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The Iron Claw (2023)
The true story of a wrestling family that was beset by so much tragedy it might as well be a lost Shakespearean drama. The Iron Claw follows the Von Erich brothers, lead by oldest brother Kevin (Zac Efron). They’re all competing for their father’s approval, the same man who gives them updated son rankings at the breakfast table. Kevin and his three brothers (Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson, Stanley Simons) are living out their old man’s dream of being a professional wrestler of significant renown, and the appeal of the brothers is as a fighting family of wrestlers rather than as single entities. In essence, they don’t seem to matter unless as a collective. This leads to plenty of misguided attempts to curry favor with their toxic parent and a pile-up of tragedies that would be absurd if it wasn’t actually true. The issue for me was that I didn’t see the other brothers as fully dimensional characters, and side stories like Kevin’s romantic escapades felt lacking as illumination. It felt for much of its running time like a good movie but one going about its business with a little too much expediency. I was interested but felt like the brothers were more reflections on Kevin than their own separate characters. However, the film’s last twenty minutes are by far the best part and finally find a way to elevate the drama as well as better personalize it through Kevin’s grief and survivor’s guilt. “It’s okay dad, we’ll be your brothers,” spoken with the innocent yearning of a child, pretty much broke me and caused me to sob. If you’re a fan of 1980s professional wrestling, or meaty dramas about the suffering of strong men from strong men, I’m here to assure you that it’s okay to cry here. The Iron Claw is a fine drama that comes together by its end for an off-the-ropes wallop, and the lingering sadness is one that will be hard to shake for hours.
Nate’s Grade: B
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The Butterfly Effect (2004) [Review Re-View]
Originally released January 23, 2004:
Notice: I found Ashton Kutcher, star of The Butterfly Effect, on a trip to buy dog food, and cordially asked him to write a review. This is what he sent me. It’’s totally him. I wouldn’’t make this stuff up. That would be dumb.
“So, like, this Nate guy asked me to do a review of my new awesomest movie, The Butterfly Effect. Dude, like anyone needs a review for the most awesomest movie ever. I mean, like, the term ‘awesomest movie ever’ should say, like, everything. The only thing possibly more awesome than The Butterfly Effect would be trucker hats …… or two chicks totally making out. And I only said ‘possibly more awesome,’ which doesn’’t mean it is more awesome, because, dude, like I said before, The Butterfly Effect is the most awesomest thing ever. You can’t dispute that. Don’t even try. I’m awesome!
Like, the story goes like this, man. I play this guy, like I know big stretch there, but he’s not the most awesome guy ever, which is what you’d be thinking since it’s the most awesomest movie ever. But no, he’s like this kid who blacks out and has this wickedly twisted childhood where he stars in his neighbor’s kiddie porn, has his dog set on fire, and, like, his dad is all crazy, or, like I like to say, insane in the ole’ membrane. Ha, I totally made that up right now. I’m awesome!
So, you’re like saying, ‘Dude, that movie sounds less than awesome. Yes, sir, I am having definite doubts about the awesomeness of this movie. Like, do I need to go to the movies to, like, feel bad? I got my parents to do that for me. That and school.’ Hey man, I’m there, I know what you feel. ‘Cause right when you are like, ‘Dude, when is Demi gonna’ show up playing his mom?’ I find these old journals of mine and, dude, use them to travel back in time. I know, the awesomeness has returned. And I use the journals to go back and try and punk time, man. I try and make things better and change the future but I like totally just make it worse. I know, double punk’d, man! I try and fix the life of this hot girl in the movie (she showed her boobs in that Road Trip movie, did you see that? That part where she shows her boobs, oh man … It is awesome) but things don’’t work out. Like she becomes a crack ho at one point. Dude, total punk’d. I’m awesome!
I should be taken as a serious actor. I didn’t hit my head on something and I grew a beard, what more do people need to know I got the goods? I mean, I don’t want to keep saying it but …… beard. C’mon! When actors want to be taken seriously they, like, grow beards. That’s why all those people in movies before 1970 (I know, it surprised me too that there were older movies) got awards and stuff. Beards, dude. Beards. When Billy Dee Shakespeare, like, invented acting, he totally imagined dudes, and chicks too, with beards. That’s why girls can’t be taken as serious actors, ‘cause they can’t grow beards. Ha. I’m awesome!
So, like, if you ever wondered what it would be like to see me, Ashton Kutcher, the most awesome man alive …who ever lived, no… the most awesome human being …-the most awesome thing …- ever, as a frat boy, or like, some poor dude with no arms, then you should see my new movie, The Butterfly Effect. After all, it is the most awesomest thing ever. That’s awesome. So, like, you people reading (is that what school is for?) should go see my movie. I’ll tell you why in two words: beard.”
Nate’s Grade: C+
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
It’s hard to remember but there was a time where Ashton Kutcher was the king of the early 2000s universe. He had parlayed his excitable supporting character on a late 90s network sitcom into a successful movie career top-lining wild comedies, and he had also found success as a producer, bringing new life to the hidden camera prank TV show with his eponymous Punk’d where many of his celebrity friends would be victimized for the lols. The man even single handedly made goofy trucker hats a fashion mainstay. I know we haven’t seen much of the Kutch in a while, as he’s settled into his non-profit charities and being a family man, ceding the spotlight to his wife and former sitcom girlfriend, Mila Kunis. The Kutcher brand was stronger than ever at the time of The Butterfly Effect, enough so that Kutcher signing on as an executive producer was what finally got this widely read industry script to finally get made. You must view The Butterfly Effect as a point not just in Kutcher’s career but also in millennial edge-lord culture, the concept that anything dark is therefore compelling, and the more twisted the better. Re-watching the movie twenty years later, I wanted to laugh out loud at so many points because The Butterfly Effect is so serious while being so silly as it plumbs every depth of misery, both for its characters as well as any potential audience members still keeping track of the messy metaphysics.
Kutcher plays the adult version of Evan, a kid who has had quite a challenging upbringing to put it mildly. Mom (Melora Walters) is doing her best while Evan’s father is locked away in a mental asylum, and she’s worried her child might have inherited dad’s instability. He blacks out for extended periods and is found holding a knife or having drawn a horrible massacre at school, and even worse neighborhood tragedies (oh, I’ll get to all of them). A psychiatrist advises him to start journaling as a therapeutic means, and so he does, and when adult Evan reads his childhood journals, the words become blurry and he’s able to travel back in time to those exact moments. With this great power, adult Evan tries to right the wrongs of his life and those around him, but as all time travel stories are destined to discover, there are cruel unintended consequences to endure.
