Sloshed Cinema

Finally, a film that makes the lighting design to Gaspar Noé’s Lux Æterna look muted and soothing. This chaotic concert rehearsal doc is like This Is Spinal Tap on poppers, harried and frenetic and oozing dread. Charli xcx is fundamentally unserious about her pop star persona, but is also at points vulnerable about how she feels about that. This works or doesn’t work on a few different levels. The overall conceit of clinging to the thing which brought you recognition even to the point of destroying it is played out, and you more or less know where it’s going from the start. But there are quiet moments of self-doubt which have a stronger sense of authenticity to them: while Charli alone in a car after a disastrous rehearsal, wiping off messy makeup, isn’t novel territory, it’s committed and feels right for the moment, overhwhelming in a sense of personal choice rather than too many things happening at once. Same too is the overall tone of the story. Never overtly dramatic, it does vacillate successfully between out-and-out bits, partying (for good or ill), and a sardonic but sincere look at a toxic work environment on the rehearsal set. Alexander Skarsgård’s Johannes is magnificently douchey, insinuating himself into a situation from the outside and slowly committing a coup as he deposes the old art director in the name of something more widely marketable to the Amazon Music audience, and therefore bland and saying nothing. The label are just in it for the bottom dollar. And Charli doesn’t know what the fuck she wants with it, manipulated by others as well as her own insecurity.

But how much of a teardown of the music industry is this, really? Charli xcx has always done her own thing, but she’s not punk and she certainly isn’t counterculture. It could be said that this is mud in the eye of record companies, but is it, though? The Moment delights in mocking Kendall Jenner, existing as a vapid, pointless social media personality who buys into nonsense pseudo-health gimmicks. And the closing trailer for Johannes’ bastardized version of Brat eviscerates the flashy emptiness of Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour documentary while implying that Amazon Music pumps out trash. But both of these entities signed on and are to some degree self-aware. This is a “safe” drubbing that they okayed to seem cooler, ironically by attaching themselves to Charli xcx’ brand. The film pulls its punches while presenting the illusion of not doing so. But maybe that’s really what Charli and the fanbase at large are about: the fiasco of the “Brat card” bankrupting an entire (foundering) bank because of an idle social media post and then the fanbase at large turning it into some kind of Communist sleeper agent conspiracy makes it all more of a joke. It’s not angry at the system like a punk rocker, it just finds the establishment kind of goofy and unserious.

THE RULES

SIP

Someone says 'Charli' or 'party'.

Cameo from someone from the Charliverse.

The credit card is brought up.

BIG DRINK

Strobing starts.

Great Scott! We need to skydive off the CN Tower! Again! Movie magic can make you wonder how a certain effect or stunt was achieved, but for Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, I’m more curious how the permitting process went for them. Like… how did that get made, actually? As Jay and Matt launch yet another attempt to play a show at the Rivoli, this time around they know they’ve got a feature film to fill. Runtime, budget, you name it. It does posit a world where venue gig booking is essentially performed retroactively: if a venue has a flyer for a show being played there, it simply has no choice but to allow the show to happen. But then again this is a world where time travel is fueled by Orbitz (essentially Canadian boba tea for the uninitiated) so somehow that checks out. As they mount a winking parody of Back to the Future--legally distinct enough to avoid litigation, of course--the boys of Nirvanna the Band navigate personal and physical trials spanning time and space. But not 9/11. 2008 may be a horror show of goths in the streets, iPod ads, and below-the-belt queer jokes in mainstream comedy (raucously received by two audiences at the time, of course), but these two don’t want to be 2000-and-late to their gig. Should it happen. Because what is the cost of fame? When the timeline gets butterfly effected, Jay’s meteoric offscreen rise to global superstardom requires he go on Carpool Karaoke with James Corden. Is it really worth that?

What are time? As Matt and Jay try to wrangle their way out of a paradox, the film is acutely aware of its precarious situation. How to line up all of these dominos that are primed for knocking over? What even is a flashback? Tongue is firmly lodged into cheek with approach to narrative, as sticky situations are swiftly remedied with flashbacks to scenes that have been strategically altered to recontextualize and add new details. The mockumentary styling is toyed with as well, Matt acutely aware that they’ve bit off quite a bit in trying to recreate 2008 Toronto, after all. Might as well try and set expectations. Best just to get in a few Cosby jokes and rework things so that Jay gets punched by Will Smith at the Academy Awards instead, while vaguely eluding to H1N1. Simple, economical timestamps. There’s that CN Tower budget to account for, after all. Of all the things that I expected to feel while watching this, acrophobia was truly not on my Bingo card, so props to Nirvanna the Band for that.

