→ January 23, 2023
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Aftersun.

Aftersun is the debut feature from director Charlotte Wells, a lovely, bittersweet slice of memory that avoids big moments or clear answers. Featuring two outstanding performances by Paul Mescal and newcomer Frankie Corio, it gets under your skin, and lingers on the palate afterwards like a dessert with complex flavors. (You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc., or watch free on MUBI outside of the U.S.)

Mescal and Corio are Calum, a single dad, and his daughter Sophie, who embark on a long father-daughter vacation with a tour group to Turkey to celebrate his upcoming 31st birthday and her 11th birthday. It’s around the year 1999, based on some of the music (Blur’s “Tender” was released that year), and the two have brought a handheld video camera on the trip, allowing Wells to present some scenes as they would have been recorded by Calum or Sophie. As the trip progresses, it becomes clear that Calum is not doing well, as he shows signs of depression and makes offhand comments that offer a slight glimpse into his inner turmoil. That trip constitutes nearly all of the film; there’s just one brief scene afterwards, as we see an adult Sophie watching the end of the videotape(s) we’ve been watching with her.

To say more about Aftersun risks breaking the spell it casts upon the audience. I have a vague memory of an interview Tom Petty gave around 1991, saying that part of Bob Dylan’s genius as a songwriter was the way he could just drop you into a story without giving you all sorts of prologue or introduction; you’re just right in the story from the start, and he figures you’ll catch up. Aftersun functions exactly like that: There’s almost no introduction to these two characters, other than a brief scene near the start where we learn about their ages and imminent birthdays. Wells allows us to learn about the characters through dialogue, such as that Sophie’s mum and Calum are divorced, or that she lives with her mum in Scotland and only visits Calum in London occasionally – or for a special trip like this one. It is a difficult way to tell a story, but Wells executes it flawlessly. By the end of Aftersun, you know Sophie, and you know Calum well enough to try to understand him as adult Sophie is likely trying to do by watching these old videos. He’s not declining over the course of the trip, but we see the vicissitudes of his mental state, sometimes through Sophie, but also sometimes when he’s on his own, raising the question of how much of what we see actually happened and how much is Sophie trying to fill in the gaps.

Both Mescal and Corio are superb in Aftersun, as they must be, with virtually no other characters getting more than a few lines. I had only seen Mescal in his small role in The Lost Daughter, and he is a presence here, with instant credibility as a young, single dad, adrift in his life, loving his daughter and increasingly aware of his deficiencies (or perhaps exaggerating them) as a father. Corio had never acted in anything prior to Aftersun, which is just shocking given the performance she delivers here, playing a kid her own age with the aplomb of an actor who’s playing down a few years. Sophie is trying to figure out her dad while she’s also at an age when she’s trying to figure out herself – her interactions with some teenagers staying at the resort are unrelated to the father-daughter storyline but crucial both in expanding our understanding of her character and in anchoring us to the time in her life when all of this is occurring. Corio gets even tiny details right, like the look on her face when the teens first invite her to come hang out with them, without her dad; she’s there, quietly smiling, but also so clearly absorbing everything she can take in, as if she’s studying this alien species, the Teenager, to better understand them.

Aftersun ends on an ambiguous note, and I’m fine with that in this case. This isn’t a mystery or thriller that demands explanation. The actual details don’t matter for the narrative in the film – what happened after the camera stopped rolling, so to speak, is immaterial. If anything, Wells’ choice not to give any sort of epilogue redirects your thinking back to what you did see and pushes us into adult Sophie’s perspective. It’s one of the best films I’ve seen from 2022, a story to be experienced, one that touches on universal facets of childhood and parenthood – yet another film about how we can never truly understand our parents – while also telling a very specific story about two very realistic and memorable characters.

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→ January 17, 2023
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Elder Race.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race made the shortlist for this year’s inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, which first brought him to my attention even though he’d written twenty-odd novels before this and won a few awards along the way. It’s a quick read with a clever conceit at its heart: what if the person who’s supposed to be a great wizard is, in fact, just a human who possesses sufficiently advanced technology that it appears to be magic?

The ’wizard’ Nygroth Elder is, in fact, Nyr Illim Tevitch, an anthropologist left in stasis to keep an eye on this colonized planet while the remainder of his crew has long since left to return to Earth – which may or may not still be a going concern. Lynesse Fourth Daughter, a princess so junior you might call her a spare to the spare, believes there’s an existential threat to her people, so she treks to Nyr’s tower to try to enlist his help to fight what she calls a demon, which her own mother thinks is a fabrication to try to gain attention or glory. Nyr reluctantly agrees to help, even though his directive is to observe but not interfere, even if refraining might cause harm to the people he’s watching, and they set off on a quest to find and defeat the threat. Along the way, the culture clash between the two emerges through their languages, as Nyr can’t even explain what a scientist is, and the translation engine he uses makes everything sound to Lynesse like some sort of magic.

