Author: Mark Goodyear

Talking to someone, someone you know and trust, about your inner demons and struggles is the perfect first step to overcoming them. Cinema displays and romanticises this in a number of ways, and more often than not, someone you know and trust isn’t involved at all.

Take ‘Good Will Hunting’ or ‘The Breakfast Club’ both are about people coming together to help each other when they didn’t even know the others existed before they met. Don’t Look Down (Haut perches) from French auteurs Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau is a new film that takes from a similar vein. 

5 strangers, Veronika (Manika Auxire), Marius (Geoffrey Couët), Nathan (Simon Frenay), Louis (François Nambot) and Lawrence (Lawrence Valin) find themselves together in Louis’ Paris apartment. They aren’t there by force, and they aren’t there because of some grand conspiracy, they are there because one individual unites them all and he’s waiting inside a room in the corner of the house, one we never get to enter.

All we know about the room is that the man inside it hurt every character we meet. He manipulated and humiliated them each in a different way; he’s an abuser. Together the 5 take turns entering the room to exorcise the man from their lives, and we are left to decipher the in-betweens. In these moments they paint their tormenter for us through the stories of how they ended up here tonight. They all fell for him in some way or another, and he used them all leaving scars in the process. 

Don’t Look Down is unflinching in its approach. We are strictly never allowed to meet the man whom we hear so much about, and the characters are not allowed to talk about what happens in the room either, everything about him is a mystery. As a result, we find ourselves hearing a whole lot of conversation that only vaguely connects to the situation; most of it is intensely sexual.

They go around and share their deepest fantasies, and despite promising not to judge each other, it very much seems like they all quietly do. Amongst this, they prepare and eat a variety of food and drink plenty of wine. As they do bonds begin to form between them, tenuous bonds but bonds nonetheless. 

But as much as the film evolves on the relationship front, the main story fails to become any more transparent. No one seems to be finding any genuine closure; we lack so much crucial information that everything drags almost to a halt. How was this all organised? How did they find out about each other? And most of all what is going on in that room? I understand the powerful concept the film aims for, a ‘power in knowing you aren’t the alone’ angle and whilst its depiction of camaraderie is effective its depiction of the relationship between abused and abuser is lacking.

The man in the room doesn’t become this menacing presence capable of hurting everyone immeasurably by merely showing his face, all in all, it’s more like he’s not there at all, and they are walking into an empty room. From what we hear from the 5, he is sinister, but his physical presence in the film isn’t. 

Each of the cast performs admirably. Such a dialogue-heavy film can’t have been easy to prepare for, but they each flawlessly transition from one scene to the next. Most importantly, they are engaging when they need to be which failing to do in this film would have been catastrophic as it naturally drags.

One by one, they have moments in the spotlight, detailing what the man did to them, and it works on every level when they step up to the plate. On balance, the casting may be the strongest aspect of this film because they are everything about the film that works. 

Don’t Look Down doesn’t budge for anything and that’s admirable. But in sticking so rigorously to keeping the antagonist faceless, the film loses what it’s trying to say and becomes empty.  

Bloody Marie is a Dutch film about an alcoholic struggling comic artist riding the long drawn out and fading high of her most significant career success that occurred six years prior to the setting. Her name is Marie Wankelmut (Susanne Wolff), and she, for almost the entire first half of the film, chases alcohol spending every last cent of her earnings along the way.

She even trades her shoes for what appears to be a half-empty bottle of wine. She lives in the middle of Amsterdam’s red-light district right next to a brothel which she drunkenly wanders past to get home each night. 

Despite it only taking up the second half of the runtime, the main story is that of a criminal act Marie commits whilst on a drunken tirade and the drastic consequences that ripple from it. She does something completely unjustified and illogical, and her primary justification is that she was ‘drunk as a skunk’. This sums up Marie as a character. She is the direct cause of all her own distress, she is foolish, consistently deplorable and aloof, yet we are supposed to cheer when as she stumbles her way through avoiding the consequences of her actions. Now, this isn’t to say the individuals dishing out those consequences aren’t bad; they most certainly are. 

Dragomir (Dragos Bucur) is the films primary antagonist; he evolves into a wretched character, but everything he does is as a direct reaction to what Marie did to him. This leaves us with an extremely detestable villain but no hero worth rooting for, since the reality is, it’s all her fault. No matter how hard I tried I could not bring myself to care about Marie, I wanted her to escape her situation, but only because the cruel pimp would otherwise win, not because I cared at all about Marie.

As a result, the film is void of emotion; there is no one to root for and almost no reason to watch. The script, written by the two directors of the project Lennert Hillege and Guido van Driel, is at fault for all of the issues here, more needed to be done to flesh out the characters, Marie in particular. There is no insight to be found here, no entertainment either, just unlikeable characters being unlikeable until the climax comes around and they can leave our screen.

