“Relaxer” is a dark comedy, semi-dystopian film from Joel Potrykus. The film follows an unhygienic, unkept slacker named Abbie (Joshua Burge.) The year is 1999, Abbie accepts a challenge from his callous older brother Cam (David Dastmalchian) to beat the mysterious and believed to be unbeatable level 256 in Pac-Man, but, there is a catch, Abbie cannot move from the couch and has only until Y2K, New Year’s Day 2000, to complete the challenge. If he does, Cam will give him 100,000 dollars.
When I use the word bizarre to describe this film, I mean bizarre. Audiences watching this piece may see similarities to “Slacker” (1990, Richard Linklater,) and there are, but I saw something much more disturbing. When I was watching this film I was reminded of “Room” (2015.) Not entirely due to the setting never changing from Abbie’s living room, but more due to the fact that his brother Cam almost felt like a sadistic kidnapper.
From the beginning we see Cam abusing Abbie both mentally and physically, in one instance forcing him to drink copious amounts of milk until he vomits, a scene so gross and disturbing it reminded me of “A Clockwork Orange” (1971.) In that way I began to empathize with Abbie, this wasn’t just some burnout or stoner film, this character was actually being abused by most of the people around him.
Abuse can do strange things to people. It can isolate them, either voluntarily or involuntarily, make them completely lose their sense of self and rely on their abuser for any shred of self-worth, and even cause them completely retreat from society. In Abbie’s case, he completely shuts himself off from the outside world in order to play video games. In this sense the film is deeply dark and depressing. A portrait of a guy who most people would just refer to as a loser is actually a suffering, lost soul with no direction or hope.
Potrykus effectively used the only space he had, the suburban Michigan living room, and made the film’s cinematography and singular location work. DP Adam J. Minnick did well with using slow pans and subtle camera movements to widen the space, additionally, the clever use of sound design and foley brought the outside inside so we feel like more than one thing is happening.
Joshua Burge really holds the film together and does an excellent job acting from the same spot, not an easy task. His character is gross, repulsive, and you can almost smell him through the screen. He embraces the stench and crafts a great performance, I could see him working with someone like Jody Hill in the future.
Much of the dialogue, written by Potrykus, was perhaps darkly funny, but the entire thing was so abrasive that I did find it hard to watch. It felt like a marathon to see if I could make it through this film and get to the payoff at the end, which did come but only lasted about 10 minutes. That being said, if Potrykus ever does go mainstream I can see his films being darkly funny and sinister, hopefully expanding their breadth to include a wider audience.
I can’t exactly recommend this for that wide audience Potrykus will hopefully capture in the future, as it is more of an indie think piece. If you can sit and watch someone play a video game on a 1999 couch covered in sweat and spoiled milk for 91 minutes and try to gather a deeper meaning of isolation and social regression, it may be for you. There is a lot of meaning here, but it is a tough one to digest.
‘Here in Britain, we know much about the Americas…slavery, civil rights, but very little is known about the black British struggle. It’s not just people abroad, Britains living here are very unaware of what it is to be born and raised in a country that’s foreign; and on a wider level I think it just humanises the immigrant experience. In my story I just hope to show the love and heart of who I am as a black person.’
Adewale ‘Eni’ Akinnuoye Agbaje
Here’s an incredible premise: In the 1967 right-wing English town of Tilbury, a Yorubá-Nigerian couple, in the UK to study law and accountancy, hand over their 6-week-old baby, Eni, to an unknown illiterate couple, after placing an ad in the newspaper.
That baby grew up to create an identity for himself in a violently racist local skinhead gang. The protagonist of the story, actor Adewale Akinnuoye Agbaje (The Bourne Identity, Lost…), says he started writing the screenplay years ago because he couldn’t sleep at night. In development since 2012, the script progressed while he was part of the Sundance Film Institute.
Until 1960, Nigeria was a British colony and had been for the previous 70 years. Once liberated, British imperial administrators departed, leaving a system of government with few skilled leaders. Suddenly professional possibilities opened up to Nigerian citizens. Akinnuoye Agbaje’s parents were among a generation of Nigerians to come to the “mother country” to get a university education they could take home and use to build democracy in their newly independent nation.
However, with no extended family to turn to, young couples went looking for childcare, providing a way for parents to work and study before their return home, and their children to be immersed in English culture. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, thousands of Nigerian children were informally fostered out by their educated parents to white working-class families, who often took in too many children, attracted by the undeclared payments, and lack of supervision from welfare services. “Every day we get to make a new choice”, Eni’s teacher Ms. Dapo (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) tells him; the one person looking out for him.
