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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE BIRTHDAY (2004)

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The Birthday is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.

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DIRECTED BY: Eugenio Mira

FEATURING: , Erica Prior, Jack Taylor, Dale Douma

PLOT: Norman Forrester navigates his girlfriend’s father’s birthday party as he waits for the right moment to tell her how he feels.

Still from "The Birthday" (2004)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Whatever Corey Feldman is doing to portray Norman is up there alongside ‘s turn as a romantic lead in The Room (albeit hovering on the reality-side of believable), and that’s just for starters in this oddball bit of capering which unfurls like a forgotten b-side.

COMMENTS: Norman wears white socks with his tuxedo. His powder-blue ruffled shirt is more appropriate for a high school prom. Alison, his girlfriend, runs hot and cold, making her difficult for him to read. The father, whose birthday is being celebrated, is dismissive of Norman’s pizzeria job. Norman can’t unload a hotel room glass he picked up at the start of the night, an old school buddy insists they watch the strippers together, blackouts begin to plague the main event, and he never finds a moment to give his girlfriend that special gift. All told, it’s not a good night for Norman—and that’s not even taking into account his discovery of a death cult hoping to summon a ian-style god of hopelessness.

Norman is our constant guide for this special evening, whether we want him or not. His eyebrows are always rising and lowering; he often doesn’t know what to do with his hands; and his voice sounds like it should be coming from a tertiary Dick Tracy villain with one line. But we’re with that voice, and that awkwardness, for two hours. It’s a heckuva gambit on the part of both actor Corey Feldman and director Eugenio Mira. This fractured character is what’s needed, though, for channeling this irregular narrative, peopled as it is from the basement to the penthouse with differently aberrant characters. To perform Mira a modest disservice, the dialogue oscillates between the goofiness of The Hudsucker Proxy and the menace of Barton Fink. Is everyone having a great time? Are they doomed? As with life, there’s a bit of both.

The Birthday kicks off with an Art Deco font-flourished title card reading “The Most Amazing 117 minutes in Norman Forrester’s Life,” before fading into a shot of the named character emerging from a creaking elevator whose tinny music, after some repetitions, clarifies itself as a Muzak rendition of “It’s My Party.” Mira’s promise trundles along deliciously for the first hour, as he slaps snips and snatches of eccentricity into the mix—the belligerent father, the Valium-addled mother, the alarmingly eager-but-unhelpful staff, and even the hotel itself, with its strange secrets—culminating in a first act climax of soul-searching and monologue from Forrester as he descends into the basement.

For a reason that baffled me at the time, Mira seems to cut away the entire, hard-earned accumulation of dark wacky and silly foreboding, deciding that the second half will instead travel full bore into a kind of stupid story line. For a stretch, I worried that Yes, the first half is weird enough to carry the film and an apocrypha recommendation, but I’ll have to warn that—and before I knew it, Mira was building again. A final blow-out wraps up this strange birthday party with style and intensity. Norman, who has spent his life ducking down and backing away from conflict, is provided the ultimate test; and despite his white socks, ruffled shirt, and “My Goodness What is that Voice?” timbre, by the very end, my weird hopes had triumphed.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a cinematic enigma that most definitely won’t be for everyone. However, for lovers of the wonderfully weird and mesmerizingly Lynchian, it’s a lost gem begging to be discovered.”–Stephanie Malone, Morbidly Beautiful (2024 re-release)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CONFESSIONS [KOKUHAKU] (2010)

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DIRECTED BY: Tetsuya Nakashima

FEATURING: Takako Matsu, Yukito Nishii, Kaoru Fujiwara, Ai Hashimoto, Yoshino Kimura,

PLOT: A schoolteacher informs her class that that two of her students are responsible for the death of her daughter, and she has exacted revenge by secretly exposing them to a fatal disease.

still from confessions (2010)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Confessions offers an unusual mix of styles and goals: a brutal revenge thriller, a screed against the inhumanity of Japanese schoolchildren, a dark and twisted mystery, a gentle teen romance, and a meditative drama paced deliberately enough to make jealous, all living side-by-side within the same film. On their own, none reinvent the wheel, but the resulting bouillabaisse is a creation unto itself.

COMMENTS: The very last word spoken in Confessions is “Kidding.” The word is wielded like a dagger to the heart. There have been no jokes told over the preceding 100+ minutes, and even moments of smiles have been laced with cruelty or cynicism. It’s the final opportunity for the movie to make clear its intentions, and this final utterance establishes once and for all that its blood runs ice cold.

