Yearly Archives: 2013

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You’re Next

Youre Next
You're Next

Format: Cinema

Release date: 28 August 2013

Distributor: Lionsgate UK

Director: Adam Wingard

Writer: Simon Barrett

Cast: Sharni Vinson, Nicholas Tucci, AJ Bowen, Joe Swanberg

USA 2011

91 mins

The precocious and prolific Adam Wingard has not just one, but two films in the programme of this year’s Film4 FrightFest (22-26 August 2013). The rising indie horror director has been championed by the festival, which screened his wistful, affecting A Horrible Way to Die in 2011, followed by the anthology film V/H/S (for which he shot the wraparound segment) in 2012. This year’s edition of FrightFest sees the UK premiere of V/H/S 2, as well as the London preview of You’re Next.

V/H/S/2 is available on DVD & VOD from 14 October 2013.

With You’re Next, Wingard delivers a hugely enjoyable, thrilling, smart take on the home invasion sub-genre. After a terrifically creepy, brutal opening sequence, teacher Crispian takes his new girlfriend Erin to his parents’ isolated country mansion for the latter’s wedding anniversary. They are joined by his siblings: his obnoxious, successful brother Drake (mumblecore actor/director Joe Swanberg) with his wife Kelly; his younger brother Felix, accompanied by sulky, scornful girlfriend Zee; and his over-enthusiastic sister Aimee, who has brought along her new filmmaker boyfriend Tariq (played by House of the Devil director Ti West). Tensions rise over dinner as the smug Drake purposefully provokes Crispian. But as the festivities descend into a generalised shouting match, barbed comments are suddenly replaced by crossbow arrows, as the family comes under attack from sinister assailants wearing animal masks. As the besieged relatives devise strategies to survive the terrifying aggression, Erin turns out to be surprisingly well equipped to deal with the situation.

You’re Next will be released on DVD + Blu-ray (R2/B) in the UK on 13 January 2014.

The first part of the film is exhilaratingly tense, thanks to a tightly wound script and taut direction, enhanced by the surreal sense of dread created by the animal masks. With their inhuman appearance and no apparent motivation to their actions, the aggressors seem to be playing random, cruel games with their victims (in a way that is reminiscent of David Moreau and Xavier Palud’s Them). Once the reason for the attack is revealed, the film switches to a different kind of dynamic, losing that unnerving strangeness, although it remains ruthlessly effective.

While You’re Next doesn’t have quite as much heart as A Horrible Way to Die, it provides all the required blood, gore, thrills and jumps, which have been so glaringly absent from many recent horror films. Wingard demonstrates a real talent for directing action scenes, cleverly plotting and expertly choreographing them. The dialogue is sharp and entertaining, the characters believable and well defined, with Erin (an exciting performance from Sharni Vinson) adding a brilliant twist to the final girl type. Wingard and his writer Simon Barrett use the premise intelligently, integrating the personal relationships and family conflicts to feed the terror, and have fun playing with audience expectations. The most nerve-racking horror film to come out in a long time, You’re Next is a blast, from the viciously intriguing beginning to the humorously nihilistic ending.

Virginie Sélavy

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Dressed to Kill

Dressed to Kill
Dressed to Kill

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 29 July 2013

Distributor: Arrow Video

Director: Brian De Palma

Writer: Brian De Palma

Cast: Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson, Nancy Allen

USA 1980

83 mins

The legendary New Hollywood director Brian De Palma has had a more erratic filmmaking career than most. Iconic classics (Carrie and Scarface) rub shoulders with legendary disasters (The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Black Dahlia – not coincidentally, two unwieldy adaptations of classic American authors). Impassioned, personal labours of love (Blow Out, Femme Fatale) vie with hire-a-hack studio gigs (The Untouchables and Mission: Impossible). His trajectory is an unpredictable swerve: De Palma has often seemed like an outsider in the fickle world of Hollywood, persecuted first by critics who decried his unoriginality and apparent bad taste, and then by censors balking at his films’ often transgressive content.

Dressed to Kill, newly reissued on Blu-ray for the first time in uncut form, and made at a convenient mid-point in De Palma’s now 50-year career, provides a timely opportunity to evaluate this uncommonly talented auteur. The film has aspects of the passionate, personal side of his directing, as well as his underrated commercial instinct: its box office success marks it as an early populariser of the modern erotic thriller. De Palma was enamoured with Hitchcock; a science whiz as a young man, he fell in love with film at college via Hitchcock, Welles and Godard, and spent his career crafting elaborate cinematic love letters to the three of them (Antonioni was also a favourite). Dressed to Kill is one of his most overt Hitchcock homages: it overflows with lush audience-baiting orchestral music cues, bravura wordless set-pieces, and erotic perversity.

