Author Archives: osunwali

Renfield

Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Awkwafina, Ben Schwartz, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Brandon Scott Jones, Adrian Martinez, Nicolas Cage

Director: Chris McKay

Writer: Ryan Ridley

Renfield is a movie about co-dependent relationships, and in a way I think I might be in a co-dependent relationship with Hollywood. For example, when it was announced that a Mr. Nicolas Cage would be playing Count Dracula in this new flick, I allowed myself to get my hopes up. I’ve been burnt before by such a seemingly perfect casting choice (words can’t describe how let down I was by the nonentity that was Ian McShane’s Blackbeard), but surely the team on Renfield knew what they had? Dracula is about as iconic as movie monsters get and Cage, one of our most iconic leading men today, is the exact right level of commanding and erratic to assume the role and deliver something new and original. It isn’t too much to ask for this movie to deliver on such a promise, is it? Well, it just might be for a Hollywood that is so averse to risk, so homogenised in its content, so colourless in its stylisation that they wouldn’t know what to with Cage if he turned up to rehearsal in full costume and makeup with a Transylvanian accent and actual necrotic powers ready to go. And so we keep regressing to the same pattern: Hollywood comes up with a vaguely interesting idea with a great deal of potential behind it, and then proceeds to deliver the most uncreative and uninspiring rendition of that idea. Except when they don’t, which is why we keep coming back.

Count Dracula (Cage) is in fact a supporting player in this story. The main character is, as you might have guessed, Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), the English lawyer who fell under the vampire’s thrall when he visited him in Transylvania to broker a land deal. In the century since, Renfield has lived (or is the word unlived, given that he’s undead?) as the Count’s familiar, an immortal servant with a portion of Dracula’s powers whose only purpose in life (or undeath) is to serve his master’s will and find him victims to feast upon. Having gone into hiding in New Orleans following a skirmish with vampire hunters that left Dracula in a decrepit state, Renfield has worked out an effective system for bringing him bodies for his recovery without having to murder innocents. He has started attending a support group for people in abusive, co-dependent relationships where he will hear stories about terrible partners, friends, and relatives whom nobody would miss were they to disappear without a trace. But when Renfield shares his own story about a boss who thinks he can take over the world and has insidiously planted himself in his mind, he begins to understand that he is working for a narcissist who is preventing him from being his own person. The only way out then is to stand up to Dracula and reach full power for himself.

That’s all fine and dandy, but for some reason there is a parallel plot centred around some woman called Rebecca (Awkwafina), a police officer looking to take down the all-powerful crime family responsible for killing her father. This is the Lobo family, led by the conniving Bellafrancesca (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and her hothead son Tedward (Ben Schwartz). They perform whatever crimes they please without impunity because half of the police force is in their pocket, but then find a themselves in a problem they can’t pay off when Renfield happens upon one of their operations and brutally executes every goon present. He meet cutes Rebecca in the process and finds that he likes the idea of becoming the hero that she believes him to be. If this sounds like a tacked-on narrative and a great big distraction from anything to do with Dracula, then you would be right. But what’s even worse is that it adds further whiplash to a movie that is already tonally confused about itself. Renfield is an action-comedy that’s trying to align itself with some of the biggest trends in Hollywood right now (what if Dracula’s familiar was a superhero, essentially) and so is trying to marry its Marvel sensibilities with the wry humour of What We Do in the Shadows. In doing so, all the movie succeeds at is embodying some of the weakest practices plaguing modern cinema.

The concept is the brainchild of Robert Kirkman, creator of The Walking Dead, but those charged with translating his idea into a coherent picture never seemed able to nail down what that idea really is. It plays things in too broadly comical a fashion to work as the kind of satire that What We Do in the Shadows succeeded in being, it’s too tame and reserved to aim for the level of campiness that made Bram Stoker’s Dracula a cult classic, and it’s too inept to work as a mildly watchable Marvel-style action-comedy. The excessive gore and self-referential pop-culture-induced humour tells me that what they’re shooting for is a Deadpool sort of irreverent tone, but it doesn’t land because there’s nothing tangible to latch on to. Dracula’s place in the world is never really established and nobody ever really reacts to the revelation that vampires are in fact real. The blood and gore spilt during the many elaborate fight scenes looks fake to a cartoonish degree and, no matter how much of it is splattered, little of it ever seems to seep onto the characters’ clothes and skin. The movie is obviously meant to be comedy, but it is so broad and confused in its approach that it’s sometimes not clear whether a given line or bit is even intended to land as a joke.

It’s almost impressive how blatantly the film telegraphs its themes about standing up for one’s self and battling one’s demons and yet is still so confused about itself. It pays mere lip-service to these themes without ever finding a sufficient mode of expression for them, either on the dramatic front or on the comedic one. Perhaps the ideas was for Renfield’s emerging personhood to manifest itself in the action scenes, but they are all so choppily edited that even the more creatively gruesome stuff (such as they are with those rubbish effects anyway) barely leave any impression on the brain. Hoult, bless him, tries his best and his performance is one of the few elements that rings as sincere in what is otherwise a deeply cynical film. Cage also seems like he’s having fun vamping it up, even if the film has no idea what to do with him beyond making him just generically mean and evil. They have to contend however with a script that feels like a rushed first draft and a supporting cast who give such wildly dissonant performances as if instructed to improvise whatever came to mind without direction. Renfield is bad in a lot of ways that many modern movies are bad, but it’s also worse because it fails to clear so many of the minimum prerequisites that would at least allow it to qualify as ‘passable’. Sometimes I wish I knew how to quit Hollywood.

★★

One Fine Morning

Cast: Léa Seydoux, Pascal Greggory, Melvil Poupaud, Nicole Garcia, Fejria Deliba, Camille Leban Martins, Sarah Le Picard, Pierre Meunier

Director: Mia Hansen-Løve

Writer: Mia Hansen-Løve

Life isn’t like the movies. People don’t go on journeys with definitive beginnings and ends, they don’t have clearly-defined arcs that develop along narratively-pleasing trajectories, and there is no structure or convention compelling a person’s daily existence to progress in a logical fashion. Life is just life and most of us are just doing the best we can with each day that comes. A filmmaker who understands this and is very good at depicting this idea in cinematic terms is Mia Hansen-Løve. Her films, including Things to Come and Bergman Island, are about the everyday; they are about normal people living their lives where they deal with common anxieties, experience fleeting moments of pleasure, and march forward knowing not where the road will eventually lead or what they’re going to do along the way. Those familiar with her work will know how semi-autobiographical they are and One Fine Morning is no exception. Once again Hansen-Løve has appropriated aspects of her own life and reconfigured them into a story that confronts the viewer with sobering truths and stark realities. Her movies are life as it’s lived, joyful and tragic, beautiful and ordinary, and with everything and nothing happening all at once. Having returned to her native land and mother tongue with one of the country’s brightest stars helming her latest film, One Fine Morning is one of the finest pictures yet by one of Europe’s most exciting filmmakers.

