All posts by Gregory J. Smalley (366weirdmovies)

Gregory J. Smalley founded 366 Weird Movies in 2008 and has served as editor-in-chief since that time. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society, and his film writing has appeared online in Pop Matters and The Spool.
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CAPSULE: AMNESIA (2001)

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DIRECTED BY: Martin Koolhoven

FEATURING: Fedja van Huêt, Carice van Houten, Sacha Bulthuis, Theo Maassen

PLOT: After receiving a call that his mother is ill, a photographer returns to his family estate (“AmnesiA”) to face his gangster twin brother and a traumatic childhood memory.

Still from AmnesiA (2001)

COMMENTS: You will seldom see a film where you will be as uncertain if the characters really exist as in AmneisiA. The base story of Alex returning to his old, abandoned homestead—improbably and tellingly dubbed “AmnesiA”—can be seen as nothing more than a symbolic depiction of Alex wrestling with the unresolved internal conflict of a seen-in-choppy-flashbacks childhood trauma. And although that is an extraordinary event, it is far and away the most believable thing you’ll see.

It’s not that anything truly impossible happens in AmnesiA. It’s just that no one in the movie acts in ways that make sense, but rather in ways that are unnerving or absurd. After an efficient, if ominous, setup, things start to feel off when Alex discovers pretty Sandra stowing away in his car. She refuses to explain who she is or what she’s doing there, and rather than panicking or throwing her out, Alex lets her tag along, and doesn’t correct his mother when she assumes the girl is his fiancee. Twin brother Aram brings home an even stranger companion, Wouter; the two have just returned from a bungled robbery, and Wouter sports a massive gut wound, acquired under mysterious circumstances. Every now and then someone will comment that he really should see a doctor, but basically everyone ignores the fact that he’s bleeding all over the furniture. Although the house receives other visitors, this fivesome takes up the bulk of the screentime. We are privy to many perversions along the way—disrespectful urination, a son turning into his father in unhealthy ways, and cucking twins—but introspective psychodrama, rather than shock value, remains the focus.

Fedja van Huêt is excellent in his two roles; even without their slightly different hairstyles and dress, we would never confuse the brooding Alex for the simmering Aram, or vice-versa. Carice van Houten (who would later find international stardom in “Game of Thrones”) is simply lovely, and really gives the sense that she doesn’t know what her character is doing at Alex’s childhood home (not in uncomplimentary sense, but by design; we aren’t supposed to know what her character is doing there, either). Mother Sacha Bulthuis and wounded thug Theo Maassen provide comic relief—bloody comic relief, in the latter case.

AmnesiA received positive reviews on release, but for reasons unknown never made it onto DVD in North America. Cult Epics rescues this nearly forgotten (heh heh) feature with a pristine DVD/Blu-ray release, featuring a moderated commentary from the director and star and supplemental interviews with Koolhoven and van Houten. The double Blu-ray release also includes two of Koolhaven’s two previous made-for-TV movies, Dark Light (1997) and Suzy Q (1999), made with some of the same cast. Kudos to Cult Epics for putting this overlooked, surreal Dutch psychothriller in front of more eyeballs.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The hoary myth about identical twins — that one is good and the other evil — must tap into some primal notion of the divided self in which the two halves claw at each other’s throats, each seeking dominance. The concept gets a weird but intriguing workout in ‘AmnesiA,’ a surreal Dutch film that carries the comic menace of a play like Harold Pinter’s ‘Homecoming’ to the brink of horror.”–Stephen Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

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CAPSULE: SPOONFUL OF SUGAR (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Mercedes Bryce Morgan

FEATURING: Morgan Saylor, Danilo Crovetti, Kat Foster, Myko Olivier, Keith Powell

PLOT: Millicent applies for a nanny job caring for a special needs kid with crippling allergies; unbeknownst to the parents (who are pretty screwed up themselves), Millicent is under psychiatric care, undergoing an experimental therapy where she microdoses LSD daily.

COMMENTS: Millicent, the lead character of Spoonful of Sugar, has been prescribed LSD by her psychiatrist, to be taken in microdoses. Microdosing psychedelics is an online fad taking its cue from homeopathy. It involves taking amounts of the drug too small too produce psychedelic effects on a regular schedule. When this practice is followed, the user does not hallucinate. Also, short-term tolerance to LSD builds very quickly, requiring larger doses to achieve any effects, so regular dosing should provide diminishing returns. The practice’s proponents claim that it improves their well-being and quality of life without producing a disabling intoxication, but the supposed benefits have never been studied on a meaningful scale; the evidence is overwhelmingly anecdotal. It is currently not legal to prescribe LSD.

In other words, real-life microdosing is nothing at all like the picture painted in Spoonful of Sugar: hallucinations would be virtually impossible, and no reputable psychiatrist would (or could) ever prescribe the substance. In one sense, this is a minor issue. We could suspend disbelief and head-canon Millicent’s treatment into some kind of experimental pilot program set sometime in the near future. We can posit that she hallucinates because of an underlying mental illness, possibly exacerbated by the LSD regimen (a reasonable supposition). But I think that the sloppy handling of the microdosing concept underlies the problems with the promising but ultimately unfulfilling Spoonful of Sugar. The premise sounds cool, but it just doesn’t work, at least not as executed here. But the filmmakers decide to go ahead with it anyway, trusting that the viewer will skim over the obvious flaws and focus on the vibrant hallucinations (a demonic sex scene, a crawling severed finger) and dark psychology.

