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The Corpse of Anna Fritz

The Corpse of Anna Fritz
The Corpse of Anna Fritz

Format: Cinema

Seen at LFF 2015

Director: Hèctor Hernández Vicens

Writers: Hèctor Hernández Vicens, Isaac P Creus

Cast: Alba Ribas, Cristian Valencia, Bernat Saumell

Original title: El cadáver de Anna Fritz

Spain 2015

76 mins

When the body of a young film star turns up at the hospital where Pau works, he can’t resist sending an illicit photo to two of his friends, Javi and Ivan, who turn up, booze and coke in hand, ready to party. Once in the morgue, conversation soon turns to…(well, there’s no way to put this politely) nailing the celebrity cadaver. The forceful Ivan takes the lead, and Pau, as ever, follows. But mid coitus, Anna’s eyes open. She’s alive! And they’re all in big trouble. Unless…

Hèctor Hernández Vicens’s nasty little thriller largely plays out, after its moment of awakening, along familiar lines. The three men fall out and fight, the immobile Anna tries desperately to stay alive, plans are made, escapes are attempted, everything goes horribly wrong – it’s all pretty tense and effective and well achieved. What separates the film from the flock, and may well damn it, is the sheer unpleasantness of its premise, and its lead characters.

For much of the film’s lean 76 minutes, we are exclusively in the company of three of the most repellent douchebags cinema has to offer. Whilst Vicenz is relatively restrained on the graphic sex and violence front, he lets their bros-before-hoes macho arseholery run wild and free; when, for example, Javi raises an objection to violating a dead woman, Ivan counters ‘just pretend she’s drunk’ – a line which sent cold ripples around the cinema I was in. I suspect the film may generate more walk-outs from their dialogue in the first twenty minutes than anything thereafter. Anna’s revival makes the film more bearable by, at long last, providing us with a single character that you wouldn’t like to get hit by a bus. She is gradually revealed to be crafty and resourceful, but a massive question mark hangs over the sexual politics. There’s a weird through-the-rabbit-hole morality on display, where Javi is better than the others because he didn’t fuck a corpse, and Pau is better than Ivan, because, with the kissing and hair stroking, he’s a more considerate, romantic corpse fucker.

Possibly not the best choice as a date movie.

This review is part of our LFF 2015 coverage.

Mark Stafford

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Schneider vs. Bax

Schneider vs. Bax
Schneider vs. Bax

Format: Cinema

First seen at
L’Etrange Festival 2015
Part of LFF 2015

Director: Alex van Warmerdam

Writer: Alex van Warmerdam

Cast: Tom Dewispelaere, Alex van Warmerdam, Loes Haverkort, Maria Kraakman

Netherlands 2015

96 mins

After the haunting and otherworldly Borgman, presented two years ago at L’Étrange Festival, Alex van Warmerdam – the enfant chéri of the festival – returned this year with Schneider vs. Bax, only to win the Grand Prix. As suggested by the title, the film’s plot is built around the duel between two contract killers hired by the same employer to do each other in. The film starts with the two protagonists waking. Schneider (Tom Dewispelaere) – allegedly an engineer – is woken up by his beautiful wife (Loes Haverkort) and children on his birthday, and has to cancel his day off because of a phone call from his boss Mertens (Gene Bervoets). Ramon Bax, a solitary writer living in an isolated house by a lake in the middle of a swamp, is woken up by the thought of his daughter Francisca’s (Maria Kraakman) imminent visit, and unmannerly chases away his young mistress, Nadine (Eva van de Wijdeven), to avoid an embarrassing encounter.

Long before the duel is put in place, Warmerdam establishes the comic nature of his film, when Mertens clumsily falls from his chair and accidentally knocks himself out after Schneider’s phone call. From there on, a long series of unexpected twists and blunders complicates the trap originally set for Schneider, in a way reminiscent of Édouard Molinaro’s A Pain in the Ass (1973).

Yet Warmerdam does not play by the rules of the hitman genre. He remains faithful to his criticism of the Dutch middle classes, and in this dark, social-comedy thriller, we go through every stage of a family crisis: the grown-up daughter’s depression, the father’s drug abuse, the grandfather’s incest, to name but a few.

