Spider-Man: No Way Home [12]

Dir: Jon Watts 

There have been many tries at adapting Spider-Man to the screen. Most have strengths, but all have their weaknesses. Sam Raimi’s films got Peter entirely right, with Tobey Maguire perfectly cast, but Spider-Man’s wisecracking wit got left behind somewhat. While Kirsten Dunst was good, the screenplays sanded off Mary Jane’s edges, and often leaned into cheese. The second of Raimi’s trilogy remains a hugely entertaining blockbuster, but even that one suffers from the wider problems of its franchise. I hate the Amazing Spider-Man films. Andrew Garfield clearly earnestly wanted to do the character justice, but only a couple of scenes throughout his tenure capture the character properly, and the problems are legion (reviews here and here). 

The Marvel Cinematic Universe initially couldn’t use Spider-Man but, with rights issues negotiated, he finally showed up, in the form of Tom Holland, for Captain America: Civil War, before the MCU embarked on what has become the Home trilogy of films. Like the other franchises centering on the character, it’s had its ups and downs. The first film, Homecoming, confirms what Civil War suggested: Tom Holland is a great choice, and this time not just as Peter Parker. For the first time, that film consistently nails down the persona of Peter’s Spider-Man; a witty kid who has a quip ready for every occasion. We get the sense here that the Spider-Man costume empowers him to that end, drawing a better-defined distinction between Peter in and out of costume than ever before. However, it’s not entirely a Spider-Man film. Far too much time is spent in service of the larger MCU, especially of featuring Iron Man. The film is at its best when Peter is doing his ‘friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man’ thing, and particularly when he’s in his own costume. The suit that Tony Stark made for him undermines Peter’s trademark intellect and ingenuity by, first of all, having to be something he got from another brilliant scientist, and secondly by doing too much for him. The sequel, Far From Home, doubles down on these problems while also stripping out much of Spidey’s wit. The use of Mysterio’s illusions is fantastic in a couple of late action scenes, but otherwise, it’s a weak film. 

That brings us to No Way Home. The marketing had me worried, the reliance on Dr Strange, the use of the Multiverse, which suggested nothing so much as a desperate attempt to make a live action version of Into The Spiderverse (still, hands down, the greatest Spider-Man film). Happily, this is easily the best of the MCU’s Spider-Man series, and probably one of the best films to feature the character. 

No Way Home picks up directly after the ending of Far From Home. Peter’s secret identity has been revealed to the world by J. Jonah Jameson (JK Simmons, reprising the role from the Raimi series, only this time as an Alex Jones style ranting commentator). This has major repercussions, as Spider-Man is thought by many to have murdered Mysterio, and the effects reverberate onto Peter’s friend Ned (Jacob Batalon), his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya), and his aunt May (Marisa Tomei). Most consequentially, the controversy means that Peter, Ned and MJ are all rejected from what should have been almost sure thing places at MIT. Wanting to set things right, Peter goes to Dr Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to ask him to cast a spell that will make people forget that he is Spider-Man. In his haste, he makes Strange change the spell so many times as it is in progress that it goes wrong, creating a crack in the multiverse that lets in anyone who knows, in any universe, that Peter is Spider-Man. 

I’m sorry for that long introduction, but it was important to set the pieces here, because that crack in the Multiverse pulls in many of the villains from the earlier Spider-Man franchises. No Way Home is soaked in Spider-Man lore, both from the earlier films and from the comics (often drawing the earlier versions of the characters much closer to their source material). There is no way to cover this without spoilers, so if you’ve not seen the film yet, beware. 

The first 40 minutes of No Way Home are MCU Spider-Man as we’ve come to expect, in both good and bad ways. I struggled with the point of Ned in the first film in the trilogy. The writers struggled with the point of him in the second, saddling him with a romance so prosaic they wrote it out at the end of the film. Here though, the dynamic between Peter, Ned and MJ feels much more balanced. They’re not well established as a trio in the first two films, but this film depicts them as much closer. It’s a little clumsy, but well played. There’s a sense that an offscreen friendship is bleeding into the film, and we do get a little invested in them all going to college together. The consequences of Peter’s identity being discovered could have been heavier (perhaps an alternate version would have leaned into a certain cameo and given us a trial of Spider-Man narrative), but what does weigh on Peter feels authentically life-altering for a teenager. I buy into the idea of Peter, used to fixing things with superpowers, looking first for that kind of solution. As ever, the points at which the film has to service the expansion of the MCU are its weakest. Worse, you can barely tell a difference in tone between the writing of Dr Strange (or many other characters) and Peter, when it comes to wisecracking, which is a perennial problem for the series. Overall, the first act is fine, but nothing new. 

The bridge scene is when things kick into gear, with the appearance of Alfred Molina’s Dr. Octopus. Molina positively relishes the part, and Jon Watts stages an imaginative action scene, with the fact that Doc Ock’s tentacles are now fully CG giving them somewhat greater freedom. It’s also a well-written scene when it comes to Peter’s character; he’s curious about why this man has suddenly appeared and attacked him, but it also incorporates some of Spidey’s humour, especially in his delight when he discovers how the nanotech of the Iron Spider suit interacts with the tentacles. It’s a tremendously entertaining sequence that combines all the best qualities of Spider-Man. 

Bringing the old villains in one by one allows Watts and writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers the chance to do a soft reboot on them, fixing some issues that fans had with the original cinematic incarnations. Jamie Foxx still plays Electro, but he’s no longer the Edward Nygma knockoff of Amazing Spider-Man 2; his powers have given him a swagger that Foxx is much more comfortable with, while a late change in look gives hints of the original comic character’s lightning bolt mask, without going for the full silliness of that look. Similarly, the Green Goblin of the Raimi films is retconned a little. Willem Dafoe continues to play him with the same glee he had in 2002, but the Power Ranger mask is smashed early on, and Norman takes on a look much closer to the classic John Romita design, purple cowl intact. For someone who has always loved the character, it’s a near perfect mix of something credible within its world and preserving the comic book look. 

