24FPS @ Raindance: Where's Rose?

Dir: John Mathis

After 8-year-old Rose (Skyler Elyse Philpot) goes missing, she is quickly found. Once she comes home though, it seems that only her brother Eric (Ty Simpkins) can see that she is not the same little girl who disappeared from her bed just hours before.

Where’s Rose? doesn’t suffer from a lack of ideas. Combining domestic horror with shades of possession movies and folk horror elements, it’s covering a lot of bases in an 83 minute running time. John Mathis’ screenplay clearly sets its cards on the table from the start: Eric is the golden boy; handsome, off to college on a full athletic scholarship, close to his family, but things start to run off the rails as he becomes convinced that his sister is no longer what she appears. However, we see cracks in this perfect facade even before Rose goes missing, notably from the self-confidence audiobook he has on his headphones, and the frosty atmosphere between him and the girl next door, Jessica (Anneliese Judge).

These broad hints, and the film’s rather unambiguous approach to Rose’s changed character, are a good indication of the issues with the film. Mathis tips his hand too much, letting us be ahead of the film at every turn. When one particular revelatory sequence comes, it feels almost purposeless, because the story elements have already been tied together with the one image that leads into it. This undermines a lot of the film’s impact, which is unfortunate because otherwise there is plenty here to admire.

The performances are strong all round, with former child actor Simpkins making a strong argument for himself as a leading man going forward. His compassionate big brother character credibly develops into something more complex and nuanced, always holding something back. Skyler Elyse Philpot has some cliché things to play as the film leans into the beats of the possessed child movie. That said, she grounds Rose as a sweet, fantasy-prone, little girl early on, and is heartbreaking when we find what lies behind that fantasy. Anneliese Judge has less to do, and her role being so small means that just about every moment she’s on screen has to clue us in to some backstory (through implication rather than exposition). She gives us huge amounts of resonant character detail with just body language and the occasional line. The fact she ends up letting us know rather too much is down to how her character is used, and a testament to rather than a problem with her performance.

On a surely limited budget, Mathis sometimes makes the semi-rural setting seem almost idyllic to grow up in. However, the woods around the houses also feel menacing and oppressive as they come inside via prints on many of the fabrics in Eric and Rose’s parents’ home. He also gets some excellent practical effects in the film’s last sequence.

It’s frustrating that Where’s Rose? doesn’t quite come together. The ingredients are all there, and the ending will probably stick with you. If only it weren’t one you got to quite a while before the film does.

★★★

Where's Rose? is available on Curzon Home Cinema until Midnight on November 4th

24FPS @ Raindance: Youth V Gov

Dir: Christi Cooper

Even with COP26 happening right now, it doesn’t seem that enough focus is being put on the man made climate change that is already befalling our planet, and which all indications say is about to get catastrophically worse. Christi Cooper’s documentary takes a look at group of 21 young people in the US who have elected to try and do something radical about it, by suing the US government to claim that their action in supporting the fossil fuel industry, while knowing the effects it is having on the climate, infringes their right to life, liberty and property.

The film’s greatest asset is these young people, aged between 11 and 22 at the outset of the case. All of them are informed, charismatic advocates for the case. We see this both in events surrounding the various court dates during the case, and in some frankly ridiculous footage from depositions, where opposing lawyers badger them with questions that should be reserved for climate experts. We also get to see some of the details of how climate change is affecting the plaintiffs right now, from extended wildfire seasons threatening farmland, to hurricanes and floods all but destroying homes. In their downtime, we see how these young people become close, their bond among themselves and with their lead counsel seeming to strengthen their resolve when the case gets challenging.

As a film, Youth V Gov is resolutely standard in form, cutting between observed footage of trial prep, talking heads stuff be it with the kids or with experts, and laying out the history of the US government's knowledge of, and action to exacerbate, climate change. It’s informative, but the history aspect is rather dry in its presentation. Spending time with the plaintiffs is often engaging, but that gets repetitive, as do the arguments the film is making, important as they are. Cooper hammers home the point over and over again, which has the peculiar effect of making more than a few sequences feel like a pre-credits summing up. This is perhaps the influence of the case on the film; as much as the lawyers want to make their case in court, Youth V Gov ends up serving as that case in miniature, and there are several closing arguments made.

