I watched Les chambres rouges. It was quite good, and sneaky in an audience-respecting way. That’s hard to pull off, being a bit devious but not insulting to your viewers. Warning: spoilers will follow if you read beyond this point.

The film manages this rare feat in two ways. First, it casts an exceptionally beautiful lead, even by Hollywood standards¹. Most people equate beauty with goodness, kindness and even intelligence so that is tier one of the film’s strategy to deceive you. It usually bothers me when someone one out of a million attractive is the star, but in this case it works. The second bit of the film’s approach to throwing your judgement off balance is having another person who is obviously delusional for the putative protag, Kelly-Anne, to play against. It unites the viewer with Kelly-Anne against someone who is obviously a bit nuts and who is not composed, not that intelligent, and who is not emotionally stable. Only later do you realize that Clem is little more than Kelly-Anne’s pet that she is toying with for amusement.

Clementine is a perfect contrast to Kelly-Anne, who is more tightly-wound, far more intelligent, but is also the kind of crazy that Clem’s more mundane tendency to believe the best of even clearly-demented people cannot even begin to touch. The movie does an excellent job of seeing the world mostly through Kelly-Anne’s eyes, and any time a film manages that you start to empathize with the viewpoint even if the person whose eyes you’re seeing through is not really worthy of that.

Kelly-Anne is not violent. Or at least that is not shown. But she is certainly a psychopath of some type. She enjoys watching snuff films and spends over a million dollars to obtain one. That it is used the solve the case is only incidental to her goals. Her real motive in purchasing the killer’s “lost” footage was the thrill of being able to view it and then to use it to inflict psychological torture on the parents of one of the murdered girls.

(And note that this isn’t a horror movie. There is never any violence shown and you only hear some screams and a saw or something at one point in the background, but never see any violent acts. This is a psychological thriller. A very dark one.)

And kudos to the movie to having one of the most intensely fucked up scenes in film history that involved no violence, no gore, no blood, and barely any movement at all. And that’s when (again, spoilers!) Kelly-Anne reveals by removing her overcoat in the courtroom that she has dressed up like one of the murdered girls in an effort to connect with the killer and to further antagonize the family. When she puts in the blue contacts and applies those fake braces…dang.

I recommend the film. It’s one of those that gets better the more you think about it.

1. Yes, I know this is not a Hollywood film. But Hollywood sets the standard for all film, in a sense.

I watched The Monkey earlier.

Good grief, what the fuck was that? Did they try to make a French surrealist film in American horror movie form? Consistent tone? Consistent anything? Who needs that? It was like a Twilight Zone episode blended with Evil Dead II combined with Top Secret.

I have no idea what to make of that film. It made me laugh a few times. It made me cringe a few. I have not the first clue what the filmmakers were trying to achieve there. It feels like a story told around a campfire except by someone mildly drunk, but you never see the fire nor the raconteur.

All I can say about it is that I don’t feel like it was a waste of time to watch it, but I also can’t really recommend it to anyone else. Its rating is “what in the hell.”

Wow, Companion is much better than I expected! Good film. A dark comedy take on what the world would look like if tech like in Ex Machina were to be commercialized.

Best line:

“I am not robo-shaming you!”

Spoilers below.

Such a clever, clever film. There’s a cute part in the beginning. If you go in cold you don’t know the protag, Iris, is a machine. Of course, she does not know either. When the two main characters are exiting their self-driving car, she says “thank you” to the car and won’t let them get out of the vehicle until her human partner does the same thing. This implies that she somehow intuits that she shares more with the car than she consciously knows. Great little detail.

Second favorite line that one of the robots says of his implanted, artificial memories in a more serious moment: “I mean, it may have never happened but my memory of it’s real.”

The movie is actually a better and more incisive critique of “nice guys” and the incel phenomenon than any feminist has managed to come up with. Sophie Thatcher as Iris is perfect, too. Without her, the film would’ve been not nearly as good. The scene where she realizes she’s artificial is particularly affecting.

Recommended.

I watched the Soderbergh film Presence in the theater earlier today.

It was a good film, but it will be polarizing. If you do not like Soderbergh’s quieter, more introspective works, you probably also will not like this one as it is indeed very Soderberghian.

The performances make the film. The plot is thin, but then that is intentional. The viewpoint is the point in a sense. It is not a horror film, really, but an examination of pointless misogynistic evil and how it reverberates through time.

It also had one of the most uncomfortable scenes I’ve experienced in a movie in a long while. I know this will sound bad, but there’s a part that you’re thinking will be “only” sexual assault — then it moves to something else altogether and you wish it’d go back to the other thing.

Callina Liang both grounds and elevates the film with unexpected depth. The rest of the cast is really good as well.

Recommended.

We watched My Summer of Love earlier. Like most movies about girls/women, it’s underrated on IMDB. It’s a beautifully-shot study of the summer love affair of two girls-verging-on-women in the Midlands of the UK. The first one we meet is a lower-class, rough-around-the-edges dreamer who yearns for a better time in her life, often without quite being able to express it.

The other girl is from a posh family and seems to be sincerely looking for companionship and the solidity of a real connection after a recent tragedy has left her grieving.

But this is a deeper and more compelling work than the surface would indicate, and quite a bit darker. I’ll not say more to avoid spoilers as it’s best watching unaware. With great performances by both Emily Blunt and Natalie Press, the film never goes for the easy cliché, either in its shots or its narrative, and never is less than true to its characters and their motivations; the film moves how they would move.

Recommended.

Both Cailee Spaeny and Kirsten Dunst were very good in Civil War, but the movie itself was meh. It didn’t know what it wanted to say or to be; it committed to nothing. There is a lot of noise and Sturm und Drang but it just has no thesis. At the same time, it’s not observant nor perspicacious enough to be a slice of life (or of death) film, either.

It just was not a good film despite the combat portions being pretty well-done. I wish it had been attempting to say something, anything, to have some history or future or meaning. Not every movie needs that, of course. But this one did.

Not recommended, unless you’re a particular fan of Cailee or Kirsten or both.

The First Omen was not that good. Kind of meandering and predictable. However, the cinematography was nice.

(That’s a shot of Margaret and her roommate getting ready to hit the town. Our girl Maggie¹ is trepidatious about going out in a dress she feels is too revealing, while her roommate applies some peer pressure for her to woman up.)

In addition to just having a great name, Nell Tiger Free is very good in the film, as are Bill Nighy and Ralph Ineson. But you spend most of your time with Nell so she is the reason to watch if you like good acting. Otherwise, skip.

1. No one actually calls her this in the film.

The Skeleton Key (2005) is such a good movie.

That is a truly solid, underrated film. It’s just a tight little gem. Nothing belabored and nothing wasted. It helped I knew little about it going in so had no expectations. Recommended.