What works best about the film though is that while the fanservice is present and correct, it’s not what the film is about. With great power, every Spidey series tells us, comes great responsibility, and even before that phrase has been uttered in this continuity, that’s what this film has Peter embracing. It’s also worth noting that the twist on how that maxim is delivered here works well. It hit me emotionally, both because of an affection for the characters its between and how it pays indirect tribute to the way it’s usually shown. The villains Peter encounters may have been teleported in from other dimensions, but he feels a responsibility to them and to the other people in those dimensions not to simply kill these people, but to cure them: to send them back as the decent people they once were. It’s a great encapsulation of the main lesson of Spider-Man and just one of the ways that this—finally—is an MCU movie about Spidey himself. Dr Strange may facilitate the mechanics of the plot here, but this isn’t about Peter’s relationship to him, or his place in The Avengers the way the other films in this series are. This is a film about finally becoming the hero that his powers make it possible to be, whatever the consequences. It’s also a film about connection: to friends who are essentially family, to a parent like May and, of course, to the only people Peter knows who share his experience. 

Even though Andrew Garfield denied it repeatedly, it was always clear that he and Tobey Maguire would be reprising their roles, playing alternate Peter Parkers (Peters Parker?) What was a pleasing surprise to me was how substantial their roles are in terms of screentime and what they contribute. If the reclaiming of the old characters and the moving of them closer to the established lore is largely subtext, one scene with Garfield makes it supertext. In a pep talk the others comfort Garfield’s Parker as he does himself down—clearly a reference to the Amazing series' critical and fan reception. Garfield is great here, it seems that this is everything he ever wanted his Peter to be, and there are some lovely moments as he relates to older and younger versions of ‘himself’. His excitement at being along for this ride is both palpable and contagious. No, it doesn’t mean the  Amazing series is suddenly good. Maguire seems a little less sure about being back, but that works for his older and more reflective Peter. It makes me wonder if he’s still doing the superhero thing in his part of the multiverse. The reference to his MJ is sweet, but I do wish we’d seen Kirsten Dunst reprise her role. 

Pulling three Spideys and something close to a full Sinister Six together for the final action sequence does mean the film’s ending is busy, but it’s also pretty exciting and surprisingly easy to follow. Watts and team break the sequence into a series of mini setpieces, and the costumes and styles are distinctive enough that it doesn’t get lost which Spider-Man we’re following at any given time. The theme of responsibility, and of the cost Peter was trying to avoid, comes full circle with the ending (which also has one image that nods poignantly to the ending of Raimi’s first film). It’s here that I really felt the point of spending so much time with Ned in the two previous films. While Homecoming was a teen movie, the ending makes this one feel like a true coming of age story for Holland’s Peter. There’s an innocence the character used to have that we’ll likely never see again. 

No Way Home has many of the flaws familiar in MCU films. Ultimately it’s just as anonymous looking as any of them, and I don’t doubt that any of the Marvel directors could have delivered much the same movie, given the same second units. That said, this was never intended to be auteur cinema. If the MCU delivers films almost as a mechanical process, this one feels like it’s been delivered by a machine that has been tinkered with, retooled to work at its highest potential. It’s the MCU Spider-Man film I’d been hoping for, and while it’s not perfect (and hasn’t a single image as indelible as Spiderverse’s ‘falling upwards’ shot), that feels like as much as I could have asked of it. 

★★★★

Home Sweet Home Alone

Dir: Dan Mazer

I hate to break it to you, but you’re not ten years old anymore. That’s why Home Sweet Home Alone isn’t much cop. I was nine, right in the demographic sweet spot, when the original film came out in 1990. It used to be a holiday perennial for me; a fun bit of seasonal slapstick, but it’s been almost 25 years since I last saw it, and let’s be honest, I’ve aged out of it. So, likely, have you. With that in mind, let's try to come at this ‘reimagining’ with some perspective rather than the cries of “my childhood is being destroyed” that greeted the trailer.

The bones of the story are the same as ever; harried parents (Aisling Bea and Andy Daly) go on holiday, accidentally leaving their 10-year-old son (Jojo Rabbit’s Archie Yates as Max Mercer) at home. While he’s there, two burglars attempt to break in and steal a valuable doll they believe is in the house, and Max has to defend the home.

There is an interesting idea here. Heaven forbid we overanalyse the sixth film in the Home Alone series, but the script electing to centre not so much on Max as on the burglars adds a thin veneer of class commentary. The usual things: Max over-indulging in sweets and doing all the things he can only do when he finds himself home alone (a fairly charming sequence, actually); Max fighting off the burglars with some extremely painful-looking slapstick (a pool ball gun...ouch) are present and correct, but it’s who the thieves are that makes this a bit different.

Ellie Kemper and Rob Delaney play Pam and Jeff McKenzie, they’re not criminals, but a teacher and an unemployed tech support worker, who are having to sell the house they love because they can’t keep up with the mortgage. They discover that an ugly doll they own is worth more than $200,000 but they think Max has stolen it during an open house, hence their attempts to steal it back. This does contrast them with the obviously very financially comfortable Mercers (who have taken their extended family to a posh hotel in Tokyo over Christmas). It’s not exactly a scathing indictment of the inequities of the American economy, but at least some thought has gone into the backstory. Making Pam and Jeff first time criminals, as well as the film’s central figures, is an interesting change of focus and explains why they are so bad at crime. Kemper and Delaney are easily the film’s best asset, with Kemper’s generally friendly persona working nicely in a fun scene with a cameoing actor playing a cop she has to throw off the scent. The two also commit to the bit when it comes to the cartoon violence of the break in, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I chuckled a couple of times.

On the downside, this focus on the burglars leaves Max’s story aneamic. We never really get to know him, beyond the fact he’s a 10-year-old kid, and Yates, who is a bit flat with the dialogue, only gets one short sequence of having fun by himself in the house. The mayhem of the third act is inventive enough, but it’s all over very quickly and the film races towards a treacly ending with quite unbelievable haste. The few sequences in Tokyo offer the usually very funny Aisling Bea very little to do other than fret in an English accent. She and Max’s family are barely in the film more than the one joke members Pam and Jeff’s extended family, and this unbalances things a bit.

On the whole, if you’re coming at this as an eight to ten-year-old, I imagine you’ll have fun. It’s broad and silly, the slapstick is brief, but it works. Fans of the original will never give this the place the movie has in their hearts, but at least there is an interesting idea, and they might even get a laugh or two along with the kids.

★★

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: 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.

24FPS @ LFF: Petite Maman

Dir: Celine Sciamma

“I came from the path behind you”, says 8-year-old Nelly (Josephine Sanz), just after telling her friend Marion (Gabrielle Sanz) that, in the future, Marion will be her mother. Like many of the lines in Celine Sciamma’s exquisite screenplay for her fifth film, it’s layered with meaning; Nelly literally comes from the path behind Marion, from her Grandmother’s house, which she and her parents are clearing out after her death. It’s also a line about how Nelly, and all children to some degree, follows a path cut for her by her mother.