Elder Race is a quest novel – or novella, which is how the Hugo Awards characterized it, giving it a nomination in that category in 2022 – but one with a metatextual component as well that, in some ways, is the more interesting of the two. Tchaikovsky tells the story by alternating narration between Lynesse and Nyr, thus presenting both sides of most of their conversations, which operates as a commentary on fantasy literature and works that try to blend fantasy and science, as well as a more humanist look at the challenges of communicating across cultures. The fact that Lynesse’s language lacks so many words that Nyr takes for granted and finds himself unable to express even through translation recalled Samuel Delany’s classic novella Babel-17, which takes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – that the structure of a language influences how its speakers view the world – and turns it into an entire story, where a language is a weapon that alters speakers’ minds. Here language is less insidious, but stands as a concrete example of the difficulty of communicating across all of the boundaries that separate people, not just language but culture, history, religion, and more. Language is the visible manifestation of what amounts to a religious difference between Lynesse’s people and Nyr; what her family and subjects believe is magic is just technology they’ve lost in the centuries since humans colonized this planet.

Nyr is the more interesting and developed character of the two, in part because Lynesse is, by design, depicted as naïve – she’s young, but also not very worldly even within the confines of this civilization, and her faith in Nyr based on a historical anecdote is almost charming in its innocence. Nyr, meanwhile, has to grapple with both his role as potential savior, or as a failed savior, to Lynesse’s people, while also facing the fact that he might be severed permanently from his own civilization, condemned to a lonely existence where he enters long periods of suspended animation and can’t forge enduring relationships with anyone. He encounters crippling depression and covers it up with the help of embedded tech that takes the old trope about men compartmentalizing their emotions and turns it into software; he can just push it aside and deal with it later.

Tchaikovsky – who spells his name Czajkowski outside of his writing, as he’s of Polish descent rather than Russian – packs a lot into the 200 pages of Elder Race, without skimping on the quest part of the story, which is the real narrative that drives the book forward. You could probably just read this as a straight-up quest without giving the larger themes a second thought and still enjoy it. I found those themes gave this novel more heft and staying power in my mind after I finished. It’s to Czajkowski’s credit that he managed this in such a brief novel that revolves almost entirely around just two core characters.

Next up: I’m many books behind in my writeups, but I’m currently reading Brian Clegg’s Gravitational Waves: How Einstein’s Spacetime Ripples Reveal the Secrets of the Universe.

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→ January 7, 2023
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The Menu.

The Menu is a dark comedy/horror/social satire with an incredible cast and an impressive commitment to the details around its premise. It takes a hard turn about a third of the way through the movie that starts to make the audacious twist clear, and stays true to its theme almost to the end, where the movie sticks its first landing but fails to do so on the second, ultimate conclusion, which might be the difference between this film being just very good and being my favorite of the year. It’s streaming on HBO Max and is available for rent on amazon, iTunes, etc.

The film opens as we see a handful of obnoxious rich people boarding a boat for a highly exclusive restaurant, The Hawthorn, which is on a private island and helmed by a famous chef, Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), with a prix-fixe menu that costs $1250 a person. Our primary perspective is through the ardent foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) and his date, Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy), who we quickly learn was not the woman he was originally taking to this dinner. Other guests include the has-been actor George (John Leguizamo), an insufferable food critic who helped make Slowik’s career but is clearly now a skeptic (Janet McTeer), a trio of tech bros, and an older couple (Reed Birney and Judith Light) who we later learn are regulars. Margot recognizes the husband right away and isn’t happy to see him, nor he her. The diner-toursts are met at the dock by Elsa (Hong Chau), a humorless automaton, who gives them a brief tour of some of the grounds around the hotel before their seating. The meal begins with the sort of food you’d expect at a restaurant like this, with foams and gels and molecular gastronomy and deconstructions, with Slowik introducing each course with a soliloquy, only to have those become darker each time around. By the fourth course, things have taken a turn for the macabre, and it’s clear that this is no ordinary night at the Hawthorn. (There’s a great deleted scene that gives a little more backstory and that I think would have even further immersed the viewers in the food criticism aspect of the film, although I understand why it might have been cut.)

There is a lot going on here, and most of it works extremely well, starting with the film’s disdain for modern foodie culture – not food culture, mind you, but foodie culture, the worship of chefs, the conspicuous consumption, and the snobbery towards those who don’t speak the vernacular or share in the adulation. There’s a clear demarcation here between those two ideas; the substantive parts of Slowik’s monologues involve a real appreciation for food, for where it comes from, for living creatures that died for our plates, for the environment and the ecologies we spoil so we can eat whatever we want, whenever we want it. Chef Dominique Crenn, of Atelier Crenn, recreated several of her restaurant’s dishes for the film, and the plates we do see look incredible – and realistic, at least for a restaurant of this caliber. It’s food designed for the diner to appreciate the food, both the ingredients and the skill required to prepare them. That is separate from the diners, who are largely here for what you might call the “wrong” reasons, such as for the ability to say they ate there, even if they don’t remember or appreciate what they ate.

Margot turns out to be significant in the plot, as she’s the unexpected guest – the one person who wasn’t on the original manifest, and her mere presence seems to throw Slowik and some of the staff off their games, where they are otherwise robotic in their cultlike devotion to the chef and his commands. The contrast between their reactions to her and their reactions to everyone else is one of the early markers that something is very wrong at the Hawthorn, although I don’t think it remotely telegraphs what’s to come. (I will spoil one thing here, because it bothered me that it might be the twist: There’s no cannibalism involved. That’s such an overdone gag at this point that I was going to be seriously pissed off if that was the answer. It’s not.)