Watching this movie is like watching a checklist of events that producers thought would be dark and grisly and So Messed Up, but this movie is so self-serious that it could be a parody of what a moody teenager would think of as a “mature movie.” Let me just list some of the content the movie covers: the drunken dad next door (Eric Stoltz) is a pedophile who records his daughter and son and Evan in child porn, the kids put a firecracker in a mailbox that blows up killing a mother and her baby, an angry kid kidnaps Evan’s dog and ties him in a bag and literally sets the bag on fire killing the animal, lots of violence against young children including murder, attempted suicide, disturbing behavior in children including traumatic self-harm at school, prison rape, multiple mental asylums, disfigurement and disability, prostitution and addiction, and in the original ending, the one I re-watched, a fetus literally strangling itself with its own umbilical cord rather than being born. Wow. Just… wow. This movie is only two hours and it crams enough sundry melodrama and grimdark grist to fill out a month of the grimiest soap opera ever. Because of the sheer amount of disturbing content, every new provocative addition makes the movie’s tone teeter further and further into unintended self-parody. Once you’re starting to process the homegrown child pornographer, the movie throws animal cruelty at you, and so on. It’s not enough that Evan had a bad childhood of trauma, but does he have to experience all the traumas?
Much of the movie follows Evan’s morose quest to improve the life of his unrequited love, Kayleigh (Amy Smart as the adult version). He runs into her after several years apart and merely bringing up the past with her pedophile father filming the two of them propels her to kill herself off-screen. She’s literally introduced in one scene and then in the next she’s dead, and it’s all Evan’s fault, so says her angry brother via the answering machine clunkily informing us. Evan goes back and stops her dad from molesting her, so now dad only molests her brother Tommy instead, who Evan kills as an adult defending himself. He travels back in time and now her brother is dead and she’s become a heroin-addicted hooker and that won’t do. He travels back again and manages to improve the lives of Kayleigh, Tommy, and their friend Lenny, except in this timeline Lenny and Kayeligh are the romantic couple and Evan has no arms, having lost them in the childhood mailbox explosion. He travels back again and this time Kayleigh gets blown up as a child. Ultimately Evan concludes he cannot save her and have everything he wants, so he makes some form of sacrifice by the end; in the theatrical cut, young Evan upsets her so she chooses to live with her mother rather than her pedophile father, and in the director’s cut, he ensures Kayleigh will never meet him by killing himself in the womb (his mother reveals she’s had multiple miscarriages, leaving the impression other future siblings have done the same). I appreciate how the filmmakers have streamlined their convoluted time travel tale into a simple task of trying to get the girl, but it also becomes so overwrought that I wanted to shake my head and sigh.
These characters are put through an emotional and often physical grinder, so it’s hard not to feel sorry for them. I long felt the film’s contempt for Kayleigh ever since young Evan (a young Logan Lerman) tells her, “You don’t even know how beautiful you are,” like she’s so stupid to see the obviousness of his compliment. I think dark comedy is the best way to read the movie, laughing along the way as Evan fails time and again to improve the lives of everyone through his space-time interventions. He can save this kid but doom his mother to lung cancer. He can save this person but is locked away in prison. It’s a no-win scenario for Evan, so he decides it’s better if he was never born, negating all the possible good he’s done in his life, including maybe being a force that could keep Kayleight from living with her dad. Maybe not having that friend and an advocate push her into that decision doomed her to a life of molestation, so way to go Evan.
I kind of loathe the time travel method in this movie but at least it provides a limitation that works within the universe of The Butterfly Effect. He can only travel reading his journals, which means he’s stuck in whatever nightmare timeline he’s responsible for unless he can recapture some part of his childhood scribblings. Reading them aloud is also an unexpected source of dark comedy because it makes me question how forthcoming a child of trauma would be about writing down his experiences in simplistic shorthand (“So today Kaleigh wasn’t feeling so good. Her face blew up. I was sad”). I did like that this inherited disorder provides more mystery to his family line, a source of material not covered in either of the Butterfly Effect direct-to-DVD sequels unrelated to Evan’s troubled story. This is perhaps the second worst method of time travel I’ve found in the movies after 1980’s Somewhere in Time where Christopher Reeve uses the power of positive thinking to convince himself he’s in 1912, and lo and behold he shall be.
Watching this movie is like revisiting a Goth phase you had as a brooding teenager but have since considered a point of embarrassment (not that being Gothic is something to be ashamed of, simply that it was an overzealous step in asserting a misguided sense of what being a mature adult meant, generally disaffected and cynical and edgy for its own attention). The Butterfly Effect is an endless improv game of “yes and” where the proceedings only get worse. My original review in 2004 was one of my more unconventional reviews, and I just wanted to adopt my perception of the “Kutcher brand” persona of the era and make a bunch of dumb jokes, several of which I’m not too ashamed to admit still made me chuckle (“two words: beard.”). I’d lower my grade a tad but there is still a car-crash fascination of watching a movie try so transparently hard to be so twisted.
Re-View Grade: C
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American Fiction (2023)
Cord Jefferson’s hilarious, inflammatory, and insightful comic fable can be boiled down to the question of what exactly does it mean to be a “black writer” in this day and age? According to the main character, English professor and middling writer Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), he would pointedly argue that he is a black writer and thus his novels, never ones to climb a best-seller chart, should qualify as black literature. The publishing industry seems to think differently. Their conception of a “Black story” is one defined through poverty, guns, drugs, gang violence, degradation, and all sorts of depressing stereotypes of socioeconomic disadvantage. If there are stories of triumph, they will usually be relegated to the same familiar settings of struggle: slavery, the Civil Rights era, and modern ghettos. A simple slice-of-life about a middle-class family isn’t necessarily seen with the same level of acceptance. With American Fiction, Jefferson and Monk push through, trying to exploit a system of exploitation at its own game, and the results are biting and hilarious and a condemnation of the low expectations that can govern the supposedly open-minded values of others when it comes to celebrating authentic minority stories.
The movie really takes off once Monk decides to, as a sarcastic lark, give the publishing world what it seems to crave, a novel (My Pafology) that plays into every urban stereotype. He adopts a nome de plume, “Stagg R. Leigh,” and riffs that he’s currently a fugitive from the law. The intention was to make fun of the limited black literary stories that he despises, and yet the incendiary manuscript becomes a hot commodity. They’re already talking about turning it into a movie. Monk is aghast but the money is very appealing, so he puts his moral superiority aside to see how far he’s willing to pander if the check is right. His alter ego is deemed more authentic and compelling when he doesn’t even exist and is only a combination of the same worn-out and destructive stereotypes. It becomes an ongoing game for Monk to see where exactly a line can be drawn. He actively tries to make his manuscript objectively worse, and at every step it only seems to have the opposite reaction among white editors and agents and producers salivating to celebrate it. There’s a very telling scene where Monk is part of a literary award body scouring through manuscripts for potential worthy award-winners. He and another prominent black author (Issa Rae), the best-selling author of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, are critical of My Pafology and its adherence to harmful stereotypes, but the white liberals won’t hear it and want to reward it. “It’s really important that we listen and uplift black voices,” one of them says obliviously. Of course, if they knew the truth that the author was really an upper middle-class East Coast academic, there wouldn’t be the same rush to elevate this “brave and inspiring” story of the streets. To Monk’s ire and chagrin, there is no bottom when it comes to the appetite for degrading stories that neatly fit into a pre-existing mold.