Four of Sciamma’s five directorial films, and the two features she’s written for other directors, fall broadly into coming of age cinema. I’m not sure any modern filmmaker has managed such a consistent, varied and nuanced exploration of the genre. While it hasn’t got the spectacular effects and the high sci-fi concept, the film Petite Maman most recalls for me in spirit is, perhaps surprisingly, Back to the Future. That film, ultimately, is about meeting your own parents and realising that if you had just been a couple of guys at school, you probably wouldn’t have got on with your Dad. Petite Maman takes the same basic concept of meeting your parent at your own age, but in this case, Nelly and Marion become fast friends. While the film doesn’t have her state it in the moment, it’s clear from one subtle shot of a particular, almost talismanic, prop that Nelly figures out quickly what is going on. 

Initially, Nelly and Young Marion are on totally equal footing, there’s an innocence and purity to their play together, spending much of their time in the woods, building a hut that Nelly had asked about earlier in the film. Later, when the relationship is clear, Sciamma uses the carefree feeling of these scenes to contrast with the older, clearly more fragile, Marion (Nina Meurisse), for instance, it doesn’t seem like the silly, playful, way that the girls make pancakes for Marion’s eighth birthday party is something Nelly will have done with the older version of her mother. 

In the present day scenes, there are some beautiful observations of how much Nelly cares for her mother; feeding her crisps and hugging her from the back seat as they drive away from the home where Marion’s mother passed away. It’s something that, while present day Marion clearly loves her daughter, the younger version seems more able to express. There is so much to be said about how delicately and how beautifully Sciamma and her young stars paint this relationship, but perhaps the simplest moments are the most moving, like the image of 8-year-old Marion, blowing out her birthday candles as she looks between her mother and her future daughter. It’s a gorgeous, truly magical, family portrait that sums up the film's magical realism perfectly.

Celine Sciamma is one of the truly great filmmakers working today, and Petite Maman is another gem. Thanks to cinematographer Claire Mathon, who also shot Portrait of a Lady on Fire for Sciamma, this is a beautiful film. The scenes between the young Marion and Nelly have a golden autumn feel, while the scenes back at the present day house emphasise the emptiness, especially after present day Marion takes off, leaving Nelly with her Dad. The dialogue doesn’t always sound like 8-year-olds talking, but some of the most childlike moments are the film’s most indelible, like Nelly wanting to go to sleep “to get to tomorrow”, which leads immediately to one of my favourite cuts in any recent film, carrying that idea through directly.  In 72 minutes, Sciamma manages to convey great depth and nuance, to fully explore this mother/daughter relationship, but do so with disarming simplicity. 

I think I need to see it again (and again) to appreciate all of its layers properly, but this is clearly one of the very best films of 2021 and yet another landmark in Sciamma’s thus far flawless career.

★★★★★

24FPS @ LFF: Playground

Dir: Laura Wandel

For seven and nine-year-old siblings Nora (Maya Vanderbeque) and Abel (Günter Duret), the school playground isn’t the friendliest place. Bigger boys pick on Abel, and the association, as well as their closeness, blows back on both him and Nora, making things worse for both of them.

Playground is perhaps better served by its original title: Une Monde (A World). A child’s world is, in many ways, fundamentally different to that of an adult, and Laura Wandel goes out of her way to create that world and to bring us into it. The camera is always placed at Nora’s height. Adults are often seen as legs and have to bend down into the frame to interact with the children. This immediately places us with the children, having to remember what our perspective was like. 

Visually, Wandel also uses close-ups a lot, making the backgrounds of shots blurry. This, I think, is a neat and effective way to suggest Nora’s development. At seven, she’s just arriving at the stage where she can see beyond herself, but the blurriness suggests there’s still a shallow focus there; she can empathise with her brother, but her reasoning (“You won’t stand up for yourself, so I told Dad”) is still simplistic, and initially, she can’t see how that might have unintended consequences. It’s telling that the adults we see in focus are the ones Nora feels closest to; her Dad, a stay at home parent, and her favourite teacher, through whom the script hits its only bump, perhaps leaning a little too hard on the saintly teacher trope à la Miss Honey.

These interactions with the film’s few adults aside, Playground stays resolutely among its young cast, observing the day-to-day of primary school politics and interaction. The bullying we see doesn’t seem motivated by anything particular, just that the bigger boys sense some kind of weakness they can pick at in Abel, especially when his younger sister—again too naive to read the situation the way her brother can—tries to defend him. It’s even more affecting when, having gone to a teacher, we see Nora sitting in on a meeting as the boys are made to apologise to Abel. The whole scene plays on Maya Vanderbeque’s face, and we can see that Nora now understands that this is only going to make things worse.

The way this all affects Nora and Abel’s relationships with each other and with their own friends is incredibly realistically written, seldom more so than in a heartbreaking series of scenes as Nora tries to get invited to the birthday party of a girl who, until a few weeks ago, was her closest friend at school. This and the way Abel tries to get back in the good graces of the bigger kids by turning into one of them are so well observed by Wandel and her young stars that were it not for the purposeful stylisation of her camerawork you could confuse moments of the film for documentary.

For me, the filmmaker Wandel most recalls here is Nils Malmros, whose brilliant coming of age films are some of the best the genre has ever produced. In particular, this one seems to look to his debut, the autobiographical Lars Ole, 5C, for inspiration. There is little higher praise I can offer than to say that Playground can stand alongside that film and other classics about childhood and growing up. 

This is an outstanding debut. It's structurally excellent, with a beautiful rhyme to its opening and closing shots. More than that, it's also an incredibly articulate film that has a lot to say about children’s experiences at school and, through some of the things we hear them say that must be parroted or misinterpreted from their parents, at home as well. It's too unblinking and too serious to speak to the children it's about, but it feels like it comes from a place of deep understanding for and of them. It's one of the best films of 2021, and marks Wandel out as a huge talent to watch.

★★★★½

24FPS @ LFF: All About My Sisters

Dir: Wang Qiong

Starting in 2015, 22-year-old Wang Qiong picked up her camera and began filming her family, focusing on her younger sister Jin. The story she tells across this nearly three hour canvas is about a family that, with two daughters and despite China’s one child policy desperate for a son, first tried to abort and then gave away Jin to one of her uncles, who raised her as his own. Just over 20 years later, Jin is a young mother herself and has an understandably difficult relationship with her parents (who she calls Auntie and Uncle). Qiong’s camera documents their relationship, as well as digging into a family history of abortion and abandonment.