Sandra Kienzler (Léa Seydoux) is a widowed mother of eight-year-old girl Linn (Camille Leban Martins) with a translator’s job, a Jean Seberg pixie cut, and a messy personal life. As well as her child, she must also care for her father Georg (Pascal Greggory), a former philosophy professor who has been stricken with Benson’s syndrome, a form of dementia that has afflicted his sight and memory to the point that he can no longer look after himself. Since Georg’s partner Leila (Fejria Deliba) is too medically unwell to give him the full-time care that he needs, the family must navigate the care system, moving Georg from one hospital or nursing home to the next as they search for one that can take him in longer-term. Concurrently, Sandra runs into Clément (Melvil Poupaud), a good friend of her late husband’s. He is a chemical cosmologist (not an astrophysicist, as he repeatedly makes clear) with a son of the same age as Sandra’s daughter, and as is inevitably the case when two moderately attractive French people appear on-screen together, they wind up in bed. Clément however is still married; Sandra knows this and places no expectations on him to start. But after so many years of feeling like her love life was over for good, this feeling of desiring someone and being desired in return awakens a long-forgotten passion that won’t be satisfied for long by a casual fling.

It would be easy to tell a melodramatic rendition of this kind of story, but that’s not what Hanson-Løve does. Her approach is down-to-earth; the performances don’t play up the events or emotions, but deliver them matter-of-factly so that the feelings of devastation they inspire might emerge organically. This isn’t a tidy little drama where conflicts can be easily resolved and people and their actions can be neatly sorted into categories of good and bad. Sandra has spent so putting others ahead of herself, she effectively forgot that she had any wants or needs until Clément came along. Where Things to Come dealt with a woman realising that her husband is seeing another woman, One Fine Morning is about the other woman in such an affair and her struggles with it. Though Clément explains that things are not good between him and his wife, he doesn’t feel able to leave her for Sandra even as he falls deeper in love with her. Sandra for her part needs this affection in her life now that she’s awakened to what she’s been missing since losing her husband and is of two minds about it. She wants to be selfish for a change and have something that’s just for her, but knows that she cannot be satisfied in the long-term with a covert relationship, nor does she wish to be a homewrecker. She saw enough of the grief such a separation inspires with her own parents.

People often have to make bargains and concessions with themselves just as a matter of survival. Sandra loves her father and goes above and beyond to care for him, but there is a limit. She has a child and a job for starters, but even in those moments she reserves for visitations with Georg she cannot be wholly there for him. When Georg announces he has to use the toilet, Sandra makes him wait for a nurse rather than help him herself because it is a line that she cannot bring herself to cross. On her way out, she sees Georg blindly wandering the hallway like so many of the other old residents whose minds have similarly decomposed, and rather than escort him back to his room the devastated Sandra leaves him be and steps into the lift. The film never passes judgement on her nor on anyone else for the mundane cruelty and selfishness that they need to resort to just to get through the day. Everybody is doing their best and there is no narratively convenient resolution on the horizon that will grant them deliverance should they be virtuous enough to earn it. There is just today and the next day and everybody doing what they need to make it to the other side in one piece.

As is ever the case, Hansen-Løve find sublime beauty in the seemingly ordinary. Ordinary scenes of Sandra hard at work, playing with her daughter, or walking with Clément are scored with whimsical music underscoring how precious these moments really are; they are the kinds of moments that shall go on to become treasured memories, the kind that Georg is no longer capable of making or remembering. Even the act of listening to a piece by Schubert, one that has brought Georg such joy in the past, isn’t possible for him any longer because he no longer has his positive associations with the tune and now finds it too discomforting. There’s a briskness with which the film is constructed that slows down during quieter, more intimate moments like those shared with Clément, underscoring just how much such moments really matter, as if the rest of the world has stopped for a little while so that they might cherish the memory-to-be for a bit longer. It’s such a beautiful feeling that Hansen-Løve has captured here tinged with the bittersweet knowledge that they cannot last, neither in the moment nor in our fading memories. One Fine Morning, a title for a memoir that shall never be written, speaks both to what has been and what will be. Whatever life throws at us, it is all we can do to keep moving on until the next morning comes around. Until the time comes when there shall be no more mornings ever again.

★★★★★

Air

Cast: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Jason Bateman, Marlon Wayans, Chris Messina, Chris Tucker, Viola Davis

Director: Ben Affleck

Writer: Alex Convery

In a sense, Air could be considered an underdog sports movie. Only the subjects are not top athletes at peak physical condition, they’re a bunch of schlubby office executives who play their games not in stadiums and arenas but boardrooms and conference halls. They also work for a billion-dollar company, and so can only really be considered underdogs in the realm of Fortune 500 sporting brands, so take that for what it’s worth. But then, that’s what the 80s were all about, the Reaganite ideal of the hyper-individualistic and ambitious mavericks reaching greatness by being the best at what they do. If you aren’t yet the top dog, then you are the underdog. There are few who embody that ideal better than Space Jam star Michael Jordan, but what Alex Convey’s script proposes is that the same ideal can be extended, to a lesser but no less potent degree, to those in Jordan’s periphery. Air tells the story not of Jordan, but of the suits at Nike, Inc. who signed an unlikely deal with the then basketball rookie and designed the iconic sneaker that paved the way for Jordan to become the icon that he is today. It’s corporate propaganda that almost certainly bears no resemblance to the truth and plays into a quintessentially American kind of mythos but it does still make for a pretty entertaining movie.

Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) is a talent scout working for Nike’s basketball division. Nike is performing at a distant third in the basketball shoe market after Converse and Adidas and is considering shutting the sector down altogether unless Sonny find and land a new spokesman who can turn things around. Normally Sonny will meet with marketing director Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman) and discuss which new NBA prospects they reckon they can get with their $250,000 budget after their richer competitors have swept up the best of the bunch, but he has long since checked out and hardly cares enough to try anymore. But then a night of looking through the reels leads to an epiphany. Watching a young man called Michael Jordan, the third pick for this year’s NBA draft, land a career-making shot as if he were practicing in his own backyard, he realises that this kid has got ‘it’. Anybody can see he’s talented, but what Sonny comes to understand here is that Jordan is a star destined to become the greatest that’s ever been. And he’s pretty sure he’s the only one that understands this, which is why he proposes spending their entire budget on enlisting this one guy and betting Nike’s future on him. As part of his gambit, he concocts a plan to build an entire line of sneakers around their would-be mascot, a shoe that those watching today will recognise as perhaps the single most successful and iconic footwear in history.

