DIRECTED BY: David Lynch

FEATURING: Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justin Theroux

PLOT:  A woman (Harring) is involved in a nighttime accident on Mulholland Drive and flees into the city of Los Angeles with amnesia; she sneaks into an apartment soon to be occupied by naive young Betty (Watts), who has come to Hollywood hoping to find stardom.  Meanwhile, a film director (Theroux) finds himself pressured by mysterious mobsters to cast an unknown actress in his upcoming project.  Betty helps the amnesiac woman try to recover her identity, but the clues only lead to a strange avant-garde nightclub, a key, a box, and a sudden reality shift that throws everything that came before into confusion.

BACKGROUND:

• Lynch originally intended Mulholland Drive as a TV series in the mold of “Twin Peaks.”  When the networks passed on the pilot, the French producer Studio Canal stepped in with additional financing to turn the pilot into a feature film.  In between ABC’s proactive cancellation of the series and the creation of the film version, all of the sets and props were dismantled, forcing Lynch to come up with a different way to complete the story.
• Monty Montgomery, whose appearance as “The Cowboy” is an uncanny show-stopper, is a Hollywood movie producer (who produced Wild at Heart for Lynch).  Mulholland Drive is his only acting credit (he’s listed as “Lafayette Montgomery” in the credits).
• Lynch insisted no chapter stops be included on the DVD.
• The original DVD release included an insert from Lynch containing “10 Keys to Unlocking This Thriller.”
• Mulholland Drive received significant critical acclaim, nabbing Lynch a Best Director award at Cannes (shared with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn’t There) and a Best Director Oscar nomination.  It was voted best picture of the Year by the Boston Film Critics Society, the Chicago Film Critics Association, the new York Film Critics Circle, and the Online Film Critics Society (where it tied with Memento in the voting).  It was also voted best foreign picture by the Academy Award equivalents of Brazil, France, Spain, and Australia.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The Silencio nightclub, decorated in Lynch’s trademark red velvet drapes and staffed by his trademark subconscious monsters.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: If the massive reality shifts and actresses unexpectedly playing

Original trailer for Mulholland Drive

multiple roles is not enough for you, then the monster behind the Winkie’s, a Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” delivered by a woman who collapses onstage, and a mafia-style media syndicate run by a deformed dwarf who uses an eyebrowless cowboy as his right-hand man will convince you that we are deep in that subconscious pit of eroticism, kitsch and weirdness that can only go by the name Lynchland.

COMMENTS:  Oddly enough, what may be the most important scene in Mulholland Drive involves a marginal character, a thick-browed man whose name or profession we never learn.  After this scene we will see him again exactly one time. The man is eating breakfast at a Winkie’s (David Lynch’s mythical version of Denny’s) with a friend.  He’s recounting a dream that he had that occurred in the very diner they’re sitting in.  He goes out of his way to precisely outline the differences between the dream and the way things are now.  In the dream, his breakfast companion was standing in a different place, and he was frightened.  The light was different; it was neither day nor night, but a kind of twilight.  And, most importantly, in the dream there was a man behind the restaurant—”he’s the one that’s doing it”—and the dreamer could see him through the wall.  He’s come to Winkie’s that morning, together with his friend from the dream, to check behind the dumpsters in the light of day and convince himself there’s no one there, to rid himself of that awful fear.

But, this being a David Lynch movie, he doesn’t rid himself of that awful fear.  Quite the contrary.  And because of what happens, we’re left unsure whether this really is his description of the dream, related in the light of day, or is actually the nightmare itself.

Mulholland Drive is a dream of a movie, one with (at least) two sets of realities and characters, inhabited by one set of actors.  Each separate universe is a looking-glass version of the other, reflecting events as if in a funhouse mirror.  $50,000 in cold hard cash is a mystery in one world, and a sin in the other.  And, unlike some of David Lynch’s other movies, there is a solution (of sorts) to the mystery of Mulholland Drive, although it’s a solution that doesn’t betray the film’s mysteriousness.

In terms of penetrability, Mulholland Drive perches somewhere between the eerie off-ness of Blue Velvet and the relative inscrutability of Eraserhead.  This movie is clearly in the tradition of the psychological thriller (a genre that, somewhat surprisingly, Lynch had never tackled before, at least not head on).  And yet, there are plenty of mystical red herrings and pure dream interludes hanging in the heavy Los Angeles air that envelops Mulholland Drive.  Unlike in a typical mystery tale, with Lynch it’s the sumptuous surrealism, not the solution, that puts the thrill in the thriller.  It’s the red lampshade, the phone calls to nowhere, the dwarf in the wheelchair that drive Mulholland.

As always, Lynch releases beautiful, delicate narrative butterflies into the cinemas, but certain fans (you know who you are) insist on trying to catch them, pin them by their wings, and dissect them to death.  This time around, Lynch explicitly (and in my view, perversely) encourages the segment of his audience that prefers to treat his films as puzzles rather than as experiences to analyze the film to death by releasing a flyer called “Ten Clues to Unlocking This Thriller” (thereby negating his own advice, quoted above, to never “demystify” a movie.  No one ever accused David Lynch of a foolish consistency).

Other, more perceptive souls have pleaded with viewers not to try to understand too much of Mulholland Drive. Rather than delighting in Lynch’s clever construction of the puzzlebox, the always perceptive J. Hobermann writes instead that the movie is as “withholding in its narrative as anything in Buñuel” and, after considering that either half of the story might be an illusion, concludes—with a blithe indifference to the carefully constructed plot—”not that it matters.”  In a survey of film critic’s interpretations of the film, nearly everyone resisted the analytical mode.  Roger Ebert insisted, “There is no explanation. There may not even be a mystery”;  Jonathan Ross accepted the standard dream interpretation but demurred that it was “counterproductive to keep analysing it”; Tom Charity offered explanations but worried “I’m not sure if it helps to be so specific;” Neil Roberts was ” wary of over-analysing it,” warning that “[w]e should be careful not to let all this analysis detract from a fantastic film”; and Jane Douglas offered this advice: “in some ways it is better to just watch it without constantly trying to work out what it means.”  After working intimately on the script over a span of two years, Laura Harring concluded, “You want to get it, but I don’t think it’s a movie to be gotten.  It’s achieved its goal if it makes you ask questions.”  And co-star Justin Theroux reminds us “I think [Lynch is] genuinely happy for [Mulholland Drive] to mean anything you want.  He loves it when people come up with really bizarre interpretations.”