THE RULES

SIP

Someone says 'Rivoli'.

Orbitz is brought up.

A whiteboard appears in a scene.

A film is name-dropped.

BIG DRINK

The CN Tower / La Tour CN features in a sequence.

At the end of the day, perhaps the only gadgets anyone needs are inertia and gravity. While he boasts a bevy of gadgets to respond to any situation, Arsène Lupin (or Wolf in the English dub) is, well… Lupin. His cocky wit only gets them about 75% of the way there, yet he always manages to land, gracefully or no. After introducing himself to Lady Clarisse as they dangle from a cliff thanks to a botched rescue, he almost immediately plummets. And when trying to rescue her from a nigh inaccessible tower, he arrives outside her window mostly on accident after a few flying leaps propel him across the massive gap. There’s a charm to the way Lupin is animated, agile and light on his feet, but with a bit of a wobble as he struggles to stay aright on moving clocktower cogs and gears, or learn how to pilot a personalized helicopter contraption. While he’s got James Bond’s self-assuredness, it’s a bit more in the “fake it ’til you make it” end of things. That wit buoys an already zippy action caper replete with ancient familial legacies, riddles that Lupin can solve instantly, and some genuinely creepy henchmen. Those ninjas with pointy-fingered metal gloves skittering about like goblins are some true nightmare fuel. This is perhaps best appreciated as a proto-Ghibli film before jumping to his own studio, with touches that will get expounded upon later, from the aircraft fixation to the various stripes of female archetypes he tends to favor.

In retrospect, it’s surprising how much The Bad Guys is indebted to this film. While the cop-and-robber rivalry duo is omnipresent in this sort of film, there’s a ribbing quality, a frustration which can shift to resigned alliance of necessity which mirrors Mr Wolf and Misty Luggins with Lupin and C.I. Zenigata. Animation is light and peppy, with cars pulling off impossible feats and faces (especially mouths) which morph to meet the emotion the character is having rather than restricting to strict faithfulness to reality.

THE RULES

SIP

Someone dons a disguise.

Lupin uses a new gadget.

Lupin falls from a height.

Cup noodles consumed.

BIG DRINK

A clock starts tolling.

The passage to the prison tower extends.

Comedy and music are the artforms most difficult to describe. I can attend a symphony concert and attempt to throw a handful of adjectives around my description of how Rachmaninov 2 sounded, but there’s still a great degree of je ne sais quoi going on. The same goes with funny riffs. This ain’t the New York Times in its critical heyday and I sure as shit am not Alex Ross. Humor is something deeply felt, and the dumber the sentiment, the harder the funny-bone is assaulted. Oldřich Lipský operated on a level where Looney Toons, the Marx Brothers, and the Three Stooges all sort of slugged it out with Lupin III. New York is a land where ruffians regularly roll cartoon pipe bombs into office windows, but also Americans can learn Czech well enough to stand in with a “quick and easy” language learning tome on a train ride (hint: no it isn’t and any Czech will read you for filth for not being able to fluently pronounce the letter ‘r-háček’ even if you try in good effort; I should know). It comes down here to a sort of Naked Gun type of vocabulary where every moment needs to have some kind of gag, whether it’s a periscope protruding absurdly from a carriage or the sausage guzzling proclivities of Nick’s ambassador-assistant. He may be the best one to show our detective his way around a pilsner, but he’s got a few other issues. The characterization is so broad-strokes and absurd, the expectations so bonkers, that this is nothing short of a live-action cartoon, and by god did the production team understand that. Will this contraption be used once and become part of a five-second gag? Perfect!

Comedy is perhaps at its best when it’s flaccidly dealing with romance. Nick is a hot-shot from the amazing US of A and the sparks fly hot and heavy with local darling Květuška who makes the screen turn pink any time the two get close. It’s absolutely not a romance. An interlude with a sexy cat lady becomes a disaster. Most of the men become too inebriated to do anything horny whatsoever. It’s an absolute catastrophe, all courtesy of the local pilsener and/or interior ineptitude. But damn if it isn’t fun. Those stop motion plants will put a stop to it all, and they don’t even need campy 50s music or Seymours from whom to demand feeding to accomplish it!

THE RULES

PICK ONE

Select either USA or CZECH REPUBLIC and sip whenever the country is named.