I specify the lack of insight to note the fact that Bloody Marie is, above all else, a character study. However, Marie is not a character worth studying. Her main trait is that she’s a drunk, the film attempts to build her as some kind of tortured artist drowning in a city where anything goes, but in reality, Marie is just a drunk getting herself into trouble like she seemingly has for six years straight.

I say this as harshly as I do because that is all the insight the film grants into her persona, in the few dream/flashback sequences she remains an alcoholic. The only semblance of a life she led without her vice is the existence of her graphic novel “Porn For The Blind” and the fans whom we see congratulate her for making it. 

The performances are all respectable Wolff does her best to bring a whimsicality to Marie that, had the character been at all endearing, would have come off as brilliant. And to Burcur’s credit, the one or two moments of genuine tension in Bloody Marie come from him and his sinister look. The production design enhances their efforts to no end; it is the only genuinely good aspect of the experience.

Everything is greasy and reeks of dodgy interactions and underbelly crime that floods the red-light district of this film but is rarely explicitly seen. Floris Vos did a spectacular job creating this feeling and if anything comes across in this film it’s to stay away from Amsterdam’s red-light district.

Bloody Marie falls short on almost every front. Marie herself is an unlikeable mess of a character who only amounts to be the centrepiece of a film that was never fully realised as the thrill-ride it was supposed to be.

Gemini Man: The BRWC Review. There is a moment in Ang Lee’s Gemini Man where the two main characters, both of whom are portrayed by Will Smith, fall into a pool of water towards the end of one of their fights. The younger clone of the two, known as Junior, has just found out he was an experiment created in a lab to be a super soldier and doesn’t have it in him to keep fighting. Junior rebukes the older man, who is claiming to be genetically identical to him, he shouts at him as he floats away down an undisclosed tunnel. This is the best moment of Gemini Man; the only time the film has any heart and soul is right here in the water that merely existed in the script to stop either of the leads from dying halfway through the film.

Everything before and after this one moment is an illogical mess filled to the brim with needless characters and unnecessary cinematic experiments. The main character out of the two Will Smiths is Henry Brogan, an aging government hitman entering retirement as the demons that come with his line of work begin to haunt him. Alongside Henry is his accomplice of circumstance Danny Zakarweski (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) who is roped into the conflict when the government believes her to be helping Henry who has become a fugitive after finding out his final hit was on someone who didn’t deserve killing. The final member of the key trio is a totally needless character called Baron (Benedict Wong) who serves only to fill in the gap in Henry’s giant list of talents; he can fly, Henry can’t. They go up against the other Will Smith character Junior in an attempt to inform him that the leader of the Gemini Project Clay Verris (Clive Owen), who poses as a father to Junior, is manipulating him.

The film as a whole amounts to two things; talented actors with nothing to work with and a born storyteller director with no story to tell. It all comes down to David Benioff, Billy Ray and Darren Lemke’s impossibly thin script. Full of plot holes and an incredibly weak antagonist in Verris nothing here works. The strongest aspect is Junior coming to terms with what he is, it draws out some glimpses of powerful work from Smith, but it doesn’t last. Before you know it, Junior moves on from his mental turmoil and goes about his business for the final portion of the film. Henry’s side of the narrative is no better with both Danny and Baron adding nothing to the experience. They exist only to ensure the cast wasn’t made up solely of two Will Smiths and Clive Owen.

Why paramount thought this was something worth making we may never know, but the best guess is the abundance of talent that became attached to the project. Will Smith is a box office draw; he has been for the best part of two decades and continues to be. Ang Lee is a two-time Oscar winner for achievement in directing. Mary Elizabeth Winstead showed the world she was to be taken seriously in 10 Cloverfield Lane and has grown as a star ever since. And earlier this year Benedict Wong played a role in the highest-grossing film of all time. None of them produces memorable work here, and excluding Lee, it isn’t their fault.

I wish I couldn’t lay blame at the feet of the great cinematic genius of Ang Lee, but alas his recent films have been a drop in form and Gemini Man sees him sink lower. You cannot blame the lack of depth on the writers alone; some must go to the head of the project behind the camera. Lee is all too focused on seeing how well he can capture the gimmicks of the film like the higher frame rate and the, admittedly spectacular, CGI recreation of Smith. In all the slow-motion shots and over the top overstimulating action sequences, there is none of the heart that Lee’s best movies generate, worst of all, there are no characters even to care about throughout.

As I touched on, everything does look great. The special effects work on Smith as Junior is breath-taking at times and the cinematography insights more interest in the action sequences than the choreography itself inspires. Lorne Balfe’s score is also impressive if underutilised. The work in these aspects is so isolated in their success that I shudder to think what the final product would look like if it hadn’t been.

Gemini Man is no more and no less than a failed experiment. Generally, something like this would be easy to ignore, but the sheer amount of talented people involved in the project leads to one inescapable thought; this was a missed opportunity, and it should have been a whole lot better.