That emotional intelligence is no one’s priority is made clear from the film’s opening gambit, in which nearly the entire first act of the movie is given over to a monologue by Ms. Moriguchi, the class teacher. Her raucous class ignores her announcement that this is her last day, and pays little heed to her mentions of her dead child and her dying husband. It’s only when she happens to mention murder that she finally gets their attention; they are intensely focused as she intimates that the culprits are in the room, and her revelation that she has spiked the class milk supply with AIDS-tainted blood sends them into a complete tizzy. It’s all disrespect until the stakes turn selfish, and Moriguchi stays cool and detached the entire time.

Confessions repeats this theme of heartless self-interest throughout: a mother abandons her child to pursue a career. Another is irritated at having to engage with a new teacher following Moriguchi’s departure: “She only cares about her own child, more than for her students.” Students are jealous of the media attention paid to peers who commit murder. Most tellingly, the two students responsible for the girl’s death react in equally selfish but wildly contrasting ways: one becomes feral and wracked with existential doubt, while the other doubles down on a sociopathic mindset, devising a plan to wipe out the entire school. Of course, there’s a dark irony in the later revelation that this homicidal endeavor is actually central to someone else’s vengeful scheme.

The confessions of the title are ostensibly the admissions by each of the major participants in the story concerning their role in the events depicted. But this is mostly a nod to the story’s origins as a novel, and a means of keeping the tale’s many twists and turns concealed—because confession suggests guilt, and that is something none of the characters feel for very long. In fact, Nakashima luxuriates in both the pain and the fury of his protagonists, frequently lingering in the moment through lovingly detailed slow-motion imagery (often accompanied by Radiohead songs to maximize the drama).

Confessions is an effective piece of cinema, but a grim and nasty work. It’s a cousin to the all-the-kids’-fault nihilism of Battle Royale or the nausea-inducing machinations of Oldboy. (The climactic revelation also brought to mind the notoriously bleak South Park episode “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” which itself has a lofty antecedent in Shakespeare.) It’s a terrifically acted, beautifully rendered world that almost actively discourages revisiting. Not kidding.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Overall, Confessions is a fairly solid, creatively made picture taking a relatively simple narrative, small cast and handful of locations and creating a continuously engaging and interesting film largely through its techniques. That being said, its bloated, confused and downright bizarre plot, coupled by its overextended runtime and curious split, made it somewhat more difficult to fully enjoy.” – William Schofield, Norwich Film Festival       

(This movie was nominated for review by hanul. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

Confessions [Blu-ray]

Confessions [Blu-ray]
  • Best Director (Tetsuya Nakashima) of Award of the Japanese Academy 2010
  • Best Film of Award of the Japanese Academy 2010
  • Best Screenplay of Award of the Japanese Academy 2010
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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DAAAAAALI! (2023)

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Daaaaalí! is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Jonathan Cohen, , Pio Marmaï, Didier Flamand, Éric Naggar

PLOT: A journalist attempts to interview Salvador Dalí, but the painter’s erratic behavior and demands constantly cut her attempts short.

Still from Daaaaaali! (2023)
Anaïs Demoustier in DAAAAAALÍ! Courtesy of Music Box Films.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: If you asked who would be the most intriguing modern director to concoct a Salvador Dalí biopic, Quentin Dupieux’s name would be at the very top of the list. While other directors resort to bemused realism to tackle the Surrealist icon’s notoriously slippery persona, Dupieux is a kindred spirit who fearlessly jumps right in to what makes Dalí tick: the irrational, the nonsensical, the dreamlike. Confident in its refusal to explain its enigmatic subject, Daaaalí! is the only cinematic portrait one could imagine the real Dalí endorsing.

COMMENTS: More weirdly witty than funny and anything but insightful, Daaaalí! tackles its unknowable subject in the only way possible: as a dream. Aspiring journalist Judith somehow gets the famous artist to agree to sit down for a magazine interview, but when he finally arrives—after imperiously striding down a seemingly endless hotel corridor for long enough for Judith to hit the bathroom and order room service—he immediately shuts down the interview because there’s no camera. Then, when Judith reschedules and secures a camera for a second attempt, Dalí accidentally destroys it. And so on. Dalí serves as a negative force in the film, denying and sabotaging every plan that does not accord with his transient, selfish whims. It soon becomes apparent that, like Judith, we are never going to learn anything about the artist beyond his surface facade of arrogance.

But insight into the man is not what this movie is, or should be, about. Instead, Daaaaali! is thoroughly Surrealist in spirit, evoking Dalí’s aesthetics (and, equally, those of Dalí’s great frenemy, ). These men’s sensibilities are a perfect fit for Dupieux, who barely has to fine-tune his own eccentric predilections at all to tell this story. After the premise is established, we quickly spin off into a labyrinth of dreams and anachronisms (we see completed paintings, then later in the film we see Dalí in the process of painting them). Nothing encapsulates the playful narrative spirit better than the long digression (over a bowl of muddy stew with live worms) in which a priest tells the painter about a dream he had where he was shot by a cowboy while riding a donkey. That incident doesn’t end the dream, however; it keeps recurring throughout the film. We are quickly lost inside an arbitrary narrative structure that almost gets as confusing as Dupieux’s bewildering Reality. But we’re anchored in Dalí’s frustratingly quirky, self-involved personality, and in Judith’s repeated failure to capture anything of substance about her quarry.