De Palma was more compelled by the voyeuristic strands in Hitchcock’s films than by his studies of wronged-man innocence. So if Obsession cribs from Vertigo, and Blow Out from Rear Window, Dressed to Kill set its sights on Psycho; it lunges knife-in-hand at this overbearing predecessor, extracting the juiciest ideas and discarding the dated fat. Yet as De Palma retrofits and enhances Hitchcock with modernised sexuality and violence, the result only amounts to a blandification; it reduces the master’s fascination with human behaviour and rare empathy into something insincere and unfeeling. We leave Dressed to Kill staggered by De Palma’s technique and craftsmanship, while still unconvinced by the cold void imparted by the button-pushing plot.

Revealing too much of that plot would be cruel. Someone is offing psychiatrist Dr. Robert Elliott’s (Michael Caine) patients; Elliott believes it might be ‘Bobbi’, an unseen and unknown transgender patient, who leaves him threatening, desperate answer-phone messages throughout the course of the film. A well-heeled, bored housewife patient, Kate (Angie Dickinson), and a hooker with a heart of gold, Liz (played by De Palma’s then-belle Nancy Allen) may be in danger. It’s then left up to Liz, and Kate’s teenage computer-boffin son (Keith Gordon) to unlock this taunting mystery.

Uncharacteristically, the film’s highlight sequence is ultimately tangential to the main thrust of the plot. After a meeting with Elliott where, in rather cheesy racy-thriller form, Kate confesses her sexual attraction to him, she then takes a lazy mid-morning detour into a modern art gallery. In a sequence reminiscent of the recent Spanish arthouse film In the City of Sylvia, we follow her as she alights upon a male admirer stalking the gallery for pick-ups. What ensues is a formidably choreographed cat-and-mouse chase of attraction through the white gallery hallways, the glances and reactions of the two conveyed first in split-screen, and then in one breath-catching long take.

Yet it’s a shame that De Palma instills most of his energy into the film’s most conspicuous ‘action’ scenes; as a result, the concluding twist’s lack of psychological credibility exposes this thriller as just another giddy ‘gotcha’ contraption, rather than peering into the heart of its characters with any genuine curiosity or insight.

David Katz

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Nowhere

Nowhere
Nowhere

Format: DVD

Release date: 26 August 2013

Distributor: Second Sight

Director: Gregg Araki

Writer: Gregg Araki

Cast: James Duval, Ryan Phillippe, Heather Graham, Rachel True, Heather Graham, Jordan Ladd, Debi Mazar, Tracy Lords

USA 1997

78 mins

Gregg Araki’s Nowhere, originally released in 1997, is the last part of his Teen Apocalypse trilogy, after 1993’s Totally Fucked Up and 1995’s the Doom Generation (though I’d argue that 2010’s Kaboom, which carries on along similar lines, makes it a foursome.)

Read the Kaboom interview with Gregg Araki.

For those unaware of his oeuvre, Mr Araki’s films generally feature beautiful young things, of mixed acting ability but uniformly flawless complexion, doing drugs, and each other, in various combinations, in heavily stylised settings while spouting doomy dialogue with an emphasis on the alienating effects of a crass, overbearing consumer culture. If this, and the in-your-face nihilism of the titles seem to suggest a grim old time at the multiplex, it should be pointed out that his films are actually, y’know, kinda fun.

Nowhere follows formula, but throws a rubber-suit alien into the mix. We’re in shiny Los Angeles, following the lives of various shiny kids one sunny day. Video-camera wielding romantic Dark (James Duvall) wants Mel (Rachel True) to himself, but she’s having fun with Lucifer (Kathleen Robertson), amongst others…and doesn’t want to settle down. Around them circle other cuties: Sarah Lassez, Christina Applegate, Jordan Ladd, Mena Suvari, Heather Graham, Ryan Phillippe and many others, playing characters of varying functionality and sexual persuasion. In lieu of a plot there is the desire of most of the cast to get to a party: all have adventures, some are sweet, some are horrible, some don’t make it. Much sex is had. There is rape, addiction, messy suicide, nipple abuse and alien abduction, before it all goes horribly wrong at the party, then horribly wronger back at Dark’s place. The end.

