film reviews, interviews, features | BRWC

Author: Joel Fisher

  • Happy Face: Review

    Happy Face: Review

    Stan (Robin L’Houmeau) still lives with his mother, Augustine (Noémi Kuchler) a former model and Stan has inherited her good looks. His favourite past time besides picking up women and using them for sex is playing Dungeons and Dragons and so whereas those two hobbies don’t seem to mix, he’s living the easy life and still dotes on his mother for everything.

    Stan also spends time with a support group for people with facial disfigurements, he bandages and tapes his face so that he looks like one of them and listens to them as they talk about their lives. However, as Stan’s influence on the group grows deeper, he realises that for better or worse, they’re all complex and unique individuals, just as they want the world to see them.

    Happy Face is a drama directed by Alexandre Franchi and co-written by Joelle Bourjolly and it goes against a lot of what people usually see when they see disabled people being portrayed in cinema. For one, the support group comprises of real people with real facial differences and not just non-disabled people in make-up.

    Vanessa (Debbie Lynch-White) runs the support group and because of being teased about her size for her entire life, she feels like she’s one of them because of the way people treat her despite having no facial difference. However, Stan starts to see that her CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) approach isn’t working and decides to show them a different way of thinking and a more Cyrano de Bergerac approach to life.

    Whereas other films would use this as an able saviour trope, seen in such films as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Intouchables, Happy Face subtly plays with these kinds of tropes, even in a scene where Stan is playfully called out for doing it.

    Instead, Happy Face is a film that subverts the expectations of the audience, but doesn’t do it in a way to show how good and progressive it is. It shows that there are still people behind the disability and that even Stan has his own problems and insecurities about growing up.

    Happy Face is not another movie just to make non-disabled people feel good and be glad that it’s not them. It shows the difficulties of living in a world where if you don’t fit in then you have to adapt to make yourself comfortable. Although the question is whether the world should really adjust for them.

  • In Corpore: Review

    In Corpore: Review

    In Corpore tells the story of different people in four different locations around the world; Melbourne, Berlin, Malta and New York. In Melbourne, Julia (Clara Francesca Pagone) is worried about telling her parents that she secretly married an older man in Las Vegas. In Berlin, Milana (Kelsey Gillis) and Rosalie (Marie Schmitt) are having financial trouble and a rift is caused between them when one of them reveals an unorthodox solution.

    In Malta, Anna (Naomi Said) and her husband, Manny (Chris Dingli) are trying for a baby, although they don’t appear to want the same things and in New York… well let’s just leave that one as a surprise.

    Directed and written by Sarah Jayne and Ivan Malekin, In Corpore’s four stories about love and relationships, set them around the world to show the audience that everybody has similar relationship problems, no matter where you live. Unfortunately, none of these stories feel authentic and sincere as most of them end with a salacious twist akin to that of a soap opera.

    Although there is an emphasis on love and sex and how it can twist relationships, at times the sex scenes do seem to go on a little too long. This makes it feel like the audience is watching a soft porn movie rather than a subtle and nuanced character study of the complications of relationships.

    Putting the soap opera storylines and the gratuitous sex together and the audience will either love the tawdry and scandalous behaviour of its cast, or wish they were watching something more intelligent.

    There’s just something about the whole thing that doesn’t feel real and it completely takes the audience out of the moment. One minute there could be a frank discussion about the future of a couple’s relationship and the next there’s a steamy shower scene thrown in for the sake of it. It just seems like the directors didn’t know how to progress the stories without it.

    In Corpore should have been a multicultural, gender diverse, sexually fluid story of love and sex in the present day, instead it feels cheap and tacky.

  • Climate Of The Hunter: Review

    Climate Of The Hunter: Review

    Alma (Ginger Gilmartin) and Elizabeth (Mary Buss) are sisters, although as sisters often are, they very rarely see eye to eye. One day they reconnect with an old friend, Wesley (Ben Hall) who they haven’t seen for twenty years and he comes to stay, but Alma’s son, Percy (Sheridan McMichael) and Elizabeth’s daughter, Rose (Danielle Evon Ploeger) both take an instant dislike to the man they consider to be a stranger.

    Although the sisters soon find Wesley to be seductively alluring and they both vie for his attention. The trouble is that as Alma starts to notice things about Wesley, she starts to believe that he may be a vampire.

