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366 UNDERGROUND: IRISH CATHOLIC (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Katie Madonna Lee, A Great Male Artist

FEATURING: Avalon Rayne and assorted misfit Catholics

PLOT: Shavon rebels against her Irish-Catholic family only to find herself similarly repressed by the gaggle of punks she moves in with.

Still from Irish Catholic (2023)

COMMENTS: Katie Madonna Lee and A Great Male Artist [sic] really hit the nail on the head with this one. Indeed, they hit so many nails on the head that, once her baseball bat has been bolstered by the nails, it’s ready for them to truly wallop something—and boy-howdy do they wallop it. All of it: Catholicism, sisterhood, hypocrisy, the patriarchy, inflexible feminism, shame, conformity, and all manner of other injustices and annoyances of life. Irish Catholic is appropriately staged and shot like a morality play—with tunes!—with young Shavon navigating adversity as she frantically paddles toward self assuredness.

The lights come up, and we open on a bedraggled, middle aged mother praying for a parking space. Her makeup is slapdash, her eyes as keen as an irritated hawk, and her hair is festooned with a bouquet of infant dolls. Shavon and her siblings are crammed in the vehicle space; her sisters pray along, in song, with the mother, and Shavon tries to silence her demanding stomach (which has its own voice credit), ultimately bowing to the temptation of the bag of potato chips being brought to the soup kitchen. Guilt, guilt, guilt. The family serves the poor with guilt, and they sit through a guilt-themed sermon which ends on the hymn line, “Guilty, Forever Guilty.”

Oddly enough, Irish Catholic is also a rather fun, sometimes whimsical experience. Sure, Shavon’s brother is molested by the hot priest, but that’s offset by the smirk-inducing machinations of the sisters as they attempt to out-pray to God (the competition here being just how many starving Africans they hope to save when they grow up). Shavon’s slide from her miserable lower middle class Irish Catholic family existence to bohemian life with a quatro of questionably punk “enlightened” types is tempered by various visitations from (the appropriately credited) Hot Jesus, who at various times pines for Arby’s and is stoned out of his mind. There’s also the special celebrity guest, “the Poop Bucket” (with it’s own musical number), but I won’t get into that.

All told, Irish Catholic has quite a bit to say; much of it about religion. Greenaway came to mind more than once, despite his comparative grisliness; this skewering is far more of a  romp, despite claims of how very dark (very dark) the film is. Young person hates her life, falls in with a seemingly carefree crowd who ultimately prove to be just as controlling and image-conscious as the ostensibly more repressive traditional life she has fled. I’ve seen this, but I was happy to see this spin on it. Life can be frustrating and much too difficult. But as Jesus famously preached, “Your life’s gonna get worse, so you might as well learn to sing and dance. …it worked for the gays.”

At the time of this writing Irish Catholic is available for free on YouTube, courtesy of co-writer/director Lee.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This peculiar film blends satire and drama in a quest to unravel the complexities of faith and the timeless human yearning for acceptance… [it] exemplifies avant-garde filmmaking.” — Chris Jones, Overly Honest Reviews (contemporaneous)

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CAPSULE: THE UNRAVELING (2023)

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The Unraveling is available for VOD purchase or rental.

DIRECTED BY: Kd Amond

FEATURING: Sarah Zanotti, Sam Brooks, Katherine Morgan, Moiba Mustapha

PLOT: Mary suffers a traumatic brain injury during a car crash and thereafter is convinced her husband isn’t the man he says he is.

Still from The Unraveling (2023)

COMMENTS: Kd Amond pulls off an impressive stunt with The Unraveling. Her latest film skates around genre labels like her protagonist skirts around certainty: the film isn’t really horror, though it flirts with the genre—and the same goes for thriller, drama, romance, science fiction, and, unfortunately for us, weird. This refusal to be pigeonholable (Merriam, get me on the line) is a credit to Ms. Amond, even if it risks alienating fans of specifically horror, thriller, drama, romance, science fiction, and weird movies. We are presented with and, especially, left with a wiggly specimen of narrative, whose unreliability and oddness ultimately makes sense but raises the question: What is The Unraveling for? And, for whom?