Jefferson’s screenplay, based upon the 2001 novel Erasure by Percival Everett, is bristling with biting intelligence. This extends beyond the identity crisis of Monk in the world of publishing to his personal life, and the time spent with his fractured family is just as illuminating as the time spent in publishing. Monk’s need for money is driven less from his own desire to live large and more about caring for his ailing mother who needs to be placed in a costly assisted living home as she plunges further into dementia. His shared moments with his mother can be heartbreaking as well as informative. His relationship with his brother, Clifford (Sterling K. Brown), who is embracing his black sheep status as a now openly gay middle-aged man, is a regular point of reflection for both characters who feel their identities are in free fall. Their conversations about being accepted as you fully are help reinforce the major themes mirrored through Monk’s publishing odyssey with his alter ego. The Hollywood satire is best encapsulated by Adam Brody’s shallow movie producer, a good white liberal who is sold on the project after he perceives that Monk leaves their meeting after hearing police sirens. His every appearance is a gift. Not everything in Jefferson’s adaptation feels as exceptionally well integrated. I don’t think the romantic subplot quite works but Jefferson is smart enough to frame that as possibly the larger point, an offshoot that presents an alternative of happiness for our bitter protagonist that he will inevitably decline.
This is also a deserving showcase for Wright (Westworld, The Batman), one of our best character actors who rarely gets the plaudits he deserves. He’s a brilliant actor when it comes to consternation and exasperation, and his unexpected journey of discovery and success allows him to assess how much he’s willing to go along with a deceptive narrative in a ludicrous industry of perception. Wright’s performance is equal parts amusement, like a conman who can’t believe he keeps getting away with his ruse, and head-shaking anger at being marginalized unless he erases the complicated, unique parts of himself.
I also want to celebrate the very ending of American Fiction that goes even harder on industry satire. Jefferson gets extra meta and presents a series of possible endings for Monk’s story, from Monk’s preferred ending that leans more ambiguous and open-ended, to the Hollywood happy ending and other versions, each their own condemnation on the studio system and the larger demands of mass audiences for tidy endings. It’s a level of comic bravado that American Fiction hasn’t really fully channeled until that moment and its absence makes this conclusion, a choose your own adventure of bad endings, hit even harder. He’s been saving his full satirical might until the very end and it was worth it.
Who exactly gets to qualify what constitutes the black experience? Certainly not I, a 41-year-old white guy writing on the Internet. Even though the source material is over twenty years old, the struggles of identity and acceptance and the lens of which we subject others’ experiences through are still relevant in an increasingly hostile cultural environment for different attempts at diversity. American Fiction is hilarious and smart and produces as many thought-provoking questions as solid belly laughs. It’s a cutting satire but with characters that are compelling beyond their connection to larger satirical points. This is more than a message movie, and it’s a statement debut film for Jefferson as a filmmaker and primarily as a storyteller. Jefferson began as a journalist and has worked on several critically-acclaimed TV shows, winning an Emmy for an extraordinary episode of HBO’s Watchmen. He is a talent, and American Fiction is proof that he has a voice and the confidence to carry it through into one of the best films of 2023.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
Killers of the Flower Moon has the banner of an Important Movie, telling a story many history books have overlooked for too long, an American tragedy built upon one of America’s original sins with the indigenous peoples, and tying a direct line to not only how we live now as well as how we choose to remember the past. The true story behind the murder of the Osage Nation natives in the 1920s is an urgent story that gets to the heart of greed and the human capacity for evil, and Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour movie is somber and mournful and appropriately devastating. But I’m also wondering why I wasn’t as enchanted with it as a movie-going experience. Should I feel movie critic guilt for finding the movie merely good but not transcendentally great?
The whole of Killers of the Flower Moon is bleak, which is naturally much of the point. It’s difficult to retell the history of Native Americans in this country, or before there was a “this country,” without making use of lots of synonyms for the word “bleak.” The first hour presents the Native Americans as being legally incapable of greater agency; the murders are consistent, sloppy, and obvious, but the fact that no investigation was triggered for years in an acknowledgement that, simply put, the government just didn’t care about dead Indians. Oh, I hear you saying, but weren’t these Osage different? They had so much money from their oil rights that the local economy exploded with vultures offering common services for egregiously inflated prices to take advantage of people unaccustomed to having money and options. Even with a surge of riches, the Osage didn’t have an elevation in status. They were still looked upon as interlopers in the way of powerful white men getting that money, and there’s nothing these greedy people won’t do to get that money, especially with a system of justice of little accountability for dead minorities. One of the more galling scenes is when the town coroners are questioned over their unusual protocols, like chopping a corpse into tiny pieces so it could not be re-examined by other professionals. The whole town is in on this vile scheme, every doting neighbor can be guilty through complicity or complacency. Death after death, they all know what’s really going on; it’s plain as day, but nobody outside of the Osage feels the burning outrage, and that’s the point of the first half of the movie, to give the audience the same sense of anger and futility.
The majority of the lengthy movie follows our villains plotting their very obvious conspiracy, with Leonardo DiCaprio badly clenching his jaw in every scene as Ernest Burkhart, a WWI-veteran who comes home, becomes a cabbie, and marries Mollie (Lily Gladstone), one of the rich local Osage women. The question for the rest of the movie is whether or not his love for her is genuine or perhaps she is just a means to an end. He’s the lead of the movie and a total dope, a man who unironically proclaims repeatedly, “I love me some money!” Seems hard to read this guy, right? He’s an idiot, and again this might be the point, that this sort of small-thinking man could be the hinge on this entire conspiracy, which results in a lot of Mollie’s family members dying under increasingly mysterious circumstances to consolidate their inheritance. It’s a frustrating and spiritually exhausting experience to watch all these poor characters get murdered, again, so casually and transparently. One of them is staged as a would-be suicide except he’s shot through the back of the head and the gun wasn’t left at the scene. Eventually, the FBI does finally (finally!) arrive in town at the two-hour mark, but by then, I’ve been watching two hours of people dying without a legal stir.
This perspective is best embodied through Mollie, beautifully played by Gladstone (Certain Women, First Cow). When we first meet her, she’s a forward woman who can assert herself and what she wants. Then it all goes downhill after marrying Ernest. She loses damn near every family member she has and is forced to rely upon her husband for support, the same idiot bungling his way through arranging the deaths of her family members. She’s a personal stand-in for the Osage Nation as a whole, as we watch what they have whittled down and bled dry, watching the weight of all this suffering deteriorate their spirits and dignity. This is Mollie, our avatar for tragedy. She’s literally bedridden for a solid hour, and I dearly missed Gladstone’s presence. Since we’ve been aware of the bad deeds of the bad men from the start, much of Killers of the Flower Moon becomes a waiting game of when Mollie is hopefully going to wise up or at least suspect what is happening to her and her family. When will she see Ernest as a more nefarious force in her life, the kind of person you don’t want to solely trust with the responsibility of delivering your life-saving intravenous medicine. It adds to the overall frustrations of watching. Gladstone’s performance rises above whatever limitations her character is stricken with. First off, it’s a powerful performance of immense sorrow; having to watch her pained reaction to overhearing her sister’s skull sawed open for a disrespectful public autopsy is just sickening. The movie lives off this woman’s response to unfathomable trauma on repeat. When she is bedridden and lost in a medical fog, she still manages to communicate her wariness and suspicion through these extra layers of obfuscation.