    Climate of The Hunter is a throwback horror movie directed by Mickey Reece and co-written by John Selvidge. The idea behind Climate of The Hunter must have been to try and evoke those kinds of movies that someone may have stumbled across late one night on television in the Seventies – and it fully succeeds.

    Everything in Climate of The Hunter from the wardrobe, the cinematography, the acting and even the locations make the movie feel like it was filmed over 40 years ago, but it was only first shown at Fantastic Fest in 2019. Even with this knowledge though, it’s hard not to be sucked into the cinematic world that it creates and forget about modern cinema.

    These days most audiences these days may expect everything to be explained to them as the plot goes along. However, Climate of The Hunter is more of a snapshot of film making from an era gone by done to perfection and the audience today may even be able to imagine how the movie was made even if it actually did come out at that time.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhTIC4Nooxk

    Climate of The Hunter is David Lynch meets Nosferatu and if that sounds like your kind of thing then you will thoroughly enjoy it. There are no nods or winks to the modern day and the movie fully immerses itself in its aesthetic which makes it an incredible cinematic achievement.

    Thankfully it isn’t trying too hard to evoke a certain period either, feeling authentic right up until the very last shot.

  • The Pale Door: Review

    The Pale Door: Review

    Jake (Devin Druid) has had a hard life, as most would have had growing up in the old west. When he was young, his parents were killed when their family home was raided by bandits, leaving Jake alone with his brother, Duncan (Zachary Knighton).

    Years later, Jake meets the Dalton gang and seeing as they’re a man short after a gunfight, they coerce Jake into helping them rob a train, despite Duncan’s objections. Seeing no other choice, Duncan joins them, but after the robbery goes wrong, Duncan is wounded.

    To top it all off they also find a woman named Pearl (Natasha Bassett) inside a chest that they steal and she tells them that if they take her home then they will be greatly rewarded.

    When they get there, they are greeted warmly by a group of women who seem to be the only residents in town. Nonetheless, the gang soon settle down and indulge themselves in what the town has to offer, including the women. However, when the women find out that Jake has never taken a life and is a virgin, they reveal their true forms to horrifying effect.

    The Pale Door is a Western horror story coming exclusively to Shudder which may be a little difficult to talk about considering its twist. Starting out as a typical western, the world built is something that fully tells its audience that this is the Old West. However, The Pale Door is on Shudder, so despite initial impressions, you may know that something supernatural is about to happen.

    The plot could be likened in structure to another bandit themed movie with a horror twist from the Nineties, but again that would also give away too much of the twist. Let’s just say that those who wish to watch The Pale Door may enjoy it best by knowing very little about it.

    Unfortunately, this may put some people off though as there is a long wait until the action starts and when it does it may leave some people disappointed. There are some good effects and fans of body horror may be pleased by the inventive deaths, but in the end The Pale Door feels like a great premise wasted on something that takes too long to get going.

  • White Lie: Review

    White Lie: Review

    Katie Arneson (Kacey Rohl) is a dancer. She’s in a loving relationship with her girlfriend, Jennifer (Amber Anderson) and she uses social media regularly to raise money for cancer charities. Katie is also faking her cancer diagnosis and raising the money for herself, although in her mind she’s not doing anything wrong.

    Then one day a discrepancy comes up in her medical records, so Katie sees no other option than to find somebody who can forge the correct documentation so that she can keep her life together.

    However, things start to unravel for Katie when she goes to see her father, Doug (Martin Donavon) to get some money from him and he sees right through her façade. From that moment on, things go from bad to worse as Katie struggles to maintain her lie and ensure that she is still loved.

    White Lie is a dramatic character study of a woman faking cancer written and directed by Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas. After researching many other cases where people have done he same thing, White Lie never aims to judge Katie for her actions, but merely presents her life and her lies leaving it up to the audience to decide what motivates her.

    Rohl gives a great performance as a woman who clearly is in over her head and at times her determination to keep doing what she’s doing verges on sociopathy. However, Rohl manages to make Katie into a real person who at times even brings out sympathy in the audience, even when they know what she’s doing is wrong.

    White Lie is bound to divide the audience when they view the film as without any clear motivation, the audience is allowed to imprint anything they like onto Katie.

    Some may find her to be a ruthless opportunist driven by the attention she gets from social media, while others may see her actions as a cry for help. Either way, the movie is all the better for showing Katie’s life and not making her out to be a victim of her own mindset or a soulless money-hungry internet influencer.