Mary’s navigation of domesticity is vexed, as her husband (played by Sam Brooks, sporting a haircut I wish I had half the confidence for) fluctuates between a bit too understanding and a bit too controlling. We’re somewhat reliably informed that she recently suffered a traumatic brain injury: hence, her conviction that her husband is not who he says he is, and that her actual husband is a mysterious voice at the other end of her phone, speaking from a parallel reality. We are told she has difficulty with specific faces—while she may respond positively to the voice of her “husband” from another room, immediately upon seeing him she thinks him an impostor. So her days are filled with apprehension and confusion, beginning each morning when she wakes up in a bed with someone she is certain she doesn’t know.

Obviously throwing a baby into the mix is exactly the wrong thing to do, but that becomes a major plot point for the third act. Now, by this juncture the genre nearly tips into the realm of lifetime melodrama (or, considering the introduction of snowscape to the remote home’s exterior, perhaps even Hallmark). While following this pachinko of a plot line, I succumbed myself to Mary’s confusion: where are events heading? That I continued to invest myself in the film’s digressionary tendencies is a credit to Sarah Zanotti, who imbues Mary with a quietly desperate humanity.

To unravel a piece of knit-work is termed “frogging”, and leaping into a metaphor here, frogging is an apt one for Amond’s film. All the ducks, diving, and dodging of a frogger in their efforts to return to an error-free stage of the project are a bit exhausting. In that way, The Unraveling handily conveys its subject’s experience; but the open question I had at the finale was: Has this been worth the energy?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The Unraveling was a strange movie and for a long time I wasn’t really even sure if it could be classified as a horror.”–Daniel Simmonds, The Rotting Zombie (contemporaneous)

Apocryphally Weird

49*. BEAU IS AFRAID (2023)

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“It’s like a Jewish ‘Lord of the Rings,’ but he’s just going to his mom’s house.”― Ari Aster

DIRECTED BY: Ari Aster

FEATURING: Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Amy Ryan, Nathan Lane, Parker Posey, Armen Nahapetian

PLOT: On the anniversary of his father’s death, Beau Wasserman misses his flight to visit his mother; his guilt is magnified by his mother’s surprise death by falling chandelier. He attempts to attend the funeral (to be held immediately in accordance with Jewish tradition), but he is waylaid crime in his anarchic neighborhood, an accident that leaves him in the care of a couple who seem to be using him to replace their dead son, and a wandering theater troupe that spurs thoughts of another possible life. When he finally arrives at his mother’s house, he is surprised by both the appearance of a lost flame from his youth and by a revelation about his mother’s fate that calls into question every aspect of his existence.

Still from beau is afriad (2023)

BACKGROUND:

  • Following his successes in the horror genre with Hereditary and Midsommar, Aster determined that his next project would be a comedy. This is that film.
  • The feature is massively expanded from a short Aster made in 2011.
  • Among Aster’s descriptions of the picture: a “nightmare comedy,” a “Freudian Odyssey,” and “if you pumped a 10-year-old full of Zoloft, and [had] him get your groceries.” Co-star Lane called it “the Jewish Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
  • The animation was created by Cristobal Leon and Joaquin Cociña, whose work Aster discovered in their Apocryphally-enshrined film The Wolf House.
  • The logo for Mona’s corporation appears among the vanity production cards at the start of the movie. Some have suggested this means she is controlling the very film you are watching.
  • Winner of two 2023 Weirdcademy Awards, including Weirdest Picture and Weirdest Scene for what we chose to call “Phallic Attic.” Phoenix also grabbed a nomination for Weirdest Actor.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Well, this site’s readers didn’t declare it the year’s weirdest movie for nothing. When Beau’s mother coerces him into her attic, he is confronted with three terrifying visions: an emaciated creature chained in the dark who might be a lost twin or an alternate version of himself, the homicidal mercenary who has been chasing him across the country, and (most shockingly) enormous, grotesque monolithic male genitals that throb and scream and kill like the brain bug in Starship Troopers. Beau has been emotionally neutered his whole life, and this is the moment that suggests where his lost manhood may have been this whole time.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Crossing Hell Street; phallic attic

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Beau’s very existence is a nightmare, from the moment that he is born with a wail-inducing smack, and even dating back to the moment of conception that stopped his father’s weak heart. What unspools here is three hours of the intense and unrelenting discomfort that Beau endures just by virtue of being alive. He manages to be both the most luckless man who ever lived and a person who is thoroughly incapable of coping with misfortune. Aster concocts the most elaborate Jewish-mother joke ever told, and he never relents in demonstrating just how awful things can get, and how they can still manage to get worse.