Robert DeNiro, appearing in his eleventh Scorsese movie, is terrifying as a kindly cattle baron who fashions himself as the best friend of the Osage, preferring to refer to them by their indigenous names and warmly speaking their language. He’s also a monster, a stand-in for American big business and the blood-stained hands of capitalism without morals and oversight. The dramatic core of the movie, besides how far will this go before consequences will at long last germinate, is how can such self-styled men of God commit such heinous acts? How can people justify and equivocate over their own cruel crimes? This question is epitomized in Ernest and his direct connection to Mollie, but it’s also epitomized through DeNiro’s character, William Hale. We have two characters fulfilling the same thematic purpose, which might be the point, but it makes for a redundant narrative experience. DeNiro’s character is so much more interesting than Ernest too, with the full cognitive dissonance of being an avowed man of the people and true ally to the Osage while he’s plotting their demise. DeNiro holds to this homespun, Foghorn Leghorn accent throughout, and I can’t recall him ever raising his voice. It’s a performance where the lasting terror comes through its friendly disconnect. It’s a more impressive performance than watching DiCaprio grimace and mumble through three and a half hours.
Some chastise Killers of the Flower Moon for choosing to tell its story from the perspective of its white perpetrators. I understand from a narrative standpoint and an overall larger thematic point why this was done. Scorsese clearly thinks of his own limits of being the one to tell this story, appearing as a cameo in the coda to provide commentary on how the American morbid desire for true crime and historical atrocities will lead to yesterday’s outrages becoming today’s distilled and de-contextualized “content.” The problem is the movie already feels frustrating as is while we wait for there to finally be some accounting for the ongoing injustices, and centering the entire perspective on only the Osage would magnify this frustration with even less elucidation on the depths of what was happening. Scorsese strips away a lot of the stylistic flourishes and even the electric pacing and editing that we come to expect from his filmography. This is a slow, ponderous movie. It’s meant to provoke outrage. It’s also designed to frustrate, and I suppose I can admire that while also impatiently shifting in my seat and wondering how many of these 206 minutes could have been lost. I feel like a philistine for looking at a $200-million Scorsese movie, while this man is in the late stages of his career and clearly thinking of this reality, and asking, “Hey, can you give me maybe less movie?”
If you haven’t noticed, dear reader, I am a critic in conflict. Killers of the Flower Moon has fantastic production values, strong acting, and the importance of staging history as it was rather than how it may be remembered, especially over events long ignored by history. I even admire the choices that are deliberate that make the movie feel less like easily consumed entertainment. It’s a movie that I feel compelled to see a second time before I settle on my eventual rating (a seven-hour commitment). It’s a sad movie, a bleak movie, a challenging movie, a meaningful movie, and an Important Movie about Important Things. It’s also long, frustrating in structure and execution, and occasionally redundant with its characterization and plotting, giving the impression that things have been stretched beyond breaking. Again, maybe that’s the larger thematic point, but then again I might just be stuck in a rabbit hole of excuses to find some justification for my less-than-ecstatic reaction to Killers of the Flower Moon, a movie of strident artistic vision that can also feel like you’re eating your vegetables for three nonplussed hours.
Nate’s Grade: B
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The Zone of Interest (2023)
The Zone of Interest is one of the more maddening film experiences I’ve ever had, and I’m sure that was part of the intention of writer/director Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin). While based upon a 2014 fictional book by Martin Amis, Glazer had hollowed out the novel’s fake story and replaced it with its inspiration, the Höss family, a real-life German couple and their children who literally had their villa next door to the horrendous Auschwitz concentration camp. The husband was the chief commandant for the camp, and he had his family literally sharing wall space with the notorious factory of death. The entire feature film is then given to observing this family from afar as they try to live a “normal domestic life” in the shadow of something profoundly abnormal and abhorrent. It’s a classic example of a type of movie I will dub the “Yeah, okay, so what?” movie. I get it, I do, but why is this exactly a feature film?
I understand artistically what Glazer is going for here. It’s the ironic juxtaposition of the ordinary and the awful, asking the viewer to think about how many millions of Germans went along with the mounting anti-Semitic and racist policies of Nazi Germany out of self-interest and/or willful ignorance, the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt termed it. That becomes the challenge of the movie, watching this family tend to the garden, host a birthday party, and read bedtime stories while watching the gloom of the chimneys, listening to the constant soundtrack of scattered gunshots and the screams of victims, including the wails of babies. Every scene is elevated by the dramatic irony of the context that it is happening next door to a concentration camp. We watch them plant flowers, and it just so happens to be next door to a concentration camp. We watch them invite the mother-in-law to make her new bedroom her own, and it just so happens to be next door to a concentration camp. It gets tedious as a viewer because without the irony, we’re just watching a family live their life. I get that’s the point, this example of one family trying to ignore the terrifying reality literally at their very doorstep. I understand that message and I understand why that is even more relevant to our troubled modern times with an alarming rise in anti-Semitism and the celebration of fascism and repressive strongmen. However, I don’t think we get real insights into these characters because they’re more just general ideas intended to forward the critical thesis of the power of self-delusion and excuse-making. That’s fine as a starting point for a provocative movie, but don’t make me watch a family do their laundry for an hour and then tell me it’s an Important Statement because they happen to be next door to the horrors of history.
Let me try this same kind of approach on another human tragedy. Say we have a family drama about a hard-working couple trying to go through the day-to-day challenges of marriage and raising a family, and it JUST SO HAPPENS that they live within distance of… the internment of the Japanese in World War II. Does this magically transform and elevate the ordinary actions on-screen into more than what they are? Perhaps to some, but for me it felt too transparently methodical and quickly redundant. I don’t need a whole movie documenting a family next door that barely scratches the surface of their circumstances of living.
There are a few moments that manage to break through. There’s a scene where the daughters are swimming in the nearby river and the family realizes that the gray streams intruding upon the water are the ashes from the camp. From there they furiously scrub themselves clean, the grotesque horror something they attempt to cleanse, whether they’re horrified because the ash belongs to people or because it specifically belongs to Jews. The mother (Sandra Huller) refuses to move away after her husband Rudolph (Christian Friedel) is reassigned by the Nazi brass. This is the home she’s put her time into remodeling and reshaping and she isn’t going to just let anyone live under her roof. This setback is far more upsetting to her than anything she overhears on the other side of her garden walls. There’s also an ongoing story where one of the Höss children is leaving behind a trail of apples, inspired by a favorite bedtime fable, and this has an unfortunate unintended tragedy for people these children will never know or see. There’s an offhand remark by the mother-in-law as she’s touring the backyard where she wonders if a woman in her book club is among the throng next door in the camps. Rather than use this as a moment of reflection over the genocide occurring next door, she then moves onto lamenting that she never got this same woman’s curtains that she always prized. I wish the movie had more of these character moments that directly confront the willful ignorance rather than keeping the audience simmering with the same meditative Big Picture concept that has been relentlessly winnowed down so finely that it may as well be dust.