All About My Sisters is, from the start and frequently throughout, an uncomfortable watch. It begins with Jin asking her sister what the point of telling her story is, but as that story unfolds, whether Jin knows it or not, it becomes clear that the point is not only that it is fascinating a devastatingly emotional from a singular point of view, but that Qiong uses it to unfold a critique of how the one child policy drove many people to act. Perhaps the toughest scene to watch is an interview with Jin and Qiong’s uncle, who was one of the local administrators of the policy, and recalls leaving two babies that he and his wife attempted to abort at 8 months out to die. His regret and remorse are clear, as is the implication that this was a routine part of life at the time, but it remains an horrific moment.

The film hammers home the results of the policy not just in moments like Qiong and her other sister Li’s memory of walking over a bridge to school and seeing the bodies of babies, all female, that had been abandoned to die but in a larger, and still prevalent, preference for male children, both at pregnancy and throughout their lives. What emerges is a picture of a society—or at least a section of society—that views women’s lives as almost purely transactional. There are discussions of how much the groom’s family should pay when Jin gets married, of how much families should gift when a woman gives birth to a male child rather than a female, and more besides. 

Watching Jin’s personal story is no easier. It seems clear that her abandonment has affected her both as a person generally and as a parent specifically (some of the scenes of her scolding her two-year-old son are very difficult to watch). Unsparing as Qiong’s camera is of her sister, it’s also sympathetic. She is consistently the family member noting, especially in a late conversation with their 13-year-old brother Sifan, that the situation isn’t Jin’s fault. Many of the questions she asks their brother seem a bit challenging for someone of his age to process, especially when she asks if he thinks Jin was abandoned so that he could be born; that’s a lot to put on him, but it’s a question that hangs heavy on the film and over that relationship, which despite that seems, for much of the film, the closest Jin has with any of her biological family.

For all the moments that Jin is unsympathetic, the film strives to understand the impact of how she grew up on her. She talks about the time she did spend living with her parents and her sisters as feeling “like I was a cleaner in your home”, and the way she is treated by her parents now seems defined more by financial support (an investment in a shop, which then ties her to them) than by anything emotional. Judgments and words are harsh, though to be fair this is not just towards her, at one point her father tells Sifan “you shouldn’t have been born” after he gets in trouble at school. Again though, everything that Jin’s parents are really invested in about her seems driven by money, little emotion comes through, even on her wedding day. The ending is tinged with both sadness at the fact Jin doesn’t seem to be able to find a way forward with her parents and at least a little hope at where it finds her going, and it would be nice to have an update on how she and her family are doing now.

All of Wang Qiong’s points are worthy and often devastatingly made, but it’s fair to say that all of them are made many, many times over and that by the third hour of the film it’s hard to see that she’s adding much new to the argument she’s making. This is an insightful film, and a promising debut for the young director / producer / cinematographer / editor. Next time, it might benefit her to take on fewer jobs herself, as another voice might have focused the film down a bit more, making its points land all the harder by concentrating them. There is much here that could be tightened, from reducing some of the repetitious nature of the sequences to simply trimming back some incidental shots that don’t add a lot to the narrative or the argument. I can see that there is a point to making this an exhausting watch, but after a while, it does dull the emotional punch. 

★★★

24FPS @ LFF: Les Enfants Terribles

Dir: Ahmet Necdet Cupur

Back in 2015, Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang dramatised life inside a Turkish family where the wishes of the parents for their daughters overrode (or at least attempted to override) just about any agency the girls could have had for themselves. Ahmet Necdet Cupur’s documentary has more than a few things in common with Mustang, with its director going home to capture family life with his parents and younger siblings, chiefly twenty-something Mahmut and teenager Zeynep.

Mahmut and Zeynep are each constantly at odds with their parents for different reasons. Mahmut wants to leave his arranged marriage to 17-year-old Nezahat, not because of any fault on either of their parts, he simply doesn’t love her. Zeynep, on the other hand, just wants to further her education, to go to university in the nearest city and to live life on her terms rather than be bound by her parents’ traditions. All this makes for a volatile atmosphere in the house, something we see from the very start when an innocuous joke sends the siblings father into a violent rage. Throughout the film, Ahmet observes in close-up detail, but without seeming to impose himself on what he’s filming. Given that this is his family, that balance must have been challenging to find, but it means that the end result feels fair, if never dispassionate, in how it depicts everyone.

Later sequences demonstrate just how ingrained tradition is in Mahmut and Zeynep’s parents, especially when it comes to seeing women as inferior. In one of the film’s most quietly shocking sequences, Zeynep first debates then more stridently argues with her mother about why she so desperately wants to be educated, trying to get through to her that women have just as much value and should have as much choice of what they do, as men. Frustrated, she finally says “Studies or death, I’ll die if I don’t”, only for her mother to come back with “Death then”. It’s so haunting, so sad, summing up in two words the seeming impossibility of squaring their points of view. The image that closes this scene; Zeynep resting her chin in her hands, looking away as her mother prays, strikes me as the defining one of the film.

Mahumut’s problems have more ramifications for others, chiefly Nezahat, divorced at barely 18. We do see that Mahmut cares about her to some degree, at least expressing concern about her family “giving her to an old man” because she has lost her value. This, as it was in another film at the festival, is a running theme; women being valued as commodities, and there is much discussion of what will have to be paid for Mahmut to go through with the divorce.

As dark as the film can be, chinks of hope come through by the end. “I think a person is like a tree, says Zeynep, so intelligent and expressive throughout the film. You can only hope that she and Mahmut both get to put their roots down where they want to, and grow from there.

★★★★

24FPS @ LFF: See For Me

Dir: Randall Okita

Having recently gone blind, former Olympic skier Sophie (visually impaired actor Skyler Davenport) has found herself taking jobs cat-sitting for wealthy homeowners. On the first night at her latest job, the house is broken in to and Sophie has to make it through the night, with the help of Kelly (Jessica Parker Kennedy), a desk-bound army veteran who sidelines as a helper on an app called See For Me.

To begin with, See For Me plays like a pretty typical home invasion thriller, riffing on the likes of Wait Until Dark and Panic Room. The opening act capably sets out the space, even more vital here because, with Sophie unable to see, we need to understand the geography to appreciate the difficulties she’s going to face because of it. The first half-hour or so also deals with the character introductions, and in that respect, at least with Sophie herself, Adam Yorke, and Tommy Gushue’s screenplay (their first feature) distinguishes itself a little. Sophie is a more complex character than you might first expect, especially in her moral dimensions, and this leads to some pretty surprising twists, and one scene, involving a cop played by Emily Piggford, takes on much greater tension because of it. 

