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Top 10 Lists

TOP 10 MOVIES OF 2023: MAINSTREAM EDITION

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Here is my obligatory/traditional annual top 10 list of movies, ranked according to mainstream standards. In other words, weird movies are allowed on this list, but I attempt to rank the 2023 releases according to their general cinematic merit, intended for people who don’t specialize in the surrealer genres. If you want an advance peek at the weird list (coming tomorrow), check out our latest episode of Pod 366.

There are a fair number of films that might have made this list but for the fact that I didn’t have time to get to them in 2023. Notably, I wasn’t able to screen awards contenders All of Us Strangers, American Fiction, American Symphony, Anatomy of a Fall, Apolonia Apolonia, The Color Purple, Fallen Leaves, Ferrari, Four Daughters, Maestro, May December, The Mother of All Lies, Rustin, Saltburn, Society of the Snow, The Taste of Things, or The Zone of Interest before drafting this list. I expect to see most of these before awards voting season concludes, and some of them may end up deserving inclusion here.

Before the official top ten starts, here are 2023’s numerous honorable mentions, in alphabetical order: Beau is Afraid, Beyond Utopia, Blackberry, Blind Willow Sleeping Woman, Dream Scenario, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Give Me Pity!, John Wick 4, Killers of the Flower Moon, Lynch/Oz, Mission Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1, Past Lives, Robot Dreams, Suzume, Talk to Me, Unicorn Wars, Unidentified Objects, and When Evil Lurks.

Before commenting on this list, take a look here and see if your comment fits into one of these predefined categories.

And now, the official list:

10. Once Within a Time: Curtains open on a glowing, chanting golden tree woman, then children watch a couple with wicker cages around their heads wander through incidents of apocalypse, technology, and wonder. Simultaneously ancient and hyper-modern, Godfrey  Reggio‘s visually-stunning surrealist experimental feature is as an apocalyptic dispatch from the far reaches of reality and a major cinematic event of 2023. With a new Philip Glass score, Iranian vocalist Sussan Deyhim as a tree-mother-goddess-spirit with a glowing heart, and a very special guest star as a pied piper who speaks in saxophone solos. Under an hour long, but because of its esoteric nature (Reggio dubs it a “bardic fairy tale”) its exposure was limited to museums and major art-house venues; hopefully it will find it’s way onto disc/streaming services soon.

9. The Origin of Evil [L’Origine du mal]: A sardine factory worker (a ruthless but needy Laure Calamy) reconnects with her rich, estranged father, who lives in an isolated mansion with four women, each of whom have their own secrets and schemes. A meticulously plotted French film where no one may be who they seem, slowly unraveling a great deal of nasty behavior amidst a sprinkling of satire and split screens. You’ll be wondering who’s plotting against whom— Continue reading TOP 10 MOVIES OF 2023: MAINSTREAM EDITION →

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: THE SUDBURY DEVIL (2023)

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The Sudbury Devil can be rented or purchased on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Andrew Rakich

FEATURING: Benton Guinness, , Josh Popa, Matthew Van Gessell, Kendra Unique

PLOT: In 1678, 2 years after King Philip’s War, two Puritan witch hunters from Boston, John Fletcher (Guinness) and Josiah Cutting (Popa), are sent to a town in the Massachusetts sticks to investigate allegations of witchcraft and deviltry in the nearby woods by Isaac Goodenow (Van Guessel), where they encounter Patience Gavett (Gregg) and her companion Flora (Unique).

Still from "The Sudbury Devil" (2023)

COMMENTS: American folk horror is an established genre in literature, but it hasn’t quite made the jump to movies or television to the extent that its British cousins have. Outside of adaptations of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s works (“The House of the Seven Gables”, “Young Goodman Brown” to name a couple), ‘s Eyes of Fire is probably the film people would point to, along with Ravenous and The Witch.1

The Sudbury Devil is a good addition to that slim lineup, and even more impressive for accomplishing what it does on its budget; of the films mentioned, it’s certainly the one that qualifies as microbudgeted, and it makes the most of its available resources.

If you mashed up A Field in England with Ravenous and The Witch,  you’d get The Sudbury Devil. It’s more than apparent that director/writer Rakich is a hardcore fan of the aforementioned films, and it’s to his and his cast and crew’s credit to have produced a film which goes further than its predecessors, as proper Hellspawn should.

Director/writer/actor Andrew Rakich is known for his Atun-Shei YouTube page, where he utilizes his knowledge and interest in history—he was a ‘living historian’ at Gettysburg National Military Park and a New Orleans tour guide—to produce work that amuses and informs. Starting from highlighting sites and events in New Orleans, he progressed to a Civil War series, “Checkmate, Lincolnites!”, which takes on the mythology of the South’s “Lost Cause” propaganda in entertaining fashion. Entertaining here means comedic, which makes sense; hard and unflattering truths tend to be accepted easier if there’s a laugh or joke involved, and once hooked, thinking can begin (ask filmmaker .) The same effect can be obtained by replacing laughs and jokes with dread and horror in Sudbury (although there is a touch of black humor in what the filmmakers describe as a “mischievous indictment of America’s foundational rot”).

As Sudbury lays it out, hypocrisy is at the heart of that rot. The justification of King Phillip’s War, which eradicated much of the indigenous population of New England, still weighs heavily on Fletcher in his nightmares. The “piety” of Cutting and Reverend Russell allows their disdain of women (specifically Patience). Russell supports  Mosley’s Company and the war, despite actively avoiding any involvement in it. Cutting dsiplays racism towards the original inhabitants of the land and towards Flora, despite his attraction.