Glazer makes very specific choices to highlight the detachment of the movie. His camera angles are often taken from far fixed points, and the coverage makes for smooth edits that let you know there were multiple cameras filming these scenes rather than the stress of multiple setups and different takes to cobble together. This makes the movie feel closer to a documentary where we have captured real life as it is happening instead of a group of actors on a set pretending to be different people putting on a show for our entertainment.
The Zone of Interest is a movie that crushes you in the everyday details, and in that it reminded me of 2020’s The Assistant, another indie that didn’t quite work for me. That film was about a young woman who served as a film production assistant to a producer modeled after Harvey Weinstein, and it asked how much she can ignore for the sake of her own upward mobility. It had a really compelling premise but the movie spent most of its running time just watching her do her job, filing papers, getting coffee, walking home, with the implicit knowledge banging around in our anxious minds to then elevate the mundane (she’s not just fixing the copy machine, she’s fixing the copy machine and Harvey Weinstein might be abusing someone just in the next room!). This ironic juxtaposition proved too tiring for me without also exploring the characters and conflicts more explicitly. Things happening off-screen while far more boring things happen on-screen is not itself great drama. Being drama-adjacent does not automatically magically imbue the ordinary with transcendent meaning. I need more than, “Big things are happening… over there.” The Zone of Interest is a critical favorite for 2023 but I think many viewers will have the same response I did: yeah, okay, so what?
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Eileen (2023)
Based upon the novel of the same name, and adapted by the novelist and her husband, Eileen is an affectingly broody unrequited romance awash in noir trappings and feelings. It’s set in a prison facility in 1960s Boston, and one young worker Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) becomes enraptured with her new co-worker Rebecca, a psychologist with an exceptional sense of confidence and hunger, played by Anne Hathaway. For a solid hour, the movie becomes something akin to 2015’s Carol, a lesbian romance where the social norms of the time force both participants to speak in codes and glances and gestures. Eileen is given to flurries of intense daydreams, often sexual, and sees a fellow creature in Rebecca, who doesn’t so much as walk through rooms as slinks, doesn’t so much as stare but smolders. Hathaway is in full-on femme fatale seduction mode here and enjoying it. It is following along this path of possible mutual connection, of finally acting upon these hidden desires, and then the movie takes a SHARP LEFT TURN and stays there for the rest of the duration. The twist works, and forces the audience to reconsider our notions of obsession and perspective, but it also feels like we’ve abandoned the prior movie into this new even pulpier, slightly more manic movie, and I don’t know if I wanted to leave so suddenly. If this twist were to stand, I think it needed to be introduced sooner, especially if it obliterates the prior dramatic work, and allow more time to deal with its myriad consequences. There is a powerfully gripping and deeply devastating monologue by Marin Ireland that might be the best part of the movie. Eileen the movie is a little like Eileen the character, gliding on appearances and secretly something much darker at its core.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Aporia (2023)
In writer/director Jared Moshe’s low-budget indie film Aporia, the Trolley Debate, killing one person in order to spare the lives of, presumably, more people or a greater number of people, gets its own movie in a thoughtful and provocative little indie. The thorny ethical questions are given their rightful due, and this is where Aporia really shines for me, as a small-scale sci-fi story with Big Ideas bursting forth and the understanding to give them adequate space for satisfying contemplation. It bowled me over.
Sophie (Judy Greer) is still very much not over the death of her husband, Malcolm (Ed Gathegi). He was killed by a drunk driver months ago and that driver also seems to have escaped justice. Sophie is left alone to raise their pre-teen daughter Riley. That’s where Jabir (Payman Maadi) comes in. He was a friend of Malcolm and reveals they had been working on a prototype for a time machine in secret. The machine has its own limits. It sends a photon particle back in time, which will kill any living creature that it materializes inside. All you need are the time, place, and coordinates and you could kill anyone. The further in time you need to go the more power the machine will have to draw. Sophie is beside herself but taken over with the excitement of possibly bringing her husband back to life. All it takes is murder.
What the characters have created is essentially a magic gun that can shoot into the past, which means the only use for this time travel device is to take life. They will only ever be murderers if they decide to use it, and so it becomes a question over under what circumstances would it be permissible to utilize this weapon. The first victim is obvious, the man responsible for the death of Sophie’s husband, and like magic he returns good as new without any memory of ever having been gone. It’s an important rule introduced that only the people in the room with the machine will still have memories of the previous timelines before the space-time revisions. This is a good move for an obvious dramatic one, so that the characters will be able to be impacted by the changes because they can recall a life without them, but it also sneakily supplies another complication. Each one of them has the potential to use the machine alone and thus never having the others realize what they had done. It’s one more tricky ethical question, asking whether you would betray the trust of someone close to you if you could get away with it. Naturally, the characters debate the merits of when to use the machine and when not to, with each new use further complicating matters because the next change can always destabilize the state of things, and then it’s a chain of changes to try and find the right order, and that leaves a trail of bodies littering the past.
It wouldn’t be a compelling time travel narrative without the ole’ favorite of unintended consequences. By removing the drunk driver before he could ever fatefully get behind the wheel, Sophie has brought back her husband and felt like the cost was negligible, as that driver in present-day is an abusive husband who gets drunk and yells at his family while he escapes justice for manslaughter. However, once you start pulling at the knots of the human timeline, some interesting and unexpected results can happen. That same man has been removed but his family isn’t necessarily better off. Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox), the widowed wife, is struggling to make ends meet as a single mom with a daughter (Veda Cienfuegos) suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS). They are deep in medical debt. It seems that the least this man did was help provide a financial cushion. Without his presence, they’ve had to go it alone and they’re broke and likely unable to continue paying the costly medical treatment for this adolescent girl. Because of Sophie’s desire to bring back her husband, she has doomed this innocent victim. Sophie’s guilt causes her to seek out the family, check up on them, and upon the discovery of their hardships, befriend mother and daughter and find a way to make things right as the unknowing perpetrator of their dilemma. From there it becomes a game of thinking how she can erase their misfortune while keeping her own husband.
