With Nightmare Alley, virtuoso director Guillermo del Toro has added neo-noir, alongside gothic horror, fantasy, and science fiction, to the growing list of genres he’s proven mastery over. His fidelity to the gritty, nihilistic films noir, made popular after WWII and featuring broken protagonists who play fast and loose with society’s mores – and often get brutally punished for it – almost doesn’t need the “neo” qualifier. Nightmare Alley is the closest rendering of an actual film noir made in the 21st century thus far. At the same time, Del Toro puts his distinctive stamp on the film, blending in flourishes of straight horror and devastating morality tale.
Read more…
Not since Darren Aronofsky’s mother! in 2017 has a movie so successfully and hauntingly evoked an oneiric state as Charlie Kaufman’s fever dream vision I’m Thinking of Ending Things. If I were a more clever writer, I might invent a Kaufmanesque conversation between the two filmmakers, in which Aronofsky calls to praise Kaufman’s idiosyncratic and disturbing new work of art. Since I’m not that clever, you’ll have to settle for a more standard review in which I praise Kaufman’s unique vision while also wrestling with a few of the picture’s shortcomings.
Read more…
In his first feature film, Hereditary, director Ari Aster sets the disorienting tone of the entire movie in the very first shot. It’s a glacial pan around a room full of what appear to be dollhouses. We soon find out the protagonist, Annie Graham, is a miniaturist artist, and these tiny re-creations are her work. As Aster’s camera performs a delicate dolly, getting ever closer to one of the miniatures, we see sudden motion. A man walks through a dollhouse door. This space – at first a dollhouse representation of a bedroom – now fills the frame, and it inexplicably transforms into a new, full-sized setting. The man who walks through the door is Steve, Annie’s husband, and he’s waking their son, Peter, so that the family won’t be late for a funeral. Annie’s mother, Ellen, has died after suffering from a long period of dementia.
Aster’s perplexing and clever visual introduction tries to prepare us for the story that is about to unfold. Nothing in Hereditary is what it seems. One of the most exciting things about the movie is how many surprises it contains. Every time I thought I had a handle on where it was going, Aster peels back another layer. He keeps the unexpected revelations coming at a feverish pace right up until the final, terrifying last scene. What at the beginning promises to be a film about loss, grief, and family dysfunction – although Hereditary is about all that, too – by the last act becomes a fever dream of a horror film, and easily the scariest movie of the year.
Read more…