For the sake of those who have unwisely followed Lynch’s Ten Clues to their logical conclusion, traversing the entire length of Mulholland Drive, I offer, as a way to recapture the film’s mysterious magic, the following

TEN MYSTERIES THAT RE-LOCK THIS THRILLER

1. Why does David Lynch ask viewers, in his “10 keys to unlocking this thriller” to consider where Aunt Ruth is?  What difference would it make if Aunt Ruth were alive, dead, or never existed?
2. Who is the man who thinks a monster lurks behind Winkie’s?  If he is a dream, then why would Dianne have a dream from the point of view of a total stranger?  Other than its metatextual mood setting role,what reason is there for the man and his nightmare to exist?
3. Why does a second actress (Melissa George) play Camilla Rhodes in the first part of the film?
4. Why is the syndicate so insistent that Adam cast Camilla Rhodes?  The entire conspiracy plotline, which occupies a large part of the first ninety minutes of the movie, gets dropped.
5. Speaking of the syndicate, why don’t they “shut everything down” after Mr. Roque tells them to?  Is “shut everything down” Hollywood gangster talk for “turn up the heat by calling in the Cowboy”?
6. Does Adam ever see the Cowboy again?  (We do, and Diane does, but does he)?  Why draw so much attention to the number of times the Cowboy would appear—other than that, when he says something so strange with such an aura of threat, it’s terribly frightening?  Unless—Diane is really Adam??
7. Why is the director the only main character whose identity doesn’t change (though his circumstances do)?
8. Why do tiny old people come skittering out of a brown paper bag, laughing maniacally?
9. Why does Robert Forster get a special mention in the opening credits, yet appear in the film for less than a minute, doing nothing even mildly important?  Why did he even get a special bio segment on the DVD release?  Is his agent just that good?
10. Seriously, WTF is the deal with Silencio?  Why is there no band?  Why does Betty have a brief epileptic fit while watching the stage show?  And what about the key?  (Why does the hit man think its funny when Diane asks what it opens?)  And the blue box?
11. Are there actually more than ten unanswered questions about Mulholland Drive?

Getting lost in all this talk about the film’s meaning, or lack of same, are the film’s amazing cinematic qualities: the neon-noir cinematography; Angelo Badalamenti’s brooding ambient score, which fits the director’s vision like a well-worn glove and immediately drops the viewer into a Lynchian world; and Naomi Watts’ eye-opening performance, which moves from ingenue to conniving bitch with a seriously invigorating stopover as seductress of both sexes.  There are great individual scenes, including Watts and Harring’s two tender but scorching love scenes, a murder-for-hire that goes comically amiss with a series of human and non-human witnesses that have to be dispatched in turn, and a heartrending, and very weird, Spanish rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” that inexplicably reduces Watts and Harring to tears.   Not only that, but as a bonus you get to see Billy Ray Cyrus cold-cocked onscreen, perhaps the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy for millions of Americans who suffered through the darkness of the “Achy Breaky Heart” weeks in 1992.

One of Lynch’s greatest gift is that he skirts the borderline between Surrealism and Symbolism; no one can quite nail him down.  In some movies (this one, for example) lists towards the psychological symbolism end of the spectrum, while in others (INLAND EMPIRE, which is essentially Mulholland Drive on acid) he strives for unadulterated bizarrity.  Most of the time, he mixes comprehensible, relatable psychological symbolism with a deeply irrational and fearful subconscious stream.  He’s pulled off the unique trick of rallying two philosophically opposed film factions: those who treasure the challenge of solving puzzle movies, and those who value the sense of “mysterious fullness” that satisfies precisely because it’s meaning can never be pinned down.  Though claimed by both, he can’t actually belong to both camps.

Can he?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the compelling but intentionally inscrutable return of the ‘weird’ David Lynch that will please his hardcore fans even if it has them scratching their heads as well… for the final 45 minutes, Lynch is in mind-twisting mode that presents a form of alternate reality with no apparent meaning or logical connection to what came before… the sudden switcheroo to head games is disappointing because, up to this point, Lynch had so wonderfully succeeded in creating genuine involvement.”–Todd McCarthy, Variety (contemporaneous)

“The movie is a surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood film noir, and the less sense it makes, the more we can’t stop watching it… The way you know the movie is over is that it ends. And then you tell a friend, ‘I saw the weirdest movie last night.’ Just like you tell them you had the weirdest dream.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“The worst movie I’ve seen this year… a load of moronic and incoherent garbage from David Lynch that… predictably ended up at the New York Film Festival, where pretentious poseurs sit with their eyes glued to any screen as long as the projector is still running. From this bizarro atrocity, they should get astigmatism.”–Rex Reed, The New York Observer (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE:  Mulholland Drive – some of the features on this ten year old site are broken (like a link to a chat transcript with Lynch), but Universal deserves credit for continuing to pay fifteen bucks per year to renew the domain name a decade after the film’s release—something studios rarely do

IMDB LINK:  Mulholland Dr. (2001)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Everything You Were Afraid to Ask About ‘Mulholland Drive’ – Bill Wyman, Max Garrone and Andy Klein outline the standard (and almost certainly correct) interpretation of Mulholland Drive.  Obviously, this essay contains major spoilers.

Lost on Mulholland Drive – Film fansite featuring guides, essays, a discussion forum for floating personal theories on the film, and even fan-made music videos

Understanding Mulholland Drive: Nice Film—If You Can Get It – Six film critics (Roger Ebert, Jonathan Ross, Neil Roberts, Tom Charity, Philip French, and Jane Douglas)  give their brief interpretations of Mulholland Drive

All You Have to Do Is Dream – Interpretation of Mulholland Drive by Frederick Lane, a Freudian dream analyst, courtesy of salon.com; a fascinating article, although you’ll learn more about dream states than you will about the film

The Naughts: The Romantic Pair of the ’00s – Charles Taylor of the Independent Film Channel selects Betty and Rita as the emblematic romantic couple of the first decade of the 21st century

Sinnerbrink on Lynch -Cinematic Ideas: David Lynch’s _Mulholland Drive_ – An academic treatment of Mulholland Drive from philosophy professor Robert Sinnerbrink, originally published in “Film-Philosophy,” Vol. 9 No. 34, June 2005; insightful but very technical

The Madman and his Muse – From Film Score Daily comes this interview with composer and frequent Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, focusing on his relationship with the director as well as the score for Mulholland Drive

DVD INFO: As David Lynch eschews both director’s commentaries and chapter stops, the Universal DVD (buy) contains no special features beyond the original theatrical trailer and cast bios (including, of course, one for Robert Forster).  The film is also available for download or rental via video-on-demand services.

(This movie was nominated for review by “MtnGoat,” whgo one year ago complained about a “striking lack of David Lynch” on the site. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Darren Aronofsky

FEATURING: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder

PLOT:  Nina, a goody two-shoes ballerina, wants to dance the lead role in a production of “Swan Lake,” but although she’s perfect for the role of the White Swan, she lacks the seductiveness to portray the Black Swan.  Lily, a sexy, irresponsible dancer newly arrived from a San Francisco troupe, becomes her primary competition for the part, but also helps her loosen up by talking her out on the town for a night of drinking and meeting guys.  Nina starts physically break down and hallucinate as the stress of preparing for the role takes its toll; by opening night, she can’t distinguish reality from the story she dances of the princess trapped in the body of a swan who takes her own life.