Nowhere is a giddy, wonky feat of laugh-out-loud audacity, a plate-spinning act that barely holds together over its lean 78 minutes. Characters are called Handjob and Jujyfruit and Dingbat and say things like ‘dogs eating people is cool.’ They are distinguished mainly by hairstyle and interior décor. It zips nimbly from airhead to airhead, sustained by the perkiness of the cast, the audio-visual punch, and a horny, laissez faire attitude. From the opening shower-masturbation fantasy onwards, everything seems drenched in a hormonal fug, most of the cast have trouble keeping their hands off each other for any length of time, and when they do get it on their various scenes are spliced together in artful polysexual feats of editing. Everything is affectless and candy coloured and paper thin. Dark witnesses a reptiloid alien disintegrate three valley girls at a bus stop, but is most annoyed that he failed to catch it on tape. He seems stunned when the same thing happens to his fantasy lover Montgomery (Nathan Bexton) later on that evening, but at no point does he try to tell anybody about all this. It’s like Bret Easton Ellis made over by John Waters – the tone may be numb, addled and apocalyptic, but look! There’s Traci Lords! And Gibby Haynes! And those cool background paintings! And don’t Sonic Youth/ Suede/ the Chemical Brothers sound good in this bit?

The appearances by a money grubbing televangelist (John Ritter) aside (because no post-punk indie movie of the period was ever complete without a sleazy televangelist), it’s remarkable how little Nowhere has dated, given how achingly, trying-too-hard-hip this all was sixteen years ago. Perhaps it’s because it comes sealed in its own weird bubble, where, say, the absence of mobile phones and the internet come across as another stylistic decision, but now it seems box fresh and bright. On the commentary, somebody occasionally asks Gregg about the meaning of this or that shot, but he remains tight-lipped about that stuff, allowing the cast more room to obsess over their poreless skin, their clothes, teeth and hair. This seems entirely appropriate, it’s a film as much about youthful flesh, and surfaces and eyeball kicks as it is about the end of the world.

Mark Stafford

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The Land of Hope

The Land of Hope
The Land of Hope

Format: Blu-ray + DVD

Release date: 26 August 2013

Distributor: Third Window Films

Director: Sion Sono

Writer: Sion Sono

Cast: Isao Natsuyagi, Naoko Otani

Original Title: Kibou no Kuni

Japan 2012

133 mins

From offbeat horror oddities such as Exte: Hair Extension (2007), where various victims are attacked by their hairstyles, and the epic story of love, religion and panty-shot photography that is Love Exposure (2009), to the brutal dystopia of Himizu (2011), Japanese director Sion Sono has gained a formidable reputation for having an exceptionally unique approach to filmmaking. The Land of Hope is a slight departure from his usual extremes, without being completely bereft of his surreal sense of humour and the occasional excursion into overtly symbolic imagery.

Throughout this poignant domestic drama, Sono succeeds in achieving a restrained and proficient balance between naturalism and the visually poetic as he tackles head on a monumental disaster and its tragic repercussions. The only problem with the film is his overbearing use of classical music, which often feels cheap and unnecessary. But skillfully avoiding spectacle, the director’s heartfelt authenticity is unquestionable, making this his most accessible and personal film to date.

This review was first published as part of our Terracotta 2013 coverage.

Robert Makin

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Upstream Colour

Upstream Colour
Upstream Colour

Format: Cinema

Release date: 30 August 2013

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Shane Carruth

Writer: Shane Carruth

Cast: Amy Seimetz, Shane Carruth, Andrew Sensenig

USA 2013

93 mins

A successful career woman, Kris (Amy Seimetz) is targeted by a thief (Thiago Martins), who has created some kind of drug through the harvesting of worms that have psychotropic qualities. The worms allow the thief to brainwash Kris into a series of compulsively repetitive rituals – including copying out Thoreau’s Walden by hand – before stealing her life savings and abandoning her to be released, to some extent – and in some mysterious way, via music – from her state by a mysterious Sampler and pig farmer (Andrew Sensenig), who removes and seemingly transplants the parasites. Kris will never quite recover. She has no idea what has happened to her, or the money that has been stripped away, or her identity. She is damaged goods. And apparently psychically linked to a pig.