SIP

Carter self-owns in his cultural know-how.

A strange ocular device is employed.

Naked Gun moment.

Nick Carter punches something.

BIG DRINK

Animatronic plant antics.

Sometimes it feels like the whole world is out to get you. As Ryosuke Yoshii struggles to turn around a quick profit on the reselling market, it doesn’t matter what or how he’s selling goods, whether they’re legit or not. Just so long as he makes a tidy sum. And that he doesn’t get caught. While the police are obliquely interested, it’s more the folks he’s duping that he needs to worry about. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s crime thriller presents this with an interesting—or perhaps more accurately, odd—tonal shift that folks will either respond to or not. Even before revealing just how deep in shit Ryosuke is, an air of paranoia hangs oppressively over the film. Not merely uncertain but deeply uncanny, seemingly random events almost suggest that the world is pitted against him. A tripwire is stretched across the road on his way home from work, causing him to flip his motorbike. A figure presses in too close on the bus, leaning over his shoulder before vanishing. The breaker to his Tokyo apartment is shut off briefly, and when he moves to the countryside figures stalk his home. It’s the sort of thing you could expect from the director of the likes of Cure, and he does it as few others can. But midway through, it abruptly shifts to something more akin to a mashup of Reservoir Dogs and Battle Royale. I’m not entirely sure that it sticks the landing. It’s a wobbly transition. But if you allow the film to settle in a second time, there’s a sort of shaky pleasure to the mixture of action and dark comedy as Ryosuke and his unflappable, probably yakuza-connected, potentially even demonic, assistant Sano pick off his would-be torturers one by one. If Parasite deals with anger at debt-collectors, Cloud allows a man to sell his soul to the exploitative internet resale market, scalping others and increasingly finding that he’s okay with it, or at least numb to it.

It’s fucking hard to fire a gun, even if just psychologically. Cloud really captures two things that occasionally irk me about actioners. For one thing, it’s a fucking battle for Ryosuke to pull the trigger that first time; sure, it gets easier with time but he just about can’t manage it initially. And even with a high-powered rifle, it’s damn hard to put someone down. In this case, it’s practically Blood Simple-tier difficult for our motley crew of attempted assassins to get got. Not every gunshot wound is instantly fatal.

THE RULES

SIP

Someone says 'Ratel'.

Someone names a sum of ¥.

Reflection in a window.

Ryosuke stares at the merchant webpage.

BIG DRINK

Something uncanny occurs.

What if Dick Tremayne from "Twin Peaks" was thrust into the world of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? The bedraggled fop Lord Doyle is so unconvincing in his performance as a British member of aristocracy that the Macau hotel in which he’s staying uses ‘Lord’ as his given name on billing paperwork rather than a title. Colin Farrell is a great actor, but let’s be clear: what a way to weaponize the fact that he can’t put on a British accent to save his life. As it follows a gambler woefully out of his depth, the film both pokes fun at his ineptitude and indulges in his glamorous, glitzy fantasy mindset. The camerawork in the opening sequences are utterly batshit. Money shots of Macau casinos and fountains! Gratuitous slow motion! Needless dutch angles and inverted cameras as Lord Doyle goes down an escalator! Everything drenched in neon! It’s a perfume ad on MDMA. But when Doyle goes to the casino to play, he opts for… baccarat. A game which, by the film’s presentation, takes absolutely zero skill to play. Can you count to nine? Great! Can you slowly peel back the edge of a card? Even better! Doyle is the idiot’s idea of a playboy. As the depth of his self-dug grave is revealed and while options rapidly dwindle, the camera becomes increasingly sober and staid, the color palette less saturated. He’s not even got a hand to play, and the creditors and spooks are knocking.

But this is China during the Hungry Ghosts Festival. So we couldn’t merely settle with a black comedic crime thriller. This is about greed with a capital G, indulgence past the point of sanity. Adding magic realist flourishes of temptation and self-enabling is one thing, but this tips its hand too far. The film isn’t satisfied to speak on hungry ghosts damned to eternal search for unfulfilled satiety, but has to include multiple sequences of Lord Doyle guzzling luxurious foods to hammer in the point. Ghost girls exist to provide lessons. The number four, heavily associated with death in Chinese culture, is omnipresent. Doyle/Brendan Reilly must learn his moral lesson! The siren song of addiction is compelling to portray in heightened manner, but this simply cannot pick a lane, doubling down with corny dialogue and high school English tier narrative devices.