Juliana Vs United States has the potential to be a massively important case as well as (as we see during the credits) an inspiring one, but Youth V Gov gives it rather standard issue treatment.

★★★

Youth V Gov is available on Curzon Home Cinema until midnight on November 1st

24FPS @ Raindance: Pause [2018]

Dir: Tonia Mishiali

Over the past few years, there has been a lot of coverage of coercive control relationships and marriages, with the behaviour finally being recognised as the form of abuse that it is. With Pause, her first feature, Tonia Mishali takes a stark look at Elpida (Stella Fyrogeni), a woman in her early 50s whose husband Costas (Andreas Vasileiou), while he goes out to work, controls just about every aspect of her life. 

Mishiali begins by laying out the mundane reality of Elpida’s life. She sometimes looks after her friend’s baby granddaughter, but otherwise passes the days alone in her flat, cleaning and cooking. Repeated shots of her and her husband at the table, only ever speaking for functional reasons, and of them each watching their own TVs (Elpida’s an old CRT that she’s forced to use headphones to watch) hammer home the lack of any affection in the home. We also see that the purse strings are entirely held by Costas, who doles out small amounts day by for groceries. When Elpida asks for money for a haircut, he refuses (“Your hair is fine as it is”).

Elpida’s few escapes from this reality are closed down as the film goes on; Costas taking more and more from her, and Elpida escapes into brief fantasies. In an interesting choice from Mishiali, these moments of fantasy are never cued for us, and as we see more of them even the exits from the fantasy sequences aren’t clear, so while it’s obvious when a handsome young neighbour turns and kisses Elpida in the hallway that it’s not real, a later encounter with a man painting the apartment building is more ambiguous.

The depiction of coercive control feels very real, disturbingly so, and Stella Fyrogeni (also seen in the festival in a supporting role in Patchwork) is outstanding as she plays both Elpida’s near total detachment and her fleeting moments of hope—real or fantasised. While the screenplay has a few clunky moments throughout (the painter’s “Bye bye, Hope” to Elpida is painfully on the nose), there is one moment towards the end of the film that feels very out of place and wildly out of character for Elpida. It’s as if Mishiali decided that she needed one real shock sequence in the film, which is otherwise concerned with the way that implied threat can control someone’s life. It doesn’t work in the moment, but worse than that, for me it unravels some of the good work from before, because that’s the moment it’s building to.

Much of Pause is a hauntingly close up and credible portrait of an abusive relationship, it may stumble badly at its last hurdle, but Stella Fyrogeni’s performance is worth the running time by itself.
★★★

Pause screens at 6:20 on October 31st at the Curzon Hoxton, and online at Curzon Home Cinema from November 1st-3rd

24FPS @ Raindance: Patchwork

Dir: Petros Charalambous

As one of the leads in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth and Alps, Angeliki Papoulia was one of the faces of the so-called Greek Weird Wave of cinema in the late 00’s and early 2010s. She followed Lanthimos into his English language debut, The Lobster, but otherwise has remained in the Greek (and here the Cypriot) film industry.

Papoulia plays Chara, a housewife in her 40s with a dull but comfortable job, a nice husband (Andreas C. Tselepos), and a six-year-old daughter. Outwardly, her life looks close to ideal, but Chara is depressed, worried she is a bad mother. Things get shaken up when Melina (Joy Rieger), the teenage daughter of a new colleague, asks to do work experience with Chara and the older woman begins to see herself as a surrogate mother.

Patchwork rests pretty much entirely on Angeliki Papoulia’s performance, and in that respect, it’s a great success. Much of the work she has to do here is about things that are, for a long time, unspoken to the other characters—the doubts she has about having another child with her husband, her fractured relationship with her mother, and the way this plays into how she sees Melina. Papoulia is excellent at all this, indicating these elements to the audience while Chara is visibly trying to hide them from those around her. She gets to the meanings beneath the film’s often on-the-nose dialogue: long before she explains it to Melina, we can see in how she treats the younger woman that what she’s really doing when giving her advice is essentially talking to herself at Melina’s age.