To write out one of Shane Carruth’s films as a synopsis is to do it a terrible injustice. First of all, thinking about the story in this bare-bones way makes its bizarreness too vulnerable to an easy dismissal as whimsical quirk. And secondly, because his filmmaking lives in the gaps, the ellipses. Memory is untrustworthy; dialogue is rigged, manipulative; and character is fragile, as identity can unravel at any moment. Something intricate, hyper-rationally thought out and finely detailed (and yet utterly mad/normal) is happening, but the camera catches it in glances and jigsaw pieces, overheard conversations, sounds that communicate something deeply mysterious, and beautiful rhyming colours. There is no grand scheme, or conspiracy, but everyone is interconnected in a way that only we can begin to unpick.

Read John Bleasdale’s interview with sound designer Johnny Marshall here.

Whereas many contemporary films could just as easily be radio plays, Upstream Colour is ambitiously cinematic. Scenes play out over multiple locations and large sections of the film dispense entirely with dialogue; exposition sits in a lonely corner with the other arts of spoonfeeding. There are beautiful visions of microscopic life, as well as decay and paranoia, underwater. As an allegory, the film does not lend itself for easy unfolding, but the film operates almost like magic realism. It is unashamedly sensuous. As the characters strive for communication and agreement about what is going on, the film itself attempts to give us the qualia of lived immediate experience. The title itself evokes both colour and motion, and, by association, sound. The sound design is an on-screen character. Characters manipulate each other’s reality, and at the same time try to grasp at what is there. Characters hear sounds and see colours which mean something, though – in keeping with the film’s suspicion of explication – they cannot quite put it into words: ‘It’s a low sound’, ‘No, it’s high’, ‘Yes, it’s high and low.’

Kris meets Jeff (Carruth again), and they begin a relationship that borders on the kind an amnesia-struck Adam and Eve after the Fall might have had. Something happened to them that they don’t fully understand, and feel in some way deeply guilty about, and yet they’re trying to get on with their lives. This original sin is still there, blocking their ability to progress in a world that is set against them. And yet it also gives them their compulsion to be together, the consolation of their passion, their mutual need. It is one of the triumphs of the film that this genre-defying oddity, this magnificent cinematic poem, is also quietly a brilliant and moving love story.

John Bleasdale

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Only God Forgives

Only God Forgives
Only God Forgives

Format: Cinema

Release date: 2 August 2013

BR/DVD release date: 2 December 2013

Distributor: Lionsgate UK

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Writer: Nicolas Winding Refn

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Kristin Scott Thomas, Vithaya Pansringarm

France, Thailand, USA, Sweden 2013

90 mins

Spellbinding, visionary and deeply affecting, Nicolas Winding Refn’s follow-up to Drive is one of the absolute must-sees of the year.

Gorgeous, mysterious, immersive, disturbing, dreamlike: with his new film, Nicolas Winding Refn has created one of those beguiling cinematic universes that you don’t want to leave when the credits roll.

From his hard-hitting debut Pusher, via the creepy Fear X, the violent machismo of Bronson and the mythical savagery of Valhalla Rising, Winding Refn has been exploring various facets of the male identity. With Drive in 2011, he has turned to a moodier masculinity, with the help of reluctant heartthrob Ryan Gosling. A bolder, more challenging film, Only God Forgives continues in the same vein, with Gosling playing another great, reticent, melancholy character of the kind he does so well.

Gosling’s Julian runs a boxing club in Thailand, which acts as a cover for his brother Billy’s drug trafficking. When Billy rapes and kills a young Thai prostitute, Julian is forced to deal with the consequences, and must face his overbearing mother Crystal and the fearsome police chief Chang. Verbally economical and visually sumptuous, the film relies on symbolic actions and images rather than words to tell its story – among some of the most memorable, a quixotic fight in a deserted boxing club, surreal police karaoke, a beautiful girl behind the gold curtain of a lapdancing club, and a scene of biblical violence amid a party of dressed-up girls with their eyes shut. The elliptical narrative is brilliantly edited, weaving together dream and reality until the boundaries are completely blurred, and connecting separate times and spaces to create intimate, invisible psychic ties between the characters.

In the Q&A that followed the screening, Winding Refn said that the film was about the idea of fighting God. Chang is indeed a God-like character, of the Old Testament kind, meting out a vengeful justice with an infallible sword and unwavering hand. In the opposite camp, Julian is a stranger in an unfamiliar land – which may well be his own mind – trying to cut a moral path in an immoral human jungle, fighting a doomed fight against forces too mighty, both inside and outside of himself.