Jordan himself is never directly depicted. He is played by a stand-in with his face kept out of view and the negotiations for his contract are instead conducted by his mother Deloris (Viola Davis, reportedly handpicked for the role by Jordan himself), the only other person besides Sonny who truly understands her son’s potential and worth. In a pivotal moment when Nike is making their ride-or-die pitch to the Jordan family, Sonny breaks away from the planned presentation to look Jordan in the eye and prophesy the trajectory his career will take. It is here that we see archival footage of the real Jordan during the many highs and lows that have yet to come, confirming that everything Sonny tells him is correct. It seems that by choosing not to directly depict a dramatised character of Jordan, the idea that Air has is to showcase Michael Jordan not as a man but as a myth, one that Nike had a small but crucial part in shaping. The way that the movie treats Jordan, spoken of with reverence and shrouded in mystery, he could almost be a religious figure. And, given the way basketball is prized in the USA, who’s to say that he isn’t? Air is essentially a movie about a bunch of guys who start off thinking that they are the heroes of their own stories, only to realise by the end that they are in fact small parts of someone else’s much larger story. One wonders if Convery and Affleck went through such an arc in making this film.

Though the movie may aspire to such lofty themes however, what Affleck has essentially made is a mostly straightforward picture. The story takes place in 1984 and feels very of that time. As well as checking off about every piece of 80s iconography under the sun, Air is a workplace drama about a bunch of guy who are very good at their jobs pulling off an unlikely feat. Hollywood used to produce movies like this all the time and Affleck seems almost nostalgic for a time when straightforward adult dramas without jedi or superheroes were plentiful. He is smart enough however not to be too nostalgic to the time itself, when free-market Reaganomics went into full swing and paved the way for, well… where we are now, and is socially aware enough to know that rooting for a $1 billion company to land the deal that will turn them into a $100 billion company is pretty silly. There is a nice sense of awareness in the movie’s approach to the tension between creativity and capitalism as it navigates these trappings. One scene has Rob observe how the patriotic Springsteen song he’s been jamming to recently turned out to be a bleak anthem about a blue-collar man being left to rot by his country, leading him to a larger point about exploitation in art and how easy it is to be ignorant about it when you’re caught up in the hype.

This is not an exceptional movie, but it is an interesting one that manages to do a lot with a little. It boasts a uniformly solid ensemble with Damon and Affleck, who plays Nike’s hip Buddhist CEO Phil Knight, making the most of their proven chemistry. Davis is a natural fit for the movie’s depiction of Deloris, a level-headed pragmatist with a cool demeanour, a nose for corporate bullshit, and a committed desire to do right by her son and safeguard his future, while Chris Messina steals scenes as Jordan’s obnoxious, foul-mouthed agent. The movie doesn’t have anything radical to say (the idea of Amazon releasing a film about a working man getting paid what he’s worth is already rich enough), but it holds together well enough and is perfectly watchable. It’s corporate propaganda, but it’s also quite an engaging story about a gambler who made the biggest play of his life not out of greed or recklessness but because he believed in something greater than himself. The movie does not depict Nike itself as being great but rather as a witness in the presence of greatness. A minor character is Peter Moore (Matthew Maher), the designer who actually created the first Air Jordan sneaker. He’s essentially just a cog in the machine, but he puts everything into making the perfect shoe and the result of his labour is a legend that outlived him, just as it will outlive everybody else involved.

★★★

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Cast: (voiced by) Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Day, Jack Black, Keegan-Michael Key, Seth Rogen, Fred Armisen

Directors: Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic

Writer: Matthew Fogel

Mario is maybe the biggest video game franchise in the world, which is why despite the lack of any substantial story or characterisation it was the natural choice for Hollywood’s first stab at a video game adaptation. The result was 1993’s Super Mario Bros., a movie that did not resemble its source material in the slightest. Now, this is not a cardinal sin in my book; faithfulness to the source does not equal quality and a movie needs some room to experiment and innovate if it wishes to offer viewers something that they won’t get just from playing Super Mario 64. In this instance however, the resulting film was total garbage and for years served as a cautionary tale of just how bad a video game adaptation could be. Though there are some who have reclaimed it recently as a cult classic, I feel like this is more a reaction to the homogeneity and blind faithfulness of movies today than it is to the merits of that particular title. The experience certainly had an effect on Nintendo, who have been highly protective of their properties ever since. But now that the IP-driven pop culture zeitgeist has reached a point where a Mario movie stands to make a billion dollars in box-office revenue, Nintendo has taken the plunge again by aligning themselves with probably the safest choice of partner possible, the animation studio Illumination.

Illumination, the studio behind Despicable Me, The Secret Life of Pets, and Sing, is in the business of making lowest common denominator movies aimed at four-year-olds. Their movies are loud and shiny and, in an age where the biggest blockbusters have embraced the PG-13 model, they are among the few big names in Hollywood who are actually trying to create a space for little kids in modern cinema. There’s a reason why Minions made a billion dollars. And that’s all well and good, I want to see more movies that wish to inspire a love for cinema in young children. I just wish that Illumination made better movies that could offer more to their easily impressed audience than a momentary distraction. I want to see the Minions performing hijinks composed with Chaplinesque inventiveness and wit rather hitting the same monotonous beats ad infinitum. I want to see adaptations of Dr. Seuss that treat children as playfully and intelligently as his books do. As a bare minimum, I’d like to see a Super Mario Bros. movie that tells an actual story. Yes, the children going with their parents to see this movie aren’t expecting much more than a bunch of cartoon characters that they recognise from the games leaping onto platforms, driving go-karts, and repeating catchphrases like “Wahoo” and “Mamma Mia”, but you can do all that and still make a good movie.

There is a plot to The Super Mario Bros. Movie, a somewhat functional one, but that’s not the same as saying it has a story. The plot concerns Mario and Luigi, two Italian-American brothers in Brooklyn trying to get their new plumbing business off the ground, and leads them to a portal in a large green pipe that transports them to a magical realm. The two are separated on their course however and wind up at different destinations. Luigi ends up in the Dark Lands, the domain of the tyrannical Koopa king Bowser, while Mario lands in the Mushroom Kingdom, where the helpful Toad leads him to the palace where he might seek the aid of Princess Peach. The Mushroom Kingdom is in turmoil right now as Bowser has just acquired a Super Star that shall grant him unlimited power and is threatening to use it in a destructive campaign for conquest unless Peach should agree to marry him. The best hope for Mario and Peach is to venture to the Jungle Kingdom and appeal to their king for his assistance. Before they can go however, Mario needs to learn how to use the powers granted by these magic mushrooms (Illumination mercifully restrains themselves from the obvious joke lying on a silver platter) so that he might become the hero he needs to be to save his brother.

So that’s the plot, but what of the story? Is this a story about everyman heroism as shown in Mario’s growth as a character? If so, then Mario, as the movie’s protagonist, needs an arc. He needs to start from a point where he falls below the heroic ideal so that he might learn what it really is to be a hero and overcome the personal weaknesses and limitations holding him back. This is basic kid’s stuff, so that kind of arc would work great for a kid’s movie. Though the movie does indeed follow the trajectory for this arc, it only does so in superficial terms. There are beats where Mario starts to doubt himself but then is inspired to pick himself up and keep going by some reminder of what he’s fighting for, but they are not spurred by some lesson he is made to learn or met with a change in his behaviour. He is the same guy at the end that he was at the start, he’s just learnt how to jump really well and pack a punch. Luigi has something close to an arc where he’s shown to be a scaredy cat but then comes through in the end at the moment when it matters most, but he gets sidelined for most of the movie and then when his moment does come it is not prompted by any sort of emotional beat that would make the change feel impactful.