THE RULES

SIP

Someone says 'card', 'gwai lo', or 'Lord'.

Slow-mo footage.

Someone names a sum of money.

BIG DRINK

Lord wakes up.

That’s really a hell of a lot of legwork to put together a Grindr profile. Following the developing relationship—perhaps ‘arrangement’ is a more precise way to put it—between soft-spoken Colin and enigmatic biker Ray, Pillion refuses to define anything firmly. Even domination or submissiveness. When we meet Colin at a pub barbershop quartet performance, he is oh so very milquetoast. His terminally ill mum sets him up with awkward dates and he lives at home, so when Ray catches his eye and makes him lick his boots in a fleeting back alley Christmas encounter, it’s something new in its subversive strangeness. But this doesn’t follow Colin either falling in deeply with BDSM culture or getting shell-shocked and fleeing back to “normalcy.” It’s more about him figuring out what he wants in life, learning how to define a relationship. Crucial to this is Ray. Presented initially as matter-of-fact and terse, he knows how to manipulate Colin in order to bring out an intense sort of devotion in him. But this isn’t pure psychological games: when Ray and Colin are with their group of biker buds, there is a sense of camaraderie to their power imbalance. Everyone gives consent here, even if outward appearances seem otherwise. And that’s the simple truth: this isn’t “for” everyone, including Colin’s mother, who misconstrues overbearing babying of her adult son as familial devotion. Colin may prefer his time with Ray, but it’s not quite right. The longer the film spends with Ray, the clearer it is that there is something missing within him, too. Alexander Skarsgård perfectly pitches his performance as Ray, cool and frank, but with something behind the eyes, a sort of wounded nature buried deep. Anyone who reads that much Karl Ove Knausgård has a secret problem, after all. One moment of genuine connection between the two forces Ray out of Colin’s life. The kiss, erupting like something that’s been building unbearably for months, Ray’s liquid, teary eyes, isn’t better than the rest of their relationship, but it is different and touches a place that Ray doesn’t seem comfortable confronting. For Colin, that seems to stop everything for him, but eventually moving on allows him to blossom in a sense, live on his own terms and find happiness in that. In a queer subgenre that can err on the side of tragedy—a relationship replaced with yearning, moments of happiness consigned to the past—this has the good sense to dust itself off and carry on.

Oliver Coates’ dreamy synth score leans heavily into Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie Nr 1, a piece which Ray plunks out on his piano and becomes grafted onto dreamy nocturnal bike rides when everything melts away from Colin save the sensation of leather and the flash of streetlights whizzing by. Perhaps the “nude dance” is an appropriate setting here, though they prefer their wrestling in other senses.

THE RULES

SIP

Bike revving is heard.

Someone says 'down' or 'no'.

People start to sing.

BIG DRINK

A glimpse of peen.

Her? What, is she horny or something? I’ve got to hand it to Emmanuelle: I’ve encountered a bad movie in my day, but it’s a rarity to bump up against one that just feels outright fake. Inhabiting a fantasy world of luxury and sensuality, Emmanuelle is basically the worst hotel guest ever, finding a never-ending litany of things to gripe about to the concierge because it’s her job as “quality control” when she’s not fucking someone(s). The sex, when we indulge in her torrid flings, is a bland affair, all insert tab A into slot B, not remotely sensual much less engaging. But it’s the line readings and dialogue which elevate this to the apotheosis of absolute nonsense. Conversations so asinine that they beggared belief, being so literal and on the nose about excessive displays of wealth or sexuality that they lose all interest. Care to beat around the bush at least a little bit? No? It’s just inert and listless, wandering about the halls and grounds of the hotel, content to stare at Emmanuelle and the attractively appointed and furnished rooms she inhabits from a distance. There’s about as much appeal as celebrity YouTube home tours taped for Architectural Digest or the like. Adapting a classic erotic character, this aims for a sort of vintage sense of luxury in an exotic locale, but at most feels reductive and leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Noémie Merlant can do so much better than this, and Naomi Watts continues her downward spiral of poorly selected roles (if delivering a comedy pièce de résistance along the way). Watching them grouse at one another in a passive-aggressive standoff would be vaguely amusing—the impossibly high standards Emmanuelle pursues are laughable after a point—but for the fact that it, just like everything else, goes nowhere, content to stare into the middle-distance. This feels like AI slop even if it isn’t.

THE RULES

SIP

A sex scene starts!!!