There are basically four actors who play Dalí, plus one actor who plays old Dalí (a sub-Dalí standing to one side of the main story), plus at least one bonus Dalí who only appears for a few seconds. There could be more Dalís running about, but 4-5 Dalís seems like the most accurate number, without counting fractional Dalís. This use of multiple actors in a central role is, naturally, a reference to Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, just as the continuous failure to consummate the interview recalls the failed dinner party of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. The gentle anticlericalism shown by the repeatedly-shot priest character is also a decidedly Buñuelian touch. Dupieux adapts these Surrealist motifs so naturally that, as much as anything, Daaaaali! serves as a reminder that the Rubber auteur, while often trafficking in modern pop culture references like slashers and superheroes, is himself firmly anchored in the Buñuel/Dalí tradition. Dupieux even creates a living Dalíesque tableau to bookend the film: a piano with a tree sprouting from its cabin and a fountain spouting from its keyboard, draining into a piano-shaped pool. Although critics sometimes view Dupieux as a lightweight due to his prolific output and disinterest in tackling political or otherwise “weighty” themes, in actuality he stands nearly alone in carrying on this strain of classical European Surrealism. We may not learn much about Dalí in Daaaaali!, but hopefully people will learn more about Quentin Dupieux’s underappreciated talents.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… great fun and appropriately strange, with Dupieux delivering a dream-layered understanding of artistry and impatience with palpable glee… ‘Daaaaaali!’ doesn’t build to a stunning conclusion. It moves slowly to weirder and weirder encounters, doing so with an assortment of performers portraying Dali, with everyone offering their fingerprint on the subject, making for flavorful acting choices.”–Brian Orndorf, Blu-ray.com (contemporaneous)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: RUMOURS (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: , , Galen Johnson

FEATURING: , , Denis Ménochet, Charles Dance, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Rolando Ravello, Takehiro Hira,

PLOT: G7 leaders gather at a conference to write a statement on an unspecified crisis; everyone else suddenly disappears, leaving the leaders stranded in the woods with masturbating zombie bog-men and a giant brain.

Still from Rumours (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Ever since seeing the pre-release still of the giant brain in the forest with ivy growing on it, we knew Rumours was going to be weird. While the cast and budget may be bigger than usual, Guy Maddin proves he is no sellout, and the rumo(u)rs are all true: the movie does not disappoint in the oddness department.

COMMENTS: Seeing a Guy Maddin (well, a Maddin and the Johnsons) movie with known actors in an actual AMC theater is, in itself, a surreal experience. The fact that I was not the only one there was even stranger. Although it would be nice for other local Maddin fans to get a chance to come out and catch Rumours on a big screen—there must be at least one or two others in a metro area of one million souls—I was halfway hoping that the five other patrons had wandered in unsuspecting, lured by Cate Blanchett’s name on the marquee, and, like hapless G7 leaders, were about to be blindsided by a strangeness they could never have foreseen.

To be fair, it takes a while for it to sink in that this is a Maddin movie. There’s no homage to a particular cinematic era—the movie instead is a stylistic melange of soft focus, lavender lighting, and melodramatic musical cues, shot in academy ratio—and the broad political satire is far away from Maddin’s typical Freudian introspection. Perhaps this shows the influence of screenwriter and co-director Evan Johnson and third co-director Galen Johnson steering Maddin away from his usual fallbacks. But soon enough the absurd sense of humor reminds us that we are, indeed, watching a Maddin film. (My favorite joke may be when the French Prime Minister explains that the giant brain in the forest must be a woman’s, because it is “slightly smaller than a man’s giant brain.”)

Satirically, the movie is obvious rather than incisive, earning its laughs from its absurdities, not its relevancies. The G7 leaders have assembled to address a crisis they never get around to defining, instead meeting in small groups to draft statements that are made up of half boilerplate, half non-sequitur (items like the display of non-sexual physical affection within marriage make it into the statement, along with nonsense the American president mutters while talking in his sleep). The characterizations of the ineffectual statesmen and women are, to say the least, unflattering: the Italian Prime Minister does little but offer his companions lunch meat. In a ironic nation-deprecating joke, the most dynamic of the seven is the Canadian: he’s a horndog in a man-bun with a weakness for strong women, who has, or will, sleep with the entire female cast. But don’t do as the French Prime Minister explicitly suggests and look for symbolism in the leaders’ characters. Instead, embrace the UK’s atypical astute response when P.M. Broulez asks, “what does it mean that Canada is faster than Germany?” “Nothing!” It’s not specific shots at the political order, but the dreamlike elements of the masturbating bog-men, the giant forest cerebrum, and the treacherous A.I. chatbot that hit hardest in Rumours. We don’t know what has caused the apocalypse, or even if it is an apocalypse; all we know is that the world’s leaders are spectacularly unequipped to save us all from whatever weirdness is slouching towards the summit.

