Tag: horror

REVIEW: Climax.

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With films like Black Swan, Suspiria, and now Climax, dance is a staple in horror, both sublime and dangerous. Some kind of magnetism exists to the art, an incredible fascination with the primal power behind the lofty, elegant institutions of dance. Climax is already a bit stripped down in this sense – there is no renowned ballet school, no classical compositions to be centered around. Instead, the film is focused on a diverse dance troupe, and the pace is set from the first major dance sequence to be erotic, sensual, and chaotic.

Climax feels like an amalgamation of limbs and sound, as if it were a strange animal pulsating with bass and red lights, with a feral energy that doesn’t stop until the party’s over. There isn’t really a script, and it was noted by the director Gaspard Noé that most of the scenes were improvised, shot linearly, over the course of only a few days. It feels organic and crude, surreal in some ways and too real in others.

The cinematography is unusual, with brutally long takes, and the camera primarily focused on the mesmerizing choreography and disorientating scenes that almost seem to amount to nothing. If there is supposed to be a story line, a significance behind everything that unfolds over the course of the movie – then it’s lost to a special echelon of hell that spills across the screen.

At first, the film starts off like any other onscreen party: a bit hedonistic, a bit messy, full of drama and gossip and dancing. The audience is exposed to the private problems and personal relationships between the members of the troupes through cuts towards the different characters at different points during the party.

Things are amplified when the group realizes that their sangria had been spiked with LSD, and all pleasures and desires reach unthinkable magnitudes before turning dangerous. Dance is melded with violence and paranoia, and the scenes turn into an unending, bizarre, sensory surge. While this feeling is nearly normalized by the end of the movie, a few scenes we see through the eyes of some of the only coherent characters are the realizations of the nightmarish reality.

Climax is a polarizing film, strange in composition and delivery, but undoubtedly powerful. It’s a movie that is difficult to make sense of with the traditional parameters of good film-making, and is probably most aptly described as a bad trip – perfectly filmed as such, and unforgiving in how far it takes the viewer down a path of indistinguishable pleasures and pains. The ending reveal almost feels insignificant in comparison to the trauma of the rest of the movie.

While beautifully shot and unmistakably special, Climax is difficult to watch and reads more like an abstract exploration of the moraless, raw side of the human condition than an actual plot. It’s interesting, it’s an experience, and it’s probably a masterpiece in its own genre, but it is definitely not for everyone – maybe not even for most people.

REVIEW: Greta.

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Greta begins like an upscaled lifetime movie, with bouncy music played to the streets of New York, montages of beautiful temperate days in the park, homey cooking scenes, a cute dog – the sweet introduction to the film is a bit undermined, however, by its reputation.

Frances, an ingenuous Bostonian, finds a handbag on the subway and resolves to return it to its owner – her roommate, Erica, notably reminding her in Manhattan they usually call the bomb squad for an unattended bag. Nevertheless, the well-intentioned Frances follows the address found on an ID card to a quaint, scenic house and meets Greta, who is seemingly sophisticated and French, mother-like, charming, and isolated. They bond over their individual loneliness as a friendship is built upon the understanding of loss.

However, about twenty minutes into the film, the movie drops all its horror elements with an inelegant slap of screechy violin music and Chloë Grace Moretz gasping as if she were in a B-movie. Surprise is lost to the speed in which the film rushes into the thick of the story, barreling through its hour and a half runtime with poor pacing.

Underneath its artful glaze of cinematic appeal, Greta is brimming with the clichés of frantic music and jumpy cuts. It’s applied heavy-handed at times, less like a varnish of ingenuity and more like space to fill the shallowness of the characters, the plot.

Isabelle Huppert carries most of the film, almost all of Greta’s horror imbued into one sinister person, and it’s impressive that outside of soundtracks and camera angles, she is the sole source of terror. Greta is largely devoid of any fantasy elements, any secondary antagonists, any other fear that is not Greta herself – near comically deranged and frighteningly pervasive in Frances’ life. The suspense is from her honed act of psychopathy, the delivery of her lines. The tension is from the deliberateness of her obsession.

There are moments not quite explained, disposable characters tossed aside, overly theatrical scenes executed wildly, and the film suffers from the lack of subtlety or wit and a directorial grasp outside of just its visuals. While not bad enough to be entirely campy and not good enough to be spectacular in its genre, Greta is still strangely palatable.

Despite all of its flaws, the style in which Greta combines delicate cinematography with a hammer of horror elements banged into anywhere that fits is, surprisingly, enjoyable and interesting. Without reading too much into the plot or picking at the seams where the film unravels, Greta can still be satisfying in an uncomplicated, indulgent, slightly satirical way. Like a McDonalds milkshake – not necessarily good but whatever.

REVIEW: Happy Death Day 2U

Laura Dzubay Leave a comment

I watched Happy Death Day and Happy Death Day 2U in somewhat close conjunction with one another, which made for a somewhat bizarre and disorienting (or weirdly orienting?) viewing experience. A large part of this is due to the eerie, albeit absolutely deliberate, similarities between the structures of the two movies. At their very heart, the central problem is almost the same: Theresa “Tree” Gelbman (Jessica Rothe, La La Land) is stuck reliving the same day.