The lighting is just very blue (heh).

Sex moans.

Emmanuelle is inconvenienced by something.

No war but the class war. Depicting events leading up to the sparking of the Angolan War of Independence, Sambizanga considers the creation of a martyr and public hero. Unified political resistance and opposition is a threat to the Portuguese colonial powers in Angola, and they respond to that with violence and oppression as a means to retain a strangle-hold on the population. But while Domingos Xavier’s stoic weathering of sustained police brutality suggests his resolve to support the cause, there is still a sense of futility or resignation that hovers over the narrative. His partner Maria searches for him throughout the various government offices and police stations of Luanda, stonewalled at every turn. The police are here not to protect or serve, but to interfere, whether through active hostility or indifference. Weighing the gravity of her personal loss against a galvanizing force for the movement at large within the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, there is room both for mourning and to find new drive. Throughout the narrative, speeches maintain the focus on what matters, drawing a line between colonial oppression and the way that the wealthy use their leverage to keep the poor vulnerable and therefore unable to do anything about their situation. It’s about revolution to alter that.

Anchoring the emotional core of the film is a vulnerable performance from Elisa Andrade. A partner and mother, her trek throughout Luanda carries a weariness that’s communicated mostly through her gaze, though occasionally her frustration at the system bubbles out as her search eventually proves fruitless. The police may target perceived political dissidents, but the ripple effects spread much wider than just those directly involved in the struggle.

THE RULES

SIP

Someone says 'Domingos'.

A country is named.

BIG DRINK

Music kicks in.

Medieval style witch dunking trials: so hot right now! In a small community in West Africa where a wise woman who speaks for the water deity Mami Wata exercises her influence, tensions are at a boiling point. She’s lost her vibe, at least in the eyes of villagers reeling from a recent drowning. Questioning Mama Efe’s legitimacy creates potent opportunities for demagogues and malcontents within the community. What has Mami Wata done for them, after all? How has this woman to whom they’ve given their food and their meager earnings helped them? It takes an outsider to fan the flames and turn frustration into outright civil war. Jasper’s honeyed words initially make him seem meek and mild, a boon gifted by Mami Wata, but he is instead a serpent. This escalates to a shocking degree in the violence people are willing to perpetrate against one another when a wedge issue is forced, and speaks fundamentally to a clash between traditional practices and modernity. But what a hill for those traditional practices to die on. The people want education, paved roads, and electricity? How very DARE they! Vaccines? Not on Mama Efe’s watch, just pray it away! Jasper and his cadre of criminals have no intent to make good on their promises of these modern conveniences, of course. They’d rather spend the dough on machine guns. It’s all about power for them, but in a less altruistic or altruistic-presenting way than with the devotees of Mami Wata. Those seeking power do so by stepping over everyone in their way, but perhaps the revelation of the deity herself will promise a different, more hopeful path forward.

Filmed in rich monochrome which lends a sort of timelessness to this tale halfway between the ancestral and the contemporary, CJ ‘Fiery’ Obasi’s film is prone to dreamlike flights of fancy. Mama Efe prophesies her demise, and interactions with the divine or dream self take place against bright white voids. Conversations can take place free of location or context, spanning space and time. The final revelation adds a few pops of color to emphasize the import of this concluding event, the first actual promise for something brighter and better, or at least different, to come.

THE RULES

SIP

Someone disparages Mami Wata.

Waves crashing on the shore.

BIG DRINK

The Nordic Flower (for Girl With Hyacinths)

1.5 oz aquavit

1 oz pink grapefruit juice

0.75 oz elderflower liqueur

0.5 oz lemon juice

Edible flowers

This just in: men are the worst. Film noir, as with horror, uses genre intrigue to pull back the curtain on a darker aspect of humanity in a “safe” way. The characters may suffer, but it’s all conducted in a well-defined manner so that it feels more controlled with which to interact. But this one cuts to the quick. Unfolding as a nonlinear series of vignettes, Anders Wikner embarks on a journey to learn about what led to his neighbor Dagmar Brink’s suicide. As is often the case with neighbors, they barely spoke, but now he and his spouse Britt have been bequeathed all her possessions. Acting the amateur sleuth, he finds a series of connections in past partners or loves, all while a mysterious “Alex” evades all. As a narrative, it allows the audience to play along, realizing a split second before Anders how some earlier information connects to a new revelation. Early in the film, it even courts a sort of humorous streak. While suicide is a serious matter, there’s a slight Hitchcockian wink to how long it takes the housekeeper to discover Dagmar’s body despite the noir hard shadow of her lifeless form clearly visible on the wall. But that narrative device cuts both ways. Dagmar is objectified by each man in sequence, and even Anders’ determination to neatly tie up one succinct reason for her ending her own life, despite its compassionate intent, reduces a full person to two dimensions. No, she resists all of that, but refuses to reveal outright the totality of herself; only Britt Wikner gets some true sense of closure. Anders can keep his sketch, a false memory preserved on the wall; that’s good enough.