This is why the movie feels as empty as it does, because it is only an illusion of a story. It is granted no easy task to build a narrative around a video game that is so famously light on story and character, but that’s why you have to put the work in. Just because the film is for little kids doesn’t mean it can be done without effort. It’s also the reason why fidelity to the source material can be such an Achilles’ heel. A great deal of clear effort went into recreating the aesthetics of the video games as faithfully as possible, and indeed the look is absolutely spot on (Illumination has never wanted for bright and polished CGI renders). But you can appreciate those same aesthetics in the games themselves. What does The Super Mario Bros. Movie offer that you could only get from watching it as a movie? Chris Pratt? He did a good enough job in The LEGO Movie I suppose, but that was a film that actually gave him some character-driven material to work with. This movie doesn’t know what to do with him or the rest of its ensemble of A-list screen actors because the movie only values them as famous voices for their mascots. Jack Black does alright and has a couple of funny moments, but even an actress as great as Anya Taylor-Joy comes across as stiff and uninterested simply because the material and direction is not there (and also because she and most of the principal cast are not trained voice actors).

The Super Mario Bros. Movie is probably better described as a ninety-minute commercial than it is as a movie. Is it an effective advertisement for the brand? Sure, but that doesn’t make it a good movie. There are few things about it that are outright bad, and at just an hour and a half it stays shy of overstaying its welcome, but it isn’t good, and it isn’t good specifically because it doesn’t care enough to be good. The LEGO Movie is a good point of comparison. That too was a movie that existed to sell toys, but it did so by using that toy as the basis for an entertaining and compelling story that encapsulated what people love about that toy, and did it really well. It was a corporate product made with love (yes, I know, you can go ahead and roll your eyes). The Super Mario Bros. Movie is nothing more than a corporate product, one that does no justice to whatever love and passion surely went into its making. It has few interesting ideas, it dare not take any chances, and it has nothing to say except that Nintendo is great. Will the four-year-olds in the audience care? Not on your life. But is this movie one that will stay with them years from now when they become parents who want to share their childhood favourites with their own kids? Maybe, if they have bad taste in movies.

★★

Godland

Cast: Elliott Crosset Hove, Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson

Director: Hlynur Pálmason

Writer: Hlynur Pálmason

We as human beings are not equipped to deal with chaos and chance. This comes down to how our brains are wired. We instinctually look for patterns and seek order in the world because that is easier for us to process than a world that functions on random fortuity. It is this human inclination that gives rise to superstition and religion. The idea that there is a design to the world and that we can exert some control over it by making an appeal to a higher authority appeals to our monkey brains’ desire for harmony and predictability. But while there are laws to the universe governed by what we now call physics, they are not subject to human foibles no matter how hard we try to impose our will. Thus much of our history is about humans trying to shape and control a world that is not only beyond our influence, but indifferent to it. This conflict between faith and nature is at the heart of what Godland, an ironic title that appears on screen in both Icelandic and Danish, is about. This is a film about a dogmatic, God-fearing people who succumb to something that we could call madness as they struggle to reconcile their blind faith with the sheer, severe majesty of the untameable world that their God has created.

Specifically the film is about the journey undertaken by Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove), a 19th century Danish priest who has been tasked with travelling to a settlement in Iceland to set up a new parish. At this point in history Iceland is a colony under Danish control, but the two nations are worlds apart. The weather is harsh, the land is unforgiving, and even the people have been hardened by the bitter landscape. It will be up to Lucas to adapt if he wishes to make a success of his congregation, a tall order for one as stoic and stringent as he. Upon arrival to the island Lucas is to be escorted to the settlement by the rougher and more weathered Ragnar (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson) and the expedition that makes up the first half of this picture depicts Lucas’ futile attempts to impose order on a landscape that refuses to bend. When a river they must cross proves too turbulent for safe passage, Lucas demands that the effort be made anyway so that they may not be delayed. When he realises that the journey is one that must be made on horseback, he struggles to rein in the steed handed to him. And when he stops to take photographs along the way, the method demands a stillness that is abnormal to nature. His rigidity clashes with Ragnar’s pliancy and gives way to a quiet enmity between the two.

The film is a fiction that was inspired by a series of wet-plate photographs that were taken in Iceland and Pálmason goes to length to emulate this early style of photography in his visual approach. The Icelandic scenery is similarly captured here in the boxlike 4:3 aspect ratio with a static frame that somehow manages to capture such breathtaking depictions of nature’s uncontainable beauty within the confines of Pálmason’s precise compositions. There are extended shots, some of them at 360° rotations, that are masterclasses in using slow pans to gradually reveal information or to watch subtle changes in effect. The details are often so minute, like a tiny fly creeping over Lucas’ brow or the pitter-patter of the first drops of a rainy day, and work so harmoniously with the use of lighting and colours that one wonders whether the crew succeeded where Lucas failed and attained total mastery over the natural elements of the land where filming took place. Still images are also used to reveal information in the edit, like the cuts between the progressively decaying carcass of an animal to signal the extended passage of time, as well as the priest’s deteriorating faith and spirit. One of the constants of nature is that it is both unchangeable and yet ever changing and the level to which Godland is able to capture this phenomenon really does feel miraculous.

The second half of the picture has Lucas trying to establish himself and settle down in the village where the church is to be built. There is a quiet intensity to Hove’s performance in this stretch as Lucas undergoes a transformation brought about by his crisis of faith and the bleak landscape he comes to detest so much. Pálmason, who is native to Iceland but spent ten years of his adulthood living in Denmark, employs a bilingual approach so as to reinforce Lucas’ sense of alienation. He is mistrustful of the Icelanders and finds that the language does not come so naturally to him. When his translator and tutor dies en route to their new home, he abandons his efforts to learn and becomes resentful of those such as Ragnar who are unable to adequately communicate with him in their second-language Danish. Where Lucas starts off as a shrinking character, he becomes simultaneously more tenacious and impatient to the point that he can best his rugged opponent in a wrestling bout. As tensions increase, the sense that the cold war between Lucas and Ragnar could meet violent ends becomes more and more likely, though the film is still delicate enough in its approach that no conclusion feels telegraphed or preordained. When a moment of brutality does occur, it feels as shocking to us as it would to those caught in the moment.

There is a mythical quality to Godland, a powerful sense of a landscape that shall always endure even as cultures collide and people die. Constant yet ever-changing, the question of where humanity fits in shall always remain an open one, and thus it is with Lucas who only finds futility and folly in his search for God. There is profound beauty as well in all of Iceland’s natural splendour and Lucas’ concerns are as petty in the face of them as they are to the icy ridges and torrential rivers that are so inhospitable. From the sublimity of the film’s photography to the fully lived-in performances delivered by Hove and Sigurðsson to the intertwining of divinity and naturalism that makes for such a visceral dialogue, this is a fine picture indeed and a confirmation of Pálmason as a formidable Nordic talent working at the height of his abilities. The brilliant resplendence and tactile textures of the scenery, the finely-honed character dynamics, the haunting ambience, this is a film that engulfs the viewer from the first frame to the last, never letting its spell break for a single second of the two-plus-hour runtime. It ends with a choir singing of the consecrated godland where Lucas’ journey started, his native Denmark, over images of the desolate godland where it ended, Pálmason’s native Iceland, and we are left with a powerful sense of symmetry. All that lives is born from the Earth, and all that dies shall be returned to it.