After a series of shocking events that drive the story deeper into the abyss, we get a double-barreled ending, one of which works extremely well, the other of which seems overcooked. The Menu requires some suspension of disbelief; it is the triple-distilled version of reality, which is a hallmark of great satire. The script is sending up both sides of the blade here, both the chef and the patrons, and does so effectively for most of the film, working with slight exaggerations that push the characters just to the wrong side of the line of plausibility. It earns that modest suspension of disbelief with dishes that look and sound completely accurate to the setting, with customers who viewers will easily recognize as archetypes, with a chef who conforms to the stereotype of the kitchen tyrant who abuses his staff in the name of great food. The first ending taps into a deeper understanding of two of the characters, and how one of them got to this point. The second ending feels more like bombast, and while it’s visually inventive (and funny), it pushed too far over that line of plausibility for me.

Fiennes and Taylor-Joy both landed Golden Globe nominations for their performances as the leads in a musical/comedy, which seems about right – Colin Farrell should win over Fiennes, Michelle Yeoh or Emma Thompson should win over Taylor-Joy, but both of these performances were strong and integral to the film. It’s a relief to see Taylor-Joy get a decent role and deliver within it after the fiasco of her performance in Amsterdam, and it might be her best film work since the very underrated Thoroughbreds (although I haven’t seen the 2020 version of Emma). Fiennes’s performance feels like the Spock-with-a-goatee version of his director character from Hail, Caesar!, a particular style he’s practically trademarked but that this time he twists just enough to make it incredibly sinister – not purely evil, like You-know-who, but menacing, so you feel like something awful is coming but can’t quite put your finger on why until the awful somethings start. He plays Slowik as the black comedy version of Daniel Day-Lewis’s fashion designer in Phantom Thread. I was a little disappointed to see The Menu didn’t get a screenplay nomination at the Globes, but they only give out one screenplay honor, while the Oscars do two and thus have twice the number of nominations available, so I hold out a little hope on that front. Right now this is in my top 5 from 2022, although we still have a lot of big films to watch (notably Aftersun and The Fabelmans), and the fact that I can’t stop thinking about it is probably the highest compliment I can give The Menu. It’s imperfect, but still has so much good stuff in it that it’s worth accepting its flaws.

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→ January 1, 2023
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La Caja.

La Caja (The Box) was Venezuela’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, but didn’t make the shortlist of 15 that was announced in December; it’s on MUBI, for which we signed up to watch Decision to Leave, so I watched this as well. It’s a simple, bleak story that is exceptionally well-told, and while the story is quite specific to its setting, the themes of displacement and loss should have a much broader appeal.

Hatzín (Haztín Navarette) is a young Venezuelan teen or pre-teen who has traveled to a village in Chihuahaua, Mexico, to pick up the remains of his father, which were discovered in a mass grave there. After he gets the box, he’s on the bus back to Mexico City when he spots a man in the street (Hernán Mendoza) who looks just like the pictures of his father, whom he hasn’t seen since he was very little. Hatzín gets off the bus and confronts the man, who insists he’s not Hatzín’s father, but Hatzín returns the box of remains to the office and confronts the man, repeatedly, until he takes Hatzín in and ends up bringing him to his work as a recruiter for a maquiladora (factory) near the U.S. border. The work isn’t always savory, and at times is illegal, leading Hatzín to question whether he should stay there or even wants this man to turn out to be his father.

The story is pretty simple, and revolves around just those two questions: Is this man Hatzín’s father, and what will Hatzín do if it turns out that he is? The man, who calls himself Mario, is furious with Hatzín at the start for the boy’s insistence that this is his father and refusal to leave, although of course that could be a sign that Mario doesn’t want his old life – where he at the very least left Hatzín, Hatzín’s mother (since dead), and his own mother – to intrude on his new one. As Mario, he has a wife, child, and a baby on the way, as well as a job, a factory of his own in progress, and a middle-class existence. Or maybe he just thinks this kid is a pest and doesn’t want to be responsible for him. But he then takes Hatzín in and uses him as a helper, especially when he discovers the boy can read and write well and has a good memory. Does he actually care for the boy, or is he just an opportunist?

Meanwhile, Hatzín confronts an escalating set of moral quandaries as he follows Mario through his job, from recruiting desperate people to work in the sewing factory under dubious pretenses to quelling dissent to grand larceny, and more. Hatzín barely had any memories of his father; if Mario is, in fact, his dad, is this the dad he wanted? What happens to us when our memories of those we’ve lost are tainted by reality? Is it better to know the brutal truth, or to leave the past buried? He’s also faced with a more immediate dilemma: If he were to go to the police, would he be betraying his father? What if he does nothing, and it turns out that Mario isn’t his dad? The excellence of La Caja lies in just how many of these moral questions, ranging from basic to profound, it manages to pose despite just two main characters and what had to be a fairly short script.

This is Naverette’s first film or TV role, and he delivers an essential performance – without him, the film can’t work – that doesn’t line up with his lack of experience. Hatzín the character is a stoic, taciturn kid, already resigned to the tragedies that have taken both of his parents from him and the life it implies; when pure chance throws Mario into his path, he’s already mature enough to make the serious choices required of him. Navarette puts that tension to work on his face and in his sparing movements, making it easy to see his future as a noir detective or a sardonic action hero. Mendoza is almost his equal, threading the needle between the gruff and callous businessman he is at work and the caring family man he can be at home – or the maybe-father he is to Hatzín.