Anyone who has seen Happy Death Day (2017) is familiar with this conceit and with the problems it spells for Tree, a college student. There are the typical Groundhog’s Day-style frustrations of retaining her memories of previous days — falling in love, for instance — while everyone around her forgets. And then there’s the somewhat more distressing problem of the killer in a baby mask, who stalks Tree and murders her every time on the night of her birthday.

The sequel, Happy Death Day 2U, directed by Christopher Landon and released recently through Blumhouse Productions, presents a new complication. Not only is Tree stuck reliving the same day—it’s now the wrong day. In the completely wrong universe.

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The film sets itself up in an interesting way, holding a close focus on Ryan Phan (Phi Vu), who had a marginal role in the first movie as the roommate of Tree’s love interest, Carter Davis (Israel Broussard, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before). It seems at the beginning like the focus of this movie is going to be on Ryan, but this remains the case just long enough to explain to the viewers that Ryan and his science friends are responsible for the strange time-looping that Tree has experienced. After a strange altercation involving multiple Ryan’s and the panicked pressing of Ryan’s student-made quantum reactor, Tree wakes up back at the beginning of the previous day. Only this time, she’s been thrown into another dimension, and things are a little different: The original Babyface culprit, Tree’s roommate Lori Spengler (Ruby Modine, Shameless), is no longer the killer, and Carter is now dating Tree’s sorority nemesis, Danielle Bouseman (Rachel Matthews). Perhaps most significantly, while Tree’s mother (Missy Yager) was dead in her original timeline, she is now alive and well.

Tree’s transplantation into this new world kicks off a wild journey, as she is confronted by the simultaneous problems of learning how to navigate the changes to her life in this new world and the implications of those changes, figuring out how to get back to her home dimension (and indeed, whether she even wants to), and solving the Babyface killer mystery all over again. Although interestingly, the latter of these winds up taking something of a backseat. While the original Happy Death Day was a black comedy slasher film, working largely within the sphere of horror, its sequel ditches the horror almost entirely in favor of comedy, emotional drama, and adventurous science fiction. The segues into hallway-creeping and killer-unmasking don’t feel out of place at all, but they also don’t feel particularly haunting or scary, especially not in comparison to some of the emotional scares that Tree must deal with instead.

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On the whole, Happy Death Day 2U is a success not because it delivers scares, but because it recognizes and builds on the elements that worked so well in its predecessor: comedy, irony, and a real sense of heart that carries emotional resonance. A great deal of this is concentrated in Tree’s character, actualized by Rothe’s wonderful acting; we spend almost the entire movie in Tree’s head, and we’re along for the ride as she finds herself forced to tackle conflict after conflict, eventually having to choose between a life that’s not hers that would mean reuniting with her mother (albeit under somewhat false pretenses) and the world she knows, where her real friends and loved ones are back waiting for her, but her mother is not. The implication that her choice is as simple as her mother versus her boyfriend is a bit of a red herring, and the film tries to stay attentive to this, stressing how the memories everyone else has of Tree in this new dimension don’t align at all with her own. Ultimately, Happy Death Day 2U is an adventurous and captivating success, demonstrating how the continuation of Tree’s story can again have more profound and intriguing implications — not only for her, but, in the end, for the people around her as well.

PREVIEW: Happy Death Day 2U

Laura Dzubay Leave a comment

Directed by Christopher Landon, Happy Death Day 2U is a follow-up to 2017’s slasher hit, Happy Death Day. Happy Death Day told the story of Theresa “Tree” Gelbman, a college girl who is murdered by a masked killer on the night of her birthday — and then wakes up and finds herself reliving the same day over and over. Happy Death Day 2U takes place immediately after (or, in a way, concurrently with?) its predecessor, as it follows Tree after she is transported to a different dimension, where she must again relive that same Monday while figuring out a way back to her home dimension.

Jessica Roth (La La Land) reprises her starring role as Tree, with Israel Broussard, Phi Vu, Rachel Matthews and Ruby Modine also returning. Happy Death Day 2U is currently showing at local theaters such as the Quality 16 and the Ann Arbor 20 IMAX.

REVIEW: Truth or Dare

Laura Dzubay 2 Comments

Everyone is familiar with the old trope of going out with your friends on a Friday night, settling into theater seats with some popcorn or soda, and watching a scary movie. Like Michael Jackson in the “Thriller” music video. Even if you’re not that much into horror yourself, you’ve likely seen this image before. The movie might not necessarily be good, but for many people, it’s still an idea of a fun night.

Truth or Dare is a great type of movie for this. It’s surprising and scary, shallow enough to make fun of but still deep enough to be genuinely clever. The film tells the story of Olivia (Lucy Hale, Pretty Little Liars), a kind and charitable girl who is enticed into joining a spring break trip to Mexico by her best friend, Markie (Violett Beane, The Flash). While they’re there, they end up getting roped by a stranger into a game of Truth or Dare. When they return to school, they find that the game is possessed with a demon that has followed them back, and now they must take turns being forced to play with the demon. If they answer untruthfully, fail to complete a dare, or refuse altogether, they will be killed.