★★★★★

Tetris

Cast: Taron Egerton, Nikita Yefremov, Sofia Lebedeva, Anthony Boyle, Roger Allam, Toby Jones

Director: Jon S. Baird

Writer: Noah Pink

How the hell do you tell a story about falling blocks? That was the question that entered my mind when I heard that a movie based on the game Tetris was in the works. I figured that we were in for a Battleship or Pixels type of deal. But then the studio clarified that the movie would in fact be about the real-life story behind the innovative and influential game that took the world by storm in the 80s. So does that mean the resulting film would have us follow the inventor of the game, a Russian programmer desperately trying to arrange all the variable pieces in his life as they fall past him at increasing speeds? Nope, the main character of this tale is Henk Rogers, the dutch video game designer who flew to Moscow to secure the right to licence the game for distribution on handheld devices so that Tetris might be the launching game for Nintendo’s upcoming Game Boy. So in fact, Tetris is a legal drama about contract negotiation and copyright infringement. Imagine if The Social Network had been made with the energetic style of a movie like Catch Me If You Can or Ocean’s Eleven, and you have Tetris. If you read the Wikipedia article, you’ll find that it is a genuinely astonishing story that demonstrates just how much stranger truth can be than fiction. You’ll also get about as much out of it as you would watching this movie.

So the story is that the game Tetris was designed by Russian programmer Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Yefremov) and became immensely popular in the USSR. The worldwide rights held by his employer ELORG (remember that under Soviet Communism Pajitnov has no claim to ownership) were handed to Mirrorsoft, owned by British media tycoon Robert Maxwell (Roger Allam), by way of Hungarian businessman Robert Stein (Toby Jones). And so this is how Henk (Taron Egerton) came to discover Tetris at the 1988 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. He becomes enamoured with the game and, understanding fully well what a gamechanger it is, he wastes no time jumping onboard the train, buying the rights to the game’s distribution in Japan. He meets with Nintendo to negotiate a partnership, but word is beginning to spread and they discover that their rivals at Sega have already secured the arcade rights. But when Henk learns that Nintendo is soon to launch a brand new handheld device called the Game Boy, he realises that they could get ahead of the competition by securing the exclusive worldwide handheld rights to the game and making Tetris the platform’s launching title. He resolves to do this by flying straight to the USSR and meeting directly with ELORG, ignoring all warnings of the dangers posed.

It is here that things start to get complicated. It turns out that Stein and Mirrorsoft have taken liberties with the contract they negotiated with ELORG and that the licensing rights they purport to claim are still up for grabs. This sets off scenes of cross-negotiations as Stein and Maxwell’s son Kevin (Anthony Boyle) each set off on their own similar missions to secure a deal. The Soviets play the mayhem to their advantage, literally marching from room to room to acquire information, negotiate terms, play the competitors against each other. But they are at cross-purposes; there are some within the bureaucracy who would work out a deal to their own advantage rather than the state’s (in its waning days at this point in history) and the only party who stands to gain nothing from any deal is the man responsible for the game’s very creation, Alexey. This wringing and wrangling over terms, figures, and definitions is the most compelling part of the movie, in no small part thanks to Egerton’s magnetic performance as a go-getting businessman who refuses to take ‘no’ for an answer. But Tetris fancies itself as something of a Bridge of Spies thriller with an upbeat tempo and thus sees fit to spruce things up with fictionalised intrigues and thrills.

Tetris has a very similar problem to the one that holds Argo (a much better film) back from greatness: it is a movie that works right until it doesn’t. In the case of the Ben Affleck film, he was able to construct this legitimately captivating political spy thriller that was gripping right until the point when it devolved into a Hollywood action movie with an implausible chase scene that detracted from the tension Affleck had so expertly built up to then. The same happens in Tetris and while no movie is obliged to tell its story truthfully or to refrain from exercising its creative licence, the climax is just ludicrous. The problem isn’t that the car chase we see very obviously didn’t happen, but that the idea of it is so implausible it cheapens what preceded it by association. The way Tetris is constructed, it is so easy to tell which details are based on fact and which were invented that it screams of insecurity, like Pink and Baird had so little faith in the story they wanted to tell they felt compelled to Hollywoodise it. It tells the audience that the creative forces did not trust them enough to engage with the story on its own merits and decided on these cheap thrills and gimmicks so as to retain their fickle interest.

Now, some flourishes do work rather nicely. The movie gets the 80s look down to a tee with its neon lighting, glam rock needle drops, and employment of 8-bit graphics at points of introduction and transition. Egerton carries you through and his scenes with Yefremov are particularly good, with Pajitnov begrudgingly taking a liking to the foreign entrepreneur who at least seems sincere in his desire to make sure that the programmer gets his due. The antagonists of the film (British and Russian alike) are a tad cartoony, but perhaps that might have worked in a movie that was willing to play looser with its story and style. Tetris instead shoots for a middle ground that does not complement the story it wishes to tell. Its more grounded elements are undermined by the more fantastical elements, which do not work for their own part because the style isn’t inventive or audacious enough. What makes Tetris such a great game is its elegance and simplicity; a child can understand how to play it, but it is just as mentally fulfilling for adults. The movie could have afforded to follow the game’s lead; it is convoluted and confused about what it wants to be and the pieces are just not falling into place. Kudos on using the game’s iconic music as the basis for the orchestral score though.

★★★

Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

Cast: Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, Hugh Grant

Directors: Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley

Writers: Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Michael Gilio

So I played a bit of Dungeons & Dragons as a teenager and in university and then I really got into the game during lockdown when virtual gaming provided a means of socialising with my friends. I am the forever gamemaster of my group, which means that I am always by default the one who organises and runs the game for the players because nobody else in my circle has the time, energy, or will to do it. Which is fortunate because I love being the gamemaster. And what I love about this game is that, at its best, it is a game founded on sincerity, affection, and stupidity. When I get together for a session with my friends, I never know what’s going to happen. As the gamemaster I can set out a plan, I can define the objectives, and I can establish the parameters, but the players will always find some angle or throw a curveball that I never expected and what follows from the improvisations that ensue will be culmination of our collected imagination. My embrace of the game has fallen in accordance with a surge in its popularity starting from around 2015, when the 5th edition of the rules was released. Shows like Critical Role and Stranger Things helped make the game part of the same nerdy renaissance we’ve seen with Marvel, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones, and so a Dungeons & Dragons movie was only ever a matter of time.