I will discuss one significant turn because I think it’s an evocative example of the thought-provoking nature of the screenplay, but I will warn you there will be significant spoilers. If you wish to remain pure, dear reader, then skip to the next paragraph. The team comes up with a new name to eliminate to solve the fortunes for Kara and her daughter, a man who swindled her, a Ponzi scam artist who left her penniless and forced to close her bakery. Seems open and shut with an obvious bad person, thus an easy solution. But you should recognize there are no easy solutions in stories untangling timeline interference. All of a sudden, Sophie and Malcolm come home to discover that they have a completely different child. Their teen daughter is now a teenage boy with a different personality and different interests. How? How could eliminating one bad man in a completely different state change the course of history enough that their child has been affected? They debate the possibilities, perhaps something as small as a different sperm winning out or conceiving her on a different day or month, but the results are irrefutable. While their child is alive in this timeline, in a very real sense they have both now lost their daughter. The person they raised together, loved, and helped shape has been eliminated and the grief is palatable. This new child is a stranger, but they too are strangers to this child. They are absent formative memories and do not have the shared connections and history to draw upon. When Sophie tries to comfort this new Riley, she doesn’t know what may work because she doesn’t know anything about this child. I don’t think the filmmakers are making negative commentary on adoption, which is essentially what this scenario mirrors, but the grief goes two ways. They mourn the child blinked from existence, and this child also had his parents blinked from existence and replaced with lookalikes, they just don’t understand it yet. It’s this escalation that personalizes the unintended harm of what they’re doing and sets the stage for the final decision.
The ending is going to divide people but it felt note-perfect for me. It ends on an emotional high of coming to terms with their culpability but also on accepting uncertainty. We end on an ambiguous note, absent a resolution about the final extension of the final decision. I think it works very well not just in trying to have it multiple ways but because after being in the know, it puts the characters, and vicariously the viewer, in a state of vulnerability and the acceptance of staying there. It’s an uplifting conclusion thematically because it’s about accepting loss but also accepting our limitations. The final conversations are inadequate because how can you summarize a life with another person, whether a lover or a friend or a spouse, into just a handful of clumsy words. Our vocabulary does us a disservice when it comes to expressing the glorious debt we feel having had these people in our lives. That is why the movie ends on an emotional high for me and really comes together, personalizing the ethical conundrums.
Greer (Halloween Kills) has had a long career as a supporting actress, usually the funny but supportive best friend to the lead, and as an outstanding voice actress (Archer, Let’s Go Luna), but rarely does she get a meaty dramatic lead role. She’s terrific here and serves as our dramatic anchor through the turbulent changes and moral soul-searching. She is our reflection, and Greer’s emotional journey is well encapsulated in a performance that doesn’t go big into histrionics but is more carefully grounded and natural. I don’t think the movie would work as well, at least on an emotional level, without her.
Is Aporia a perfect film? Well, very few are, and the movie could have even more development, leaving possibilities behind given its tantalizing premise. I’m glad the movie didn’t go overboard into some slapdash thriller territory and instead grounded its science fiction timeline wonkiness into engaging human drama about loss, sacrifice, and acceptance. As my pal Eric Muller said, Aporia likely works better as a screenplay than a finished film, though this discounts the heavy-hearted contributions of Greer. I’m glad this movie emphasized its ideas and provided the time to really dwell in them, even if the movie is only about 90 minutes altogether. Aporia is a deeply engaging movie that worked on all levels for me, enriching emotions and satisfying intellect, and is definitely worth the discovery.
Nate’s Grade: A-
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Spencer + Penny, Forever (2023)
In the best way, Spencer + Penny feels like a Pixar short, something sweet and subtly profound that then suckerpunches you into a mess of feelings that you didn’t think were possible given the abbreviated length as well as the subject matter. You may ask yourself, “Am I really about to cry over some pencils?” and I’m here to tell you yes, and it’s okay to cry. In just a matter of seconds, this Ohio-made short film gets you to think from a different perspective, that of a mechanical pencil named Spencer (voiced by writer/director Eric Boso), and through that object we will feel all-too familiar human traits. There’s elation at aligning with one’s purpose, but also a melancholy that comes when we feel spent, empty, and rundown, needing to be replenished. Because of Spencer’s unique identity, his lead can be replaced, though this also causes him to feel hollow at times. Then one day he meets a friend, a traditional wooden pencil named Penny (voiced by Samantha Martin). She’s chipper and unflappable in her enthusiasm and optimism, lifting Spencer’s spirits. And then this relationship rapidly changes through a simple and elegant visual means of montage, and all at once this cute film about two pencils, and thematically about mental health, has transformed into one about mortality and legacy. It works so well that I was shocked to be feeling urgent emotions, begging a muted pencil to speak back. That’s quite a creative coup for Boso (Bong of the Living Dead). The short itself is visually lean and clean, given to presenting the story like it was a writing utensil catalog. The sparse visual arrangements further made Spencer + Penny, Forever feel like a children’s storybook come to whimsical life. I enjoyed the emphasis given to erasers and the disappointment we feel at making mistakes but the acknowledgement that mistakes are also a part of life, a big idea but made easily digestible for all ages through the carefully crafted writing style of a bittersweet child’s storybook.
I won’t delve into detailed spoilers but I think the ending concept is fitting but we needed a different path to finally wind up there. It’s sweet but feels like a different story starting, which may well be the point. I also think the metaphysical and eschatological implications are rather large to try and make this work, so I think something more practical with the in-universe setting and a direct connection would have felt like a more appropriate thematic conclusion. Still, it works, I just quibble with the means we reached this ending.
Spencer + Penny, Forever was produced for the 2023 Winterfilm Festival in Ohio and won several awards, including Best Writing, Audience Award, Best Music (the music does have a definite Jon Brion-esque quality of deceptive whimsy that blends into heartache), and Best Film. It’s easy to see the movie as a crowd-pleaser and an unassuming charmer, able to delicately hit weightier themes with cute observational quirk (a.k.a. The Hidden Life of Writing Utensils). It will be entering the festival circuit shortly and I’m sure I won’t be the last person walking away from Spencer and Penny and shaking my head and smiling that an eight-minute short made me think differently about my pen.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Monster (2003) [Review Re-View]
Originally released December 24, 2003:
Monster follows the life of Aileen Wuornos (Charlize Theron, now nominated for a Best Actress Oscar), Americas only known female serial killer. In the late 1980s, Wueros was a roadside prostitute flexing her muscles with Florida motorists. She describes hookin’ as the only things shes ever been good at. One day Wuornos has the full intention of taking her own life, but she meets 18-year-old Selby (Christina Ricci) at a lesbian bar and finds a companion. Driven by a growing hatred of men from sexual abuse, Wuorno’s starts killing her johns to try and establish a comfortable life for her and Selby.
Let’s not mince words; Theron gives one of the best performances I have ever seen in my life. Yes, that’s right. One of. The. Best. Performances. Ever. This is no exaggeration. I’m not just throwing out niceties. Theron is completely unrecognizable under a mass of facial prosthetics, 30 extra pounds, fake teeth and a total lack of eyebrows. But this is more than a hollow ploy to attract serious attention to the acting of a pretty face. Theron does more than simple imitation; she fully inhabits the skin of Aileen Wuornos. The closest comparison I can think of is Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison in The Doors.
Theron is commanding, brave, distressing, ferocious, terrifying, brutal, stirring, mesmerizing and always captivating. It may be a cliché, but you really cannot take your eyes off of her. Her performance is that amazing. To say that Theron in Monster is an acting revelation is perhaps the understatement of the year.