The cruelty that Dagmar goes through exposes an essential sorrow at the raw heart of Girl With Hyacinths. Each interview allows someone from the dead woman’s life—her Nazi-sympathizer ex-husband, a binge-drinking artist with a persecution complex, a playboy former pop idol—to frame how he viewed his relationship to her. The film often cuts to flashback, in keeping with noir non-linear tropes. We witness the abject cruelty of Elias’ drunken rants and abuse, or Willy’s self-centered schmoozing. But as we return to the present, the men conclude by leaving out or reframing reality as it has been shown; Anders isn’t getting the unvarnished truth. Emphasizing this is the prevalence of nude female figures as a central design feature of several of these men’s homes. Elias sculpts women in his desired image, and Willy’s walls and coffee table are littered with nudes of a slightly baser, more provocative nature. Dagmar was just another accessory of this sort, their treatment of her only twisting the knife in the case of her true love. This secret of Dagmar’s weaponizes and elevates another oft-featured element of noir: a willingness to embrace transgression. In this kind of world, recognizing queer love and attraction is just as subversive as showing a murder in heavy shadow or glimpsing prostitution. But rather than indulging a cheap thrill, it acknowledges a fundamental cruelty of society and how people who don’t fit a narrow definition of ‘acceptability’ can be harmed by that.

THE RULES

SIP

Someone says 'Dagmar' or 'lonely'.

An artist of some sort is named.

Sapphic vibes.

BIG DRINK

A flashback begins.

Something something inside you there are two wolves. For Rose-Hélène living in a small, rural community, love exists as the familiar and the forbidden. Living with her sickly shut-in grandmother, she is cautioned against dalliances. Yet she is presented with two: Diego, a local handyman, serves as her on-and-off fling, yet Rose-Hélène is more enthralled by the mysterious Valentin, who arrives from parts elsewhere. Aside from both having rather hairy arms, the two couldn’t be more different. Diego is so close to home as to be able to see the grandmother’s house from his window, yet has little to offer. Valentin, associated with the woods and the domesticated yet wild temperament of horses, remains unattainable. With David, sex is shot as presentational and fetishistic, the man caressing a disinterested woman. Yet with Valentin, the script is flipped, with passions implicitly focused on Rose-Hélène. But then he’s gone. This type of love is seen as dangerous to her grandmother, who fears echoes of her daughter Flore in this behavior. Indeed, the film opens on a fraught woman literally making love to the wild as she kisses a tree before flinging herself on her lover’s grave. Eschewing all passion, the grandmother favors home life (ever so subtly underlined by her fixation with the card game solitaire). Rose-Hélène exists at some confluence of the two, serving as a nurse and yet often affiliated with horses, the domestic and the freedom-seeking in one. Ultimately she does pursue the latter, and the film concludes on a wonderfully ambiguous note, no reunion with her love, no destination, but satisfaction in the wintry beauty of the moment.

Michel Hostettler’s rich score too signals that there is no hereditary cycle to some relationship to love as inherently cursed. Opening on tense and uncertain strains of strings and woodwinds, a soprano rises as if in a horror cue to accompany a wild-eyed and tousle-haired woman fleeing through the forest. It almost sounds like a forgotten Schoenberg work, or something of the like. Much of the film retains the restlessness of these opening moments, preserving in score Rose-Hélène’s essential question of passion. But there is resolution, the same palette of solo female voice and chamber orchestra closing on a lovely carol, satisfied with the decision to break out on one’s own.

THE RULES

SIP

A scene involves walking across a field or forest.

Voiceover narration begins.

Insects buzzing in a scene.

Mirror frame cross-dissolve.

BIG DRINK

Someone is lying in bed in a scene.