The film’s sophisticated ideas are fleshed out by the excellent cast. Gosling brings the powerful mix of poignant sadness and underlying menace that makes him such a compelling actor to watch in Drive and The Place beyond the Pines. Kristin Scott-Thomas is a revelation as the bitchy, selfish, domineering, incestuous mother, while Vithaya Pansringarm has the commanding presence and awe-inspiring authority required for his role as Chang.

With its rich colours and intricate patterns, its sensual, oppressive light and oblique storytelling, and at its centre, a laconic, supernaturally powerful, sword-wielding protagonist, Only God Forgives feels like a very Asian movie, mixing the exquisite aesthetic sense of Chinese filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou with the brutal anti-heroes of Takeshi Kitano. In this darkly seductive, exotic cinematic land nestles the Heart of Darkness-type story (a stunning early sequence that sees Billy and Julian engaged in enigmatic drug talk in a shadowy room, with only their eyes lit, is reminiscent of the ending of Apocalypse Now). Winding Refn makes the influences and references his own with intelligence and imagination, producing his most accomplished work to date. Spellbinding, visionary, ambitious and deeply affecting, Only God Forgives is one of the absolute must-sees of the year.

Virginie Sélavy

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Dark Star

Dark Star1
Dark Star

Format: Blu-ray

Release date: 23 January 2012

Distributor: Fabulous Films

Director: John Carpenter

Writers: John Carpenter, Dan O’Bannon

Cast: Dan O’Bannon, Brian Narelle, Cal Kuniholm, Dre Pahich

USA 1974

83 mins

Dark Star began as a student film. It was expanded following an initial success on the festival circuit and released theatrically to fairly dismal results. Later, it was destined to become something of a cult classic, introducing as it had done the career of John Carpenter, as well as screenwriter Dan O’Bannon, who would then go off to modify his claustrophobic cult comedy into a darker horror story for his screenplay that would become Alien. That film was marketed with the brilliant tag line ‘In Space No One Can Hear You Scream’, and Dark Star has that same sense of lonely isolation.

The B-movie score by John Carpenter contrasts with the lonesome, bluesy-ness Country and Western song ‘Benson, Arizona’. The beepy-clunk sound design has to work hard to breathe into convincing life the improvised and visibly cheap effects, but it is also inventive in turning some sequences involving the beach-ball alien and the elevator shaft escapades into a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. The ADR on much of the dialogue has the effect of creating a kind of goldfish bowl ambience, as the characters bicker and muse.

The crew of the titular star ship – the spaced-out space ship, according to the poster – are a bunch of disaffected hippies, sporting the kind of facial topiary that would make them honorary members of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers; the anti-Star Trek. The post-Catch 22 humour sees the crew at a loss to produce any enthusiasm for their mission. Commander Powell is dead and kept frozen, in case the crew needs advice. His stand in, Lieutenant Doolittle (Brian Narelle) – an inspiration for the BBC’s Red Dwarf series – is only interested in one thing: ‘Don’t give me any of that intelligent life crap, just give me something I can blow up!’ His bored nihilism is contrasted with Talby (Dre Pahich), who spends his whole time communing with the universe from the ship’s observation port. Some of the main slapstick comedy is provided by the whinging Sergeant Pinback, played by O’Bannon himself. Each of the crewmembers have difficulty remembering not only each other’s first names, but also their own. Pinback himself turns out not to be Pinback. Despite Talby’s enthusiasm for the stars – the part incidentally was (according to legend/Wikipedia) voiced entirely by director John Carpenter – the only real life is shown by the HAL-like talking bombs. The philosophical discussions are a highlight of the film and also have the benefit of wrapping up a meandering narrative that otherwise might drift along eternally.

John Bleasdale

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The Conjuring

The Conjuring1
The Conjuring

Format: Cinema

Release date: 2 August 2013

Distributor: Warner Bros

Director: James Wan

Writers: Chad Hayes and Cary W. Hayes

Cast: Patrick Wilson, Vera Farmiga, Ron Livingston, Lili Taylor, Joey King, Shanley Caswell

USA 2013

111 mins

James Wan’s Insidious (2010) showed the Saw director (with regular screenwriter Leigh Whannell) branching out from the mayhem thriller to the more subtle domain of the ghost story, albeit a very pumped-up version, with many more shocks per half hour than classical iterations of that genre, and a real talent for suspense, misdirection and sudden scares in evidence.