With previous acting roles in Reindeer Games and The Cider House Rules, Theron is usually delegated to pretty girlfriend roles (who occasionally shows her breasts). Who in the world thought she had this kind of acting capability? I certainly did not. If Nicole Kidman can win an Oscar for putting on a fake nose and a so-so performance, surely Theron should win an Oscar for her absolute transformation of character and giving the performance of a lifetime.
With this being said, and most likely over said, Monster is by no means a perfect film. Minus the terrific central performance, Monster is more of an everyday profile of a grotesque personality. The film weakly tries to portray Wuornos more as a victim, but by the end of the film, and six murdered men later, sympathy is eradicated as Wuornos transforms into the titular monster. Some supporting characters, like Ricci’s narrow-minded Christian up bringers, are flat characters bordering on parody. The supporting characters are generally underwritten, especially the male roles that serve as mere cameos in a film dominated by sapphic love.
Monster is proof positive that human beings will never be phased out by advancing machinery when it comes to acting. Monster boasts one of the greatest acting achievements in recent cinematic history, but it also coasts on sharp cinematography and a moody and ambient score by BT (Go). Monster is a haunting film that you won’t want to blink for fear of taking your eyes off of Theron. She gives an unforgettable tour de force performance that will become legendary.
Nate’s Grade: B
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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER
Monster was a revelation for Charlize Theron, an actress who until then had mostly been known for parts that asked that she be good looking and little else. Twenty years later, Theron is one of the best actresses working in Hollywood and it almost never happened without her breakthrough performance where she brought to startling life the horror of Aileen Wuornos’s tragic life and tragic desperation. When this movie came out originally in 2003, I doubt anyone but Theron’s closest friends suspected she was capable of a performance this raw and spellbinding, but that’s also a condemnation on all of us. How many other actresses out there could maybe rival the best of the best if they just had the right opportunity? How many actresses are stuck playing the same limited roles because that’s all they’re ever asked to do? How many actresses are wrongly assumed to be of limited talent simply because of their comely appearance? That isn’t to say there’s some hidden universal equation that the uglier you are the better at acting you have to be (though it sure has worked out for [insert your example of a conventionally unattractive actor here]), but this movie is a clear indication that too many actors are never given enough opportunities to shine.
Back in early 2004, I credited Theron’s performance as one of the best I’ve ever witnessed in my then-twenty-one years of moviegoing (although that number should be smaller considering I wasn’t keenly watching Scorsese as a baby). She is very good, but I’d like to claw back some of my rapturous words of praise now that we’ve seen twenty years of Theron acting excellence. Looking over her career, I might actually cite 2011’s Young Adult as her finest performance, and that one didn’t even nab an Oscar nomination (she’s since been nominated twice since, for 2005’s North Country and 2019’s Bombshell). The draw of the movie is the head-turning performance from Theron and she just disappears completely inside the skin of her subject. It’s hard to remember at times that this is Theron, thanks to the richness of her startling performance but also the accomplished makeup effects, which were not nominated. At every point, you feel the fire burning behind the stricken complexion of Theron, a fire that will eventually consume her and everything she loves. While highly compelling, this is not a performance of subtlety and restraint. This is a big performance, and the movie is often prone to making loud pronouncements about its subjects and pertinent themes. It’s loud, brash, and maybe for some it will seem a little too loud, a little too unsubtle, but it’s a movie that refuses to be ignored for good reason.
In my original review I raised some reservations with the rest of the movie, and I’m here to recant one of them. I wrote back in 2004, “The film weakly tries to portray Wuornos more as a victim, but by the end of the film, and six murdered men later, sympathy is eradicated as Wuornos transforms into the titular monster.” I’m positive that many will still cling to this same idea but oh boy have I come around in twenty years. By the time the movie is over, you wonder why more women haven’t just snapped and gone on killing sprees. Wuornos is indeed a victim. She’s responsible for terrible deeds but that doesn’t change the fact that she started as a victim and continued as one until put to death by the state of Florida in 2002. She was a sexual assault survivor, groomed into prostitution, and then trapped by a society that saw her as little other than trash, something to be pitied but ultimately forgotten. She comes of age as an adult thinking her only value is the fleeting moments of pleasure she can provide for men, and in the narration, we hear her dreams that one of these men who repeatedly tell her how pretty she is would take her away to another life, like a princess. Alas. It’s impossible to separate her past as a victim of predatory men from her actions when she turns on predatory men. Being forced into prostitution out of desperation is one of the definitions for sex slavery and trafficking. The movie does try to make her last few johns more ambiguous over whether or not they are “good people” and thus “deserving” of their fates, like a scale is being introduced and we’re doing the calculation whether Wuornos will strike (#NotAllMen, eh felas?). There’s a clear dark path where the murders get considerably worse. She begins by defending herself against a rapist, but by the end, it’s just a kind family man who picked her up without even the intention of having sex. We’re meant to see her transform into the titular monster, but I kept wondering about Aileen Wuornos as the societal stand-in, accounting for thousands of other women who lived and died under similar tragic circumstances.
I also found myself growing increasingly contemptuous of the love interest character played by Christina Ricci (Yellowjackets). When we’re introduced to Selby, she’s a wide-eyed naif testing her boundaries of comfort but clearly tapping into repressed homosexual feelings. Their relationship is meant to serve as the emotional rock for Wuornos, the reason that she’s acting more rash is because she’s trying to earn enough money for the two of them to run away together and build a new life. She is her motivation, but Selby is absolutely the worst. You can excuse some of her hemming and hawing about striking out on her own and leaving her controlling parents, as she’s fighting against repression as well as trepidation for starting out independently, but this lady becomes fully aware of the dangers and dehumanization that Aileen goes through to earn her meager amounts of money, and Selby encourages her to do so. Not just encourages her, Selby pressures her to do so, to get back out there and “provide” for her, knowing fully well what that means, knowing fully well how these men have treated Wournos, repeatedly abusing her. What are you doing to help things out, huh Selby? She’s embarrassed hanging around Wuornos around some other lesbian friends she just met, so she’s already looking to upgrade and move past her lover. By the end, as she’s trying to coax a confession of guilt from her girlfriend to save her own skin, Selby becomes just another user, taking what they want from Wuornos and discarding her when they’ve had their fill.
This was the directorial debut for Patty Jenkins, who also served as the sole credited screenwriter, and while the indie darling-to-franchise blockbuster pipeline has been alive and well in Hollywood, it was quite a surprising leap that her next movie after Monster was none other than 2017’s Wonder Woman. To go from this small character-driven true crime indie to leading the big screen solo outing for comics’ most famous female hero is quite a bizarre but impressive jump. Her only other feature credit is the much less heralded 2020 Wonder Woman sequel. She was attached to direct a Star Wars movie about fighter pilots but that seems to have gone into turnaround or just canceled. So is the way with Star Wars movies after 2019’s Rise of Skywalker. Just ask the Game of Thrones creators, Josh Trank, and Taika Watiti how that goes.