What fundamentally makes Honour Among Thieves work as an adaptation of a beloved role-playing game is that every second of it feels like it was concocted by a group of good friends in one evening over pizza and beer. To understand what I really mean by this, take a look at the movie’s approach to comedy. We live in a post-Joss-Whedon world where, amongst his many crimes, the Buffy and Firefly creator has inspired so much modern sci-fi and fantasy to favour a style of dialogue characterised by irony and quips. So many of our current blockbusters eschew sincerity; they have been trained to act above their own material and to constantly save face from their own absurdities by pointing out just how absurd they find themselves to be with a smug, eye-rolling, “Well, that happened” sort of detachment. Honour Among Thieves does not do this. A game like Dungeons & Dragons calls for a certain level of vulnerability, you have to be able to perform and play along with your friends without feeling embarrassed, and the humour that emerges from that kind of rapport is far more earnest. And that is what Goldstein, Daley, and Gilio have been able to translate to the screen. This is a story set in a world that embraces its own strangeness and it takes itself seriously enough to not care that others may not take it as seriously.

Encapsulating that spirit is Edgin (Chris Pine), a jovial bard who used to be an agent of the Harpers, a faction dedicated to protecting innocents from the forces of evil, but left the life of heroism and turned to thievery after his wife was murdered by his enemies. With his sister-in-arms Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), an exiled barbarian, he has travelled the realms in search of easy pickings so as to provide for his daughter Kira (Chloe Coleman). Along the way they picked up other wayward companions such as the mediocre sorcerer Simon (Justice Smith) and silver-tongued rogue Forge (Hugh Grant), but when a major heist goes wrong, Edgin and Holga end up in prison and Kira is taken away from her father’s custody and led to believe that he has abandoned her. Edgin and Holga escape from prison and set out to rescue Kira, but to do so they must overcome the magical obstacles that stand before them and uncover the plot being hatched by the evil Red Wizards of Thay. And so our heroes set off on an epic quest, joined along the way by the likes of insurgent druid Doric (Sophia Lillis) and stoic paladin Xenk (Regé-Jean Page), to search for lost artefacts, uncover hidden secrets, and make battle with dark forces. And along the way, they shall indeed explore some dungeons and encounter some dragons.

As Edgin, Pine continues to demonstrate why he is the greatest of the Hollywood Chrises. As handsome and charismatic as any leading man working today, I’m not sure there are any who are as willing to be the butt of the joke as he is. There is many a star whose egos would simply not permit them to accept a role such as Edgin (remember that some, such as Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham, even have clauses in their contracts stipulating that their characters may never lose a fight or take too much of a beating). The man is not a hero in any traditional sense. He does not wield a sword, but a lute. He isn’t intelligent or courageous or noble-hearted, he is a petty thief. And he isn’t even very good at it; half the time his schemes go completely awry and all his cons have amounted to is a sad life of abject failure. But it’s the life that he continues to lead because there’s nothing else he can do. Another of Pine’s virtues is that he is genuinely a very good actor and so even in a movie as silly as this you can still feel the weight o the guilt, loss, and wretchedness that he carries. It’s hard to imagine the movie working as well as it does with anybody else in the lead.

When Edgin sets off on this journey with his compatriots, it is one that initially threatens to be the kind of generic, digressive fetch quest that prioritises plot over story, but instead it finds that story in how the characters treat their endeavour. The plot is constantly having to change direction because plans keep going wrong and the adventurers keep having to think on their feet, and not only does this prove fodder for laughs rooted both in character and in the world, it also allows for a kind of storytelling where every incidental detail feels purposeful. This is a story rooted in failure, and the character growth we see comes from then learning how to accept their failures, how to turn them into victories, and how to find it within themselves to be more than their failures. And that is the stuff that Dungeons & Dragons is really made of. It is a collaborative storytelling game in which the structure is as loose as it could possibly be, but the humour, the relationships, and the victories are real, and that is the spirit that the movie seeks to capture. It plays things loosely, but it all still feels organic. It isn’t a movie that wishes to be defined by a single cohesive tone or emotion, but by a whole range of them that it jumps between at its pleasure.

The effects could be better (imagine how much more alive this world would be with some Jim Henson’s Creature Shop muppets playing these creatures!) and the movie is a touch too long, but it is so much fun to watch that you hardly care. Goldstein and Daley are able hands at comedy and the humour they use is not just there to punch up the dialogue, it is embedded in the action and suspense throughout. When the characters are searching for information no longer within living memory, they make use of a charm they possess that allows them to pose five questions to a corpse. So they go about this, but then screw up the interrogation and have to dig up another corpse to question instead. Then they start to get the hang of it, but then struggle to find the corpse that actually has the information they want. Not only is this funny, it makes the viewer more invested in learning the crucial bit of information that will allow them to move forward. It’s all in the details. Just look at Jarnathan, a clear throwaway character with a name that a gamemaster pulled out of their arse once upon a time because they never expected the players to latch onto him. These are the details that add up to make the story something special and Honour Among Thieves is a movie that just gets it.

★★★★

God’s Creatures

Cast: Emily Watson, Paul Mescal, Aisling Franciosi, Declan Conlon, Toni O’Rourke, Marion O’Dwyer, Brendan McCormack, Lalor Roddy

Directors: Saela Davis, Anna Rose Holmer

Writer: Shane Crowley

“We’re all God’s creatures in the dark” says a character in a pivotal scene, and essentially the film that derives its title from that quote is about trying to determine what that really means. To say that we are all of us God’s creatures, is it to say that whatever our sins we are all God’s children and therefore all still capable of salvation, or is it perhaps more to say that all of God’s creatures, from the saintly to the evil, are his creations and therefore are condemned to be whomever he’s ordained us to be. For a community as remote and religious as the rural Irish village in this film, there may not be a question more important. The line speaks to that which is both holy and ungodly, saying everything and yet nothing in its ambiguity. If the characters so choose, they may see it as either be an absolution or a prophecy. Or perhaps those words mean nothing at all, maybe there is no God and thus we are nothing more than mere creatures in the dark. But in God’s Creatures, it is the idea that this community believes in a higher authority and an intentional shape to the universe that lends the story its power.

In the wake of a solemn tragedy, estranged golden child Brian (Paul Mescal) returns to his hometown after several years away in Australia. The reason why he left is the first place is never made clear, nor is the reason for his sudden return. He shows up without warning and announces his intention to take over his grandfather’s oyster farm. His mother Aileen (Emily Watson) is caught off-guard, but then receives him warmly and supports his choice of vocation. His father Con (Declan Conlon) and sister Erin (Toni O’Rourke) are colder with their welcome, and we start to get this sense that whatever unspoken tensions or hidden grudges are being kept bottled up, Brian has very much always been his mother’s son. With his grandfather Paddy (Lalor Roddy) in a vegetative state however, it would definitely do for someone to step in and resume the trade. The unspoken tensions also extend to local lass Sarah (Aisling Franciosi), and old flame of Brian’s and a co-worker of Aileen’s at the seafood plant that is the centre of business for this island town. When an allegation is raised against Brian for a heinous crime, Aileen is put on the spot and must decide in that moment whether to stand by her son and trust in his better nature or to face up to what her gut tells her is the truth.