BACKGROUND:

• Natalie Portman danced many of her own parts, and actually dislocated a rib while dancing during the shoot.  More difficult moves were performed by professional ballerinas, and for two sequences Portman’s face was digitally superimposed on dancer Sarah Lane’s body.  There was a minor controversy over how much of the dancing Portman actually did herself and how much was performed by doubles; Aronofsky estimated that the actress executed more than 80% of the dance moves that appear onscreen.
• Portman won the 2010 Best Actress Oscar for her role as Nina.  The film was also nominated for Best Picture, Director, Cinematography and Editing.
• Aronofsky received “The Understudy,” the original script that became Black Swan, while he was making Requiem for a Dream (2000).  He described the script as Dostoevsky’s “The Double” meets All About Eve.  Aronofsky combined that script, which was set in an off-Broadway production, with an idea he had to shoot a movie in the New York ballet world to create Black Swan.
• Aronofsky and Portman had discussed doing a ballet movie together 8 years prior to shooting.
• Made on a relatively small budget of about $12 million, Black Swan has grossed more than $300 million worldwide as of this writing.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Nina’s “triumphant” onstage transformation into the Black Swan: as she pirouettes, feathers sprout from her arms, thickening with every swirl, until her limbs have been replaced by wings.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Up until opening night, Black Swan is a backstage melodrama

“Music Video” for Black Swan

about backstabbing ballerinas, with an exaggerated, lurid psychopathology that’s thrust even further over-the-top by lesbian love scenes, hints of horror, and mirrors, mirrors, mirrors.  When the curtain rises on the big night, we experience the performance through the subjective perspective of an overworked, paranoid, demented dancer, whose psychology has been shattered by the film’s sledgehammer symbolism.  No avant-grade choreographer could stage as disorienting a “Swan Lake” as the one she hallucinates for us through her obsessed eyes.

COMMENTS: Black Swan is the weirdest movie ever to win a major Academy Award (Natalie Portman’s Best Actress nod).  Swan also received a Best Picture nom, but that was in the recently-expanded field of ten nominees: we’ll never know if a movie where the protagonist hallucinates and metamorphoses into a bird could have made it in the historical field of five, but considering that now-revered classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Brazil have traditionally been considered too outré to be shortlisted, it seems doubtful.  (A Clockwork Orange did manage to get a Best Picture nomination in 1972, but that may have been the Academy’s make-up call for missing the boat so badly on 2001).  For the time being, Black Swan is weird cinema’s most recognized and decorated film, a fact which by itself is enough to make it a Must See feature in the genre.

How does a film where pictures on a wall literally laugh at the heroine, and major plot points may not even happen, worm its way into the ultra-conservative, ultra-literal, historical-epic favoring Academy Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ good graces?  Director Darren Aronofsky, who began his career with the punky, experimental and Certified Weird Pi, ingratiated himself with cinematic conservatives in 2008 with the (excellent) sports drama The Wrestler, proving to the mainstream that he could be “more” than just a technically proficient cult/arthouse director whose tastes ran dangerously close to the surreal.  Building on that success, Arnofsky assembled a classy cast, headlined by Portman, for his followup project.  It didn’t hurt the film’s prestige that it was to be set in the high-art strata of the New York City dance world and feature the music of Tchaikovsky; no one could doubt the film’s serious intent.

Buzz began to build around Black Swan, and particularly around Portman.  At 29, the Israeli-born actress/model was at the peak of her beauty and had already paid her dues in Hollywood, acquitting herself admirably in dozens of roles from the orphaned Lolita of Léon to the lone important female role in the Star Wars prequels without ever having sniffed a major acting award.  Observers noted that Portman studied ballet intensively for six months prior to shooting, becoming an athlete and exhibiting the sort of dedicated physical transformation that makes the Academy sit up and take note.  A more salacious sort of buzz began to form around the reported love scene with sexy co-star Kunis.  Portman, like ballerina Nina, had a perfectionist, goody-two shoes image: she had even put her acting career on hold for four years to pursue a psychology degree at Harvard.  The notion of the Crimson grad locked in a lipstick-lesbian tryst, while arousing interest in itself, had the further virtue of appearing to cast her against type (in fact, the role of prim, perfectionist Nina comported almost perfectly with Portman’s public image).

Portman was thus positioned for success, and the sensual but repressed performance she delivers as Nina is indeed worthy of the Oscar (though if I were voting in 2010, I would have cast my ballot for Jennifer Lawrence’s spunky teenage meth-orphan from Winter’s Bone).  Nina, who’s dedicated her life to dance, is a woman whose sexual development stalled at that precious stage when she first became infatuated with ballerinas, stuffed animals and the color pink.  Uncomfortably, she still calls her mother (a former dancer who now manages her daughter’s career and keeps her a virtual prisoner in their shared apartment) “mommy.”  She demurs questions about whether, in her late twenties, she’s still a virgin, and responds with breathy trepidation to a man’s, a woman’s, and even to her own intimate touch.  Physically, Portman inhabits the delicate but constantly bruised and busted body of a ballerina; she looks natural stretching out in sweats or a tutu, and when an attendant cracks her feet and depresses her strained diaphragm, you believe you’re watching trainer work over an athlete. Her dancing is impressive, not for the technique (which most people won’t be able to judge) but for the confidence she projects when she whirls her way onstage as the Black Swan, her eyes blazing under the dramatic black-feathered eyeshadow with a true performer’s passion.

There are two competing themes in Black Swan: a child-woman’s fear of growing up, and an artist’s need to supplement her technique with passion.  Both paths require sacrifice: she must kill the little girl inside to become a woman, and to reach perfection she must be willing to risk everything for her art. The point at which the two strains meet and harmonize is sex; Nina’s artistic and sexual maturity, while weaving separate melodies, climax together.  As an artist, it’s stressed (actually, it’s rammed down our throats) that Nina’s perfectionism inhibits her perfecting her art; she’s so concerned with proper technique that she’s always thinking about her next move and never able to abandon herself to passion.  Mila Kunis’ Lilly is the opposite; her movements are imprecise but full of natural allure.  It’s the ancient struggle between the rational Apollonian and chaotic Dionysian artistic impulses, between the right brain and the left brain, between the White Swan and the Black, both of which must be balanced and integrated together to produce a meaningful work of art (or a life).  Nina must learn to dance both the White and the Black Swan, and that will involve learning to surrender herself to an artistic passion; essentially, to sexual abandonment. Nina is not a woman; she’s a little girl trying to act pretty for her mother, trapped inside a body she’s yet to come to terms with.  Symbolically, Nina is on the cusp of womanhood; the bizarre and frightening changes her body undergoes, although they may take the form of gooseflesh and webbed toes instead of budding breasts, represent the onset of puberty.  Her sexual maturity and her artistic maturity occur together. Nina’s final act of artistic fulfillment, when she integrates the Black Swan into her personality and performance, occurs via an act of penetration.  The blood staining the lower abdomen of her virginal white tutu comes from her symbolically broken creative hymen.