Monster is a phenomenal performance with a pretty okay movie wrapped around it in support. Twenty years later, Theron is still a monster you can’t take your eyes away from. It changed her career destiny and I think acts as an exemplar for two reasons: leaving the viewer with the question how many other wonderfully talented performers will never get the chance to showcase their true talents because of faulty assumptions, and how many other women are out there living in quiet degradation like Aileen Wuornos.
Re-Veiw Grade: B
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Leave the World Behind (2023)
Apocalyptic thrillers can oddly enough serve as a therapeutic means for dealing with our fears of being helpless against forces well beyond our control, but they’re also reflections of our current state of anxiety as well. There’s more than just giant hurricanes or earthquakes breaking records on the Richter scale, it’s about how we respond to the momentous and alarming changes and what that says about The Way We Live Now. The new Netflix apocalyptic thriller Leave the World Behind, based on the 2020 book of the same name, has some big mysteries that I feel safe to say won’t fully be explained by the end. There is a possible explanation but it’s a movie more consumed with how people respond to tumult than the tumult. I found the majority of the movie to be gripping and engaging, and while it doesn’t exactly nail the landing, writer/director Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot, Homecoming) crafts a paranoid thriller with flair. It’s an apocalyptic thriller at crossroads with a paranoia thriller and a disaster movie, and the biggest challenge of them all is ultimately being able to trust another person during a time of remarkable uncertainty.
Amanda (Julia Roberts) and her husband Clay (Ethan Hawke) have elected to take a spur-of-the-moment family vacation out of New York City and onto a lavish home in Long Island. Everything seems so placid until the phones no longer get a signal, the TV broadcasts are strictly limited to a blank emergency screen, and two strangers show up (Mahershala Ali, Myhal’la) saying this is their house and they would like to stay inside. They claim that the U.S. is under a cyber assault and there’s more to come.
Leave the World Behind has two intriguing questions to keep the audience hooked: what is actually happening and who are these new people? Most disaster movies put you in the thick of the action, from presidential boardrooms to scientific outposts keeping up with the changing data and going over the options to prevent further loss of life. This movie purposely leaves you in the dark in a well-kept Long Island home and the first thing that goes is the expediency of knowing things from our phones. When two new people come knocking at the door to say the world is falling apart and this is our home, trust us, it’s hard not to hold some level of suspicion. Can we take these people at their word? What kind of agenda could they secretly have? And if so, what does that say about what has happened or what is happening in the outside world? They seem like they know more than what they’re letting on, so how much do they know themselves? It’s the slow drip of information that makes the movie simmer in such an anxious predicament of looking at every new piece as another new question. This places the viewer uncomfortably in similar territory as Amanda, who despite her prejudices might be right not to trust the newcomers. We’re stuck on the outside wondering what has happened and what may be left. The movie is carefully crafted to only give us so much to work with while our minds start reading and rereading everything for more connection and meaning, running rampant and going stir crazy just like the characters. While the second big question naturally gave way and could only produce so much tension, the main thrust of the movie kept me hooked and excited and worried and actively questioning just what exactly was going on.
I appreciate how Esmail is a restlessly ambitious filmmaker. He took on directing duties for the entire second season of Mr. Robot and from there continued coming up with new challenges. There was an episode meant to be told as an episode-length elaborate tracking shot. There was an episode that was told almost without any spoken words, entirely through visual action. There was an episode that was presented like a five-act stage play and it was enthralling. While these are the easy to recall gimmick episodes, Esmail’s directing vision for his series never eclipsed the series itself. It elevated the episodes but the emphasis was still on the significance of the characters and their emotional states (highly recommend Mr. Robot, one of my favorite 2010s TV shows, to anyone who has yet to watch). With Leave the World Behind, only his second feature after 2014’s parallel universe rom-com Comet, Esmail refuses to let any sequence pass without some kind of visual flourish. His camera is constantly swooping through the visual landscape, flipping and spinning and craning above the characters from on high. It reminded me of Brian DePalma, who also loves the high angle pans across rooms and also abides by the dogma that there should be no uninteresting shots in a movie. It’s easy to appreciate but without an engaging story can quickly become a distracting exercise in empty artifice, which is also how I view most DePalma. Here, much like Esmail’s accomplished prestige TV work, the style makes me better appreciate how much effort and thought Esmail has put into his presentation and his ideas. The man wants you to see his work, and there’s no fault in that as long as you’re enjoying the experience, which I was for the most part.
There are some supremely well-crafted moments played to a breaking point of intensity. Early on, as the family relaxes on the beach, they see a ship in the distance, an ordinary sight on a seemingly ordinary day. Then hours pass and it’s getting closer, and closer, and finally the realization begins to settle in that this thing is now a danger and they need to very much run very much now. Esmail’s camerawork keeps the scene feeling kinetic, with a long take that establishes the colossal danger as the tanker runs aground and the family has narrowly fled in time. In many ways this moment also serves as an ecological metaphor, with problems looming in the distance but ignored until they are at their most dangerous and right on top of us. Another sequence involves Clay venturing outside and discovering what appears to be a dust storm the color of blood. It’s getting closer and closer and the movie is testing how much we can take before you start hitting an imaginary gas pedal to strongly suggest Clay out of there. There’s another sequence that’s a literal pile-up of driver-less cars coming to the same nexus point like they’re all migrating. It makes for an immediately eerie sequence that becomes extra horrifying once the Teslas become unmanned missiles.
The themes of disconnection aren’t exactly subtle but that doesn’t mean they are misguided. This movie is about as subtle as an oil tanker heading straight for you, but I didn’t mind because of the skill of the storytellers and the ongoing mysteries that kept me begging for every new morsel. The messaging isn’t exactly complex. At one point Amanda has a speech that might as well be titled “This is Why Humans Are Terrible and We Deserve This.” Following this, another character tells her that they may not agree on much but she agrees with every word she just uttered with her speech, so you know this is the kind of pessimistic monologue that can reach across the doom-scrolling aisle. The movie almost frustratingly ends without a larger sense of clarity over what has been happening, a fate that would have greatly angered my wife. Esmail gives you something that can work as an explanation without making it definitive; it’s merely a theory but it’s enough to hold onto if you desperately need an explanation. However, the way the movie ends feels less conclusive and more like the conclusion of a season of television where the characters, now grouped together, are in for something fierce next year so stay tuned. The nature of this story is designed to leave you hanging, and that’s why I circle back on it mattering more on how these characters respond to this apocalyptic event versus what is clearly happening.
Chilling and effectively plotted to keep you guessing until the end, Leave the World Behind is an apocalyptic thriller that really simmers in the anxiety of the unknown. It’s not perfect but it’s pretty good, as long as you can accept not having all the answers. The acting is strong but it’s the control and finesse that Esmail exhibits as director and screenwriter that really makes the material engaging and impactful. It’s an apocalyptic thriller where the scariest proponent might be having to live with one another.
Nate’s Grade: B
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