Now Wan has partnered with different writers to give us, well, the same film, with a little 1970s period detail (although analogue tape decks are not fetishized here as much as in Berberian Sound Studio) and two parallel hauntings that kind of join forces in the middle.

As with Insidious, there is much to quibble about, but as with that film, it’s all mad fun, and so quibbling remains what it is. But how else can you fill a review, except by guaranteeing the audience will levitate from their seats with fright at least five times during the 111 minutes?

While Insidious had its own, not entirely convincing mythic backstory, laid out by funny parapsychologists, the story world of The Conjuring (nobody conjures anything in it, another quibble) is more openly religious. Fortunately, the movie doesn’t turn into a pure born-again Christian reactionary paranoid fantasy, like Eduardo Sanchez’s Lovely Molly a couple of years ago, but there’s still some discomfort from the uncritical presentation of religious crackpots as heroes. And in particular, the scenario’s drafting in of the Salem witch trials as backstory, with all the haunting caused by one evil witch, is tasteless and tacky. The movie wants its audience to have vaguely heard of Salem as some kind of thing, but not to be aware that the men and women tortured and killed were innocent. Wan wouldn’t, I hope, treat Auschwitz that way, so why should another historical tragedy be exploited and distorted?

Fortunately, this is a lone misstep, and the movie actually earns points for not being too nasty: there’s a lot of child endangerment and terror, but relatively little violence, and no exploitation of sexuality. The movie wants to be good-natured, which makes the Salem thing disturbing evidence of dumbness in high places. Wan is super-talented at delivering frissons and jumps, he just needs to take himself a bit more seriously.

On that note, it would be nice if the film had some kind of subtext. As the filmmakers evidently don’t have any particular conviction regarding the supernatural (which is part of what makes the movie so agreeably lightweight: you’ll scream, then go home and sleep like a baby), it would be nice if Wan’s movies could refer to something real outside themselves. Insidious, with its insistent and enervating burglar alarms, did at least call into play modern fears of domestic intrusion, but The Conjuring’s period setting robs it of even that.

Wan continues the upward movement in production values here, but the movie is bigger mainly in terms of cast: one of the great things about his previous movie was the relative conviction of the nice, everyday family. By bringing in Vera Farmiga and Lili Taylor, along with an excellent troupe of juvenile performers (why so many daughters, though?), Wan builds on his evident gift of harnessing strong performances to the thrill ride.

Wan is young, successful, and having fun: he probably wasn’t even thinking of making a great film, but he should try. With a little attention to meaning, he could.

David Cairns

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The Returned

The Returned
The Returned

Format: DVD

Release date: 22 July 2013

Distributor: Arrow Films

Director: Robin Campillo

Writers: Robin Campillo, Brigitte Tijou

Cast: Géraldine Pailhas, Jonathan Zaccaï, Frédéric Pierrot

Original Title: Les Revenants

France 2004

102 mins

Those with only a fleeting interest in current TV listings would still be hard pressed not to have noticed the groundswell of interest in and (largely) glowing reviews of Channel 4’s new Sunday night supernatural series, The Returned. This slow burning, eight-episode French import posits a scenario in which random, dead ex-residents of a small, isolated town are inexplicably resurrected. With the Z word only mentioned once to date – and the resurrected showing no outward signs of their official post-mortem state – The Returned is focused more on the interpersonal and familial tensions wrought by the situation than it is by the ‘horror’ of it. To coincide with the series’ UK airing, Arrow Films are releasing the original 2004 movie by full-time editor and part-time director Robin Campillo on which the series is based. Originally released under the title Les Revenants (The Returned) in its homeland and as They Came Back on the international market, Campillo’s directorial debut is every bit as engrossing, creepy and atmospheric as its small-screen sibling.

Fans of the TV show worried that watching the movie mid-series might spoil both versions can rest easy, as only the concept of the original survived the transitional process from a feature length to long-form narrative. Though Campillo’s tale is on a wider scale – with some 70 million people worldwide having returned to life, and 13,000 alone in the town in which it is set – the tight focus on the lives (no pun intended) of the dead and those they left behind gives the film an intimate feel, making for a wholly engaging viewing experience more akin to brooding, arthouse human dramas than it is to visceral genre movies.