Watson is one of those actresses who very rarely gets her due, at least cinematically. She is a mainstay on British TV and consistently delivers top work, but since first making her name is Breaking the Waves the movies have tended to favour in supporting roles as the token wife or mother, all the while delivering more than the material grants her. Her role in God’s Creatures is one of the rare occasions where the film rises to meet her on her level. Indeed, much of the power behind this performance comes from the awareness that this is a kind of role that so often gets sidelined in these kinds of stories. Here, she is the focal character. The overarching tension lies not on whether or not Brian is guilty, but whether or not Aileen believes he is guilty and what that means in her duty to him as a mother, her duty to her community as a respected figure, and her duty to herself as a moral, devout human being. She is fond of Sarah and deeply sympathetic to the clear plight that she is going through, and as she instinctually rushes to her son’s defence she finds that she is in fact betraying herself as much as she is the poor girl. Watson plays all this without having to make a show of it; she is a natural performer and is at her best in the quieter moments when she is looking, listening, and thinking.

The film is not interested in preaching morals that most viewers will already be inclined to agree with, but there’s a strong awareness all the same of how these kinds of stories tend to play out in the real world. Not only is our patriarchal society one that is disinclined to believe women when they speak out as victims and survivors of assault and abuse, but there are specific archetypes of womanhood who are looked upon more favourably than others. Aileen is a communal figure, she is a grandmother, she is quiet and submissive, so if she says that her son was home with her on the night in question nobody is going think twice about her credibility. Sarah is younger and prettier, she recently broke it off with her hothead prick of a boyfriend, and she and Brian used to be an item. But the point isn’t to make demonstrative assertions about the state of things for women in light of the #MeToo movement, the point is to have Aileen look inwardly and confront her own feeling of guilt, responsibility, and treachery. Even so, the film is guilty of placing its heart too clearly on its sleeve; the script’s greatest weakness is that feelings and ideas that could have been spoken as subtext are instead stated plainly and the case in question is, if anything, too clear-cut for Aileen’s feelings to be clouded and conflicted in uncertainty.

Directed by Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer in their joint sophomore feature, the film favours a toned-down style that allows the actors to step forward and let their efforts take centre stage. Mescal was fresh off his TV BAFTA win for Normal People when he joined the production and it was a smart move on their part. As Brian he is able to employ that nice rugged lad persona that the series had cultivated for him in a more insidious, manipulative form that makes it all the more understandable why his mother would be so quick to leap to his defence. Franciosi, best known for The Nightingale, has been a reliable presence in Irish media since The Fall and is on similarly top form here in conveying the brutalisation her character has been subjected to without the need for direct, overt depictions. She is the subject of a particularly effective prolonged shot that speaks more about her trauma and resolve than words ever could. With the cold-coloured cinematography and a quietly foreboding score that evokes the mood of distant thunder supporting them, Davis and Holmer are able to construct a taut thriller with a pronounced sense of place to it. What’s more, they are also able to provide Watson with a showcase worthy of her talents.

★★★★

Infinity Pool

Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Mia Goth, Cleopatra Coleman

Director: Brandon Cronenberg

Writer: Brandon Cronenberg

Plato, writing in the voice of Thrasymachus, once stated that “justice is the advantage of the stronger”. In other words justice serves those who wield power and wealth over those who do not because it is they who are in the position to determine the law and bend it to their will just as it is they who can afford to transgress the law when it suits them. So if the penalty for breaking the law is a fine, for example, then the law effectively only applies to the poor. The extent to which the world today has been built to serve the interests of the upper classes at the expense of all others has reached such unprecedented levels that it has inspired an emerging movement of ‘Eat the Rich’ cinema. Recent films like Parasite, Triangle of Sadness, and The Menu have set out to explore and satirise the privileges that have enabled such economic inequality and Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool is a new addition to the conversation. With his previous movie Possessor, the Canadian filmmaker already demonstrated a proclivity for social and political themes in his work as illustrated through a lens of body-horror of a similar vein to his father’s work. His latest film uses the language of perversity and grotesquerie to explore the extent to which the ultra-wealthy can buy their out of the consequences of their actions.

As husband and wife James (Alexander Skarsgård) and Em (Cleopatra Coleman) arrive in the fictional Li Tolqa (the movie was shot in Croatia) for their holiday, the camera eerily tilts on its axis as if they are entering an upside down world where the rules don’t apply. There they attract the attention of fellow vacationers Gabi (Mia Goth) and Alban (Jalil Lespert). Gabi recognises James from the novel he wrote six years prior and is keen to make his acquaintance. James, who hasn’t written anything since and lives at the beck and call of his inherently rich wife, is flattered by the beautiful Gabi’s attention and wishes to savour her company for as long as he can. Gabi and Alban tempt their new friends to join them for a picnic outside the guarded boundaries of their luxury resort, and on the way back a drunk and tired James runs over a local farmer, killing him instantly. So James is promptly arrested and interrogated by the no-nonsense Detective Thresh (Thomas Kretschmann), who informs the hapless author that he is to be sentenced to death for his crime. There is a loophole however that he is privileged enough to be made privy to. For a substantial fee the government can create a perfect clone of James and let it be executed in his place. His only punishment then will be to watch himself be killed, which he does with morbid fascination.

It turns out that Gabi and Alban are well familiar with custom and invite James to join their circle of rich friends who have been through similar experiences. Secure in the knowledge of this get-out-of-jail-free card at their disposal, this group indulges in a hedonistic hobby of debauchery and vandalism. Here the film veers away from its plot-determined structure into more avant-garde territory. Scenes of riotous revelry are depicted with psychedelic sounds and imagery as James finds himself becoming consumed and overwhelmed with the high of death defiance and uninhibited depravity. Though Skarsgård is very good at both playing and subverting the archetypical masculine ideal (as he did so very well in The Northman), he is just as good at playing mediocrities. As an untalented writer who married rich to a woman who constantly flaunts her higher status over him, James as a character has been beaten down within an inch of his life by insecurity and emasculation, making him more susceptible to the gratification promised by Gabi than Em, who is horrified by the side of her husband that this ordeal has awoken. Skarsgård plays this throughline to haunting effect; no matter how unhinged or animalistic he allows James to become, there remains an ever present awareness of where his uncurbed impulses are coming from. But that lingering thread to his humanity also means that those same insecurities are present still, and so tensions arise as he is pushed to greater extremities.