In a lot of ways, this movie follows a typical, formulaic scary-movie structure. Without naming names, many of the friends are picked off one by one in a series of violent deaths that each manage to be shocking, despite the often-predictable nature of the movie. Olivia and Markie, the main characters—each a “Final Girl” in her own way—eventually end up returning to the Mexican mission where they initially played the game in an effort to set everything straight. When people are possessed temporarily by the demon, their faces take on smiles with a freakish Uncanny Valley quality, which is genuinely disturbing to see.

Additionally, many of the characters fall into convenient and general archetypes, particularly when it comes to the side character friends. Ronnie (Sam Lerner) is an insensitive jerk nobody really wants around. Penelope (Sophia Ali) is an alcoholic. Brad (Hayden Szeto) is the perfect son who’s hiding the fact that he’s gay from his police officer father—who, incidentally, manages to crop up out of nowhere at even the most random and improbable places and times. Each character has one defining feature about them. Only with Olivia, Markie, and Lucas (Markie’s boyfriend and Olivia’s crush, played by Tyler Posey), do these features begin to expand into truly fascinating character arcs.

At the center of the movie is the friendship between Olivia and Markie, established at the very beginning. The repeated line, “Between you and the world, I choose you,” is crucial, as over the course of the movie this friendship is tested in ways that range from trivial to terminal. The audience is coaxed into caring about each of them. Markie is grieving the death of her father, who took his own life, and even at the times when the story seems to flirt with turning her into an antagonist, it is always easy to sympathize with her point of view. Hale and Beane have tangible, believable chemistry, and one finds oneself rooting just as much for them to stay friends as for them to make it out of everything alive.

In many ways, Truth or Dare can be said to be another drop in the bucket of predictable, college-student-focused, slasher horror movies. But the characters are real enough (and the performances strong enough) that it’s still engaging, and it is truly clever in a lot of ways, featuring some major plot twists—again, some of them easily foreseeable, but some still totally out of the blue. It’s not the type of movie you’d root for at the Oscars, but it is the type of movie that will show you a good time if you’re just in the mood to buckle down with some friends and enjoy some good, old-fashioned scares. Truth or Dare is currently showing at multiple local theaters, including the Quality 16 and Rave Cinemas.

REVIEW: A Quiet Place

Laura Dzubay Leave a comment

A Quiet Place is built off of a premise that makes itself known even in the title: The world is quiet. Anyone who makes a sound places themselves in immediate peril of being violently destroyed by any one of a group of sound-hypersensitive monsters that have taken over the country, and possibly the world as well. The idea of a movie in which the characters cannot speak is an interesting concept, and a particularly inviting one for the horror genre, in which so much can be drawn from jump scares and loud noises.

Indeed, A Quiet Place makes plenty of use of these. In this way, the movie benefits from the rules it sets for itself, because in a world of so much silence, each jump scare is that much more arresting. There are other common horror elements at play in this movie, from the horrifying images of the monsters themselves to some of the concepts on the screen, like when the children (Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe) nearly drown in a silo and are unable to scream out for help.

But what ultimately makes this story so frightening is the devotion that everyone in the family feels toward everyone else. John Krasinski, who directed, co-wrote and co-starred in the movie, has said in interviews that he wanted the primary focus of A Quiet Place to be the family’s love and dedication, and he absolutely succeeded. He and Emily Blunt, his wife in real life, star as a husband and wife, Lee and Evelyn respectfully, who will do anything to keep their children safe in this dystopian world. Their love for the children is palpable, and small gestures and acts throughout the movie, like Evelyn’s attempts to teach her children reading and math, bring the audience closer into their minds and make it easier to sympathize with them. Which is, after all, the primary objective of so many horror movies, and for good reason: If the audience can come to sympathize with the main characters, then the concern for their safety will be that much more impactful and close, because it will feel similar to a concern for the safety of the self.

Beyond its success within the horror genre, though, the film is fascinating in and of itself, in large part because it isn’t afraid to break its own rules. Or rather, it follows its own rules, but it explores them in so much depth that the viewers are allowed to view them both from within and from without.

The main one, of course, is the principle of silence. The characters are unable to speak out loud, so they communicate through pantomiming, mouthing, and sign language. However, early on in the movie, Lee takes his son Marcus to a river, where the two of them are able to speak out loud for the first time in the film. The way Lee explains it, talking is loud, but the river is louder, which means it drowns out any sound of them being there, and they are safe for the time being. While this does seem to invite some more questions—namely, if talking by the river is safe, why doesn’t the family just move to the river?—it is also a crafty early indication that the film is ready to get creative.

“Creative” is probably the best overall way to describe this movie. Bolstered by strong performances by all four of its lead actors, A Quiet Place, while unconcerned with background information (How did things come to be this way? What was this family like before all of this?), is a skillful look into the strained, meticulous process of preserving love in the face of the apocalypse. A Quiet Place is currently showing at local theaters around Ann Arbor, including the Quality 16 and Rave Cinemas.