The Returned eschews histrionics and horror in favour of a studied look at the socio-political implications arising from the sudden return of the dead; do they still have the same rights? Are they entitled to walk back into their old jobs? How do governments – local and national – cope with the sudden extra demands on services and benefits? Issues surrounding grief, loss, love and the passage of time are addressed in an unhurried fashion, as the ‘dead’ and their loved ones try, some successfully, others not so, to adjust to the miraculous turn of events.

The clinical, observational air of The Returned brings to mind Peter Greenaway’s The Falls (1980) and Mick Jackson’s Threads (1984), with their personal stories similarly acting as micro insights into a macrocosmic situation. The Returned drifts along for most of its running time as if in a daze, a tonal, stylistic and aesthetic decision clearly reflective of the physical and mental state of the returned dead – robbed as they are of a sense of being fully ‘in the moment’, somehow alive but ‘concussed’, as one of the doctors charged with helping their reintegration into society observes. Those with mental health issues, dementia sufferers, immigrants and ex-offenders could all be seen as being embodied by the ‘dead’, the space they occupy on the margins of society reflected in the faceless dormitories, sideways glances and openly mistrustful encounters experienced by the titular hordes. However, such is the general ambiguity of the film that whether Campillo intended any metaphoric intent is open to debate. Only in its final act does the film enter into anything resembling a conventional genre narrative, and even then it fundamentally remains an oblique mystery. Controlled, thought provoking and refreshingly elusive, The Returned is a sparse, engaging and stimulating experience.

Neil Mitchell

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Frances Ha

Frances Ha4
Frances Ha

Format: Cinema

Release date: 26 July 2013

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Noah Baumbach

Writers: Noah Baumbach, Greta Gerwig

Cast: Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Adam Driver

USA 2012

86 mins

It all starts with a mobile phone. Frances, a 27-year-old living in New York, points out that her best friend Sophie (Mickey Sumner) has become distracted since getting a ‘cell with emails’. They’re at that age: on the cusp between post-grad optimism and the realities of growing up, and while some (Sophie) are cranking up to professional success and personal fulfilment, others (Frances) are still struggling to get themselves going.

Frances, played by mumblecore darling Greta Gerwig, is a long-term dance understudy. Refreshingly, Frances is what Americans refer to as a bit of a ‘clutz’, masculine of gait and gauche of manners. It is no surprise to the viewer that she is forever the stand-in and never the lead. At the beginning of the film, she splits up with her boyfriend and the ensuing action sees the remainder of her life (primarily her close friendship with Sophie) unravel.

With its New York setting, witty yet flawed female protagonist and concern with the hinterland between youth and adulthood, Frances Ha already appears a lot like Lena Dunham’s Girls, and that’s even before Adam Driver (who stars in the HBO series, as well as Dunham’s earlier film, Tiny Furniture) appears on screen, playing a potential love interest for ‘undateable’ Frances. You may wonder whether it was budget constraints or a nod to Tiny Furniture that caused Frances’s parents to be played by Gerwig’s own parents, just as Dunham’s mother and sister starred as those of her character in Tiny Furniture. The answer is probably both. It most certainly can’t be a coincidence: Gerwig, who co-wrote the film with Noah Baumbach, and Dunham are good friends.

But where Girls is squalid and explicit, Frances Ha is cute and whimsical, thanks in part to its French New Wave influence (it is shot in black and white, has a soundtrack that references Truffaut and indulges Frances with the occasional long tracking shot of her running or dancing through Manhattan). It is also funnier. Where Dunham’s characters might strip off and engage in humiliating sex on camera, Frances simply refers to an ex who could only climax when having sex with her from behind, lamenting the fact that in this position ‘all the important things are covered’.

To challenge the current popular thinking that television has overcome film as the medium with which to tell sophisticated and powerful stories, despite using the same milieu and subject matter as Dunham, Baumbach and Gerwig have created something more joyful and more entertaining than its television counterpart. But they’re lucky. Their film, which has an uplifting if slightly idealised ending, exists in its own finite universe. Girls, which is far more bleak and problematic, is perhaps feted to be so, given that it lives or dies on the vagaries of television commissioners. The mediums have similar backgrounds but, while one is already established in telling stories of this nature, the other is still finding its feet, just like Sophie and Frances.

Lisa Williams

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