This is the old Florida Project special, another Sean Baker-involved project that has a deep, abiding love for people considered on the fringes of what might be a “cinematic” family drama, finding empathy for their everyday struggles while avoiding coming across as condescending toward them. Having not seen Take Out, this is so akin to Tangerine or Florida Project that I hope it’s borne out of a synergistic relationship between the two filmmakers and Baker using his post-Oscar clout to uplift his longtime producing partner in her own work rather than puppeteering her through his usual beats. It is a winning formula, however, and the generations of a family returning to Taipei each have a rich interiority to them. Shu-Fen brings a resigned weariness as she tries to make ends meet for her two daughters, a sense of weight to her muted responses to everything around her. I-Ann, initially a prickly presence, soon shows a deep core of sorrow and resentment towards lost opportunities. And I-Jing balances that energy of how little kids can make friends with just about anyone at the drop of a hat with a budding sense of how things don’t always work out how we’d like them to do. These are the black sheep of a family struggling with traditions and modernity, where saving face can quickly become a theatre of humiliation. It’s emotionally raw without feeling melodramatic, weighty without feeling like a drag. You want them to succeed but recognize that the road ahead will still have some bumps along the way. But my god, Johnny, maybe ease the try-hard act up a notch or two. It’s sweet, but it’s a lot.

Informed early on by her magnificently checked out grandfather of the sinister nature of her dominant left hand, how it carries out the Devil’s work, I-Jing makes the most kid-logic conclusion from there: I can get away with doing bad stuff if I scapegoat it on the hand! A cheeky drum riff clues the viewer into just what is going through her head any time antics are going to go down. There’s a price to pay for this, and her feeling the consequences of something beyond her control due to superstition is heartbreaking, but as with the tonal balance of the narrative, there’s a little bit of a rush the next time the cue kicks in. The camera skillfully navigates the tragic and the mischievous fluidly, whether breathlessly dashing at kid-eye-level through the night market or pushing in on faces, not flinching away from discomfort. There’s still humor to be found even tough times: just how the betel nut dealer keeps his gals around when he mostly exists to play cards and get his dick sucked is mystifying, and there’s nothing quite so surreal as the sight of a man practicing ballroom dancing solo in a neon-lit space as Grandma gets her latest visa scam assignment.

THE RULES

SIP

A night market stand proprietor greets someone.

A new cleaning gadget is being sold.

BIG DRINK

The Devil Hand drumming music kicks in.

Familial time-traveling causality loops aren’t all just 88 gigawatts and cars with gull-wing doors. Using a vaguely witchy lens to explore a family marred by past trauma and unstated pain, Léa Mysius emphasizes the dire toll this can have on individuals. Joanne and Jimmy’s daughter Vicky, quiet that she is, shows immense ability in her talent for identifying objects by scent. It’s how she interacts with the world. But after Jimmy’s sister Julia comes to visit, along with all of her emotional baggage, a strange vial of elixir pushes this exploration of scent deeper: Vicky begins to witness flashes of the past, revealing a connection between her mother and the woman that she now deeply desires not to spend time around. The implication is horrible: Julia can see Vicky too, which frightens her and drives her to want to get rid of these visions. By some line of logic, Vicky’s presence is to blame for everything leading up to a fire during a Christmas gala that rocked the town and left lives and bodies scarred. Which isn’t entirely fair to the girl, but that’s how it can feel as a kid looking on and trying to make sense of messy family dynamics. The notion that they themselves are to blame can rear its ugly head, and lead to all sorts of questions that manifest as “do you really love me” or “why do I exist.” Structurally, The Five Devils builds tension around what caused all of this anger and hatred about Julia’s return to town while driving wedges into relationships that seemed on tenterhooks to start with through the episodic revelations. But it also reflects on how even without the supernatural we are our own worst enemies: it doesn’t exactly take a witch’s brew to hurt others with a pointed karaoke performance to make the subtext pretty much text, just a fair bit too much booze picking away at frayed emotions.

Compounding the crisis of self-identity is a racially charged thread to the dynamics in the film. Vicky questions why Julia doesn’t have an accent whereas her father does. But while Julia was born in France and Jimmy immigrated from Senegal, she is no less of an outsider when first introduced to the gymnastics group in this small Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes community, the color of her skin is the only thing noticed at first. Vicky herself is subject to bullying by her classmates who only see a girl with different hair, and Joanne’s father is a homophobic, racist lush who is antagonistic toward Julia even before she’s pushed to the brink and does the unthinkable. It can be easier for some to ostracize others against whom they already had made up their mind.

