Jake pursue his female housemates – which just isn’t advice a shrink would ever give – and when Jake informs him that his housemates are in a lesbian relationship, Sean remarks, “Even better”.

    Then there’s the moment were Sean laughs at Jake’s claim that he has testicular cancer, cracking up as if Jake had revealed some sort of obscene, Freudian secret. These attempts to characterise Sean as a roguish maverick just do not ring true, stripping his dynamic with Jake of all credibility.  

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqvvG5a6npw

    The ineptitude continues when we meet Jake’s ice rink colleagues, who are introduced as a rag tag clan of misfits in a sort of Z-grade Edgar Wright montage. Indeed, Neon Days is padded with montages – usually to the aforementioned synth and indie rock – that contain little of interest. Actual conversations between the characters may have brought some much needed character development, but it would most likely just subject the viewer to more contrivance and tumbleweed comedy. 

    Stories of small towns and dead-end jobs are the bedrock of the social realist tradition. Unfortunately, a contrived, lacklustre script and sophomoric production values causes Neon Days to be a misfire.