Once again, Warmerdam succeeds in creating a perfect, absurd mix of very realistic action and very unrealistic sequences of cause-and-effect, the accumulation of which fuels the plot. The mystery of Borgman gives way here to exhilarating comedy, indulging in some delightfully trashy jokes, as when Nadine returns with her friend Jules, who threatens to crush Bax under his thumb, only to have his thumb shot off a few minutes later.

In Schneider vs. Bax Warmerdam yields to nature’s call, which was already budding in his previous films. The gardens, forests and countryside there provided a counterpoise to the urban, middle-class setting that Warmerdam is so keen on satirising (the countryside is also an occasional burying ground). This film was shot on location in a nature reserve, and the choice of the wild marshes deeply affects the aesthetics of the film, which moves away from the usual Hopper/Tati-like atmosphere. Much more than in The Last Days of Emma Blank (2009), the exceptionally picturesque landscape has enabled Warmerdam to achieve an unprecedented level of mastery in articulating elements of the plot with visual effects. Bax’s white, immaculate lakeside house (contrasting with his profession) is made even brighter by the fact that the house has a glass roof to let more light in. The obsessive cleanliness of the interior is almost uncanny, especially as Bax returns there all muddy from the swamps, without affecting the pristine state of the house. This is perhaps the most original of Warmerdam’s aesthetic choices: rather than a chiaroscuro reflecting the moral stakes of the protagonists, the screen is overwhelmed by the unchallenged brightness of the swamps in broad daylight, which thus paradoxically enhances the film’s dark atmosphere and the characters’ no less dark motivations. No pathetic fallacy here – the weather remains sunny all through the fight between Schneider and Bax, and the different deaths that occur in its course, even until the film’s ‘happy ending’, when Schneider returns home to his ‘perfect’ family, who are blissfully ignorant of the pater familias’s profession.

Pierre Kapitaniak

This review is part of our Etrange Festival/LFF 2015 coverage.
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The Invitation

The Invitation
The Invitation

Format: Cinema

Seen at LFF 2015

Director: Karyn Kusama

Writers: Phil Hay, Matt Manfredi

Cast: Michiel Huisman, Logan Marshall-Green, John Carroll Lynch

USA 2015

97 mins

Will (Logan Marshall-Green) and Eden (Tammy Blanchard) split up two years ago after a tragic accident drove them apart. Now he and his new girlfriend are invited to a dinner party in Los Angeles with Eden, her new partner David (Michiel Huisman) and a handful of old friends, at their old house in the hills. The evening’s festivities were, perhaps inevitably going to be a trifle strained, but from the moment Will enters the house he senses that something is a little…off. Maybe it’s the two new friends of Eden and David‘s, who seem overly familiar and willing to get intimate, maybe it’s the guest that persistently fails to show up. Maybe it’s Eden herself, with her blissed out smile and her claims to have banished pain from her life. It could be just his grief, and his resentment of her happiness blossoming into paranoia, but something is…off. And as the night wears on his certainty that the hosts have a hidden agenda grows, something more sinister than swinging or scientology…

A masterclass in sustained unease, The Invitation had me more agreeably creeped out than any film in recent memory. The prevalence of ‘I appreciate your honesty’ L.A. therapy speak alone gave me the terrors. Add that to the accretion of unsettling details and the claustrophobic, chamber piece setting and your brain is screaming; ‘Run! Get the hell out of there!’ at the guests before the first 40 minutes are up. But the genius of the construction is that there’s nothing specific that Will can point to to justify his fears. Or rather, the bar for committing the social transgression of telling the hosts to go fuck themselves has not yet been met, especially after they’ve broken out the ’8-million dollar wine’. And that moment remains elusive. Until….

Performances are all excellent, especially Tammy Blanchard, whose Eden is all tactile gestures and fragile positivity. The camerawork is fluid and unfussy with a nice line in unbalanced compositions, and the focus is on telling body language and expression and well edited reaction shots. I love how the outwardly desirable house becomes a scarily unreadable beige and brown prison. And I love how it never lets you off the hook until the final payoff. A proper skincrawler.

This review is part of our LFF 2015 coverage.