The mix of characters among the three criminals in is pretty typical: the tech guy who doesn’t like violence, the controlled pro, and the loose cannon, and Kelly is also quite loosely established, though her sense of responsibility to Sophie comes through strongly and at least initially there’s some spark in the relationship between her and Sophie, though that is reduced as the film goes on, and she becomes a lot more purely functional as a character. Director Randall Okita does a decent job establishing and exploiting the geography of the location. Best in this respect is a series of shots early in the break-in that use first a wide exterior and then a more claustrophobic interior to show, in single frames, where Sophie and the robbers are in relation to each other.

Unfortunately, the whole film begins to lose its way in the third act. Up until this point, Davenport has given a performance that plays interestingly with our sympathies and challenges us on whether to root for her. The last half-hour, however, ends up letting in the only truly bad performance in the movie. The script piles on too many twists, and eventually loses credibility in story terms and, more damagingly, in terms of what we believe Sophie would be able to do with the level of visual impairment the film says she has. A tacked-on coda suggests something I simply don’t believe, before wrapping up on a twee note that doesn’t really fit the film, dragging it further down just before the credits roll. It’s a pity because there are things to enjoy here, but a solidly tense first hour ends up deflating by the end.

★★½

24FPS @ LFF: Cop Secret

Dir: Hannes Thór Halldórsson

Not all filmmakers have always been in cinema. Some come from visual art, others from criticism, still others from completely different areas, but I have to say, a film directed by the goalkeeper for the Icelandic national football team isn’t something I saw coming. Nor, if I’d thought about it, would I necessarily have expected that film to be a spoof of 80s and 90s buddy cop actioners.

Cop Secret is, in the tradition of the best spoofs, a loving homage to the genre it’s riffing on. You’ve got the rival cops who have to become partners. In this case that’s loose canon Bussi (Auðunn Blöndal) and wealthy former model Hörður (Egill Einarsson). You’ve got the flamboyant villain with the diabolical plan; Björn Hlynur Haraldsson as Rikki and you’ve got supporting players like the boss who communicates almost entirely by shouting. The plot is drawn together from bits and pieces of earlier films, notably Die Hard With a Vengeance and Lethal Weapon, among others. The twist here, aside from the general absurdity, is that Bussi and Hörður are not just partners as cops, drawn together, they end up in a relationship. It’s important to note that, while Bussi has to come to terms with his sexuality, the fact of this relationship is never played for laughs. The film is absolutely sex-positive, embracing the sexuality of its characters without question. This isn’t to say that there isn’t fun to be had with their attraction, especially at the moment in the middle of a gunfight when the two brush hands; the first moment of electricity between them.

The performances are all entertaining, the whole cast going for the tone, but Björn Hlynur Haraldsson has a wonderful time as Rikki. He speaks almost entirely in English, which gives his performance the feel of a slightly low rent direct to video bad guy, offset by the fact his attempts at menacing dialogue become ever more convoluted, to the point that even his henchmen barely know what he’s saying. He also plays on villain clichés. When he threatens one henchman another reminds him that he can’t just start killing people “oh, just this one?”, comes the reply.

The action scenes, despite some terrible CGI, are a lot of fun, especially the kinetic car chase that opens the film (and which has a great gag midway through) and the aforementioned bank shootout. Unfortunately, that comes midway through, and the third act doesn’t quite have anything to match it. The parody may keep the bad guy’s plot from mattering too much, but given that this isn’t quite pitched at Naked Gun levels of silliness, it’s a shame it doesn’t engage a bit more on that level. Still, Cop Secret is a knowingly and mostly winningly ridiculous good time.

★★★½

24FPS @ LFF: Martin and the Magical Forest

Dir: Petr Oukropec

10-year-old Martin (Sebastian Pöthe) is a town kid who is packed off to a forest-based summer camp that he’s less than excited to be going to. Uninterested in joining in with the team games, and constantly complaining, he soon alienates most of the other kids. However, the sprites that live in the forest need some of the items he’s brought with him to cast a spell that might save them from a drilling crew looking for minerals. Martin’s price is their help so his team can win the camp’s series of challenges.

I sometimes worry that we’re not doing enough to grow the next generation of cinephiles, raising them on a limited diet when there is a world of kid’s cinema out there, and the LFF’s family strand is always a good way to throw the net a little wider. This Czech film is squarely pitched at an audience of its main character’s age, but it doesn’t talk down to them in terms of the environmental issues, nor by assuming that it needs fart jokes to keep a young crowd engaged. 

The magical world of the forest is something the film highlights from the very start. We see it in the beauty of the setting, but more to the point in the creatures that appear from the very first time Martin steps foot in the forest. Initially the sprites like him about as much as he does them; pine cones throw themselves onto his head and vines trip him up, but we also see that they have a side that can come to people’s aid, flying Martin back to the campsite when he’s tried to leave or helping him win the various challenges.

 

The methods used to realise the creatures are a little tough to discern. There may be animatronics in use because the sprites are very present within the frame and have a slight staccato effect to their movement, but if they are CGI then it is exemplary work. The creatures are expressive and fun to look at, with several developing personalities. One moment, when a stick Martin has been trying to get an arrow back from gets run over and ‘bleeds’ sap is surprisingly affecting as an image, even though we’ve never seen that creature before. It’s an effective way to teach kids a healthy respect for nature, but it’s never cloying or overly preachy.

Most of the kids other than Martin and Foxie (a winning Josefína Krycnerová), a fairy-tale loving 8-year-old who believes in the sprites but has never seen one, aren’t especially well-defined. The adults fall into two categories: the counselors, only one of whom, who measures chemicals in the local water and talks about being ready for a catastrophic event, is particularly notable and the drillers, personified by a couple in their 30s. On the one hand, it’s refreshing that the drillers aren’t simply shown as monsters who can’t wait to destroy the forest (remember Ferngully’s smoke-belching bulldozers), but on the other hand, they don’t otherwise have a great deal of personality.

The stakes and morals are pretty simple, as is the solution of the ending, but Martin and the Magical Forest should be a fun time for its intended audience, and it’s hard to argue with any of what it's trying to teach them about respect for nature and finding common ground with other kids. For adults, there’s some lovely imagery and the chance to watch something a little different from the usual kids movie fare. It’s slight, but a charming and fun time.

