Raul Ruiz’s high-concept horror film turns a cheerfully naive group of holiday-goers (“Ecologists? No, Americans, I think”) into a microcosm of the violent brutishness at the heart of human society. A hiking trip into a lush park takes a turn toward the maddeningly labyrinthine, as the park oneirically contains the whole world within it, a world which in turn contains [re-contains?] the park within itself. “To get out of the park, we have to get out of Europe. But to…
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Girl with Hyacinths 1950
A noir-inflected set of flashbacks turns young Dagmar Brink’s opening suicide into a mystery to be solved; death by “high ideals,” though the open question of who or what ended up being enough to shatter her last illusions. “Surely there’s someone who hasn’t let you down?” It turns out there isn’t; people are, after all, always disappointing once you get to know them, though that won’t stop Dagmar from persisting to care nevertheless. A dense maelstrom of achronological memories piling…
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Titane 2021
Clearly, I’m in the minority here, but it’s the sort of transgressive provocation I just find incredibly dull, if not flat-out useless. As with Raw before it, the sensationalist genre trappings just become a way for Ducournau to avoid having to try to say anything about any emotional depths she might’ve wandered into. Indeed, literally nothing of either Alexia’s narrative trajectory or Vincent’s emotional awakening would change at all if her baby had been made of flesh and blood instead…
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Friends and Strangers 2021
The best new young-people-going-through-vaguely-defined-shit film I’ve seen in years; if Vaughan largely leaves the reasons for Ray and Alice’s stuntedness – professional, romantic, emotional – only hinted at, numerous casual reminders of Australia’s aboriginal and colonial origins point to some more widespread malaise amid all the self-indulgent millennial comfort. Past failures that haven’t been fully reckoned with, future roadmaps not yet drawn, a present dominated by so many forgotten histories, useless digressions, missed cues, and false starts. “We’ll just have…