While sex has always been a part of folk horror, it’s usually presented obliquely rather than directly. Sudbury puts it upfront: polyamory, homoeroticism, masturbation, gender-shifting, and even a climatic double penetration (although not in the way that you might expect.) Sex and sexual freedom is usually presented as aligned with devilry in folk horror, though Sudbury subverts that expectation.

In that sense, Sudbury is not only folk horror, but also a subset of what could be termed ‘Woke Horror’ (Get Out, Us, Harvest Lake, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster). This vein of film includes the works of , ‘s The People Under the Stairs (1991), and others; a long established tradition, so ‘Woke Horror’ isn’t such a new thing after all.

The Sudbury Devil will be available on VOD today, December 21—in time for Xmas!— on Rakich’s website, Atun-Shei Films. Other related work that may help in understanding the nuances of the film (King Phillip’ War, Sudbury area history, and specifics in the film) can be viewed there and on YouTube, as well as the webseries Checkmate, Lincolnites and The Witchfinder General, a lighter look at Puritanism. A physical media release may also happen sometime in 2024.

A note of interest for those literary horror aficionados who notice the name Tabitha King as an executive producer: yes, it is that Tabitha King (novelist and wife of an obscure writer named Stephen King). As Rakich explained in the Pod 366 interview, she is also a noted genealogist and had heard about the production and contributed to it.

Listen to our interview with Andrew Rakich and producer Veronika Payton about The Sudbury Devil.

  1. I’m certain there will be “That Guy” who pops in with some titles not named. That’s a protracted discussion for another time, after Vol. 2 of “All the Haunts Be Ours” is released… ↩︎
Capsules

CAPSULE: DREAM SCENARIO (2023)

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Kristoffer Borgli

FEATURING: , , Dylan Gelula, , Tim Meadows

PLOT: A mild-mannered evolutionary biology professor becomes a celebrity after appearing in the dreams of random strangers across the world.

Still from dream scenario (2023)

COMMENTS: Dream Scenario begins mid dream, as balding professor Paul Matthews, raking poolside, calmly watches his younger daughter float into the sky. This scenario is quickly revealed to be a dream: this is not a movie that plays with ambiguity between dreams and waking. Rather, it’s a magical realist fame fable about what it would be like to be a nice-enough 21st century nobody who mysteriously begins appearing in people’s dreams.

While I personally could watch 90 minutes of Nic Cage making cameo appearances in other people’s nocturnal hallucinations, Dream Scenario only enacts a smattering of the dreams themselves. One dreamer perches on a desk while a pair of crocodiles menace her and Cage watches dispassionately; another wanders through a forest with strange mushrooms growing from the trees, wearing a tux and pursued by a nightmare figure, while a distracted Paul munches on a shroom.Paul is distressed that he never takes an active part in anyone’s dream, but seems to enjoy the media attention—at first.

It’s all light comedy up until a midpoint pivot. Paul finds someone in whose dream he takes a more active part. And soon after, his mood sours, for reasons both related and unrelated to his newfound celebrity. Soon, dream-Paul starts misbehaving in dreams, in ways that turn him into a public pariah. Even if they know intellectually that Paul isn’t responsible for how he behaves inside their subconsciouses, people can’t help but be angry: his students stop attending his lectures, he’s asked to leave restaurants because he makes people uncomfortable. Of course, Paul has done nothing wrong, but every real-life mistake he makes now gets magnified and taken out of context, until he’s completely pilloried in the public mind and essentially exiled from society.

Paul’s severe change of fortune necessitates a corresponding change of tone, one that’s not quite for the better. Dream Scenario‘s second half amps up the “cancel culture” satire and critique of mob-think. It’s an obvious target that Borgli’s script handles competently, and with a few chuckles. But while it’s always fun to watch a villain, or even a charming antihero, get their comeuppance, it’s a harder ask to make us enjoy a Job scenario where we watch an innocent, generally likable character get raked over the coals repeatedly.

Dream Scenario explores the gulf between reality and public perception, a problem exponentially magnified in the TikTok era. It also posits fame as something inherently undesirable, or at least inherently dangerous, through a recurring analogy about zebra stripes: being the one who sticks out from the herd makes you into a target for predators. These are not (or at least, should not be) profound insights, which is perhaps why, by the end, the movie takes on the tone of a sad parable rather than a stern lecture. Fortunately, Cage’s balanced and committed performance buoys everything. He’s amusing in the first act, cringe-worthy in the second, and an unwilling (and unrecognized) martyr in the third. A few of the wackier dreams give him a brief chance to show off his crazy side. He’s perfect for the role. Nicolas Cage is a man who has achieved the same kind of meme-heavy, eccentric celebrity as Paul Matthews; someone who is widely known, and has been both worshiped and ridiculed, for his persona rather than his actual personality. Cage puts his soul into this one, making for a pleasant Dream.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The world has finally gotten weird enough that Nicolas Cage now makes total sense… It’s as if his movies are saying, ‘Yes, it’s bad. It’s as bad as you think. But there’s an aspect to this that’s actually funny.’ That notion that everything is both horrible and amusing all but sums up the story of ‘Dream Scenario.'”–Mick LaSalle, The San Francisco Examiner (contemporaneous)

Dream Scenario

Dream Scenario
  • Hapless family man Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) finds his life turned upside down when millions of strangers suddenly start seeing him in their dreams. But when his nighttime appearances take a nightmarish turn, Paul is forced to navigate his newfound stardom, in this wickedly entertaining comedy from writer-director Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself) and producer Ari Aster.
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