Original trailer for Beau is Afraid (2023)

COMMENTS: Beau Wasserman’s life is governed by a few simple Continue reading 49*. BEAU IS AFRAID (2023) →

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CAPSULE: THE BEAST (2023)

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La bête

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , George MacKay

PLOT: To get a job in a dystopian future, a woman undergoes a procedure designed to dampen her emotional responses by ridding herself of past-life traumas.

Still from The Beast (2023)

COMMENTS: Surely Henry James could never have imagined that, more than a hundred years after he wrote it, a Frenchman would loosely adapt his story “The Beast in the Jungle” as a centuries-spanning science fiction story incorporating a belief in past lives. James’ protagonist suffers a certain paralyzing presentiment of obliteration (the titular Beast), which is shared by (at least one of) Seydoux’s characters; but truthfully, Bertrand Bonello’s ambitious screenplay incorporates almost nothing from the original story—just the theme of loneliness and regret for missed opportunities, and a similar European setting for about 1/3 of the film. It also throws in a metric ton of other concerns, including artificial intelligence, incel culture, and reincarnation.

As suggested by the plot summary and hinted above, The Beast tells three different stories: one set at the turn of the twentieth century, one set approximately in contemporary times, and one set in 2044. This last date is the film’s base reality, despite not being the first story we’re thrown into. The Beast sets up the rather ridiculous premise that past life experiences are encoded in DNA and traumas that lead to automatic emotional responses can be overcome through a therapeutic regression that involves being submerged in a tub of black goo while a computer probes your ear—a concept that sounds like it came out of an esoteric Scientology text. While the procedure, and the theory underlying it, are insane, it doesn’t matter whether we accept them; it only matters that the movie believes in them, and creates a world that operates according to those rules. In Gabrielle’s case, the recurring trauma is her unconsummated passion for Louis, who is a gentleman in the 1900s, a stalker in the early 2000s, and an aspiring functionary like her in his current incarnation. The future’s rationale for the operation is legitimately unsettling, tapping into fears of cybertechnological dehumanization: with so much work automated and taken over by A.I., humans voluntarily try to rid themselves of passion and emotion in order to make more rational decisions that enable them to compete with the dominant machines.

So The Beast is, in a sense, three movies in one. There’s the science fiction fable; the Parisian period piece; and a contemporary stalker drama that quickly shades into (pretty effective) thriller territory.  As a standalone film, the full-length petticoat and starched collars of the Belle Epoque section would have made for a staid and respectable period drama, with a tremendous closing image. The modern day incel story can come off as a preachy, with on-the-nose commentary; MacKay’s portrayal of a 30-year old virgin who vlogs about how he’s “magnificent” and “deserves girls” but “can only have sex in my dreams” would seem like an eye-rolling caricature, if the character were not directly based on real-life incel mass-murderer Elliot Rodger (I believe some of MacKay’s monologues were taken verbatim from Rodger’s YouTube videos). But although each section is merely competent on its own—and arguably make for a bloated picture with a lot of unnecessary fat left in—tying them together in the reincarnation format makes for a whole greater than its parts. Certain conversations are repeated in full in different eras, and recurring themes like dolls/puppets resonate across time. Both previous Gabrielles consult psychics, in radically different contexts, who are able to see through the years and reference things that occurred in other lifetimes. Looking for common threads and shared symbols across the three stories engages the mind more than any of the issues the three tales address. And Bonello sprinkles significant weirdness throughout the project, much of it justified as artifacts of the disorientating effects of the procedure, but some of it freestanding. In the latter category is the opening with in a green screen studio, apparently rehearsing a scene for the upcoming film as she takes direction form an unseen voice (belonging to Bonello). Disorienting editing, uncanny dolls, dream interludes, unexpected clips from movies, a panicky laptop pop-up nightmare, and a nightclub with rotating mid-20th century themes all contribute to the strange flavor. The end result is a challenging art-house feature that doesn’t always hit its marks, but nevertheless remains intellectually stimulating.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a weird sweeping romance and sci-fi dystopia mix that taps into so many contemporary anxieties, from AI stealing our jobs to climate disaster and the overall sense that the world is becoming unfeeling. It’s existential, yes, but it’s at its core a love story.”–Sara Clements, Pajiba (contemporaneous)

The Beast (Janus Contemporaries) [Blu-ray]

The Beast (Janus Contemporaries) [Blu-ray]
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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DAAAAAALI! (2023)

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Daaaaalí! is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.

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DIRECTED BY:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

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