After an unfortunate knife-testing accident, Sandy and Mitra urgently need a ride to the hospital.
Content Warning: This short contains violence.
Tag Archives: 2022
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022)
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Crimes of the Future is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.
DIRECTED BY: David Cronenberg
FEATURING: Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Scott Speedman, Kristen Stewart, Don McKellar, Welket Bungué
PLOT: Sometime in the future, for unknown reasons, human evolution has accelerated; one man makes performance art out of growing new organs and surgically removing them before a live audience, while other groups attempt to put their own stamp on humanity’s future.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Recycling a title from the very beginning of his career, this grisly summation of Cronenberg’s unique brand of carnal depravity feels like it’s closing a circle.
COMMENTS: The crime that opens David Cronenberg’s latest feature is a rough and bizarre reverse-Oedipal affair. It seems that the crimes of the future will have to be extreme, considering what passes for entertainment: the arts are dominated by grotesque displays of self-surgery. For unknown reasons, evolution has gone askew. The ability to feel pain has diminished in the general populace, while certain people—among them our performance artist protagonist, Saul Tesher—spontaneously grow new organs, of uncertain function. A pair of government functionaries run a novel “organ registry” out of a dusty office, but act more like obsessed fans than bureaucrats. A special police “vice” unit defends the integrity of the human body, but when “surgery is the new sex,” what rises to the level of crime?
Sickly Saul Tenser (Mortensen) wanders eerily deserted streets, wrapped from head to toe like a Bedouin prowling the Interzone. The world is almost depopulated; the only crowds are found at surgical theaters. One lonely conversation plays out in front of a beached yacht, a symbol of a world wrenched from its purposes. A surprisingly high number of expository scenes drag the pace down, but they are punctuated by moments of squirmy perfection: a man festooned with growths who sews up his eyes and mouth before performing a dance, Saul and his assistant Caprice (Seydoux) embracing in the nude while being punctured by remote-control scalpels.
Crimes calmly and coldly considers the aging Cronenberg’s obsession with carnality. Shadowy cabals, which hint at the promise of some rational purpose behind the apparent randomness of bodily decay, yield only more mysteries upon investigation. He adds a new measure self-reflexivity—how can showing people being sliced up be considered art?—along with a satire of our contemporary passion for body modification, a sad attempt to assert symbolic control over the vessels that will eventually rebel against us. But his main theme remains the fragility of the human body, its arbitrariness and lack of integrity, its susceptibility to maiming and tumors. It’s a graphic and honest vision of mortality; the strangeness of the presentation masks the inevitability of the decrepitude he prophesies. Although the story lacks the narrative drive of Cronenberg’s earlier features—rather than climaxing in the uncovering of a grand conspiracy, the ending here fades out—the atmosphere of evil, corruption, mutation and decay is as strong as ever.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: THE HOUSE (2022)
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DIRECTED BY: Emma De Swaef and Marc James Roels (Part One), Niki Lindroth von Bahr (Part Two), Paloma Baeza (Part Three)
FEATURING: Voices of Mia Goth, Matthew Goode, Jarvis Cocker, Susan Wakoma, Helena Bonham Carter
PLOT: Designed by an eccentric 19th-century architect, a magnificent house traps and torments a series of owners over the centuries.
COMMENTS: This unusual house has three stories. The first is classically unsettling, the second is downright creepy, and the third is charmingly hokey. Each story’s physical structure is ever-changing, as the house is built, re-built, and re-built, then is infested and decays, finally embracing its ephemeral nature. From its loftily sinister beginnings as a macro-doll’s house up through its final untethering from its foundations, the titular mansion houses three separate visions: one man’s cruel infliction of nightmarish doom; one man’s mental disintegration as he attempts to tame the decaying edifice; and one woman’s spiritual liberation. Each director provides a unique touch, but each tale fits together, creating a narrative arc that morphs into an arc of redemption.
The chronicle begins with a house within a home. A doll’s house, that is. Mabel’s immediate family has fallen from grace, and a troupe of off-putting relatives chastise them. That night, her father gets drunk and wanders angrily through the woods, only to stumble across an illuminated sedan chair, the luxurious transport housing the altogether-too-creepy architect, Van Schoonbeek (“clean stream”, one of the most subtle bits of foreshadowing I’ve seen), who promises Mabel’s family a beautiful new place to live. But as is so often the case, midnight rendezvous with giggling fatcats lead to terror and lamentation.
The House dodges the bullet typical of anthology films in that, unlike the physical structure, none of the sections are weak. Their tenor differs, as well as their style. The first features unnerving felt-made people, the latter two anthropomorphic animals. The dark shadows of Mabel’s section become marvelously lit, and tackily modern, in the second segment. An unnamed “Developer” (perfectly voiced by Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker as an at-his-wits’-end handy-rat; he also provides the closing credit’s song) begins falling part as he repairs the now-dilapidated house in the hopes of selling it off. Fate is as unkind to him as it was to the first owners—albeit with a modern twist. Part two climaxes with an intricately choreographed club-jazz dance of fabric beetles and a run-in with the law after the Developer’s dentist, sick of being telephoned at all hours and called “sweet-heart” and “dear,” sends the police around to the hapless rat realtor.