Black Swan‘s popular and critical success is almost as mysterious as the film’s ambiguous resolution.  The movie seems too exploitative for arthouse crowd, yet nowhere near explicit enough for the grindhouse crowd.  It mixes genres promiscuously; it’s inspired by backstage melodramas, enlivened by horror movie conventions and topped with neo-surrealism.  The category it fits in most comfortably may be “psychological thriller,” yet though there are very few genuine thriller elements in it: unlike genre classics like Jacob’s Ladder or The Machinist, there’s no mystery to be solved by exploring the protagonist’s psychology.  Black Swan works instead as a character study of Nina’s subconscious, and there’s no event in the movie for which it makes much difference whether it takes place in reality or in her imagination.  The tone is deliberate melodrama, and the few critics who didn’t connect with the movie believed that it strayed over the line of exaggerated emotion into pure camp (there were even a few unkind comparisons to Showgirls).  Some found it trashy, although it’s only “trashy” in the tame sense Pauline Kael used the term; but anyone who uses the term “trashy” to insult this film reveals themselves as unqualified to judge great trash.  Black Swan mixes the “high” art of Tchaikovsky, the ballet, and modernist set design with the “low” art of lurid melodrama, horror movie conventions and gratuitous lesbian love scenes.  Like Nina dancing both the virginal White Swan and the seductive Black Swan, the film struts out both its high and low impulses, harmonizing the sublime beauty of art film and the pure passion of genre film into an artistic whole.  At the film’s close, Nina whispers “it’s perfect;” that’s no longer Nina’s, but Aronofsky’s voice we’re hearing.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…full-bore melodrama, told with passionate intensity, gloriously and darkly absurd.”–Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“…vivid and engrossing, teetering between trash and art, a sleek exploitation borrowing from (among others) Fight Club and The Fly, Mulholland Drive and Persona…. [yet i]n the end, for all its imagination and artistry, Aronofsky’s film achieves neither the pristine elegance of the white swan nor the hallucinatory depravity of the black. It fades, instead, to gray.”–Christopher Orr, The Atlantic (contemporaneous)

“Black and white, good and evil, ambition and obsession, delusion and reality are all blended together in this crazy, weird, compelling film, and it’s masterful, inventive storytelling, whether you like the end result or not.”–Kim Voynar, Movie City News (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE: Fox Searchlight – Black Swan – Official Site - A very nice site with numerous news items, concept art to download, and several short video featurettes

IMDB LINK: Black Swan (2010)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Interview: Darren Aronofsky On Music, Scares And Gender In Black Swan – This Aronofsky interview by Katey Rich of Cinema Blend is a lot more interesting than the director’s discussion with MTV, even though they don’t discuss the lesbian scene at all

Black Swan | Darren Aronofsky’s Dances with ‘Swan’ – Steve Zeitchik of the Los Angeles Times describes the genesis of Black Swan

Black Swan: The Exhibition: A Black Swan-inspired L.A. art exhibit curated by Dominic Sidhu (who created art used in the film)

Black Swan dance double controversy – Someone thought the hoo-ha over who did most of the dancing in the film was significant enough to deserve an entire Wikipedia article

Darkness and despair: that’s dance on screen – Anticipating the release of Black Swan, The Independent‘s Sarah Hughes runs down the top movies about ballet (even giving a nod to Suspiria)

List Candidate: Black Swan (2010) – Alex Kittle‘s initial take on Black Swan for 366 Weird Movies during its theatrical release

DVD INFO:  The Fox Searchlight DVD (buy) contains a 49-minute documentary featurette, “Black Swan Metamorphosis,” as the only extra (expect a Special Edition release down the road).  The Blu-ray release (buy) adds extra interviews with the actors and also includes the now ubiquitous “digital copy” of the film.  Some of these special features can be previewed at Black Swan‘s official site.

Note that the rental DVD version available from Netflix and other outlets does not contain any special features, unless you consider previews of other attractions “special.” This marketing strategy is increasingly being used by certain studios, notably Fox, in hopes of bolstering sagging DVD sales.

FEATURING: Nick Stahl, Rose McGowan, Amy Smart

PLOT: Haunted by the memory of a car crash, a lonely funeral assistant fakes his own

death. Tracking a mystery mourner, he finds himself tangled in intrigue while suffering from bizarre, piecemeal flashbacks from his discordant, seemingly supernaturally influenced past.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  While Dead Awake captures our imagination at first with ominous flashbacks and peculiar visions which emphasize details in a way that foreshadow profound significance, none of these clues pan out to reveal an extraordinary plot.  The method of revelation builds interest in previous events that turn out to be not very mysterious once we are let in on their meaning.  Worse, at about the halfway point, the story becomes a derivative, conventional chiller.

COMMENTS:  The setup:  Nick Stahl plays sullen, skulking  funeral director who stages his own death to see if old friends will arrive at his funeral.  When an enigmatic young woman comes to mutter cryptic utterances over his “corpse,” he follows her and has some unusual misadventures.  In the meantime, he flirts with an ex-girlfriend who also came to his viewing, unlocking a cascade of strange memories and guilt about some mysterious, previous tragedy that broke them apart.  Eventually, we find out how both women are connected to  Nick’s past and to his haunting recollections.

Sounds like the makings of a real whiz-bang chiller-thriller, right?  Wrong!  What a massive disappointment. I was expecting something clever, brooding and supernatural like Dark Corners, and that’s how Dead Awake starts out. There is a mysterious car crash, a mortuary attendant faking his own funeral, a mysterious griever talking in riddles, indications that half the characters may be dead and not know it, and eerie flashbacks wrought with hidden symbolic meaning.

The non-linear plot, dark tone and twists and turns made me think I was in for a real doozy of a story.  And then the film peters out.  The flashbacks reveal no great mystery, the symbolism turns out to be arbitrary and empty, and real ideas are replaced with melodrama, over-acting and a grandiose musical score that is more fitting of a sweeping historical epic.  The score seems calculated to try to fool the viewer into thinking he is watching something more important than he really is (it didn’t work).

The movie wraps up with an unlikely stretch of a “climax” (more of an anti-climax) and a corny, happy (more like sappy) ending with a lame and very mild twist that opens up a bunch of plot holes.

I paid money for this???  I swear, no more poppy juice and Colt .45 before I read DVD jackets at the video store.

I saw that Nick Stahl was in this and so far, I have seen him in three other movies that turned out to be artistic, independent, and pretty good, so I took a gamble.  Mind you, Dead Awake is not a bad movie.  It doesn’t smack of major studio schlock.  The problem is that is promises to be so darned intriguing and then drops the ball, almost as if a writers strike led to someone with no imagination completing the script from the halfway point.

Rose McGowan, formerly a delicious woman, looks just . . . awful, post plastic surgery.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A poorly structured and even more poorly shot mixture of a gothic suspense thriller with a vanilla romance filmed in Des Moines, “Dead Awake” never comes close to springing to life.”–Mark Olsen, The Los Angeles Times (contemporaneous)

Dead Awake trailer

DIRECTED BY: Jeremy Kasten

FEATURING: Andras Jones, Seth Green, Jeffrey Combs, Beth Bates, Ted Raimi

PLOT: Awakening from a dream to find himself on an operating table, an amnesiac is

informed that he is a schizophrenic murderer who has been committed to a private institution and is now being sent to a halfway home—nicknamed “the House of Love”—to be rehabilitated.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The Attic Expeditions sounds echoes of some (better) weird movies: Jacob’s Ladder (in the way that the script offers different possible explanations for the protagonist’s hallucinations, and jerks the viewer back and forth between those theories) and Donnie Darko (in that it seems the director intended to tell a fantastical story that “made sense” on a literal level, but lost control of the story when he took it one paradox too far).  An interesting, confusing, out-of-control picture, it’s as fascinating for its misses as for its hits.  It falls just short of a general recommendation, but it is recommended to anyone interested in psychological, mindbending horror seasoned with heaping doses of confusion and who isn’t a stickler for great acting.  This is the kind of curious, singular picture that could wind up filling one of the final slots in the List.