She had seen a disturbed but clever teenager amongst the mediocre, bored, discriminatory small-town life of Tilbury, a fertile recruiting ground for nascent far-right groups in the years after Enoch Powell made his “rivers of blood” speech. A place where bingo and the pub were the highlights of the 80s; and the practice of fostering small children was called farming – children were goods to be bartered and manipulated as a means to an end. Their names were changed to ‘Boy, Divvy Cods, Dopey, Mingle, Madam and the rest of them…’ and their dog shears were used to cut the children’s hair.
The film is both important and brutal to watch. The violence is incessant and vivid, earning it an R rating in the US. Containing some of the most humiliating scenes I’ve seen in a film, young Eni is transformed from an imaginative young boy seeking love and solace to a young man (Damson Idris) desperately needing self-protection. Amongst the swollen-lipped and broken-toothed gang members, Levi (John Dagliesh), the manipulative leader of the Tilbury Skins, brings a particularly malevolent edge to the film. One that is shaped by ambiguous relationships.
This is a film principally about self-protection and urban day-to-day survival. Akinnuoye Agbaje describes it as “…about triumph over adversity, challenges and obstacles, finding a sense of belonging, finding self-worth, learning how to love one’s self and these are things that everyone can relate to.” Not only did he play the role of his father, Femi, he also wrote, directed and produced as well as writing, performing and producing most of the soundtrack. He describes it as “…only a low budget film in terms of finance, but not in terms of aspiration.”
What do you do when you’ve been endlessly rejected by both societies into which you were born? In Eni’s case, use your imagination. How did a young man move into such extreme self-protection? With nobody to rely on, he’d been practising for 17 years.
By Naseem Ally. ‘2030’ is a docu-drama film centring around futurist Fereidoun M. Esfandiary, otherwise known as ‘FM-2030’ who died in 1999. The futurist and author went into great depths on the marvels of modern technology, which we are now being accustomed to.
It was of his conviction that modern technology would allow for a push for a ”post-human” world where revolutionary technological advances would change a host of perplexing ills.
However, before he died of cancer in 1999 FM turned to science to cryogenically preserve his brain for a potential future awakening.
Before his passing, filmmaker Johnny Boston who met FM when he was 10, developed a strong friendship that led him to decide to create this film as a tribute to him.
With that being said, with this film being a docu-drama it does tend to throw off this film from time to time, and at points feels less like a tribute and more like a hidden camera show.
It blurs the lines and can throw off the audience, at least from my perspective, as at certain points in the film, it feels ‘badly scripted’ to the point where you can’t help but ask your self in certain scenes ‘is this real!?’
From what otherwise would have been an interesting insight into the ‘2030’ world, ended up swaying towards the higher end on the spectrum of a reality show than an informative documentary.
‘2030’ felt scattered and tended to divert which felt frustrating, to say the least. The film ‘Public Enemy Number One’ in my eyes, is a great model for actualising the full potential of a documentary.
And yes, this is a docu-drama so I can to some degree understand the reason for this film having a sense of ‘hysteria’ over its duration. I just wish it had more ‘documentary’ and less ‘drama’.
Especially with the running time of close to one hundred and five minutes, it felt dragged out and could have been more condensed. I felt the makers of this film didn’t really get the most from this subject, and in general, felt watered down.
From an aesthetic standpoint, this film is presented beautifully but even then it’s not enough to compensate for a lack of substance in this film. In this film, there’s input from a number of scholars and researchers who give interesting takes on the morals and ethics of certain technologies, but it’s so brief that it felt pointless to use the footage.
It’s as if this film was rushed, and aimed to tick as many boxes as possible.
Nonetheless, it was an attempt at presenting some insightful information on an interesting and somewhat provocative subject, but this film, unfortunately, feels like it gets lost in its own narrative.
When a young family moves to the Heelshire’s residence, terror strikes when a boy from the family named Jude (Christopher Convery) discovers a doll called Brahms that appears to be eerily human.
So far, in the year 2020, we have been cursed with quite a number of horrible horror films. In the first week of January, Nicolas Pesce released his new vision for The Grudge, which was a painfully contrived and bland reboot. Then, we got Floria Sigismondi’s feature adaptation of classic novel The Turn of the Screw in the form of The Turning, which turned out to be a massive disappointment. If that wasn’t bad enough, just this past week, Blumhouse Productions released their worst movie since Truth or Dare, a horror film version of the beloved television series Fantasy Island.
But, out of all the early year horror movie releases, William Brent Bell’s Brahms: The Boy II, was one of the films that had the most potential to be great, despite having a ridiculous title. A few years ago, Bell helmed the previous installment in the franchise, The Boy, which was met with mainly mixed reviews from both critics and audiences alike.