You can only find La Caja on MUBI, at least right now, but if you subscribe to that site it’s worth the watch. You can also sign up for it via amazon, with a 7-day free trial, which would also let you watch Decision to Leave, one of the best movies of 2022 that I’ve seen, and Aftersun, which is coming to MUBI on January 9th.

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→ December 31, 2022
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Decision to Leave.

Decision to Leave is the latest film from South Korean director and screenwriter (co-writer, in this case) Park Chan-wook, his first since 2016’s The Handmaiden and only his third as director in the last ten years. It’s a Hitchcockian thriller with a slow burn, reminiscent in many ways of Vertigo, right down to the romance between the male lead and the femme fatale he’s chasing, that also taps into bigger themes of alienation and self-worth, anchored by two incredible lead performances that should be earning broader acclaim.

Detective Jang Hae-jun (Park Hae-il) is called in to investigate the death of an immigration worker who fell while climbing a mountain near Busan, a mountain the man liked to climb and livestream. Jang suspects the man’s young Chinese wife, Seo-Rae (Tang Wei), who works as a caregiver to senior citizens, and who has suspicious marks and bruises on her when they police speak to her. Jang only sees his wife on weekends, because she works at a nuclear power plant, and he quickly becomes obsessed with Seo-Rae, following her and imagining he’s with her at work or in her apartment, which she realizes and turns back around by following him. The two end up in a chaste relationship – not without sexual tension – that Jang must keep secret while she’s still a potential suspect. Of course, nothing is as it first appears, and he finds evidence that might point to Seo-Rae’s guilt, leading to a second act where their power dynamic shifts repeatedly as Jang tries to figure out what’s real and what matters.

Some of the plot points in Decision to Leave are a little easy to spot, but the story isn’t the real strength here – it’s the two main characters, and the actors who do such incredible work to flesh them out. Jang has shadings of the noir detective, a tough guy with a grim exterior, capable of solving tough crimes, earning plaudits from his colleagues while he’s also putting them down for their coarse methods, but he’s also dealing with an existential grief that he tries to assuage with Seo-Rae. He’s not maudlin, or quiet, but actually depressed – he doesn’t seem to love his wife, although he will go through the motions to keep them together, and he doesn’t seem to gain satisfaction from his job, even when he’s doing it well. Park Hae-il has won a slew of awards for his portrayal here, deservedly so, as there’s a nuance to the performance that keeps him away from the stock hard-boiled character that’s fine in genre films but would take away from the bigger ideas here. Seo-Rae, meanwhile, is an immigrant from China who frequently apologizes for her poor Korean and appears in many ways to be an isolated figure – perhaps a damsel in distress for Jang to save – but, of course, she might also be a very cunning killer. Tang, who first rose to prominence in Ang Lee’s 2007 film Lust, Caution, is Park’s equal here, playing the did-she-or-didn’t-she part without the cheap seduction common to the archetype; in fact, there’s very little sex at all in this movie, as the script almost dispenses with the idea that these two are physically attracted to each other, or at least removes it from the equation so the focus is instead on who they are and what might be driving them. (Apropos of nothing, I couldn’t believe Tang is 43 years old; her character, at least, seems at least a decade younger than that.)

Park Chan-woo utilizes a number of symbols in the film, two of which recur enough to merit mention. One is the eyes of various characters, including the victim at the start of the film, whose eyes we see several times in close-up. Jang uses eye drops to moisten his eyes frequently throughout the film, which the director has said is his way of showing that the detective has a hard time seeing what’s right in front of him, whether it’s with Seo-Rae or his wife or other cases. Blurred or diminished vision also comes into play with the frequent fog and mist we see in the film, which apparently is a feature of Ipo, where Jang’s wife works. You could also have a field day just with Jang’s bespoke suit and its seemingly infinite number of pockets, and how Seo-Rae seems to know where he keeps various things – as he is always prepared with little supplies, like he has every mother’s purse’s contents scattered throughout his clothes – while his own wife doesn’t.

My only quibble with Decision to Leave is the ending, as it just doesn’t quite stick the landing, but that’s a tiny complaint in a movie of this ambition. Like Hitchcock’s best films, however, much of the film’s inherent mystery lingers after the conclusion – and Decision to Leave does just that, giving you plenty to ponder long after the movie ends. I seldom watch movies twice, but this one likely rewards a second viewing.

Park won Best Director at Cannes for the film, which was also nominated for the Palme d’Or, and at the Grand Bell Awards, the South Korean equivalent to the Oscars, it took home the honors for Best Film, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor for Park Hae-il. Decision to Leave was South Korea’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, making the December shortlist and I have to assume eventually getting one of the five nominations. But it also seems like it’s going to get shut out of everything else, which seems like a shame – I can’t imagine there are ten better movies in the 2022 crop than this one.

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→ December 29, 2022
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The Eternal Daughter.

Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir was a semi-autobiographical film that received general plaudits from critics but was also notable for its casting of Tilda Swinton and her daughter Honora Swinton-Byrne as mother and daughter in the film, with the latter serving as Julie, Joanna’s stand-in. That film led to a sequel last year, and now a connected film, The Eternal Daughter, that features the same two characters but isn’t a direct sequel or continuation of any sort. The artifice this time is that Tilda Swinton plays both Julie and her mother, Rosalind, as we’re about 30-35 years on, and the two women head off for a week’s stay at quite possibly the worst bed & breakfast in Wales – which happens to be in their former family home. (You can rent The Eternal Daughter on Amazon, iTunes, and so forth.)

Julie is hoping to make a movie about her mother’s life, and has taken her mother on this trip to try to entice her mum to tell her more of her story and, as we learn over the course of the film, to better understand her mother, who has always been just inscrutable enough that Julie feels insufficient to the task of summarizing her on film. The hotel is something out of a classic horror film, dark, empty save for the world’s least-helpful clerk (Carly-Sophia Davies, who is superb) and later one other staff member (Joseph Mydell), and constantly surrounded by mist and fog. Julie, Rosalind, and Rosalind’s dog Louis (played by Louis, Swinton’s dog) are alone everywhere, in their room, the dining room, on the grounds, anywhere they go. There’s an air of mystery from the air itself, and the constant darkness. The hotel seems to have weird sounds, and Julie even thinks she sees the visage of an old woman in a particular window on the first floor. The answer to everything does appear near the end of the film, although the mystery isn’t the real point here; it’s about a mother and daughter, and how we can never truly know our parents no matter how close we try to get to them.

Swinton has become so known for playing weird characters – and doing so in weird fashion – that a bravura performance like this might just go unappreciated and even unnoticed. If you take GoldDerby’s Oscar odds seriously, she’s at 100 to 1 to win Best Actress, the lowest probability they assign to anyone who has better than a zero chance of winning, although they only gave seven actresses higher odds in that category. (Also at 100:1 is Ana de Armas, who was considered a likely nominee before Blonde bombed.) This is two performances, of course, and the roles required some improvisation, as Hogg typically does not provide word-for-word scripts to her actors, but provides treatments and works with them as director to see where the dialogue goes. There are several obvious reasons to cast Swinton in both roles, from the physical similarities we expect from a mother and a daughter to the fact that this was filmed early in 2021 when a small cast was probably a greater asset for COVID mitigation, but perhaps the best reason is that she’s an amazing actor and very much rises to this occasion. There’s one scene where she seems to pour it on a little thick, but after the film’s reveal at the end, her emotions in that one conversation are easier to understand.

The twist, or mystery, is not that hard to discern; my wife called it within five minutes, and of course we spent most of the film looking for clues to verify or debunk it, but she was right. It’s something we’ve seen before, although I won’t spoil it by citing other films that have used this conceit, but I will defend the choice again by saying it’s beside the point. When you find out what’s been happening, it provides context to everything that’s come before. It’s not a “did you figure it out?” mystery, and there are no jump scares or shocks here; any review calling this a horror movie, in any sense at all, has completely missed Hogg’s intentions. The gimmick exists so Hogg and Swinton can further elucidate the difficulties we face as adult children who are trying to understand our parents better before it is too late to do so. The fog and mist are fairly obvious metaphors for that last part – we simply cannot see our parents clearly because we haven’t lived their lives, or even seen the first portions of their lives, and have then spent much of our lives looking at them not as people, but as parents.

There are only seven credited actors in The Eternal Daughter, including Louis, since the hotel appears to have no other guests – I can’t imagine why not, as it’s dank, noisy, and the one full-time employee seems to hate her job. Davies is pretty fantastic as that clerk, and waitress, and almost everything else, as she isn’t so much mean as apathetic. Your concerns are not her concerns, and since there’s no one else there like a supervisor, she doesn’t have to worry about whether you ever get that kettle you asked for. Mydell plays Bill, who seems to work there sometimes in a sort of catchall porter/groundskeeper post; it’s a dicey role, as it veers close to the Magical Negro trope, since his main function here is to help and comfort Julie, with just a slight backstory of his own. I think the counterargument here is that his race is immaterial to his character, and there isn’t a good way to give him anything more to do in a script that is about 90% Julie and Rosalind. I have another possible explanation for this, but that would require spoiling something in the story to explain.

I find it incredibly impressive just how deep The Eternal Daughter is despite the sparse cast and single setting, a testament to what good writing can do and in many ways a nod to the movies’ roots on the stage, where words were almost all that mattered because you didn’t have huge casts, sets, or special effects to paper over flaws in the script. This exploration of filial ties felt especially poignant to myself and my wife, as our parents are all alive but getting older, and this desire to hold on to what you can because you can’t hold on to what you desire is something that crosses boundaries of race, class, and so on. The bond between a mother and daughter, and the strain that can coexist with it, is something I know I can’t understand, but I hope I can at least appreciate how Hogg has brought it to life on film. It’s a shame that The Eternal Daughter has been so overlooked, between Swinton’s excellent and – gasp! – understated twin performances and the themes that power the story.

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→ December 28, 2022
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The Banshees of Inisherin.

The Banshees of Inisherin is writer/director Martin McDonagh’s first film since 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which was his most acclaimed movie to that point and took home the BAFTA for Best Film and the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Drama. His latest led all films this year with eight Golden Globe nominations, and reunites the two leads from his debut film In Bruges, Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, in a dark comedy with two distinct, serious themes lying beneath the film’s absurdist surface. (It’s streaming now on HBO Max.)

Padraig (Farrell) and Colm (Gleeson) both live on the small island of Inisherin off the west coast of Ireland, where not much of anything happens, and as far as I can tell almost nobody ever has to go to work. Padraig and Colm are drinking buddies who walk to the pub every afternoon, with Padraig stopping by Colm’s house on the way, until one day Colm completely ignores Padraig’s knock, and ignores him at the pub as well, eventually telling him he doesn’t want to be friends any more. This unprovoked severing of ties, which Padraig can’t understand and won’t accept, even in the face of Colm’s threats and rather disturbing actions, leads to an escalation of hostilities that wrecks the peace of the island and leaves nobody better off than before.

McDonagh has a gift for language and crafting witty lines, starting off early on in Banshees when everyone asks Padraig if he and Colm are “rowin’” often enough that it becomes funny just by repetition. The comic elements here are a necessary reprieve from the film’s increasingly dark elements, including the deterioration between the two main characters, the insidious gossip that poisons the island’s culture, young Dominic (Barry Keoghan) and his abusive father, and more. It’s the sort of story where its pervasive awfulness becomes even more apparent after it’s over, because the humor and absurdity mask the bleak story while you’re still watching it.

The film works on one level as an exploration of male friendship, and how fragile those bonds can be in the wrong sort of environment. It’s not so much a question of toxic masculinity, as neither character exhibits much in that vein; Padraig is probably too sensitive, at least when he’s not in his cups, and Colm’s reasons for shunning Padraig and subsequent reactions are more those of someone dealing with mental illness. One of them eventually takes their quarrel too far, pushing them past the point of no return, and a once-solid friendship, one that everyone on the island took as a given, is reduced to ashes.

It’s also a thinly-veiled metaphor for the Irish Civil War, which is often mentioned in the script, including in the final scene, and is nearing its conclusion as the movie takes place. This civil war began after the Irish War of Independence, which led to the establishment of the Irish Free State as a “dominion” within the Commonwealth, giving the island – sans Northern Island, which exercised its opt-out clause and became a free agent remained part of the United Kingdom as Northern Island – greater autonomy, leading to full independence in 1933. After the Free State was established, however, pro-independence forces who opposed this partial solution fought an armed rebellion against the new, provisional government, with former IRA members from the war of independence now split between the two forces. The Irish fought a war to kick out the English, won it, and then ended up fighting themselves, leading to nearly 2000 deaths and substantial economic losses. The conflict may have begun over a principle, but escalated into violence when a democratic solution was likely achievable. It led to decades of mistrust between the spiritual descendants of the two sides, one of which later split into the political parties Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin. The metaphor here doesn’t map perfectly one-to-one – I don’t think Colm is one side and Padraig the other, although a scholar of Irish history may see it quite differently – but it does speak to the pointlessness of war, especially when the two sides escalate hostilities in turn.

This is the best thing I’ve ever seen Colin Farrell do, requiring more range from him than In Bruges or The Lobster, as he makes Padraig feel completely three-dimensional – you know someone like him, someone well-intentioned but unable to get out of his own way, someone who’s probably not the most interesting guy to have a beer with, let alone a beer every day, but who would likely be the first person to show up if you needed help. Gleeson is also strong, as always, but his character is just not as well-written, and his complexity is, shall we say, a little harder to understand. Keoghan is fine as Dominic, who is probably developmentally disabled, although his story feels tangential and his main function seems to be to serve as a plot point for Padraig and Padraig’s sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon), on whom Dominic has a crush. Siobhan’s life is even more stifled than Padraig’s, and an opportunity eventually arises for her to leave Inisherin, a move that completely unmoors her brother, already shaken from having Colm cast him off.

We’ve largely just begun our run through Oscar-worthy movies, so I can’t compare it to much, but I wouldn’t put this over Everything Everywhere All at Once, which is still the best movie I’ve seen from 2022, although I could take an argument for McDonagh’s script over the Daniels’ script for EEAAO. Both are outstanding, but McDonagh’s dialogue is better. The Academy has already nominated McDonagh twice before for his screenplays, which makes me strongly suspect he’ll get a nod for this one as well.

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→ December 14, 2022
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The Wonder.

The Wonder is another adaptation of a book by Emma Donoghue (author of Room), directed by Sebastian Lelio (Una Mujer Fantástica, winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film), and starring Florence Pugh. It has no reason not to be good. And it is good, imperfect but good, taut and spare and well-acted, with Pugh, who seems very unlikely to get any awards love for her performance, showing once again what a compelling talent she is.

Set in 1862, The Wonder tells the story of Elizabeth Wright (Pugh), a nurse who is called to an Irish village where a young girl, Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy), appears to have been fasting for four months, requiring no food or sustenance, subsisting solely on prayer. Her Catholic family wants to believe she’s blessed by God, as does the local priest and several other town authorities, although there’s enough disagreement that the triumvirate of local leaders (Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds, and Dermot Crowley) have called in Mrs. Wright and a nun to watch over Anna for two weeks, taking twelve-hour shifts to determine whether she’s for real or is somehow sneaking or being given food. An Irish journalist with a questionable past (Tom Byrne) shows up as well, and he’s even more skeptical than Mrs. Wright is, but it’s unclear if or how Anna and her family might be pulling this off.