If you can get involved enough in the story to make it to the end, Spoonful of Sugar concludes on a strong note, with an exciting and unexpected violent finale ending in a dark twist. Hopes of running into another psychedelic nightmare prods you to stick with it. But unfortunately, the bad mostly outweighs the good here. Morgan Saylor is asked to strike a difficult tone as the “weird girl,” required to be quietly sinister, wounded, naive, and delusional, all at the same time. It’s a tough assignment, and she has difficulty creating a believable character: her expressions and readings are awkward and forced, forcing her wardrobe and hairstyle (Red Riding Hood coat, Pippi Longstocking braids) to do the heavy lifting in constructing her childlike persona. The script, which includes creaky, clumsily ironic lines like “people aren’t always as they seem” and “women aren’t violent,” doesn’t provide a lot of support. The other main performances are fine, especially Kat Foster as the mother with issues relating to her sick child and a secret taste for masochism; Danilo Crovetti also makes a convincing kid, helped by the fact that he’s embedded in an astronaut costume for most of the picture and has very few lines. But a credible performance from Millicent is central to making this logically-challenged scenario successfully pull off the trick it wants to—and on this score, the experiment falls short.

A Spoonful of Sugar is now on DVD and available on VOD; it also streams on Shudder.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… a strange and uncanny psychedelic thriller with excellent performances at its core.”–Jon Mendelson, CBR.com (contemporaneous)

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CAPSULE: BLIND WILLOW, SLEEPING WOMAN (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Pierre Földes

FEATURING: Voices of Amaury de Crayencour, Arnaud Maillard, Mathilde Auneveux, Pierre Földes; Ryan Bommarito, Marcelo Arroyo, Shoshana Wilder (English dub)

PLOT: A salaryman struggles emotionally when his depressed wife leaves him; meanwhile, his co-worker is approached by a giant talking frog who insists that the timid accountant assist him in forestalling an earthquake set to devastate Tokyo.

Still from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2022)

COMMENTS: The blind willow of the title is a fictional tree; flies bear pollen from its blossoms and deposit it into the ear of a woman, causing her to fall into a deep, fairy-tale sleep. The fable is related from inside a flashback in one of the stories that compromise this semi-anthology film. It’s one of many mysterious strands running through Pierre Földes cinematic debut, adapted from six Haruki Murakami (Drive My Car) short stories. The film follows three main protagonists, and one anthropomorphic Frog, through dismal-but-bearable lives in a post-earthquake Tokyo. The movie marches the trio through bouts of catatonic depression, workplace humiliations, odd vacations, encounters with magical restaurateurs, ambiguous erotic and semi-erotic encounters, a search for a missing cat, dreams, and one epic, hallucinatory quest.

The stories are all suffused with gentle melancholy and a sense of humanity’s search for meaning. No answers are given or purposes uncovered, except, perhaps, in the case of accountant Katagiri, who, with the help of the movie’s breakout character, the loquacious and puissant Frog, finally achieves recognition for his years of long and thankless service. The film’s general tone is more attuned to Komura, who endures abandonment by his wife with quiet and insular stoicism, and Kyoko, whose dissatisfaction remains inexpressible, even to herself. The figurants the main characters sit beside on subways, buses, or cafeterias are all silent and spectral, drawn as translucent overlays. There’s something ghostly about the film’s protagonists, who move about as if they’re bound to the world by some unremembered purpose, so it only makes sense that they inhabit a spectral civilization.

The artwork reinforces the calm, poetic, dreamlike mood. Color palettes are muted, with static backgrounds; in the loveliest composition, two characters stand at a bus stop in front of what looks like a springtime watercolor landscape of cherry blossoms and tall grass, a brown mound of mountain arising in the deep background. At times, especially in scenes with Frog, the art can recall anime, although this is not as much of a stylistic touchstone as the Japanese setting might suggest. The movie takes time out for flights of fancy in several dream sequences—Katagiri finds himself flying through the sky in the belly of a worm who resolves into a train as he wakes—but also in waking daydreams, as when Komura sees the whorls of his nephew’s ear morph into a nude woman, or when a spectral salmon swims above two lovers in bed. These digressions harness the fantasy power of animation in a way that seems more natural than it would in a live-action feature, suggesting that the characters’ interior realities have as much emotional weight as their dialogue. Földes has an odd trademark of drawing his character’s lips unusually wide and dark, but this is a minor distraction.

The multitalented Földes, previously known mainly as a composer, not only adapted Murakami’s stories into the screenplay, directed, and wrote the score, but also voiced Frog in both the French and English versions. Perhaps only his love of Murakami’s prose pulled him into filmmaking, but I hope this isn’t the last we see from him. He’s too skilled at this to sit on the sidelines.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a film that’s lovely, mysterious and also, at times, fittingly odd… the film itself is sync with Murakami’s particular blend of the quotidian and the surreal.”–Sheri Linden, The Hollywood Reporter (contemporaneous)