The relatively big exposure of Rumours made me slightly afraid that Maddin might have gone (slightly) mainstream.  My fears were assuaged when the credits rolled and the five other people in the theater all started loudly complaining to each other: “That made no sense at all!” “That was terrible!” “I wanted to leave but I just thought it had to get better!” “Who did Cate Blanchett owe money to?” They may have hated it, but odds are they would think about what they had seen later, and would never entirely forget the bizarre experience. It’s a response that I like to think would have had Maddin and the Johnsons chuckling. It certainly had me chuckling.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sporadically ingenious, occasionally chilling and entirely bonkers… Maddin… responds to the call of the weird with a refreshing lack of pomposity.”–Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MOTHER, COUCH (2023)

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Mother, Couch is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.

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DIRECTED BY: Niclas Larsson

FEATURING: Ewan McGregor, Ellen Burstyn, Taylor Russell, , Lara Flynn Boyle,

PLOT: A mother refuses to get up from a furniture showroom couch despite the best efforts of her three children—each, incidentally, from a different father.

Still from Mother, Couch (2023)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The spanner ratchets up the pressure on poor David and his siblings, making for a whimsical-into-menacing story flow with waves of absurdity. In other words, the Beau is Afraid archetype, but with a happy ending.

Kind of.

COMMENTS: What does it take to break one mild-mannered Scotsman? Niclas Larsson’s film, Mother, Couch, explores this question, among several others. From the starting gun, however, it was clear that this was the question that would be on my mind, until it was either answered or the credits rolled. The opening scene pulls us into the awkward and uncomfortable world of David, as he uneasily navigates a run-down parking lot and then enters “Oakbeds Furniture,” a similarly run-down home furnishings department store where his mother has permanently ensconced herself, on the second floor, in the seat of a (rather expensive) Italian sofa. From there, events turn with an increasingly jittery surrealism.

The humor found in Mother, Couch is, not to mince words, a bit “Swedish.”1 Those of you who know, know, but to explain briefly: sitcom by long-suffering ordeal. (Not to stereotype this flavor of Scandinavian, but my admittedly limited experience suggests Swedes possess a heavy streak of wry fatality.) David—a magnificently middle-aged Ewan McGregor, neither the gung-ho heroin kid nor the sage Jedi—politely, and a touch pathetically, lets everyone roll over him: his laid-back-but-glib Welsh brother, his snarky American sister with permanently-affixed cigarette, and his dotty mother whose tongue is as sharp as the penknife she, inexplicably, brought with her. In true Buñuel–Dupieuxiène style, the links in this chain of events grow to such a weight as to bring David to bursting point (apologies for the semi-spoiler that answers my opening query).

Mother, Couch is soft-spoken in its eccentricity, allowing its quiet oddities space to breathe. F. Murray Abraham’s turn as both Marcus and Marco, Oakbeds’ twin owners, is a delightful two-fer of talent, with Marcus something of a David-double (calm, deferential, doormat), and Marco eventually threatening our hapless protagonist with a chainsaw when price negotiations for the titular couch hit the rocks. At times, Rhys Ifans and Lara Flynn Boyle each appear to be performing in a different film—for reasons which become clear as events progress. As for Ellen Burstyn, well, I alternately loved and loathed her, as her “Mother” character occupies perhaps three different narrative planes.

The movie kicks off with a glib bit of foreshadowing: the on-screen quotation, “It was all very simple, they were looking for a dresser. Blood wouldn’t spill until later.” Larsson positions the furniture motif throughout, with an unlikely key (given by mother to son) failing to open the half-dozen or more dressers littered around the store and the mother’s apartment. The simplicity of the premise gets things rolling. There’s hope in Mother, Couch, though it’s nearly crushed by a long history of lies and creeping irrationality. As Mother says, “You don’t stab someone in the back, that’s for sure. Not even family!” Ultimately (another semi-spoiler) she fails to follow her own advice, but I believe she tries. When she veers from this maxim, though, it doesn’t stop the first finale’s last supper, as family, old and new, gather together just before David suffers a (literal) sinking feeling.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an all-star cast in a surrealist dramedy… What begins as relatively straightforward takes a fever dream turn that pushes weird off a cliff. This approach may appeal to the art house cinema crowd but will leave most audiences befuddled.“–Julian Roman, Movieweb (contemporaneous)

  1. As it well might be: Swedish director Larsson here adapts a novel by Swedish novelist Jerker Virdborg. ↩︎