There were some that thought the film was delightfully creepy and a welcome surprise release for the month of January, which is widely regarded as the month where movies go to die. But, there were also some people (myself included) that thought The Boy was a missed opportunity for the most part.
The whole “evil doll comes to life and starts to kill innocent people” idea is nothing new. Far from it, in fact. One of the most beloved horror franchises is that of the Child’s Play or Chucky franchise. Throughout the decades, many generations have been creeped out by the Brad Dourif and now Mark Hamill voiced doll, and it seems like the franchise will not be going anywhere soon.
But viewers that are looking for a little bit more originality with the creepy doll movies have not had much luck in recent years. With that being said though, the original Boy did have its moments where it shined, namely its twist ending that took plenty of people by surprise. Does it make a lot of sense when you think about it in retrospect to the rest of the film? Not really. In fact, it is a little bit goofy. But it was certainly a shocking ending and genuinely set up a sequel that could be incredibly interesting. Bell’s original film paved the way for a follow-up with plenty to explore and expand upon.
Whether you expected this to be good or not, there is some bad news. Not only is Brahms: The Boy II not a worthy sequel to an otherwise mediocre film, but it is far worse than its predecessor and the worst horror movie of the year thus far.
Weak jump scares and painfully boring and long drawn out sequences are the least of this movie’s problems. Yes, the endless string of jump scares was extremely tiring. There are few things that people hate more than jump scares, and this film is riddled with them. To make matters worse, they are “false jump scares”. Instead of the jump scare consisting of something actually creepy like a figure popping out of a corner, it is always something incredibly ridiculous such as the main child Jude sneaking up behind his mom and scaring her.
Additionally, yes, it’s immensely boring. Even with a running time of only eighty six minutes, the film feels remarkably longer due to there being no real meat on this screenplay. This absolutely feels like a first draft in every way. You know there’s a problem with your film when the scariest thing that happens in it is a doll moving its eyes around. A movie with a running time of less than ninety minutes including credits does not have anywhere to go really. It takes about thirty to thirty five minutes for anything remotely creepy to occur in Brahms: The Boy II. The scenes that play out beforehand are extremely bland and lifeless.
Something else that was greatly frustrating here was the characters. They have next to nothing for development. In the original film, my favorite aspect to the entire thing was Lauren Cohan as Greta Evans. Not only did she deliver an emotionally raw and riveting performance, but her character was one that was impressively fleshed out. We were given a good reason to care for her and her plight. Whenever she got herself tied up in a sticky situation, it was easy to root for her. With this sequel, the characters get nothing to do. They all have one little personality trait on display and that’s it. Jude’s character is there to be Brahms’ best friend. Throughout the movie, he is seen giving him food, doing homework while Brahms watches, and gets mad whenever his parents tell him to cut it out. That’s literally the extent of Jude’s character, and it was frustrating.
Speaking of his parents, they get just as little to do here as well. In fact, they get even less. Liza’s character worries throughout the entire movie and that’s it. Something creepy happens in the house, and she expresses concern. The same thing goes for her husband and Jude’s father Sean (Owain Yeoman). Seeing this highly talented cast of actors get absolutely nothing to do in terms of a character point of view was frustrating and maddening. But it also makes me think why these actors accepted roles in this film in the first place.
There is nothing even impressive on a technical scale here either. It’s not as if the cinematography by Karl Walter Lindenlaub is bad or anything, but it most certainly is nothing remarkable or anything like that. There is not a single shot in the entire film that is going to stick with me. It’s all extremely generic and surface level stuff. Even the score by Brett Detar is average, and the editing on display by Brian Berdan is genuinely jarring in numerous scenes, with a lot of poorly done slow motion sequences incorporated.
All of those massive issues aside though, the other humongous problem with Brahms: The Boy II is the fact that it acts as if the first movie doesn’t even exist. Yes, you heard me right. If you absolutely adored that first film, you’re more than likely going to hate this movie and be massively let down.
The ending of the predecessor was greatly promising and set up a potential franchise that had a lot of areas to explore. Spoiler alert for the original film if you haven’t seen it yet. Throughout the running time, Lauren Cohan’s Greta is seeing terribly weird things going on around the manor. She feels like she is being watched and it seems to her like the doll Brahms could possibly be alive and moving around. At the climax of the film, after the doll is shattered in pieces, it is revealed that Brahms, who was thought to be dead many years ago, is actually very much so alive and has been living in the walls of the Heelshire Manor the whole time. He was the person that was moving around the house at night and he was able to watch Greta via the Brahms doll.