Mark Stafford

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February

February
February

Format: Cinema

Seen at TIFF 2015

Director: Osgood ‘Oz’ Perkins

Writer: Osgood ‘Oz’ Perkins

Cast: Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, James Remar, Lauren Holly

USA, Canada 2015

93 mins

*** out of *****

The prolific character actor Oz Perkins makes his promising directorial debut with this creepy, atmospheric and surprisingly affecting blend of psychological thriller and outright horror. Most importantly, February not only signals the arrival of a formidable filmmaking talent, but is a picture that takes its rightful place within an important pedigree of scarefests, which harkens back to the golden age of RKO’s horror unit in the 40s.

The childhood fear of dark corners, in addition to feelings of both loneliness and abandonment, always seem to make for the happiest of bedfellows in genre cinema – happy for viewers, however, not so much for the protagonists of said films. For me, the grandfather of all such work is Val Lewton’s alternately chilling and deeply moving 1944 classic The Curse of the Cat People (directed by Gunther von Fritsch and Robert Wise, written by the indomitable DeWitt Bodeen). That highly influential RKO masterpiece saw the ghost of Irena (Simone Simon) return from the Jacques Tourneur-directed and Bodeen-scribed Cat People (1943) to act as a spiritual guide, playmate and protector for Amy (Ann Carter), the daughter of Irena’s former lover. Utilizing an ‘imaginary’ playmate and nods to Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations” allowed for a horror film that worked on both visceral and emotionally dramatic levels.

February treads similar territory in a wholly contemporary context. Following the mysterious journey of Joan (Emma Roberts), a furtive, seemingly eidolic, yet determined young lady who makes her way across a New England landscape of blood, ice and snow, we become all-too aware that her destination is a place of gothic bumps in the night and a genuinely malevolent force. The place in question is an old, isolated, high-end girls’ boarding school, which has been closed for its winter break and appears to house only Kat (Kiernan Shipka) and Rose (Lucy Boynton), two young ladies who are stranded there when their respective parents do not arrive to pick them up.

A storm appears to be brewing – not simply of the meteorological kind, but of the supernatural kind as well. At first Rose, the eldest, bitterly rejects being placed in the role of protector and ignores Kat. Gradually Rose’s protective instinct kicks in as the long, dark night wears on. Alas, she finds herself desperately powerless as a truly insidious force overcomes Kat and increases in ferocity. Occasionally cross-cutting with Joan, it seems that the evil in this dark, old school is ever-swelling as she nears her ultimate destination.

A convergence is clearly in the cards and it’s not rocket science to guess that it might not at all be pretty. Where things do go a bit awry on my own disappoint-o-meter is that the fine combination of visceral and cerebral chills were of the ‘I hope things don’t go here’ variety during the denouement. A fine screenplay buoys so much of the film’s evocative directorial style, plus the genuinely terrific performances, but once again, I find myself up against a wrap-up I’d expect from a much lesser work.

I doubt this will bother most, but as a psychopath who sees way too many movies, it troubled me to no end. That said, on my baser levels of critical assessment, the movie offers three babes, a creepy old house and a malevolent possession all within a sumptuously crafted indie feature, so what the hell am I complaining about?

Greg Klymkiw

This review is part of our 2015 TIFF coverage.
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Baskin

Baskin
Baskin

Format: Cinema

Seen at TIFF 2015

Release date: 24 June 2016

Distributor: Vertigo Releasing

Director: Can Evrenol

Writers: Can Evrenol, Ercin Sadikoglu, Cem Ozuduru, Ogulcan Eren Akay

Cast: Gorkem Kasal, Ergun Kuyucu, Mehmet Cerrahoglu, Sabahattin Yakut, Mehmet Fatih Dokgoz, Muharrem Bayrak

Turkey 2015

97 mins

Turkish director Can Evrenol has expanded an earlier short film into a pulse-pounding feature-length horror-fest.

**** out of *****

Imagine a clutch of tough-talking cops of various ages, demeanors, experience and corruption levels, hanging around an isolated roadside bar, swapping tales, ribbing each other, engaging in rat-a-tat-tat patter that might make Quentin Tarantino envious and/or mouth-wateringly engaged in the proceedings.

Imagine they’re all speaking in Turkish since, uh, they’re in Turkey.