The House breaks no new ground, and much of the spook-or-creep factor relies on old fashioned methods: light-play, musical cues, background laughter, scuttles, wriggles, and poofs of poison. But it all works more than well enough. I was not unpleasantly transported in mind to that special place I can end up when emerging from a well-crafted film experience. It is worth noting the third segment, which differs sharply from the first two. It’s the story of the final owner, and of her desire for her home clashing with a subconscious itch for freedom. Helena Bonham Carter’s hippy cat performance is relief-through-whimsy (she pays rent with potent crystals), and she is the perfect guide for the frazzled young owner. The House‘s first two acts scrabble in the darker corners of the mind, but when the sun breaks through the finale’s mists, I could feel the haunting memories begin to recede.
The House is exclusive to Netflix.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
SATURDAY SHORT: SOUVENIRS (2022)
A friend-for-hire balances his time with his eclectic clientele as he prepares for his most involved assignment to date.
CHANNEL 366: “RUSSIAN DOLL,” SEASON 2
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DIRECTED BY: Natasha Lyonne
FEATURING: Natasha Lyonne, Chloë Sevigny, Elizabeth Ashley, Charlie Barnett, Greta Lee
PLOT: Having escaped the time loop that imprisoned her in Season 1, Nadia now finds that she can visit her own past via the New York City subway system, and uses this power to try to salvage her family legacy of stolen Krugerrands—with troublesome and paradoxical results.
COMMENTS: Just a few years after resolving the time loop that saw her killed nightly, Nadia steps onto the 6 train and finds herself transported back in time to 1982. Her smartphone is gone; in its place is a matchbook cover with a note scrawled telling her to meet one “Chaz” at the Black Gumball at 8. The Gumball turns out to be a go-go bar with a topless dancer gyrating on the counter, and when Nadia orders a bourbon, the bartender asks her if she’s sure. Launching into one of her typical raspy monologues, she responds, “It’s arguably the only thing I’m sure of. Basic concepts like time and space are suddenly eluding me. Last night this place was mayhem because the wi-fi went out, but in the new here and now, apparently gratuitous nudity is back in play. My past, your future. Begs the question: am I haunting you, or are you haunting me?”
Circumstances have changed, but Lyonne’s unflappable (or at least, very rarely flapped) Nadia—streaming’s quirky, acerbic breakout character of 2019—is a constant. She’s the kind of middle-aged arrested adolescent who grabs a cocktail first thing in the morning (after lighting a cigarette, of course), chooses both when offered a choice of uppers and downers, and impulsively sleeps with creeps from other eras she barely knows and likes even less. She acts drunk even when sober, but she’s grown into her identity: she’s permanently tipsy and supremely confident, with a mouth like Dorothy Parker if she been raised by a company of Jewish longshoremen. She’s a treasure, and the sole justification for reviving a series that successfully closed its loop back in 2019.
Lyonne puts her mark on the series, directing three of seven episodes this season (as opposed to only the finale of Season 1). She also becomes the only person credited with writing on every episode in the series: while the team of Lyonne and co-creators Leslye Headland and SNL-alum Amy Poehler wrote all of Season 1 together, Season 2 features a wider variety of scripters, with Lyonne the only constant. We suspect that her main contribution is Nadia’s dialogue, which remains as sharp as ever (“every time you compliment me, a cockroach gets its wings.”) Perhaps as a result of the larger writing staff, Season 2 is looser, almost reckless compared to the relatively tight focus of the debut season. The setting is no longer confined to modern day New York City, but ranges through time and space, from the crime-ridden city of 1982 (patrolled by red-bereted Guardian Angels) to Nazi-era Hungary and Cold War Berlin to an allegorical subway labyrinth of memory and regret.
Despite being as acerbic as ever, Nadia has become even more blasé about her dislocated realities, barely batting an eye (and definitely not dropping her cigarette) when she finds herself thrown backwards in time. This matter-of-factness reflects a thematic decision to never even hint why Nadia, and the similarly-situated but far more neurotic Alan, are the subjects of such wrenching temporal anomalies. This approach allows the story to focus purely on its symbolic meaning, which, in Nadia’s case, is coming to terms with her family’s dysfunctional past: she believes that if she can rescue the family Krugerrands, she can redeem her family’s legacy. Of course, things are never that simple, and in the series’ final two episodes the weirdness blooms as Nadia has created a series of paradoxes that throw her carefully laid plans into complete chaos.
It’s inevitable that Netflix’s “Russian Doll” will be compared to Amazon Prime’s “Undone“: two slightly trippy time-travel stories starring strong and sarcastic female leads, centered around the investigation of family histories. The main difference is cosmetic, if significant:”Undone”‘s uncanny valley rotoscoping versus “Doll”‘s traditional live action setting. “Doll” has more comedy (Nadia’s comebacks are a lot spikier than Alma’s); “Undone” takes its science fictional conceit more seriously, delving into time travel mechanics and hinting at some possible causes for the family’s gifts. I’ve tried, and I can’t pick a favorite between them. Stream them both, if you can.
The series’ nesting title is more apt this season (you’ll see why soon enough). Both seasons of “Russian Doll” stream exclusively on Netflix for the foreseeable future.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: