→ February 28, 2023
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Nope.

Nope is the third feature film from writer-director Jordan Peele, who won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for the outstanding Get Out, which was a biting satire wrapped in a smart horror film. For some reason, the studio behind Nope tried to pitch it more as another horror film, but that’s not just underselling it, but also probably misrepresented it. This is much more of a sci-fi mystery with a surprising moral to it, another smart film from Peele but in a completely different vein from his debut. (I haven’t seen Us, his second film.) You can stream Nope on Peacock or rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.

Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer star as the siblings OJ and Em Haywood, who run a horse farm where they train the animals for roles in film and television. As Nope begins, their father, Otis Sr. (Keith David), is killed by metal debris that falls from the sky, with a nickel impaling him in the eye and a key embedded itself in the horse he was riding. They assume these fell from an airplane and eventually they try to pick up more business, but when they find it’s lagging, OJ sells some of his horses to the nearby western theme park Jupiter’s Claim, run by Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), a former child star whose TV series ended in tragedy when the chimp who starred on the show became violent to several of the cast members – but not to Jupe. When the electricity starts going off on the Haywoods’ farm without explanation, and the horses start reacting badly to some unseen force, the siblings decide to invest in some high-tech cameras to try to figure out what’s going on.

Nope is a slow burn, similar to Get Out, but not quite the same – where Peele’s first film was sinister until the big reveal, this one unfurls its mystery by degrees, with more misdirection that allows you to experience the perspectives of multiple characters. It was also easier to figure out what was happening in Get Out, or at least get the sense, than what’s happening in Nope. The obvious answer would be that it’s a UFO, which, of course, most of the characters think is the answer, including the Fry’s Electronics employee Angel (Brandon Perea), who realizes from the start that something weird is happening out at the ranch and invites himself to be a part of the investigation. What they find is much more interesting on a literal level and a thematic one.

The cast is fantastic across the board. Kaluuya has never missed for me, right down to his pre-fame appearance on Doctor Who (where we get to hear his British accent for once). The steely reserve that made him so menacing in Widows here works in a different direction, as his character is so tightly wound that he feels like he’s about to combust. Yeun probably needed more to do, but he’s excellent, as always, as a huckster and entrepreneur trying to squeeze every dollar he can out of the limited assets he has. Perea is a scene-stealer in a comic relief character that’s actually well conceived and well written – he’s hilarious, but also plays important roles in the plot and helps illuminate the relationship between the siblings and also later provide some connection to a fourth character who helps them try to unravel the ultimate mystery. If there’d been any awards attention for this movie, he would have been worthy of a Best Supporting Actor nomination, as well as a potential Original Screenplay nod for Peele. Wrenn Schmidt is a little wasted as Jupe’s wife, while Barbie Ferreira is even more wasted in a cameo as Angel’s co-worker, but I did enjoy the cameo from ‘80s prime-time soap star Donna Mills.

There’s one overarching theme to the story here that I might spoil by discussing, so if you haven’t seen Nope and intend to, you may wish to stop reading. The throughline that connects Jupe and the Haywoods is the use of animals for entertainment, with the implication that how we treat these animals in turn affects how they will treat us, or even what sort of animals they will become over time. OJ shows respect for their horses, and when he’s trying to show one horse, Lucky, for a commercial, he bristles at any suggestion from the director that might distress the animal, even telling a crew member not to make eye contact with Lucky for fear it will upset him. While we don’t see Jupe’s chimpanzee colleague being openly mistreated, the flashbacks – the one bit of the film where there’s some actual violence on screen – strongly imply that the chimp was being exploited, and that his rampage was the result of this treatment. (If you want to go down a rabbit hole about this, several critics and writers have noted that this subplot mirrors the actual story of Travis the chimp, who was separated from his mother at three days old and sold to a couple who kept him as a pet, only to have him turn violent one day, mauling and disfiguring a family friend.) All of this comes together in the film’s resolution, which also features some spectacular visual effects, to make it clear that the story is at least trying to make us realize the extent to which we are exploiting other creatures – and perhaps, on some level, other people – for no purpose beyond our entertainment. The characters who don’t understand this end up dead; the others survive. I don’t think you could make the moral much clearer than that.

Right now, I have Nope in my top ten for the year, although it could end up pushed out as I see more foreign-language films, since several of the most acclaimed non-English language movies, including two Oscar nominees, still aren’t available digitally as of February 27th. (Here’s hoping I wake up to find The Quiet Girl is rentable.) Regardless of its exact ranking for me whenever I wrap this cycle, Nope is excellent, another cerebral, thoughtful undertaking from Peele, even if it’s not quite up to the high bar he set for himself with Get Out.

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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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→ August 7, 2019
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Climax.

Gaspar Noé has a strong reputation among critics for provocative movies that often skirt the line of good taste, and seems to revel in his ability to shock or even repulse audiences while similarly challenging them with his stories. This year’s Climax is probably his best-received film, even though it was made with just a loose outline, employed mostly non-actors, and took just a few weeks to film. It’s a nightmare come to life, one that is more revealing than horrifying, but also clearly crosses the line into poor taste.

Climax is based loosely on an actual story of a French dance troupe whose afterparty was spoiled because someone spiked their drinks with LSD, although in that case no serious harm came to any of the dancers. That is not true in Noé’s retelling here, as the party devolves into Lord of the Flies-level savagery because someone spiked the punch, made by the troupe’s den mother Emmanuelle, with LSD or a similar psychotropic drug. (The very end of the film makes it seem like it was LSD, although the dancers never know this.)

Things don’t fall apart until about halfway through the brisk 93-minute film; the first half includes an impressive, long modern dance number that incorporates numerous styles and presents more to the viewer than the eye can possibly follow. The party starts out well enough, but eventually the dancers who drank the punch start to feel unwell; no one speaks of hallucinations, but they become disoriented and paranoid, and start to revert to base instincts. As it becomes clear that the punch was tainted, they begin to band together to try to identify the culprit, blaming Emmanuelle, then blaming the two dancers who didn’t drink it, never considering that the person who spiked the punch may in fact have consumed it themselves. This devolution also sees them lose many of their inhibitions, giving in to violence and sex, and by the time the police arrive the next morning there are several dancers dead or grievously wounded, while others are simply damaged by what’s occurred.

The drugs really are beside the point in Climax, which explores the nature of fear and how quickly we come to distrust others when we think we’re in danger. Noé wrote an outline and some general directions but asked the actors, most of whom were professional dancers without acting experience, to simply act as they would if under the influence, showing them videos of people who’d taken LSD or other hallucinogens. There are two professionals in the cast, Sofia Boutella (Selva) and Souheila Yacoub (Lou), who do more heavy lifting than anyone else, the former as the de facto social leader of the group, the latter the one character with something resembling a storyline.

Noé’s hand is all over the film even though there wasn’t a proper script. There’s one continuous shot that runs over 40 minutes, shifting perspectives and angles, drifting to different characters, that helps convey the dancers’ disorientation to the viewers. He also moved the closing credits to the beginning of the movie, and the typical title card with cast listing to the middle, which felt more like a gimmick to me than an important change. (Plus Adam McKay did it better in Vice.) He made one truly regrettable decision, the part of the film that crosses the line into needless suffering; Emmanuelle’s son is at the party, and while I won’t spoil it, what that child is put through did not need to be in this movie at all. Noé could have accomplished everything he wanted to accomplish without that. Assuming the boy’s inclusion was an active decision by Noé, it was a blatant attempt to shock the audience for shock’s sake.

Several days after watching Climax, I can’t decide if I think the film is good. I would say I didn’t enjoy watching it, because it is so unpleasant (by design) to watch the dancers lose control of themselves and their situation, wandering around a dark building that looks like an abandoned school or mental institution. I also couldn’t stop watching it, and was past the halfway mark before I even thought about how much time might have passed, and it’s certainly had me thinking about it in the time since I watched. There is something essential about stories that remind us of the thin line between the way we live and utter anarchy, of the tiny genetic barrier that separates us from chimpanzees, of the social norms we take for granted that allow us to live our daily lives. When one brick is removed, the entire edifice could collapse. Noé is willing to stare into that abyss and show us what he sees.

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→ September 17, 2018
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The Endless.

The Endless (just $0.99 to rent on amazon or iTunes) is very much my kind of horror film – which is to say that most viewers today would probably not consider it a horror film at all, since it includes precisely zero on-screen violence of any sort, and the horror is entirely of a psychological sort, primarily that the viewer mirrors the protagonists in their incomprehension of what might be wrong. It’s a film of creeping dread until the secret is revealed, after which the dread merely intensifies because it appears that the two heroes might have no way out of the trap, powered by a brilliant, subtle script by Justin Benson (who plays one of the two leads, with co-director Aaron Moorhead) that piles existential angst on top of the physical dilemma the two characters face.

Benson and Moorhead play brothers, conveniently named Justin and Aaron, who live a meager existence on the fringes of society, barely connected to anyone or anything but each other, whose lives are upended when they receive a video cassette from members of the cult from which the two escaped about ten years previously. Aaron, the younger of the two, is more disturbed by the video, which implies that the cult’s members expect to soon undergo “The Ascension,” which Justin interprets as a coming mass suicide, and wants to revisit the cult, citing the brothers’ pointless lives of empty work for a cleaning service and lack of any meaningful links to other people. Justin agrees to take Aaron there for a single day, which turns into a second day, by which point Justin in particular realizes something’s amiss at the cult’s campsite while Aaron seems to relish the presence of a community where he feels like he belongs. Justin encounters other people who live in the same woods as the cult but aren’t members, which shows him what exactly is wrong and why escape might never be possible.

The psychological horror story on the surface of The Endless is straightforward – the brothers may be trapped on the campgrounds with no route for escape, and it’s never clear if the cult members are trying to help or hinder them. There are totems marking the boundary of the property from which members can’t leave, and as the brothers explore the area they run into other people also trapped by the unknown force who urge them to flee before they’re imprisoned by it too. The cult itself is partly a red herring – the horror isn’t the cult members themselves, but is related to whatever they might be following; they’re just at peace with the situation while the other denizens of the woods are increasingly desperate to escape it.