★★★

24FPS @ LFF 2021: Inexorable

Dir: Fabrice Du Welz

Adoration, Fabrice Du Welz’ last film, which played at LFF in 2019, was basically Junior Badlands, with two twelve-year-olds on the run from a mental hospital. It’s still only had a digital release in the UK, and remains something of an underseen gem. If that film had a single obvious influence, then Inexorable is much more of a patchwork, drawing plot points and images from a lot of entries in the yuppies in peril subgenre, among others.

Marcel (Benoît Poelvoorde), his wife Jeanne (Mélanie Doutey), and their young daughter Lucie (Janaina Halloy) have just moved back into the massive estate owned by Jeanne’s family. When a young woman named Gloria (Alba Gaïa Bellugi) brings their daughter’s new dog back after he has run off, and offers to show Lucie how to train him, the family soon offers her a job as a nanny/maid. However, it quickly becomes clear that Gloria is not just a fan of Marcel’s successful novel, Inexorable, but that she may have a fixation on it and him, which begins to manifest in manipulative ways.

Like many of the films it draws on, much of Inexorable unfolds like a home invasion thriller in slow motion. Gloria’s assault on the family is not one of sudden violence, but of nurtured obsession and festering resentment. It’s a mix that Alba Gaïa Bellugi plays effectively. The first moment there is a flicker of a crack in her mask is especially good; it’s a tiny bit of nervousness that passes across her face when she’s asked about a bit of her background, visible enough for it to register for us, but fleeting enough that we buy Marcel and Jeanne failing to recognise it. The performance, driven by the necessity of the screenplay, gets broader throughout, but Bellugi comes up to meet the tone rather than overplaying.

Poelvoorde, Doutey and Halloy are all good too, and a believably imperfect family unit. Poelvoorde’s blocked author (an early drone shot has shades of The Shining as it tracks the car on the way to the dusty stately home they are moving into) is obviously at first intrigued by and perhaps too easy-going with the attractive young woman who is now in his home, but from his lies to cover an indiscretion to his hiding of parts of his life, it becomes clear that he’s largely driven by self-preservation. Doutey has perhaps the least rounded character here, too often she’s written a little overly spiky, and early on there’s a naïveté in the way she takes Gloria in (and especially her reaction to Gloria’s first real manipulation) that never seems especially credible from the rest of her performance, but these too are largely script issues.

Du Welz doesn’t just wear his influences out in the open, from Chabrol to Barbet Schroder and from Hitchcock to (if I didn’t misread a certain point) Park Chan-wook, he displays them proudly. Sometimes, as in a stylish shot of Marcel throwing Gloria out of his (stationary) car, one side bathed in blood-red light, the other in vivid blue, in what one could take for a fleeting giallo homage, it works in his favour. When his plot points bear if not direct then certainly considerable comparison to the likes of La Ceremonie and the criminally underrated The Page Turner, those influences hang heavy on the film. That said, Du Welz and the cast successfully draw out the tension. The single location where the bulk of the film takes place may be expansive, but the lighting and the blocking, particularly as Gloria begins to draw Marcel in, help to shrink that space and eventually make the dynamic between the three adult characters fairly claustrophobic.

Inexorable isn’t a bad film. The issue is more that it’s never as good as the sum of its influences promises. The performances are capable, it’s got some thrills and some tension, but you’ll always know where it's going, and you’ll know because you’ve seen its moves done better before. An engaging homage, then, but not one that can sit alongside the best of its predecessors.

★★★

The Mad Women's Ball [Le Bal Des Folles]

Dir: Mélanie Laurent

Eugénie (Lou de Laâge) is the daughter of a well off family in 19th century France. An independent spirit, she’s sometimes prone to embarrassing her father and brother, but the last straw comes when she begins to believe she hears the voices of the dead. Institutionalised, she slowly convinces head nurse Geneviève (Laurent) that she’s not crazy and is telling the truth.

Over the past decade, and now five films, French actress Mélanie Laurent has quietly built a low-key but high-quality directorial career. Here she reunites with Lou de Laâge, one of the leads from her 2014 film, Breathe and takes the other lead role herself. Laurent surrounds herself with talented collaborators. Emmanuelle Bercot brings experience and authority as a much less empathetic nurse, who runs the isolation cells in the hospital. On the other hand, Lomane de Dietrich makes a big impression in her first feature as Louise; a fellow patient of Eugénie’s who thinks her relationship with one of the junior doctors will be her route out of the asylum. The supporting cast, filling out the background in the asylum, give the place a sense of life; sometimes nightmarish but also often as somewhere that the inmates—many of them not ill at all by today’s standards—find camaraderie. The supporting players don’t have much development, but they give a feeling that there are stories behind each of these faces and why they are in this place, it’s just that we’re following Eugénie’s experience.

The screenplay layers in a feminist point of view, about how a society controlled by men locked women away rather than deal with their problems, real or imagined. It’s not difficult to see contemporary resonance here in how women may not be institutionalised for such prosaic reasons anymore, but are still frequently dismissed as ‘hysterical’ as a way to avoid dealing with what they are saying. It’s also interesting that the story (adapted by Laurent from a novel by Victoria Mas) chooses not to entirely heroise Geneviève by making her awakening about being a moderniser in how they treat the patients as a whole, but because she comes to believe in Eugénie’s contact with the dead when she passes a message from her deceased sister. Where the writing, and the film as a whole, falls down, is in giving the story real force. While it drives the narrative, and in one scene Laurent movingly plays Geneviève’s gratitude at what she believes is contact with her sister, we don’t get a lot of sense of the background of the tragedy. This lack of weight is also present in the other sibling relationship in the film, between Eugénie and her brother Theo (Benjamin Voisin). He appears a couple of times, once to beg Geneviève to give his sister a book, but the sense of the guilt the character presumably feels for being in on the plan to commit his sister or the scheming to save her just isn’t there. Perhaps the best-developed relationship in the film is between Eugénie and Louise, and fittingly Lou de Laâge and Lomane de Dietrich (a name to keep an eye on in the future) give the film’s most complete performances and play off each other very well.

Where Laurent excels here is often in the film’s imagery. Not only does she create a world that feels definitively removed from the outside within the walls of the asylum, but she and DP Nicolas Karakatsanis also capture the different aspects of that world viscerally, from the cold greyness of the ice bath treatments to the strange spectacle of Louise being hypnotised until she has a seizure in front of a group of doctors who stroke their beards, talk around her and ignore her distress. The ball of the title has a feeling that captures a sort of pantomime version of the opulence of the opening scenes with Eugénie and her rich family but has an edge of danger that the scenes between the inmates only otherwise have when the staff; uniformed and stern-faced, come to take one of them for a treatment. Worse than all of this is the featureless dungeon of the isolation cells, which Laurent makes claustrophobic in a way none of the rest of the asylum feels. On top of the well-drawn environment, there are some sharp editing choices here that draw parallels between various different characters and moments. Most effective is a cross-cut of Eugénie and Geneviève each removing their corsets; the patient in her dungeon and the nurse in her bedroom.