COMMENTS: Trevor Blackburn may be a schizophrenic murderer, or he may be an amnesiac sorcerer, or he may be the victim of an unethical psychological experiment; or he may be all three.  It’s impossible to tell, especially since The Attic Expeditions is full of contradictions and contains segments where the timeline suddenly resets and the action repeats itself with slight variations.  The mystery promiscuously throws out clues, but every possible explanation for Trevor’s woes seems chained to its own refutation.  Trevor is an unreliable narrator in triplicate: he’s a definite amnesiac, a possible schizophrenic, and, to top it all off, his state-appointed guardian appears to be deliberately playing with his loose grip on reality.  Psychiatrist Dr. Ek (played by Jefferey Combs as a variation on Herbert West as a pot-smoking, skin-popping headshrinker) uses Trevor as a case study for an experiment in housing madmen together, with hidden cameras studying their movements, “Big Brother” style.  Ek is either searching for a cure to schizophrenia, somehow, or else spying on Trevor to try to discover the occult secret locked away in his mind.  Trevor keeps having flashbacks to a bloody Crowley-esque sex and death ritual that ended the life of his girlfriend and sent him to the madhouse.  Of course, as the only convicted murderer in group therapy, suspicion naturally falls on him when his fellow residents start turning up dead.  Amateurish Andras Jones, unfortunately, wasn’t ready to play the tormented protagonist here; in fact, though cast as the lead, he may be the least expressive actor in the entire movie.  Fortunately, Seth Green is around as a fellow paranoid pensioner to take up the thespic slack. The twitchy Green has “R” and “L” written on the appropriate hand and shows an uncomfortable attraction to Trevor. He simultaneously feeds the recovering madman’s conspiratorial delusions by suggesting that everybody in his life may actually be an actor performing for his benefit; he simultaneously acts as Trevor’s only ally in the House of Love, encouraging him to explore the spooky attic with the locked chest that keeps showing up in Trevor’s nightmares. Inside that trunk lies either the traumatic secret to Trevor’s amnesia and lunacy, or else a paradox that will make your head spin and eyes roll. In the end, the film makes no sense, though it appears to want to believe in the occult resolution. What we get instead is the paradoxical spectacle of a movie that uses hallucinatory storytelling to mask and muddle a mystical but comprehensible plot, but botches the serious explanation by including too many leaps of logic and irreconcilable red herrings. The result is an irrational experience that’s legitimately, but not intentionally, a surrealist film. And, fortunately, there are a few great horror images embedded in the mess of a script: there’s little that’s more horrifying than the idea of suddenly waking up on an operating table and gazing up at nurses wearing non-standard uniforms—their faces unnecessarily masked by what appears to be fishnet mesh pantyhose with homemade eye holes cut into them. It’s shivery stuff, one of a set of curiosities that make Attic worth the expedition for horror fans who can overlook uneven acting and aren’t hung up on their nightmares making rational sense.

The Attic Expeditions script had an odd genesis that may help to explain its ramshackle and nearly incoherent final form. The screenplay began its life intended to be the fourth installment of the direct-to-video Witchcraft series, the soft porn/horror line that was a staple of video stores in the late Eighties and early Nineties. Director Jeremy Kasten though the script had potential to be more than just another sexy exploitation horror, so he sent the script to his film-school buddy and writing partner Rogan Marshall for retooling. Here, things get interesting. Marshall claims that he didn’t trust Kasten’s intellect and that he made the script deliberately hallucinatory and incoherent because he recognized that the director was only good at one thing: shooting dream sequences. Kasten, on the other hand, claimed in a podcast interview that Marshall’s script was written in five days, on drugs, and that he had to cut out a lot of the writer’s unsuitable ideas, as well as adding new central elements, like the character of Dr. Ek. So in the end, we may have three different visions of The Attic Expeditions embedded in the movie: Kasten’s occult puzzle fighting Marshall’s hallucinatory nonsense, with the ghost of the original “boobs and broomsticks” exploitation movie occasionally peeking through.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an overly ambitious slice of Grand Guignol that is none too grand in conception or execution… doesn’t make it as horror, sci-fi spoof or psychological thriller, despite strained efforts in each direction.”–Ken Eisner, Variety (contemporaneous)

(This movie was first nominated for review by “Holly,” who said “I love it every time I watch it; and it has always struck me as strange.” After the initial review disappeared, it was re-suggested by “engineerd2011″, who called it “a total mind trip…” Suggest a weird movie of your own).

FEATURING:  Sara Foster, Cary Elwes, Michael Biehn, Gabriel Mann, Ryan James, Colleen Camp

PLOT: A records clerk working the graveyard shift in a shut-down hospital has puzzling,

ghastly visions that may or may not be connected to a string of murders and her own past. As she strives to interpret the unusual events, she becomes ensnared in the uncanny, plummeting into a morass of sick secrets, murder, arson and madness.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Psych: 9 sports a delightful, creatively non-linear plot. The story is conveyed via a reality-blurring mixture of flashbacks and delusions blended with the present.   Aside from the clever story-telling technique however, Psych: 9 is an otherwise conventional psychological thriller, with mystery and horror elements.

COMMENTS:  Roslyn (Foster) takes a night job sorting records in a defunct, mostly deserted, eerie old hospital. At work, a sleazy security guard (James) likes to leer, her nervous husband (Mann) likes to visit, and an off-kilter detective (Biehn) is taken to calling on her. Her only trustworthy ally is a shrink who is busy sorting records up on the fifth floor, and he’s somehow just a little bit too nice.

The detective is investigating a series of sensational hammer murders in the hospital’s creepy neighborhood, and the shifty-eyed husband, Cole, who drives a taxi, just happens to be in the vicinity every time the murders occur. Suspiciously, Cole can’t account for the whereabouts of, you guessed it, his long, sharp geologist’s hammer missing from his toolbox.

To make things even more coincidentally unsettling, Roslyn was born in the hospital where she now works and has some undisclosed issues about her past. Disturbingly, these past issues connect to troubling uncertainties about her present. Complicating matters, she starts seeing scary apparitions that may or may not really be there. Roslyn also has occasional daydream/nightmares. They are deepening in intensity and increasingly resemble psychotic episodes.

Roslyn does her best to maintain her composure by delving into her duties, and she has her work cut out for her. There are an awful lot of files on an awful lot of patients in the hospital archives. People Roslyn wouldn’t have thought would be patients. And these files contain an awful lot of information, maybe a little too much information. It doesn’t help Roslyn’s state of mind that a killer is on the loose and the records she is sorting include those of gruesome murder victims, complete with graphic police crime scene photos.

Told through a mix of conventional plot points, flashbacks, and delusional visions, the non-linear storyline creates an atmosphere of steadily mounting tension and dread. What the devil is happening to Roslyn? The solution lies within the hospital itself, but Roslyn may discover more than she wants to know when she probes the dark hallways and dusty records for an answer.

Psych 9 gets right to the point and stays on course without wasted footage. The audience is in for a surprise however, because what seems at first to be a typical, even bland haunted house or slasher story is anything but. The empty, ancient hospital is a backdrop and the slasher killings establish a context rather than constituting the story itself. Watching this picture is not unlike sitting down in the seat of a Ferris wheel, only to have the Ferris wheel unexpectedly transform into a roller-coaster.