The Endless is also a film about the bonds of family, and how losing can leave a person unmoored and grasping for some sort of connection. Aaron is especially lost and miserable before the brothers return to the campsite, and despite having only scattered memories of his life before they escaped, he slides back into a comfortable skin among the other members, serving as the (obvious) foil to Justin’s skepticism about the cult’s intentions towards him and his brother and their plans in general for some kind of mass event. The split between the brothers over the cult – including whether to stay longer than they’d planned – is predictable, but the script resolves this, at least partially, in an unexpected way that highlights the strength of familial bonds without ignoring the baggage that comes with them.

Aside from the two leads, the other standout performance in The Endless comes from Callie Hernandez as Anna, a sort of den mother within the cult, a character with a wide range of requirements for the actor depending on which brother is with her on screen. She’s the most interesting of the cult members, several of whom are depicted as if half in shadow to disguise their possible motivations or simply to amplify the uncertainty facing the main characters. (If her face is familiar, you may have seen Hernandez in La La Land as one of Emma Stone’s character’s friends in the “Someone in the Crowd” number.)

The Endless is apparently inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft, particularly his Cthulu writings, but I’ve never read any of his stories and really just know them through the significant number of tabletop games inspired by that universe; Lovecraft fans may find even more here to chew on than I did. Even without that background, however, I found The Endless totally compelling from start to finish, with tension that crescendoed in the second half, and a resolution that gives you just enough information to wrap the film without attempting to answer every question you might have had about what happened.

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→ July 1, 2018
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Annihilation.

Paramount made some curious decisions earlier this year with the release of the film Annihiliation (amazon • iTunes), loosely based on the Jeff VanderMeer novel of the same name (which I have not read yet), including an off-period release date in the U.S. and the sale of the film directly to Netflix for most of the world (other than the U.S., Canada, and China). Marketing of the film wasn’t great either; I saw the trailer before its theatrical run, and the trailer doesn’t represent the film well at all, overselling the horror elements and underselling the story. The result is that the movie didn’t fare that well at the box office despite positive reviews, undercut somewhat by Paramount’s machinations and I think the failure to push this film as a smart sci-fi flick that overcomes some modest flaws with a big finish.

The movie opens with Lena (Natalie Portman) in medical isolation, being interrogated by a British scientist (Benedict Wong) about what happened to her on a mission that went wrong and from which she is the only survivor. She’s somewhat vague on details, after which we flash back to before the mission and see that she’s a professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School and that her husband, a special forces Sergeant (Oscar Isaac), has been missing for a year and is presumed dead. He shows up at the house one day, but is totally vacant and almost immediately begins hemorrhaging, which eventually leads to Lena volunteering to lead a mission of five women soldiers and researchers into a mysterious, growing region called the Shimmer, into which the military has sent many missions but from which only Lena’s husband has ever returned. The women find a seemingly impossible environment where animals and plants are swapping DNA, with increasingly horrifying results the longer the team stays within its boundaries.

Annihilation has two main conceits in its story: the ongoing mystery of what the Shimmer is and what it’s doing, and the fact that previous teams have all disappeared and are likely dead, a Lovecraftian mystery trending towards horror since we know from the start that Lena is the only survivor. (The Wikipedia entry on the movie notes the script’s similarity to a Lovecraft short story, “The Colour of Space.”) The former is revealed gradually at first, but proceeds in fits and starts in accordance with discoveries the team makes and with Lena’s examinations of blood and other cells under her microscope. The latter builds as the story progresses and the team moves through the Shimmer with increasing disorientation; they encounter animals that loosely resemble familiar creatures but that have evolved at impossible speeds. Eventually Lena reaches the lighthouse at the center of the Shimmer and discovers something more of the nature of the anomaly in a gorgeous special-effects sequence right before her final battle to escape.

The script does waste too much time on irrelevant details outside of the mission, including Lena’s affair with a colleague while her husband is missing, a subplot that is neither germane to the main story nor resolved in any satisfactory manner during the film. And while screenwriter/director Alex Garland (Ex Machina) tries to give the team members some identities as individuals, none but Lena comes across as much more than a redshirt, not even ostensible team leader Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), so none of their losses is particularly tangible to the viewer. One team member cracks under the stress after the first death and another attack, which is foreshadowed in earlier dialogue but really not well explained by her character at all. Lena’s decision not to reveal to other team members that her husband was on an earlier mission is played up as a major issue, but without justifying why that’s a big deal or why the team member who cracks is so angry about the omission.

There are two scenes of gore in Annihiliation, more than enough to earn its R rating but not so much that I’d call this a straight horror film. There’s more of an intellectual undercurrent to the script than the trailer gave it credit for having; the way the Shimmer evolves, and then affects the members of the team, poses real questions about what it means to be human or even conscious, ones the film doesn’t try to answer even as characters directly ask what the Shimmer “wants.” Maybe it was just too hard to market on its own merits, but Annihilation is intense and smart enough to deserve to find an audience now that it’s more widely available.

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