This is the weakness of the screenplay; as much as Papoulia is able to make them play, scenes later in the film often simply explain out loud everything we’ve been reading perfectly well from her performance. Melina isn’t written with quite the same depth, but Joy Reiger (though visibly older than her character), manages to give some life to her beyond the stereotype of an alienated 16-year-old. Melina’s interest in patchwork quilting gives the film its title, but there’s also a sense here that the title Patchwork is meant to be about the way people stitch their adult lives together; the parts don’t always match perfectly, and she doesn’t always like the way that some of them feel, but Chara pulls those pieces together into some kind of whole. That’s where the film is at its best, and Papoulia’s performance, as is so often the case, makes it worth seeing all by itself. 

★★★½

Patchwork screens at 3:10 on October 31st at the Genesis Cinema, and online at Curzon Home Cinema from November 1st-3rd

24FPS @ Raindance: Shadow

Dir: Bruno Gascon

In March 1998, 11-year-old Rui Pedro Teixeira Mendonça disappeared from close to his home in Lousada, Portugal. Later that year, his picture was identified when an international child porn ring known as the Wonderland Club was shut down by Police in an operation that spanned 13 countries. He has never been found. 

Shadow changes a few names, but otherwise sticks close to the facts of the case, following Ana Moreira as Isabel, after her 11-year-old son Pedro goes missing and Police botch the initial investigation the film tracks both the devastating psychological effect on Isabel and her efforts to keep the case alive and find her son.

Shadow is largely a performance piece. The cast that surround her, including Miguel Borges as her husband and Tomás Alves as the man she believes holds the key to what happened to Pedro, are effective, but this is  Ana Moreira’s show. There is little in the way of grandstanding in her performance, instead we see the impact of Pedro’s absence reflected in her body. The film unfolds in chapters: 1998, 2004, 2011 and 2013. Across the first three we watch as Isabel slowly shrinks before our eyes; an already slender woman becoming anorexic and sunken as if the stress of Pedro’s absence and simply of not knowing is eating her from the inside. The dialogue can be a little blunt (at least based on the subtitles), but Moreira’s physical performance always cuts to the core of the emotion of her scenes.

Much of the film looks like a typical Netflix true-crime story: it communicates the story well enough, but Gascon doesn’t find many images that stand alone. The exception, and the film’s most interesting purely visual thread, is in the use of yellow. The portrait used on Pedro’s missing poster has him in a yellow short, and for almost the entire film, Isabel is either wearing or carrying something yellow. Most of the time it is her shirt, but when she travels to meet another mother of a missing child, it is her suitcase. When Gascon, at Isabel’s low point, strips yellow out of the frame it feels like a final signal that Isabel has, at least in the moment, truly lost hope. Interestingly, this isn’t noted in the dialogue, so it’s only late in the film that it feels entirely intentional on Isabel’s part, but the emotional impact of the choice is there throughout.

The problem with the film is that nothing that surrounds Isabel is particularly well developed. To a degree that’s because she tunnel visions just about everything else in her life away, but there’s a lack of much sense of the impact of that on her husband and especially on her daughter. The final chapter focuses on a court case that, important as it is to Isabel, never gives us a feel for the stakes of its outcome, nor the specific charges it is over and which is much more formulaic than the rest of the film. It’s a weak note to end the film on. 

Of course, the problem that Gascon has is that there really isn’t an ending here. Nobody knows what happened to the real Rui Pedro, he was declared dead in 2019, but that’s an assumption, and the film never quite finds a way to deal with that beyond just stopping and dedicating itself to him and his family. The ending here ought to be lingering and haunting, instead, it just feels rather hollow. This is a tragic case, and Ana Moreira’s performance impressively articulates the impact of it on Pedro’s mother, but the rest of the film doesn’t land with quite the same impact.

★★★

Shadow screens at the Raindance Film Festival on October 30th at Curzon Hoxton and online on October 31st. Tickets are available here.