Further imagine, if you will, that a call for backup, to an even more remote area than they’re hanging around in, forces them to unwittingly unlock a portal to Hell.

Well, imagine no longer, for this is the dense, scary, hilarious, nastily yummy-slurp world of eventual viscous-dribbling and mega-perversion that comes to us courtesy of Turkish director Can Evrenol, who has expanded an earlier short film into a pulse-pounding feature-length horror-fest entitled Baskin. Though most of the proceedings (insanely thrown into the pot by no less than four screenwriters) are a dream-like blur that sometimes makes little sense, it seems not to matter too much and is probably part of the grand design. I think. It matters not.

We’re treated to a myriad of flashbacks, flash forwards, inexplicable details that go unexplained, little in the way of backstory (save for one character’s opening dream, involving his parents’ grunting lovemaking, waking him up to all manner of horrid images more disgusting than the oldsters bumping their uglies) and the sense that all of the characters have been doomed from the start and may well be in a perpetual, purgatorial loop of suffering.

It starts with a terrific slow-burn in the bar, wherein the snappy repartee is peppered (so to speak) with the flavorful seasoning of several grotesque shots of raw meat (from a supremely dubious source) hacked up and tossed onto a grill, whilst the head cop gets into an odd squabble with the joint’s proprietor. I can accept this. So, I think, will you.

Soon enough we’re on the road with our crew in a ramshackle van as they make their way deep into a Turkish Delight of depravity. A naked guy leaps in front of their van, weird gypsies hunt frogs (of which there appear to be several million, hopping and squirming about), and the dread mounts a thousand fold. All the cops, save perhaps for the sucky young twerp with the parental-unit-humping dreams, are some of the most miserable, unsympathetic, macho men you’re likely to encounter in any recent movie, but for some insane reason, their piggishness endears them to us even more.

Sounds just fine to me. And so it is. The film is a supremely entertaining freak-show extraordinaire from a director with talent, style and filmmaking savvy oozing from every conceivable orifice. Speaking of which, orifices and oozing, that is: it doesn’t take long before we follow our reprehensible thug-like cops into the breach of utter horror. The first sign that something’s not quite right appears to be when one of the cops who called for backup smashes his head to a pulp against a concrete wall. The next sign that shit is amiss appears when our men of the law encounter a grim-looking Black Mass.

Enter, The Father. We know this sicko is going to be trouble. The biggest hint appears to be the fact that he resembles the acromegaly-inflicted 40s’ horror actor Rondo Hatton, if Hatton’s head had been made of Plasticine and scrunched into a misshapen gourd. Oh, and he’s adorned in a cloak – always a bad sign at any Black Mass.

Call it torture porn, if you will, but the final thirty minutes are revoltingly shocking – replete with all manner of eviscerations, eye gouging, flesh burning and – my personal favourite – sodomy involving a half-woman-half-goat. Well, it appears to be a woman. The goat part is unmistakable.

And that, ladies and gents, is what you’re in for with Baskin. Take it or leave it, but I was very happy to have partaken. So, I suspect, will more than a few other pervy geeks. Oh, and if you’re wondering what the title refers to, it beats me. I’ve seen the film twice and still have no idea what it means.

Greg Klymkiw

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The Witch

The Witch
The Witch

Seen at
TIFF 2015

Format: Cinema

Release date: 11 March 2016

Distributor: Universal

Director: Robert Eggers

Writer: Robert Eggers

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger, Lucas Dawson

USA, Canada 2015

90 mins

** out of *****

There are some horror films you know you’re going to love right from the very beginning. Alas, a lot of what tingles thine fancy – the deviations from the norm by which one is seduced during the first third of said pictures – eventually cave in on themselves and collide with elements more true to the genre, which are not especially well-handled by this filmmaker. That’s the good and the bad of The Witch, but then, there’s the ugly. Before we get to that, let us survey the good.

The movie has atmosphere to burn – so much so that it burns with as much vengeance, if not more so, than did the Puritans who used to burn witches at the stake – blending period-perfect 17th-century language culled from actual documents of the time with meticulous adornments upon every aspect of the film’s production design.

William (Ralph Ineson), the character we’ll be spending most of the film with, is the patriarch of a family that includes his wifey Katherine (Kate Dickie), a woman whose kisser looks like she’s perpetually sucking on lemons (especially when her baby is suckling on her teat); their sexy, drool-inspiring teenage daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy); son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), on the cusp of burgeoning manhood; and a pair of pint-sized twins, Mercy and Jonas (Ellie Grainger, Lucas Dawson) who are so annoying that one is hoping they’re eventually dispatched in the most vicious (and viscous) manner possible.

What’s immediately creepy and oddly hilarious is that William and his family have been living in a commune of religion-soaked Puritan nutcases, but our hillbilly-like patriarch decides to move his family deep into the wilderness as he fears the commune isn’t religious enough. To say he a religious fundamentalist in extremis would perhaps qualify as an understatement.

He drags his family out into the middle of nowhere, forcing them (and himself) to endure backbreaking hardships. When the baby is kidnapped by an evil witch and dragged off into the woods, Mom goes completely bunyip, Dad gets even crazier, meaner and more violent with his 17th-century Tea Party-like values, the eldest son and daughter become even more sexually frustrated and the twins skyrocket into the kind of obnoxiousness we’re still hoping yields a fate worse than death itself.

The film’s pace is that of a snail – albeit a snail, to quote Colonel Walter E. Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, ‘that’s crawling along the edge of a straight razor’.

This is all good. We wait breathlessly, if not helplessly, until the genuine shite of Salem evil hits the proverbial fan of terror. However, it doesn’t happen. The movie continues loping about like a kind of drearily blinkered and infuriatingly late-career Terence Malick, the narrative repeatedly spinning its wheels and creepy transforming into just plain Dullsville.

That’s the bad. The ugly is threefold. Occasional dollops of horror movie tropes are spat out with ever-frequent ineffectiveness and, secondly, the movie dives feverishly into religious hysteria, which is so intense it detracts from our enjoyment from what should be scary by this point, as opposed to what the film’s director wants us to find scary, the religious hysteria itself.

Lastly, the meticulous pace veers between overwrought and just plain boring, so much so that we’re allowed far too many opportunities to daydream about where all this is going. If you’re like me, you’ll realize that the whole movie is slowly building to a ‘shock ending’ we can see coming from miles away. It’s one of those, ‘Oh God, I hope the picture is not going to go here.’ Then, when it does, we’re left wildly underwhelmed.

Cinema has always had a grand tradition of dealing with religious hysteria tied to the patriarchal fear of pussy, lest we forget Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath, plus virtually anything foisted upon us by Ingmar Bergman. Unfortunately, The Witch wants to have its cake and eat it too. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, but the film’s director has not quite amassed the skill necessary to seriously explore patriarchal ignorance, which uses religion to murder innocent women, with the shudders and shocks needed to render a flat-out horror film.

The Witch is bargain basement Terence Malick crossed with a Roman Polanski wannabe and dollops of half-baked Bergman, but worse yet, is not unlike lower-drawer M. Night Shyamalan.

That, my friends, is truly chilling.

This review is part of our 2015 TIFF coverage.

Greg Klymkiw

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The Devil’s Candy

The Devils Candy
The Devil's Candy

Format: Cinema

Seen at TIFF 2015

Director: Sean Byrne

Writer: Sean Byrne

Cast: Ethan Embry, Shiri Appleby, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Kiara Glasco

USA 2015

79 mins

Six long years after his impressive debut feature The Loved Ones bowed at Midnight Madness at TIFF, Australian writer-director Sean Byrne is back in the same slot – only this time with supernatural horror awash with heavy metal. While The Loved Ones offered out-of-the-box dark humour – boasting a psychotic, would-be prom queen protagonist wielding a power drill, no less – this sophomore outing from Byrne feels less developed and somewhat formulaic.

The story’s focus lies on a metal-head artist named Jessie (Ethan Embry), whose corporate commissions become transformed when he and his young family move into a cut-price (and haunted) house. With his long-suffering wife (Shiri Appleby) and gothic daughter (Kiara Glasco) indulging him, Jessie paints up a grim storm in his new work space.

Not far away, the house’s former tenant, oddball Ray (Pruitt Taylor Vince), is stewing over his mental unease in a nearby motel. Police tell him to keep the noise down – for comfort, he plays a Flying V through a Marshall amp at night! By day, he evidently kidnaps kids, for the devil’s pleasure. Naturally, Jessie’s family is soon on his hit list, as Ray craves his old family pile.

Byrne’s grasp of unease remains potent throughout this brief but barmy outing. Casting is spot on (Vince has the lion’s gold). The tiny town in Texas where it was shot feels suitably chilly. Even the cops don’t seem quite all there, in a Lynchian sort of way.

Despite this, the action unfolds in uneven terms. Jessie’s transformation into possessed artist is slight. His daughter’s school bullying is never glimpsed. Ray’s release back into the world after 20 years in psychiatric care goes unnoticed by local police, and several kids going missing. For good measure, Ray’s also constantly dressed in a bright red, ill-fitting jogging suit. Still, he goes undetected.

On a positive note, the heavy metal motifs that feature throughout feel authentic and refreshing. Costume and production design is convincing. Music comes courtesy of Metallica and Slayer, among others.

While The Devil’s Candy isn’t anywhere near the game-changer it might have been – and coming after The Loved Ones, one would have expected something of that ilk – it’s still entertaining enough, with some memorable sequences (and ideas) that are worth exploring on VOD.

This review is part of our 2015 TIFF coverage.

Ed Gibbs

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Demon

Demon
Demon

Format: Cinema

Seen at TIFF 2015

Director: Marcin Wrona

Writers: Marcin Wrona, Pawel Maslona

Cast: Itay Tiran, Agnieszka Żulewska

Poland, Israel 2015

94 mins

Polish filmmaker Marcin Wrona delivers one of the scariest, most sickeningly creepy horror films of the year.

**** out of *****

The dybbuk has always been one of the most bloodcurdling supernatural creatures, yet its presence in contemporary horror films has, for the most part, been surprisingly absent. Rooted in Jewish mythology, it is the spirit of someone who has suffered a great indignity just before death and seeks to adhere itself to the soul of a living person in order to end its own purgatorial suffering. Alas, it causes as much nerve-shredding pain to the spirit as it does to the body of the one who is possessed. Invading the physical vessel in which a fully formed spirit already resides is no easy task and can result in a battle of wills, which not only implodes within, but tends to explode into the material world with a vengeance.

Demon successfully and chillingly brings this nasty, unholy terror to the silver screen, where it belongs. The late Polish filmmaker Marcin Wrona (who died suddenly and mysteriously at age 42, just one week after the film’s world premiere at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival) hooks us immediately and reels us in with an almost sadistically gleeful use of cinema’s power to assail us with suspense of the highest order.

On the eve of his wedding to the beautiful Zaneta (Agnieszka Żulewska), the handsome young groom Peter (Itay Tiran) discovers the remains of a long-dead corpse in an open grave on the grounds of his father-in-law’s sprawling country estate. He becomes obsessed with this ghoulish treasure lying within the unconsecrated earth of a property bestowed upon the couple as a wedding gift. Not only will the nuptials be performed and celebrated here, but the happy twosome have been blessed with this gorgeous old house and lands as their future home.

Much of the film’s stylishly creepy events take place over the course of the wedding day. Wrona juggles a sardonic perspective with outright shuddersome horror during the mounting drunken celebrations at this extremely traditional Polish wedding. As the band plays, the guests dance between healthy guzzles of vodka, whilst the dybbuk clings to the poor groom, his body and soul wracked with pain. When Peter begins to convulse violently, the lone Jewish guest at the Roman Catholic wedding, an elderly academic, is the one person who correctly identifies the problem.

Wrona’s camera dips, twirls and swirls with abandon as the celebratory affair becomes increasingly fraught with a strange desperation. Are the guests merely addled with booze, or is the estate a huge graveyard of Jews murdered during the Holocaust? Is it possible that an army of dybbuks is seeking an end to their lonely, painful purgatory?

Demon raises many questions, but supplies no easy answers. What it delivers, however, is one of the scariest, most sickeningly creepy horror films of the year. If anything, the dybbuk has finally found a home in the movies, and we’re the beneficiaries of Wrona’s natural gifts as a filmmaker, as well as the largesse of this ancient supernatural entity, which so happily enters our own collective consciousness as we experience its nail-biting havoc over a not-so-holy matrimonial union.

Greg Klymkiw

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Therapy for a Vampire

der_vampir_auf_der_couch
Therapy for a Vampire

Director: David Rühm

Writer: David Rühm

Cast: Tobias Moretti, Jeanette Hain, Cornelia Ivancan

Original title: Der Vampir auf der Couch

Austria, Switzerland 2014

87 mins

David Rühm’s Therapy for a Vampire, which screened at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, is a spry, witty and likable Gothic comedy that puts Sigmund Freud together with a pair of undead shape-shifters in 1932 Vienna.

Director David Rühm displays an encyclopaedic knowledge of classic horror tropes, with his arch-fiend gliding along with the camera like Lon Chaney Jnr in Son of Dracula, or moving out of sync with his shadow like Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. An unusually in-depth familiarity with vampire folklore allows him to include in his film, for the first time that I’m aware of, the vampire’s mythic mania for counting: if objects are spilled on the floor, a vampire must stop what he’s doing to gather them up and count them. OK, I suppose Sesame Street’s Count may have exploited this trait previously. But it’s a great device, since it implies that vampirism and obsessive-compulsive disorder may be connected, and suggests that this particular vampire may not be misguided in seeking the help of a therapist.

Tobias Moretti is both graceful and funny as the lovelorn Count, turning in a physical performance that successfully bridges the gap between supernaturally creepy and funny. Jeanette Hain as his black-bobbed partner embodies the word ‘vamp’. There’s also an all-too-rare chance to see David Bennent, former child star of The Tin Drum and Legend, as his disfigured chauffeur and victim-supplier.

Combining a few simple locations with plenty of fairy tale CGI to create some phantasmagoric settings, the movie manages to look beautiful on a budget.

This review is part of our 2015 EIFF coverage.

David Cairns

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The Lobster

The_Lobster
The Lobster

Format: Cinema

Seen at Cannes 2015

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Writers: Efthymis Filippou, Yorgos Lanthimos

Cast: Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz, Léa Seydoux, Olivia Coleman

UK, Ireland, Greece, France 2015

118 mins

Yorgos Lanthimos’ English language debut is, without doubt, one of the most exciting films to be seen at Cannes this year.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ English language debut The Lobster is, without doubt, one of the most exciting films to be seen at Cannes this year. It starts off as an impressively intelligent and highly amusing piece in the first half, and although it is overlong and less effective in the second part, Lanthimos still manages to turn the corner and create an original piece of work that is set to divide audiences and critics alike.

As the film opens Lanthimos transfers us to a near future setting, where it is now a legal requirement to have a partner and be in a loving relationship. Those who aren’t are sent away to The Hotel, run by a sinisterly straight-talking manager (Olivia Coleman). Here guests are obliged to find a romantic partner within 45 days, or face the fate of being turned into an animal of their choice and released into the woods.

One of the guests arriving at said destination is David (Colin Farrell), a man paunchy and passive, but clearly broken hearted. He’s here because his wife has left him, so he decides on ‘his’ animal – a lobster, chosen for its lengthy lifespan and sustained fertility – and sets out to explore his new accommodation and what it has to offer. Lanthimos builds this bizarre world with a sardonically absurd wit as the hotel guests communicate through strange, stilted dialogue and ritualistically spend their days attempting to increase the length of their stay by hunting the woods for ‘Loners’, who adhere to their own code of independence, while the evenings are spent scouring for potential mates at the disco club.

The Lobster may be a ludicrous vision of our future, but it’s one founded upon very genuine observations about our ultimate desire for companionship, which Lanthimos skewers with sharp satire, until eventually he seems to become overwhelmed by the material. While the first half is full of flavour, the second is unappetisingly bland. A narrative twist that sees David flee into the woods and begin to fall in love with a rabbit-catching Loner (Rachel Weisz), comes too close to convention. The heavy-handed inclusion of a stunted narration told from the perspective of Weisz’s character somewhat suggests a lack confidence on Lanthimos’ part, as if he suddenly lost faith in the ideas he has so deftly and meticulously crafted.

Pamela Jahn

This review is part of our Cannes 2015 coverage.