Fire and water are opposing, elemental forces that forged Julia and Joanne’s relationship. While the opening conflagration is a terrible inevitability we both build to and circle towards, Joanne seeks both to quench her guilt by proxy and self-punish with daily plunges into the frigid waters of an alpine lake. It skirts death on a daily basis but in a twisted way ultimately reunites the pair.

THE RULES

SIP

Scent jar appears in a scene.

Vicky identifies something by scent.

Joanne goes for a swim.

BIG DRINK

A pop song starts to play.

Folk horror is fundamentally about just that: the practices of people. Even when a significant cultural force seeks to suppress local practices, they find ways of pushing through nonetheless. The influence of the Roman Catholic Church as brought by Spanish colonization is clear here in the Philippines. Holy Week and Good Friday are venerated here, but they are colored in a way that would seem alien in Europe or parts elsewhere, because practices are infused with local folk traditions that are just as old if not older than the Church. The Rites of May takes an almost clinical approach to this through its primary character, the photographer Jun documenting the practices of the conclusion of Lent for a magazine. He encounters rich tableaux: women singing incantations of the Pasyón in a church as the idols of saints look on from a gallery on the wall, ski-masked penitents bearing crowns of thorns self-flagellating as they carry a cross down a rural road. The pointed cruelty of the latter especially stands out, speaking to a sort of baseline callousness borne out in the physical which speaks to a collective psychic crisis. This trauma is even more immediately embodied in Teresa, the vessel for grief and loss in her own sense as she is overtaken by the spirit of another in revenge over a wrongful death and violation, something that cannot be silenced during this holiest of periods. Steeped in atmosphere and imbued with a sense of creeping dread, this is less horror than it is a sort of reckoning. Folk horror as a cultural correction point.

The Tagalog title meaning ‘Black’ or a darkness, there is a Catholic gothic bent to the film’s visual language. Inky black shadows almost subsume the frame at points, nothing intelligible at all, complete mystery. This is a space of séances and uncertainty, where going out into the night is a forbidden gesture that presses outside of social acceptability, even when that same social norm is exploited by those in power. Hence the need for vengeful, possessing ghosts.

THE RULES

SIP

Someone lights a cigarette.

Holy Week mentioned in some capacity.

Someone snaps a photograph.

BIG DRINK

A sick synth riff kicks in.

Freeze-frame.

Something something you are what you eat. Living a reclusive existence in the Catskills, Izzy and her mother are something like the bizarro world version of a homeschooled fundamentalist christian household. They jam to metal originals instead of bland Christian “rock,” they study plants of the forest and herbal remedies instead of Prager “University” videos, and they have a general moral superiority complex instead of a general “moral” superiority complex. It’s a relationship that is at once toxic and loving, difficult and collaborative. Every mother faces some version of this as her adolescent child begins to test boundaries and push back, and turning any living being into some kind of hallucinogenic rush is not going to make that easier. The film leans into these sequences, psychotronic flashes of distorted imagery and faces made into kaleidoscope tessellations. It’s a terrible rush. This adds the wrinkle of a dynamic that feels not unlike a recovering addict trying to stay clean and prevent that disease from continuing another generation. It can be suffocating, and relapse is a dangerous thing. Izzy doesn’t see it the same way as her mother, who wants to return to a more conventional paradigm of morality; Izzy prefers the ‘lions do not concern themselves with the matters of sheep’ route, embracing her nature as what she sees as a demonic apex predator. Which feels very on-brand for a teen’s mindset. But still, I’ve met weirder homeschool families.

Horror movies, especially of the shoestring budget variety, really seem conclusion-phobic. This was a hell of a COVID lockdown project to undertake with family, and the band’s rehearsals are a lot of fun. But structurally it’s a bit scattershot. Random sequences of first Mother and then Izzy honing their craft happen independent of context, which is fine: the lack of cohesion suggests that Izzy is developing much more quickly than her mom suspects. But Izzy’s awkward, abortive friendship with local girl Amber is dropped and then hinted at continuing offscreen in a way that doesn’t really connect until the final moments. Is Izzy lying? Perhaps. Do we need to see everything that happens to these characters in order to understand events? Nah. But when operating on such a small story, any dropped detail can muddy the waters. And the end… yep she’s a demon now! Guess the town is fucked. Time for a hard cut to black because an inversion of the relationship and the notion of something about to happen is evidently enough. Curtains.

THE RULES

SIP

The cross symbol is made in some way.

Someone says 'fuck'.

Ritualistic whispering begins.

BIG DRINK

The band rehearse in a scene.