The Wonder isn’t really a film about religious mania or doubt, although those themes are there below the surface, but about the way in which adults use children – and, really, all manner of people – as objects to advance their own ends. The religious leaders and Anna’s own family are so invested in the possibility that her survival without food is the product of divine intervention that they’re willing to overlook signs that she’s dying, even ignoring the protestations of Mrs. Wright that the girl needs food. The nurse herself has a past of tragedy, telling Anna’s family that she’s widowed but leaving out several other details from her history, and it turns out the journalist is doing the same, leaving both of their motivations here open to question as well.

Of course, you can’t read this without seeing an implicit indictment of religion’s capacity to harm and kill, and the way that people will turn to religion, even with that capacity fully on display, in times of strife. The novel and film are set in the wake of the Irish famine caused by a potato blight that led to the deaths of about a million Irish people and the emigration of two million more, a time where you might think that people would ask why God had abandoned them, especially given the island’s history of dedication to the One True Church of Rome even as their overlords in England tossed it aside for divorce and other heresies. Instead, we have a family and a town clinging to that faith as fiercely as ever, impervious to material explanations and physical evidence of harm (as when Anna spits out an entire tooth, a sign of malnutrition), turning even more deeply into religion even when any rational person would see a person surviving without food for four months as a physical impossibility. The script doesn’t dwell much on the science versus faith battle directly, instead pitting the rationalist nurse against the nun and the spiritual leaders as a stand-in for that debate, which had just exploded on the world with the publication of On the Origin of Species just three years prior to the film’s setting.

This film is nearly all about Pugh’s performance, with a strong assist from Cassidy. Pugh has become one of those “whatever she’s in, I’ll watch, unless Olivia Wilde directed it” actors, and while she’s not going to get any awards consideration for The Wonder, it’s certainly worthy of it. Her portrayal of Elizabeth as a skeptic who’s dealing with her own secret pain and finds herself geographically and socially isolated in this small Irish hamlet is compelling and credible, and her interactions with Cassidy’s Anna are the best parts of the movie. The film overall feels a bit small for awards attention – its only nominations so far were from the British Independent Film Awards, where it earned twelve but only won for Original Music – and that might be why Pugh’s been overlooked in a very packed category. I’ll give this the highest praise I can give a film, though: I was never bored, and what’s more, it took me a while to figure out what might be going on.

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→ November 6, 2022
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How High We Go in the Dark.

Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark was one of three finalists for this year’s inaugural Ursula K. Leguin Prize for Fiction, losing the ultimate honor to Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s The House of Rust. Nagamatsu’s work is a short story novel, a series of connected anecdotes that involve related characters, all of it set in a dystopian but easy to foresee near future where climate change is melting permafrost, thawing out a virus that causes a horrifying global pandemic. Each story after the opening one explores the ramifications of these two events, ranging from the ridiculous to the tragic, but always returning to the humanity of their characters.

The initial story sets up everything that follows, as we meet Dr. Cliff Miyashiro at an archaeological dig site in eastern Siberia where his daughter, Clara, fell and died shortly after discovering the remains of a possibly-Neanderthal girl who died of mysterious causes with strange markings on and near her body. It emerged as the ice melted due to climate change, which also activated a virus in the corpse that quickly infects several members of the camp. By the start of the second story, it has become a global pandemic, and, in almost direct contrast to SARS-CoV-2, it is far more deadly to children, which leads to especially perverse ideas – like an amusement park where parents take their gravely ill children to be euthanized on a rollercoaster.

Within a few stories, Nagamatsu has reshaped society around the pandemic, making funerary companies the most valuable in the world that also control the cryptocurrencies that take over the world’s economy. It goes a bit too far – the company that manufactures the spaceship that heads out in search of another habitable planet is Yamato-Musk, which seems especially embarrassing for Nagamatsu after the last week – but that’s clearly his concept, pushing every idea to the farthest possible boundary and then exploring how his characters respond to it. In that sense, it’s very Philip K. Dick, but less insane, with at least some grounding in actual science, at least to the extent that he’s anticipating readers’ first objections to some of his concepts. There are a pair of stories that broke my suspension of disbelief, but even in those cases, I could go with it because they were both well-written and focused on the characters rather than the impossible facts.

Nagamatsu eschews easy answers, and one possible reading of How High We Go in the Dark is as an  extremely bleak outlook on the near future of our planet and our species, that climate change is inevitable (true) and we are totally unprepared for its impact (partly true), that our current pandemic, which isn’t mentioned in the book, is a harbinger of more and larger ones to come (likely). I didn’t read it that way, as grim as the subject matter is. Nagamatsu’s characters all look forward and try to find not just ways to survive, but reasons. There’s just one direct suicide in the book, and some euthanasia of the very sick, but the vast majority of the characters here are fully engaged in living. Even Dennis, a character in multiple stories who would probably have been equally at odds and ends in a non-catastrophe world, is still striving for something, even if he has no idea what it might be.