Like any good amusement park thrill ride, the plot abruptly changes direction and tempo over and over again. As the story progresses it becomes apparent that what appears to be reality has been hallucination and vice versa. What is most compelling about Psych: 9 is not what happens and why, but how it happens.

The significance of the experience is the sense of disorientation Psych: 9 produces and the intriguing way it does so. The viewer will scramble to try to keep his bearing because the plot develops in a way that changes the essence of the story several times. Audiences will continually try to guess what is what, and who is who, only to start over as each succeeding plot point topples every assumption they’ve made.

Psych: 9 presents multiple ideas, each one of which could chart a separate course and storyline. All of these paths could be even more fully developed; doing so, however, would create a finished product that would be exhausting in length. The appeal of Psych: 9 is a matter of formalism. The form is one of writhing convolution, its effectiveness triggered by rapid-fire impact. Because the collective impact results from a successive blitzkrieg of surprises, a more thorough treatment of its subplots would be anticlimactic.

While Psych: 9 is a clever thriller, it is a psychological thriller, not an action thriller. It makes a slow start in order to set the stage and the artistry of its construction does not become evident until well into the film. Jaded splatter fans stand forewarned, and enthusiasts of clever horror which challenges the viewer to guess and think are encouraged.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It aims to be a mystery, a ‘twist ending’ psycho-thriller, a gory horror flick, and a fractured character study at once. The parts rarely mesh. But it’s not a completely lost cause… for a film that’s fairly light on plot, Psych: 9 moves pretty well, keeps you guessing to some small degree (if only because there’s so much weird stuff going on), delivers a few juicy screenplay clunkers and arcane plot divergences, and features a solid little score.”–Scott Weinberg, Fear Net (DVD)

Psych: 9 trailer

Psych: 9 clip 1

Psych: 9 clip 2

More at the Psych 9 official YouTube page.

FEATURING:  Christina Ricci, Liam Neeson, Justin Long

PLOT: A funeral director must convince an accident victim that she is really dead.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:   I took a look at After.Life to determine its weird potential, but aside from the macabre story, I found it be a fairly conventionally psychological thriller.

COMMENTS:   Despite the pretentious dot in the middle of the title, After.Life turns out to be a well-made, offbeat picture.  Christina Ricci, while no Ingrid Bergman, delivers a credible performance even though she is slashed with cherry red lipstick and alternately nude or scantily draped in a clingy, scarlet satin slip for most of the movie.

After a violent car crash, Anna Taylor (Ricci) wakes up on a slab in a mortuary (where else?)  Eliot Deacon, a psychic undertaker (Neeson) must talk her into cooperating with the embalming process and mentally preparing herself for the afterlife.

Blessed/cursed with the gift of second sight which allows him to see the spirits of the deceased, Deacon is exasperated that he must argue and wrestle with every one of his dead clients, none of whom are at first willing accept the reality of their deaths.  Conversing with Deacon, Anna, like her predecessors, refuses to believe she’s dead despite his assurance that she’s in transition to the spirit realm, and that he’s the only one who can help her make the leap into the uncertain beyond

While sill on the steel gurney in the embalming room, Anna has several sinister forays into the ethereal plain to which she is about to permanently transcend.  Frightened, uncertain, and unwilling to depart this dimension to venture into the next, she requires a good bit of coaxing from Deacon.  Anna is a hard case and she makes quite a fuss.  Deacon has his hands full dealing with her and she proves to be his most uncooperative stiff to date.

Matters are complicated when Anna’s mooky boyfriend (Long) shows up demanding to view her body for closure.  Deacon manages to run him off, but the pesky beau just can’t seem to stay away.  He becomes a fly in the pickling balm when he insists upon clinging to the outrageous assertion that Anna is not really dead.

Is she?

Because she looks pretty darn hot for a dead gal.

After.Life is a different kind of supernatural movie.  Billed as a horror film, it is really a mystery-suspense.  While there are some very scary moments and surreal glimpses of the beyond, the tone of the movie is more one of steadily mounting apprehension and dread.  It’s disturbing, clever, well assembled and nicely shot, After.Life plays like an arty independent production with a Hollywood budget.  It represents Polish feminist writer/director Agnieszka Wojtowicz’s debut mainstream effort.

Wojtowicz’s last production was the multimedia O Zlozony/O Composite for the Paris Opera Ballet on which she collaborated with feminist performance artist Laurie Anderson and choreographer Trisha Brown.  A Tisch School Of The Arts graduate, Wojtowicz’s literate, artistic background is evident in the production style of After.Life.

The film has been criticized for resembling a stylish art-house piece more than a white-knuckle horror thriller.  This is exactly what makes After.Life such an enjoyable viewing experience, and why I recommend it for an unconventional audience.

Several minor plot holes can easily be filled in with a little imagination on the part of the thinking viewer.  Such patrons will readily forgive any lack of superficial Tinseltown sensationalism and appreciate After.Life as a chic, sleek, and thoughtful excursion into the macabre without the obligatory Hollywood formulas.  I recommend After.Life for thriller enthusiasts who prefer the original Northern European versions of such films as Spoorloos (The Vanishing), Insomnia, and Let The Right One In over their dumbed-down American remakes.

A pensive audience isn’t who the distributors were targeting when they promoted the finished film, however.  From the promotional materials I have seen, the producers clearly hoped that the presence of a wonderfully naked Christina Ricci would be enough to make me pay ten bucks to fill a seat—which it sure as hell was, the fact that After.Life turned out to be a gem being a bonus.

Addendum:

In an interview with Women and Hollywood’s Melissa Silverstein, writer/director Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, said:

“A number of actresses were interested in the role.  Frankly, there’s still such a lack of interesting roles for women.  Christina was intrigued by the character.  She was fascinated by the idea that maybe our consciousness remains with us after we die and you’re able to reflect on your life, which in Anna’s case wasn’t fully lived to say the least. Even though After.Life is a psychological thriller, for Christina it was a character piece of sorts . . .

” . . .I always had this image in my head of a woman on a slab and a mortician standing over her. The woman who should be dead speaks, and the mortician calmly responds to her.  It was a powerful idea to me.”

A movie with a mostly nude Ricci iin a Pygmalion situation is a powerful idea to me, Ms. Wojtowicz-Vosloo, and I think she’s equally hot alive or dead.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…some of its images of imprisonment—not to mention injection and evacuation—stay with you, like it or not. But the dialogue is clumsy, the tone swings between somber and silly and the whole bizarre venture eventually succumbs to rigor mortis.”–Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal (contemporaneous)

After.Life trailer

FEATURING: Cillian Murphy, Ellen Page, Susan Sarandon, Bill Pullman

PLOT: After a train accident destroys his privacy, a mentally ill bank employee leads

a double life, playing himself and his own wife, as he navigates his relationship with a poor single mother and his own worsening psychological state.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Although Peacock‘s gender-bending premise suggests all kinds of weird possibilities, the film’s execution doesn’t capitalize on any of them, and the final product is a muddled, small-town drama with only the occasional hint of slight weirdness.

COMMENTS: Set in the fictional Nebraska town that gives it its name, Peacock begins with an average day in the life of its disturbed protagonist, John Skillpa (Murphy), as he eats the breakfast prepared for him by his wife Emma. The twist, however, is that John is Emma, and that he’s built an illusion of idyllic family life within the house he inherited from his abusive mother. The first few wordless minutes set this up promisingly, as Murphy capably portrays both halves of this quiet household going about their daily business.