The Mad Women’s Ball isn’t so startling a film as Laurent’s last directorial effort, Galveston. There’s nothing here that marks her work out quite so much as that film’s extremely tense third act tracking shot of Ben Foster trying to escape a warehouse. That said, even if bits don’t hit with the impact you might hope for, this is still a fine showcase for Mélanie Laurent the director. She draws excellent performances from her whole cast, herself included, and makes her visuals appropriately alternately rich and dingy, rhyming those choices intelligently in the structure. I wish there was a little more to make us feel these events the way the characters do, but this is still engaging, quality filmmaking.

★★★½

Kate

Dir: Cedric Nicolas-Troyan

Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) has been trained as an assassin since she was a child. During a job in Osaka, she kills a man in front of his teenage daughter. Feeling guilty, she tells her handler, Varrick (Woody Harrelson) that she wants out, but there’s one more job to finish. During that job, Kate is poisoned by the yakuza and, with less than a day to live, goes looking for vengeance.

I like Die Hard 4.0 [aka: Live Free or Die Hard] more than most, sure, it’s barely a Die Hard movie, but I like it on its own merits as a big, stupid action film. Since I first saw it though, I’ve always thought it could have done more with Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s fierce performance as Lucy McClane. Happily, in the past couple of years, Winstead has started to capitalise on the potential I thought she showed as an action star, first in Gemini Man, then as Huntress in Birds of Prey and now as Joan Wick… sorry, Kate.

Kate is a patchwork of old ideas. The story takes classic noir DOA’s premise of a person investigating their own murder and ties it to a revenge actioner, with shades of Leon in the relationship that eventually develops between Kate and the mobster’s niece (Miku Martineau) she kidnaps for blackmail purposes. It’s all extremely obvious and pretty much the entire audience will be able to call the final villain from very early on but, as with so much of the genre, the story is really just a skeleton on which to hang the action.

To his credit, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan (The Huntsman: Winter’s War) delivers a kinetic and colourful film that keeps you on board through sheer momentum, never really giving you time, in the moment at least, to care that the plot is threadbare and that Kate has approximately two traits where you’d hope a character would be. While it’s clearly shot on location, the Tokyo setting is largely set dressing rather than something the film feels particularly embedded in, but that set dressing often looks pretty spectacular, from a geisha house that hosts the film’s first, and probably best, fight to the car that Kate steals which, the second she turns it on, lights up with neon and blasts out Japanese rock band Band Maid’s Blooming (the band also appear, playing a different song, in a concert scene). 

Most of the action is very good, which shouldn’t be a surprise with John Wick 3 and Birds of Prey stunt coordinator Jonathan Eusebio playing the same role here and serving as second unit director. Though Winstead is clearly doing a good amount of her own fighting, and is largely excellent at it, credit should also go to her double, Elisabeth P. Carpenter. The action, for the most part, is dynamic and bloody. The aforementioned geisha house sequence sees Winstead ploughing through an array of yakuza, largely with knives. It feels indebted to John Wick and The Raid, but also, in the way it uses blood splatter, particularly at the end of the sequence, to Japanese action films. The only exception to this trend of good action sequences is a glaring one; a penthouse set fight in which everything appears to have gone wrong. Japanese musician and actor Miyavi cameos in this sequence, and I can only wonder if they simply didn’t have the time to rehearse or do as many takes as were needed with him. Much of the time, this fight feels as though it is moving at three-quarter speed. Throughout, there are shockingly obvious missed and pulled impacts. In the background, there’s equally misguided and poorly shot comic business with Miku Martineau trying to load a gun. It’s a genuinely terrible scene in the middle of a film that otherwise has solid action throughout.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead is, whatever she’s in, one of those actors who makes the film around her better. She digs in here and, despite not having much to play, and the writing never making the relationship between her and Martineau’s often grating Ani convincing, she delivers on the physicality of the role. For most of the film, and increasingly as it goes on, Kate is a wreck. From Winstead we get a performance of a woman trying desperately (and, to be fair, often wildly implausibly), to extend her last gasp. Through it all, Winstead holds the camera with her customary charisma, seldom more so than walking in for the final confrontation; shades on, cigarette dangling from her mouth, backed by a phalanx of machine gun-wielding yakuza. In a way it’s a shame that we know from the beginning that Kate can’t be saved, because Winstead makes enough of an impression that I’d happily watch another film with this character, certainly much more so than the franchise threatened at the end of Kate Beckinsale’s similar, but far worse, Jolt.

So, why not a higher grade? For as fun as it can be, there’s not much to Kate. There’s nothing to really invest in. Ani, the one character we might have an investment in is, unfortunately, written to be an irritant. Equally while the Japanese cast, including Tadanobu Asano and Jun Kunimura, make what they can of the material, there isn't much depth to the villains, or to the depiction of Japanese characters on the whole. That all being the case, and all aspects of the ending being obvious from the off, it’s difficult to get much more out of the action sequences than an occasional ‘that was cool’. While the action is good, it’s not quite of the very top rank. Jonathan Eusebio and his stunt team do some sterling work, but clearly former effects artist Cedric Nicolas-Troyan doesn’t have the same innate understanding of action that John Wick director and former stuntman Chad Stahelski seems to. Overall then, Kate is a fun time, but one that only lingers until the credits run.

★★★

2021 Catch Up: Mortal Kombat and Wrong Turn

Mortal Kombat [2021]

Dir: Simon McQuoid

When I was a kid, there was a series of TV adverts for a wood varnish called Ronseal. They were very simple, saying that the product “Does what it says on the tin”. Mortal Kombat is cinematic Ronseal. I don’t mean that as a bad thing.

The last Mortal Kombat game I played was probably the third; the series’ last 16 Bit venture, and I saw Paul WS Anderson’s 1995 film once, and have never felt the need to revisit it, so I am not at all versed in the lore, but the story here is perfectly accessible to newcomers. MMA fighter Cole Young (Lewis Tan) is at the tail end of his career, but after a fight he’s told by Jax (Mehcad Brooks) that  his dragon shaped birthmark means he has been chosen as one of the champions of Earth for the upcoming Mortal Kombat championship. However, Shang Tsung (Chin Han) has dispatched his fighters—including Sub Zero (Joe Taslim)—to kill as many of Earth’s champions as possible, to win the tournament before it can start.