Even with such dismal subject matter, How High We Go in the Dark is one of the most compelling and fastest reads I’ve had in ages. Nagamatsu’s prose is clear and unadorned, hitting the right amount of detail when he’s delving into science or his speculations. There’s so much more focus on people than ideas here that the work rises above most cli-fi or other stories of realistic dystopias, up to the level of Station Eleven, a novel that turned a global pandemic that crumbled civilization into a story of great beauty around humanity, kindness, and the enduring power of art. Nagamatsu deals more with the personal tragedies of his characters and how society might grapple with mass deaths that involve far more children than our current pandemic, where the world has largely shrugged at the deaths of 1 in every 1000 people. It’s a remarkable novel and thought experiment, one of the best things I’ve read this year.

Next up: Jess Grose’s Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood. I have an advance copy so I can read it before Jess comes on my podcast in two weeks.

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→ October 27, 2022
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The Red Cathedral.

The Red Cathedral slipped through the cracks of my reviews over at Paste, as it came out at the very end of 2020, and I didn’t get a copy until Gen Con of 2021, so it missed my 2020 best-new-games list but was ineligible for the 2021 list. I’ve played it a few times now, including its very good solo mode, and I have to say it’s one of the best games of its weight (sort of medium-heavy) I’ve ever played, and is both great value at under $35 and for such a small box.

Players in the Red Cathedral will work to construct the building of the game’s title, which has six sections per player and varies slightly in shape in each game, with base, middle, and top sections that can be accentuated with different ornaments. Players move dice in six colors around a rondel to gather resources they can use to build sections or ornaments, or to collect coins, but choosing which die to move isn’t as simple as just figuring out what resource you want – you can get much more stuff if you pick the right one, or you might not move a die to prevent your opponents from getting an even bigger windfall. You gain points mostly for building cathedral sections and ornaments, although there are other ways to gain a point here or there.

There are two scoring tracks in The Red Cathedral, although they’re overlaid on each other and you don’t have to keep track of two separate point totals (like in Rajas of the Ganges, although I like how that determines the end of the game). There’s the Reputation point track, which just looks like a regular scoring track around the edge of any game board; and the Prestige track, which starts out with a marker every 4-5 spots, but those gaps quickly drop to 3 spots and then 2, eventually lining up with the Reputation track in the 40s. This matters a lot early in the game, because you can drop down one Prestige point to gain two coins, and because placing ornaments gains you one or three Prestige points depending on whether you add one gem or two (in the two colors) to the cost. You can only build an ornament on a section that’s already completed, although you can do so on someone else’s section. You’re limited to four ornaments, two for middle sections and one each for the top and bottom sections.

The dice rondel is the real heart of the game and its most clever aspect. There are eighteen spaces on the circular track, divided into six zones. At the start of the game, the five dice go into five separate zones after someone has rolled them all. On your turn, you may pick any die and move it forward the number of zones shown on its face (1 to 6). Then you collect the reward for that zone, resources, coins, or points, times the number of dice currently in that zone, which can be up to three – so you might get, say, 6 bricks, or 3 green gems. Then you re-roll all dice in that zone for the next player.

Each zone also has a “guild” card next to it that offers you a choice of two benefits when you move a die to that quadrant of the rondel. For most of those cards, which change every game, you can choose either something for free, or you can pay coins/exchange resources for something better. Thus every time you choose moving a die as your main action, you have to consider where the other dice are, what resources you’ll get, what guild card is there, and how this might leave the dice for the next player.

Your other choices of actions are to place one of your six banners on an unclaimed segment of the cathedral or deliver resources to a building site to complete a section or build an ornament. Four of those six banners start out in spaces in your inventory, which can hold up to ten resources when all the banners are placed, so you have a strong incentive to get out and claim some sections early on to free up room on your board. Delivering resources is the one frustrating part of the game: you can only deliver up to three resources in one turn, but many sections require four or five resources to complete, so it’ll take you two separate turns to do it. You can, however, deliver to multiple sites at once, so a little more planning can make this less inefficient.

The game ends when someone completes their sixth section, after which you add up the scores. Most of your points come from completing sections, which vary in their returns and may give you some coins but fewer points rather than just a higher point total; and ornaments, which, as I wrote above, come in the form of Prestige points and are more valuable earlier in the game. Ornaments only require one or two resources to build, but if you can also spend one green and one purple gem when building one, you max out your turn with three Prestige points.

The box suggests a game time of 80 minutes, which is probably true when everyone knows the game; the last time I played, with two friends who hadn’t played before, we ran closer to two hours for the full game, although I can say all three of us felt like it was a great game. (I lost, though.) There is a smart solo mode here that works well to mess with you by limiting your options, although I think it’s far more satisfying to play this with at least one other person so that the competitive aspect of dice selection comes into play.

There is an expansion called Contractors that came out earlier this year, which adds a lot of new elements, including another game board, diamonds as a wild resource, an additional (black) die, and more. The more games I play, the more skeptical I become of the majority of expansions; a few are good, like Pandemic’s On the Brink, Ticket to Ride’s 1910 (even if just for the full-sized cards), or Carcassonne’s Traders and Builders, but most just complicate the original’s game play without making it truly better. I can’t tell you if Contractors does that, because I saw it on a table at Gen Con and watched a little bit of game play, after which I thought, “I don’t need that.”

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