Then a train caboose flies off its tracks, knocking Emma unconscious while she’s hanging laundry; instantly, the Skillpas become the talk of the town, and a rallying point for local politicians. This could be the start of a tense psychodrama… but instead, it soon fizzles out and degenerates into half-baked histrionics. Although Murphy is commendable in his dual roles, switching back and forth between the ultra-jittery John and demure Emma with a convincing change of personality, his performance can’t overcome the often shaky writing. This worsens considerably toward the end, as a series of out-of-left-field twists and turns torpedo the film’s already questionable logic.

The other actors also fare poorly. Most unfortunate of all is Ellen Page, brutally miscast as a hash-slinger and sometime prostitute who also happens to be raising John’s child. Although Page has found phenomenal success playing precocious teenagers in movies like Hard Candy and Juno, she sounds hopelessly out of place as the put-upon, provincial Maggie. Susan Sarandon, as the mayor of Peacock’s feminist wife, brings some well-needed warmth and humor to the film, but she too is wasted as the film quickly stops using her interactions with Emma to explore gender roles, and becomes a dour, poorly paced thriller instead—one without any real suspense or fear of discovery.

Outside of Murphy’s oddball, over-the-top performance, Peacock is disappointingly conventional and just as mixed-up as its protagonist. Sometimes it acts like a satire of wholesome small-town values, as its supporting cast members all speak in the same exaggeratedly folksy dialect and share the same dull conversation topics. But by the end, it’s clear that Peacock is just an anemic rehash of Psycho‘s less plausible parts, with plot holes deep enough to bury a body. First-time director Lander, who also co-wrote, drops every potentially interesting angle by the wayside, and in so doing squanders a plum cast. If you want to see Cillian Murphy in drag, you should probably just watch Neil Jordan‘s Breakfast on Pluto instead.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Lander’s thriller wannabe is a confusing jumble of badly developed ideas which happen to be acted out by a talented group of actors who are squandered away in a film that is so concerned with creating a mystery that it overlooks the fact that it also needs to be a good movie. A sad waste of a great cast.”–Marina Antunes, Quiet Earth

DIRECTED BY: Darren Aronofsky

FEATURING: Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder

PLOT: A shy up-and-coming ballet dancer lands the lead in a production of “Swan Lake.”

Obsessed with perfection and paranoid that the dual role will be taken away from her, she struggles to become both the virginal White Swan and the seductive Black Swan characters.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: This is a psychological horror-thriller, no doubt about it, and in many ways it sticks to the conventions of that kind of film . But at the same time, Black Swan is so eerie, so unsettling, and so strange in its hallucinatory freak-outs and loosening grip on reality—and so good overall—that it probably warrants inclusion on the List.

COMMENTS: It is very difficult to write any kind of in-depth review of this movie without some spoilers, so if you don’t want to know anything, just take my word for it that Black Swan is a truly exceptional film and you should go see it.  Otherwise, I’ll try to avoid any big revelations, but will mention various plot points.

It seems the controversial Darren Aronofsky has found a way to combine the considerable and versatile talents he exhibited in his preceding films into one near-perfect thriller that’s both unsettling and emotionally gripping.  He infuses his new feature with all the depravity of Requiem for a Dream, the visceral surrealism of Pi, the visual splendor of The Fountain, and the grounded character of The Wrestler, while of course adding some beautiful dance sequences and a sapphic fantasy. His camera moves with the dancers as they bound across the stage, offering a volatile but accessible glimpse at a live art form and throwing in enough technical tricks to keep any camera geek guessing.

Nina is a quiet, innocent young woman—an obvious product of her coddling, controlling mother—and her quest for perfection in dance leads her to attempt a complete personality overhaul. To play the Black Swan role in Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” she must release the dark, confident, seductive force within her that’s been fighting to break out. This duality within her character is frequently hinted at throughout the film through use of mirrors, sex, and hallucination woven so seamlessly with reality that the viewer is frequently unsure what is real—as is Nina herself. The constant mind games Aronofsky plays with his audience—along with Natalie Portman’s dedicated performance—make for a captivating, tense experience. I was so engaged and so anxious during this movie I felt myself physically relax about twenty minutes after it ended, though mentally I still felt shaken.

A testament to the great struggles inherent to any artistic expression, Black Swan is an intense and passionate film. Every sound is acutely felt, every strange vision strikes a cord. At times things get as visceral as Cronenberg‘s body horrors. The horror is derived from how little we really know about anything outside of Nina’s own experience, and how unsure we are about how much worse it’s going to get. Everyone around her presumably leads a fairly normal, expected life (well, everyone except Winona Ryder’s tragic, boozy ex-dancer Beth), but we are rarely able to see outside of Nina’s self-constructed dual prison of home and studio, which is inflated in her own head. Indeed, the few times we are reminded of the outside world offer welcome comedic breaks to somewhat ease the ever-building tension.

All of Aronofsky’s stylistic flourishes and subtly terrifying images are tempered by several truly impressive performances. Portman perfectly embodies the conflicted Nina, capturing her fear, desperation, and exhilaration. Mila Kunis is an excellent foil, physically mirroring the shy protagonist while exuding the sexuality and abandon Nina strives for. Vincent Cassell is a superb jackass, channeling George Balanchine in his romantic, tyrannical choreographer Thomas Leroy, and Barbara Hershey is appropriately sympathetic and creepy as Nina’s obsessive mother Erica.

From the very beginning Black Swan reaches out and grabs its audience, never letting its grip slip until well after the credits roll. At times it may be hard to watch, but you’ll never want to look away, and what you see will certainly stick with you. And the combination of backstage ballet drama, pulp-thriller gore, and hallucinatory allegory actually is pretty weird.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Black Swan’ is a full-bore melodrama, told with passionate intensity, gloriously and darkly absurd.” –Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

FEATURING: Sophie Marceau, Monica Bellucci, Andrea Di Stefano

PLOT: As she struggles to write an autobiographical novel, a writer with childhood amnesia

finds that everything she sees—her apartment, her husband’s face, and even her own image in the mirror—is changing into something unfamiliar.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  The sophomore effort by rising bizarre star Marina de Van arrives as a slight disappointment.  The opening segments are disquieting without being bang-up weird, and by the end the mystery is resolved too completely, leaving nothing to linger in the mind.