As mentioned earlier, there are a lot of problems that arise with that twist ending, especially if you have seen the film, you’d know that there are some things regarding that twist that just don’t make a lot of sense. But on the other hand, it brilliantly sets up a potential franchise where we could follow the grown up Brahms as he tries to find new victims to torment as they go into the Heelshire Manor.
In Brahms: The Boy II, they basically retcon the entire ending of the previous entry. As said, at the finale of the original, we learn that an adult man named Brahms was the one that was responsible for all the creepy things that happened throughout the entire movie. He’s the one that was able to move the doll around, because whenever Greta was not looking, he would go and move the doll to another room.
Within the first thirty minutes of this follow-up, we see the Brahms doll’s eyes literally move around and we see his body move around all on his own. The entire question that viewers had on their mind while watching was “Is the doll possessed? Or is something else at play?”. The answer? Something else was at play. A grown man was responsible for moving the doll. Here, they pretend like that is not true. What’s also incredibly shocking about this massive retcon is the fact that this sequel is penned by the same screenwriter of the first, and is directed by Bell, who also helmed the first. Why they would retcon the biggest twist of the original movie is beyond me. It’s actually a massive disappointment and is going to anger anybody that loved that twist ending.
Watching a movie like this is tiring. Not just because it is a drastically weak movie with poor writing, character development, scares, etc. But because, while watching it, you can see all of the things that they could have changed to make it significantly better. One can only hope that horror movies will improve sometime soon in the year, because right now, it is not a great time to be a fan of the genre.
Brahms: The Boy II is a colossal disappointment due to its severely dull screenplay and awful character development, weak scares, and its disregarding of the original.
I was ready to pan up and coming auteur Oliver Laxe’s newest film “Fire Will Come”. I was fully prepared to write it off as an underdeveloped and empty mass of images with no depth. And yet, that’s not the position I’m about to take. Yes, Laxe makes clear he has no interest at running any faster than the most languid of paces, and the lack of depth remains egregious, but when the titular fire finally comes, the devastation hits like running into a glass door, and it shattered my negative opinion and changed my mind.
A quiet and timid pyromaniac is our protagonist; his name is Amador (Amador Arias). When we first meet him, he is fresh out of prison for igniting a blaze that burnt out two-thirds of a mountainside. With nowhere else to go he returns home to his mother Benedicta (Benedicta Sánchez) in his hometown located in the Galicia community of Spain. He arrives to a town he wronged with his crime, and silently takes their mockery as he tries to live life anew.
Amador living life is the bulk of the film, which is the biggest problem. His life is far from exciting, and if it weren’t for the beautiful landscapes of the region, this could never have worked. Galicia is sublime and rich with the most picturesque mountains and bushland, it just makes you wish anything about this section of the film was interesting. Amador’s life is monotonous and draining. He spends his days near speechless tending to his mother’s three cows. When he does speak to people, it’s all empty words developing the already obvious fact that he wants to be alone. Everything comes across as if Laxe was making a character study with no interest in actually studying his character.
Thankfully this changes, and as harsh as everything I said is, the best is very much yet to come. When it does, it comes in the form of a bush fire up a mountain heading directly for houses. We see Amador inconspicuously driving away from it as firefighters begin to arrive. Then we leave him and follow the men in harm’s way. Their priority is to save homes, as it is for all firefighters, and thankfully none seem to be in danger. However, en route they get the unwelcome news that the fire is closer to a village than anticipated, a village with no fire station. Chaos ensues, two young men are sent up a path through the bush to get to this village while the others head on to fight the flame directly.
For all the incredible imagery in Fire Will Come, nothing is more impactful than the few minutes we get inside the village of La Vegia. An old man stands amongst it as everyone else evacuates, and he’s holding onto a garden hose, spraying water on what he believes will soon be the burnt-up surrounds of his house and achieving nothing. The two young men try and get him to stop, but he refuses, and at that moment, the entire film clicked in my mind.
It’s still heavily flawed, but it became clear that this is something I had never seen anything like before. A community, swarmed by fog and rain, forced to fight something trying to destroy them. And once again Amador is the clear suspect. Potentially, his depiction of living life amongst them is that of a perverted criminal scouting his prey, leading up to the film pointing to its title and saying, “I told you so”. He could also be a monster who indulges destruction only to sedate himself, with no ability to care for others. On the other hand, Amador may well be a simple man trying to turn his life around, who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. The film provides no answer, but the brilliance lies in the question even existing. Amador doesn’t so much as light a match throughout, he appears reformed, yet regardless he reeks of guilt by the end.
Fire Will Come is undeniably flawed. Yet it ends with such an impactful crescendo that you can’t help but think there’s something brilliant hidden in the flames.