The film does start to lose itself at a certain point. The kaleidoscopic depictions of drug-fuelled orgies and sickening crimes that occur are visually mesmerising, but they do get a little repetitive and the spectacle of it all curtails some of the character development that would allow James’ arc to feel less rushed. Goth certainly livens things up with a no holds barred performance that outdoes even her deranged turn in Pearl. Where Gabi seems at first demure, there is a darker side of her that comes out when things really kick into gear and Goth, an utterly bewitching performer, rises to the occasion with aplomb. But even so the latter half of the film is never quite as overwhelming or as captivating for the viewer as it is for the hedonists. Yet the vulgarity on display is still compelling in how perversely it conveys the idea of these wealthy ghouls as spoilt children indulging in the worst kinds of excesses that only money can buy. The horror is in how wilfully ready they are to forsake all pretensions of morality and empathy as soon as the consequences are given a price that they can more than afford to pay ad infinitum. The movie doesn’t always hit the mark, but the efforts of the cast ensure that it never strays too far away.

The conceit itself is inspired. By making a pastime out of paying to watch themselves be killed in grisly fashion, the privileged and affluent white people that makes up this circle of vice also get to indulge in a fantasy of self-hatred. Whatever feeling of guilt or shame they might feel for their stations in life, it is exercised in this ritual of allowing themselves to die and be reborn. And this allows for an emotional compartmentalisation that enables them to return to their normal lives as if nothing ever happened. All apart from James anyway. Perhaps it’s because he wasn’t born into this wealth and thus retains a shred of humanity from his earlier days as a struggling writer, but he doesn’t find it as easy to shrug off the kinds of crimes he and his peers are capable of committing from the comfortable vantage of their privilege. Not that the film is very sympathetic to him mind, it is fully aware of just how pathetic a man he really is that this is at all a morally conflicting issue for him. When Gabi and the others start hazing James so that they might push him well over the edge, it isn’t the harms they’ve caused that provokes his outrage, it’s Gabi reading out a scathing review of his stupid book. Infinity Pool was made with both contempt and humour and, if not quite as strong as Cronenberg’s previous title, it is still a worthy follow up for such an interesting filmmaker on the rise.

★★★★

The Five Devils

Cast: Adèle Exarchopoulos, Sally Dramé, Swala Emati, Moustapha Mbengue, Daphné Patakia

Director: Léa Mysius

Writers: Léa Mysius, Paul Guilhaume

They say that smell is the best trigger for memory, that a single scent can evoke clearer and more emotional memories for us than either words or photographs. It’s something to do with how our brains are wired; the part of the brain that processes a given odour is the same that processes emotions and memories, and so they often go hand-in-hand. This can be such a powerful experience that a smell we associate with a positive memory can quite literally improve our physical and mental well-being. Because film is a visual medium however, it isn’t an association that naturally lends itself to cinematic storytelling. The Five Devils, Mysius sophomore follow up to her Cannes hit Ava, is intrigued by the concept all the same and constructs a narrative that ties scent and memory together in a story about aging, yearning, and loss. It carries the idea into the realm of dark fantasy, where there is a hint of witchcraft at work in the sensory exploration of the past. Because smell can have the converse effect as well, it can trigger repressed traumas and buried secrets that some would sooner forget and bring them forth in destructive ways. And as befits such a potent experience, Mysius and co-writer/cinematographer Guilhaume illustrate it all with such striking, powerful use of colours, shadows, and textures that the memories feel tangible even to us.

The explorer of these memories is nine-year-old Vicky (Sally Dramé). She is the daughter of lifeguard Joanne (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and firefighter Jimmy (Moustapha Mbengue) and enjoys a routine of joining her mother at the pool where she works and then following her to the lake. There Joanne will have Vicky slather her with a grease that helps with heat retention and then time her for the twenty minutes that she can safely swim in the seven degree lake. On one of these occasions, Joanne learns of Vicky’s uncanny sense of smell, so potent that she can pick up little details like a coffee stain on one page of a notebook and detect her mother while blindfolded from twenty feet away. It’s a curious discovery to be sure, but not one that Joanne really has time to deal with at the moment. Her sister-in-law Julia (Swala Emati) has just turned up after a decade of incarceration and is to stay with them for a little while. There is a clear tension that Vicky detects, not just between her aunt and parents but with others who’ve heard about Julia’s return, and it is rooted in a fraught history that none of them wish to talk about. While going through Julia’s things, Vicky suffers a fainting spell and awakens to find herself witnessing events from before she was even born, events that it turns out she can influence and can affect her in return as we see the two parallel narratives advance simultaneously.

There is a remarkable confidence to the vision behind The Five Devils that is evident from the very first shot, where we see a younger Joanne dressed as a gymnast watching a fire right in front of her. She looks back with an expression of anguish, her beauty contrasted with the destruction surrounding her just as the glittering sparkles on her outfit contrast with the ominous darkness of the night and the scorching reds of the flames. It is a bold image with which to start the film, so audacious that you can scarcely believe this is only Mysius’ second time behind the camera. It sets the template for the style that shall define the picture to follow. The lake where Joanne goes swimming after work is beautiful and serene, but there is something threatening as well about those cold, harsh blues. With a score punctuated by intense pulses, like the heavy beating of a heart under duress, we’re conditioned by the film to constantly be on edge, however tranquil things may seem. The game of contrasts plays into the needle drops as well, with Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’, a song that uses the contrasting images of light and dark to sing of an eternal romance that wasn’t to be, becoming symbolic of the doomed love story at the centre of all the tension and conflict.

Though, compelling as the story is, there are instances where it falters. For example, there are subplots that feel so tangential, such as the racist bullying that Vicky suffers from the kids at school and a bout of infidelity between two characters that comes almost out of nowhere, that they should either have been developed further or cut out completely. The film also wants for some sort of emotional catharsis at the end of it all. There is an idea of love being conveyed here as something irrational and uncontrollable, ineffable even (not unlike the Bonnie Tyler song), a force so powerful so as to be cataclysmic in nature. But that accordingly denies the characters a sense of personal desire and agency that would allow for a more character-driven arc. This could be curtailed by a deeper focus on Vicky, on her perspective and stake in everything, but therein lies the film’s greatest limitation. Her time travelling ability is never lent greater weight than that of a plot device, one that was conceived to justify this story being told in this way rather than to explore something deeper behind it all. Crucially, there is a scene missing, one that would have Vicky speak directly with the character who actually becomes aware of her in the past. The film hints at such an exchange taking place, but plays it far too cryptically and suffers for it.

Still, the sparks are undeniable. This is a lush and beguiling picture and its only real fault is that it didn’t go far enough. Exarchopoulos in particular is intoxicating playing a force of nature trying so hard to contain her most ardent drives. But the real star might be Dramé, a remarkable discovery who, even with the limited scope of her character, delivers such a charged and expressive performance that one would never guess this was her first time in front of the camera. And even if there is some unrealised potential in her approach, there is no doubting Mysius’ proficiency in the director’s chair. Her visualisation of the material sings in the way that filmmakers with several decades more experience never manage to attain in their whole careers. This is a richly illustrated and wonderfully performed picture that she has assembled, one that feels unique its unconventional approach to the fantasy of it all, and it speaks of a promising talent in European cinema. For those with the taste for it (this is not a film for everyone as many will doubtless lack the patience for its lesser qualities and the threads that don’t quite come together as fully as they could have), the dimensions of Mysius’ vision is truly something to behold.

★★★★