COMMENTS:  Don’t Look Back mines the psychological terrain of jamais vu: the strange feeling you get when you enter a room you’ve been in hundreds of times and everything suddenly looks different, or when you look at the face of the person you’ve slept next to for a decade and see a stranger.  Sophie Marceau begins as Jeanne, the woman who finds that her kitchen furniture has been rearranged, the Paris city streets are no longer familiar, and her husband and children are making strange hand gestures when she’s not looking.  Initially she just seems paranoid, but the incidents keep building until finally her entire family has been replaced by different actors whom she doesn’t recognize, and we’re convinced there’s something seriously amiss inside Jeanne’s mind.  The breaking point comes when she looks into the mirror and sees an unfamiliar face staring back at her—on her left side, she still looks like Sophie Marceau, but the right side of the image is the face of Monica Bellucci.  Based on a clue she finds in a photo, Jeanne (now being played by Bellucci rather than Marceau) travels to an Italian village where she finds herself in a situation that’s almost the reverse of Paris: she recognizes the faces she sees as those of her husband, mother, etc., but no one she encounters seems to have a clue as to who she is.   It’s an intriguing premise, and the film is sincere, well-executed, and clever—and it’s also one of those movies where, by the end, you’re puzzled why it’s turned out merely solid rather than exceptional.  Part of the problem is the pace.  The movie starts slow, and keeps piling up weird incidents long after we’ve gotten the point that something’s cracked inside Jeanne and are anxious to get moving towards some answers.  The use of horror movie music cues to inform us that something uncanny is taking place is overdone and gauche, almost to the point of parody.  Containing two episodes of traumatically interrupted intercourse and more than a hint of incest, the movie flirts with ideas of sexual repression and perversion that, in the end, turn out to have nothing to do with Jeanne’s psychology.  And although the movie gets into a nice weird groove in the run up to the finale, where Jeanne now seems to be turning from Bellucci into a third actress at a wild village party, the script explains itself too completely by the end.  Although the solution to the mystery is intellectually satisfying, it doesn’t provide the emotional chills and thrills it should.  Looking back on the “clues” scattered through the earlier parts of the film, you realize that many of them didn’t add up; they were just arbitrary strange occurrences that let you know something was off but didn’t assist you to guess what it was, and so you feel cheated.  That said, the ending is unexpected and should keep you interested enough to keep watching.  The half Marceau/half Bellucci effect is truly novel and uncanny.  And the performances by the two French beauties are superlative: Marceau sets up the character, but it’s remarkable how Bellucci picks her up mannerisms so that you never question that this is the same character inhabiting two different bodies (to a lesser extent, the same compliment can be applied to Andrea Di Stefano and Thierry Neuvic, the two men who play Jeanne’s husband).  The end result is not a disaster, but given everything the movie apparently has going in its favor, it’s underwhelming.

De Van’s previous film was In My Skin [Dans Ma Peau] (2002), a shocking and mysterious portrait of a woman’s obsessive self-mutilation.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a traumatic and reductive incident from Marceau/Bellucci’s past is to blame—hence the title—which makes the entire film feel like the laborious setup for a dopey Twilight Zone twist.”–Mike D’Angelo, Onion A.V. Club (Cannes screening)

FEATURING:  Rhys Coiro, Milo Ventimiglia, Samantha Mathis, Mimi Rogers, Susan Ward, Chip Joslin

PLOT: An honest attorney finishes last by following the rules until a sinister neighbor hires

onto the firm and throws his life into a state of turmoil.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Order Of Chaos takes the old, my new friend turned out to be an obsessive psycho stalker plot from movies like Bad Influence (1990) and sends it in an entirely different direction.  It is a slick, offbeat thriller, but it was not made to be weird.

COMMENTS:  Strong performances, stylish editing and an unexpected storyline distinguish this offbeat chic thriller from filmmaker Vince Vieluf.  An upstanding trooper of a guy, John (Coiro) is a natural subordinate.  An avowed approval seeker, John devotes himself to pleasing two dominating women: his belittling fiancée Jennifer (Mathis) and castrating boss Miss Craig (Rogers).  John leads a life of quiet desperation by the numbers.  Adhering to a rigid, tedious schedule with compulsive military precision, John’s day begins with a morning workout.

Running on his treadmill (a symbol of his corporate ladder climbing) John blue-tooths a minute by minute, blow by blow progress report of his activities and plans to his boss hours before work even starts.  The conversation includes numerous acknowledgments of “yes ma’am, yes ma’am,” as John absorbs lengthy instructions and mandates.

But his efforts to please the demanding, flippantly brusque Miss Craig are paying off!  He is her “Man Friday” (read that as “piss-boy”—her personal honey bucket toter).  Craig treats John like a plebe in a fraternity, yet the ever dutiful John asks “how high?” whenever he’s instructed to “jump!”  If John keeps following at her heels like a good dog, he just might have a shot at partner at some indeterminate point in the distant future.

Evenings, John promptly trots home to Jennifer to walk the dog and take out the trash.  Jennifer is the prize in the relationship, and John had better not forget it.  Indeed, he is frequently reminded of it by her working class father Louie (Joslin) who is jealous and contemptuous of John’s income and status.  To Louie, John is a sissy who won’t eat meat or drink booze.  Louie gleefully slings snide swipes and lawyer jokes.  He makes weekly family get-togethers pure hell.

John takes anxiety medication to deal with life.

Matters change drastically when cocksure yuppie Rick (Ventimiglia) moves next door.  After an awkward chance encounter at the condo, Rick shows up at work.  What a coincidence!  He’s not only Rick’s new neighbor, but his new coworker as well.  Hey, what are the odds?

There seems to be more to the enigmatic Rick than meets the eye.  A lot more.  Forceful, controlling, manipulative in a creepy way, Rick’s past just doesn’t add up.  John figures out that Rick hides some dark secrets.  Rick has a dangerous streak, something smacking of deliberate risk taking and a history of mental illness.  Rick sizes up John as being wrapped too tightly, and decides crack the veneer.  He unbalances John with ambiguous verbal jujitsu.  When John questions Rick’s jabs, Rick brushes away John’s doubts with a dubiously sincere, “just kidding!”  Is he?

Rick’s next move is to show John how to “live a little.”  Taking him to posh clubs for nightly partying with loose women, he introduces John to a fast lifestyle.  Reluctant at first, John finally embraces the fast lane.  It takes a toll on his domestic life, which drives John to party all the more.  As the consequences mount at home and work, Rick coaches John to stop taking abuse, stand up for himself, and reject being bossed around.

It’s obvious Rick is setting John up to damn himself by eating the proverbial apple.  Why?  What is his motive?

John’s wife of course, can’t keep it in her pants.  She cozies up to Rick at the earliest opportunity.  Jennifer is unable to resist flapping her lips about John’s latest project at work, one into which he is putting long hours in hopes of winning that elusive promotion.

When Rick tries first to move in on his wife and then his career, John finally becomes suspicious.  John’s precise, ordered life and emotions are in turmoil.  Rick has torn it all asunder like a tempest.  As unsettling coincidences stack up like a house of cards, John’s infrastructure melts away.

John is forced to question who is who, in order to determine which players are sharing alliances.  Is there a plot against him?  How many are really involved?  Fearful and full of doubt, he must now uncover the truth about the entities intent on wrecking his life.

At this point, I was convinced I was watching a remake of Bad Influence (1990 ) with James Spader and Rob Lowe.

This is where Order Of Chaos dramatically distinguishes itself from other movies about obsessive companions.  Writer/director Vince Vieluf throws a significant curve ball and the story sweeps into uncharted territory.

Order Of Chaos is a misunderstood film.  Vieluf did not intend it to be a formulaic blockbuster.  Instead, it is pensive, but not quietly so.  Interspersed with tense action, themes of independent thinking, insight, as well as losing and gaining control dominate this thoughtful, dapper suspense thriller.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a slick but strained mix of character study and psychological thriller about a lawyer unraveling under ambiguously real or imagined pressure.”–Dennis Harvey, Variety (contemporaneous)

Order Of Chaos trailer