It is an odd choice, with a game as packed with characters to choose from as this one (the latest edition has 32, discounting some characters from other franchises) to create an entirely new character to act as the audience surrogate. That said, Lewis Tan, like the rest of the actors here, does what he can with fairly basic material. Where character should be, Cole has a wife and daughter (Laura Brent and Matilda Kimber) to protect. This does provide a link to Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada), whose family Sub Zero murders in the prologue, but there’s not much more there than a couple of walking plot devices. The rest of the writing is largely functional, though Kano’s constant f bomb heavy quips, and casual misogyny towards Sonya (Jessica McNamee) get to be wearing pretty quickly. That said, this is Mortal Kombat. I suspect there is a deeper and richer backstory that fans might want to see, but as a casual viewer, I’m not really looking for great emotional depth here… I just want to see some good, bloody, fights.

On an action level, Mortal Kombat delivers. The fight the fans want to see is between Sub Zero and Scorpion, and we get one of those at either end of the film. Joe Taslim, though almost always masked, makes for a pretty menacing villain—it helps that the costume design is more intricate and less primary coloured than in the previous films—and his throwdowns with Sanada are fast, furious, and brutal. There is a little overcutting but the sequences aren’t just a blur of fists and feet. Director Simon McQuoid pulls back fairly frequently to allow us to see sequences of martial arts and emphasises the right moments, particularly the solidly impressive effects used to realise Sub Zero’s powers (a dagger frozen out of his opponent’s blood is the film’s single coolest image)  If anything, the film has bigger editing problems in its dramatic scenes, which indicate large chunks having been cut out, than during its fights. Each fighter has their own style, with Ludi Lin and Max Huang as Liu Kang and Kung Lao much more graceful than the pure brute force of Kano (Josh Lawson) and Jax. Sonya Blade is a little underused, and it’s strange to have her not be one of the chosen fighters in the beginning. The subplot of the fighters having to discover their special abilities isn’t a bad idea, but it’s underexplored and few of those abilities have any connection to even the loose sense we have of who they are. On the other hand, the effects do generally look cool, and they aren’t overused to the point that they become what the fights revolve around.

Mortal Kombat is no masterpiece; the action has its moments, but it doesn’t get close to some of the best work being done in the genre right now, whether that’s the John Wick’s of the world, the films Taslim was making back in Indonesia or even some of Scott Adkins’ DTV work and the threadbare story and characters don’t give us a lot to invest in. What it is, though, is fun. It ticks the boxes it needs to tick, it’s solidly entertaining and at 109 minutes including credits it doesn’t outstay its welcome. In this case, I’m perfectly happy with a bit of Ronseal filmmaking.

★★★

Wrong Turn [2021] 

Dir: Mike P. Nelson

There is an inherent challenge with remakes. Stick closely to the original film and that’s all people will see and comment on; either it’s too close and you might as well not have bothered, or every little change will be nitpicked and compared to the previous film. On the other hand, if you depart wildly from what has gone before then all you’re perceived to be doing is cashing in on a title, without delivering on the promises inherent in it. Wrong Turn, whatever its other qualities, does genuinely do its best to square this vicious little circle.

It no doubt helps that I have no investment in Wrong Turn. I saw the 2003 film when it came out on DVD and, while I liked it well enough, probably haven’t watched it more than once more in the following 16 plus years. I’ve also never seen any of the sequels, so I can’t claim any affection for it as a franchise. That said, the first 40 minutes or so of this version (written by original screenwriter Alan McElroy) feel pretty familiar. A group of six friends (on a hiking trip this time, rather than being waylaid by a car accident) find themselves lost in the Virginia woods and having to survive when they are threatened by a family of sorts living in the forest. The details have changed somewhat—particularly with the addition of a framing story about Scott (Matthew Modine), the father of our lead, Jen (Charlotte Vega), looking for his daughter six weeks after she has dropped off the map—but the basic shape of the film is similar enough that it makes some sense as a remake. The second hour, however, is very different and seems to have divided fans of the original film.  

In its second half the film takes a sharp diversion from the backwoods slasher it’s been hinting it would be, turning more to folk and survival horror, though with a generous helping of gore. Bill Sage plays a patriarch who still leads a family of sorts that one could call inbred, but both the society and the individuals within it are very different from those in the original. I can see how this bait and switch could be seen as a negative for fans of the franchise, but credit to McElroy and director Mike P. Nelson for trying something very different from the original, if not so much in its own right.

The character writing isn’t the strong suit here. Bill Sage’s performance; more restrained than you might expect, and more effective for it, is the standout. He also gets the best material McElroy has to offer. Jen is a fairly bland lead/final girl, there’s a potentially interesting turn involving her boyfriend Darius (Adain Bradley), but it happens out of the blue, with some development this element might have been much more effective. The friend group is filled out with the asshole (Dylan McTee as Adam), the brain (Emma Dumont as Milla) and a gay couple (Vardaan Arora and Adrian Favela as Gary and Luis). These performances, and Matthew Modine’s, are fine and a more diverse cast where that diversity is treated largely as a given rather than a plot point is welcome, but that’s not to say that any of the characters has much of a personality. Like the small plot turn with Darius, Jen’s switch to badass for the film’s final act isn’t very well developed, and there’s no reason that two or three minutes couldn’t be spent to build up her sudden Lara Croft level prowess with a bow and arrow.

Behind the camera, Mike P Nelson delivers what's needed. An early sequence with a tree trunk rolling down a hill is well-executed, and the violence is made to feel brutal without always dwelling on detail that might betray what was likely not the biggest of budgets. The aftermath, however, particularly a couple of wince-inducing caved-in heads, is appropriately nasty. Like the screenplay, the direction doesn’t do anything wildly original, but it at least subverts a few expectations an audience might have of this film, and supplies the ingredients demanded of it in a way that is somewhat filling, if not especially nutritious.

Overall, Wrong Turn 2021 is probably the beneficiary of my floor level expectations. It’s at least trying to do something new; sure, it’s just remixing a bunch of elements we’ve seen before, but it has chosen elements we wouldn’t expect from this series. In a lot of ways, it does exactly what it sets out to do; injecting new impetus into a franchise by bringing some different ideas and elements to it. With deeper characterisation and a bit more motivation for the way certain things proceed I might have gone for a higher grade, but this is a perfectly entertaining way for a horror fan to pass some time, no more, but certainly no less.

★★★