Tag Archives: 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)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MOTHER, COUCH (2023)

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Mother, Couch is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.

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DIRECTED BY: Niclas Larsson

FEATURING: Ewan McGregor, Ellen Burstyn, Taylor Russell, , Lara Flynn Boyle,

PLOT: A mother refuses to get up from a furniture showroom couch despite the best efforts of her three children—each, incidentally, from a different father.

Still from Mother, Couch (2023)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The spanner ratchets up the pressure on poor David and his siblings, making for a whimsical-into-menacing story flow with waves of absurdity. In other words, the Beau is Afraid archetype, but with a happy ending.

Kind of.

COMMENTS: What does it take to break one mild-mannered Scotsman? Niclas Larsson’s film, Mother, Couch, explores this question, among several others. From the starting gun, however, it was clear that this was the question that would be on my mind, until it was either answered or the credits rolled. The opening scene pulls us into the awkward and uncomfortable world of David, as he uneasily navigates a run-down parking lot and then enters “Oakbeds Furniture,” a similarly run-down home furnishings department store where his mother has permanently ensconced herself, on the second floor, in the seat of a (rather expensive) Italian sofa. From there, events turn with an increasingly jittery surrealism.

The humor found in Mother, Couch is, not to mince words, a bit “Swedish.”1 Those of you who know, know, but to explain briefly: sitcom by long-suffering ordeal. (Not to stereotype this flavor of Scandinavian, but my admittedly limited experience suggests Swedes possess a heavy streak of wry fatality.) David—a magnificently middle-aged Ewan McGregor, neither the gung-ho heroin kid nor the sage Jedi—politely, and a touch pathetically, lets everyone roll over him: his laid-back-but-glib Welsh brother, his snarky American sister with permanently-affixed cigarette, and his dotty mother whose tongue is as sharp as the penknife she, inexplicably, brought with her. In true Buñuel–Dupieuxiène style, the links in this chain of events grow to such a weight as to bring David to bursting point (apologies for the semi-spoiler that answers my opening query).

Mother, Couch is soft-spoken in its eccentricity, allowing its quiet oddities space to breathe. F. Murray Abraham’s turn as both Marcus and Marco, Oakbeds’ twin owners, is a delightful two-fer of talent, with Marcus something of a David-double (calm, deferential, doormat), and Marco eventually threatening our hapless protagonist with a chainsaw when price negotiations for the titular couch hit the rocks. At times, Rhys Ifans and Lara Flynn Boyle each appear to be performing in a different film—for reasons which become clear as events progress. As for Ellen Burstyn, well, I alternately loved and loathed her, as her “Mother” character occupies perhaps three different narrative planes.

The movie kicks off with a glib bit of foreshadowing: the on-screen quotation, “It was all very simple, they were looking for a dresser. Blood wouldn’t spill until later.” Larsson positions the furniture motif throughout, with an unlikely key (given by mother to son) failing to open the half-dozen or more dressers littered around the store and the mother’s apartment. The simplicity of the premise gets things rolling. There’s hope in Mother, Couch, though it’s nearly crushed by a long history of lies and creeping irrationality. As Mother says, “You don’t stab someone in the back, that’s for sure. Not even family!” Ultimately (another semi-spoiler) she fails to follow her own advice, but I believe she tries. When she veers from this maxim, though, it doesn’t stop the first finale’s last supper, as family, old and new, gather together just before David suffers a (literal) sinking feeling.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an all-star cast in a surrealist dramedy… What begins as relatively straightforward takes a fever dream turn that pushes weird off a cliff. This approach may appeal to the art house cinema crowd but will leave most audiences befuddled.“–Julian Roman, Movieweb (contemporaneous)

  1. As it well might be: Swedish director Larsson here adapts a novel by Swedish novelist Jerker Virdborg. ↩︎
Capsules

CAPSULE: THE ANIMAL KINGDOM (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Thomas Cailley

FEATURING: Paul Kircher, , , Tom Mercier

PLOT: A plague that turns ordinary people into human-animal hybrids has afflicted a family’s wife and mother, putting a strain on the relationship of the father and son.

The Animal Kingdom (2023)

COMMENTS: In the opening of The Animal Kingdom, a man with one partially-formed bird wing violently bursts out of the back of a locked ambulance caught in a traffic jam and tries to flee as orderlies attempt to corral him back into the vehicle. “Strange days,” one stranded motorist nonchalantly remarks to another. Apparently a plague, disease, or curse has been hybridizing humans with random types of animals, with no way of predicting when the condition will strike. François’ wife, Émile’s mother, has caught it, and now has fur on her face and claw marks on the wall of her hospital room. Her doctor assures the family that the experimental medical treatments are working, though, and encourages them in their plan to relocate a remote town in south France so the can be closer to her when she’s placed into a new “research” facility. François, who’s a bit of an eccentric trying to instill a distrust of authority in his son, hopes to reunite the family. But Émile’s sense of smell seems to be getting keener…

Besides the birdman, we get glimpses of tentacled squid/octopus girl in the supermarket, an aardvark lady, and some sort of tree-clinging chameleon. The costuming and prosthetics are always interesting, although you may wish to see more of the mutants. The movie instead focuses almost entirely on the relationship between François and Émile, on Émile’s attempts to fit in with his new classmates, and on Émile’s anxiety over his own bodily changes. Attitudes towards the mutants are mostly revealed indirectly: the widespread use of the emerging slur “critters” to describe the victims, the schoolkids’ lunchroom debate about the issue (with opinions ranging from coexistence to shooting them on sight), and the fact that the entire phenomenon seems to be considered a police matter as much as a medical issue. The hybrids flee whenever authorities approach, and the government is building what may amount to detention centers.

No explanation is given for the transformations, medical or otherwise. Completely uninterested in the science fiction behind it all, The Animal Kingdom instead critiques humanity’s insistence on morphological purity, and on our instinct to exile community members for any deviation. Transphobia might be the most obvious contemporary touchstone here—though the afflicted take no voluntary steps to transform their bodies—but the movie’s lessons can easily be transferred to any group of outsiders: minorities, immigrant, queers, the mentally ill, and of course, furries. Realistically, most people without a direct family connection to a victim quickly turn against the critters; besides the fear of the unknown, identifying a group of outsiders immediately elevates your own status as an insider. Only a minority of fundamentally decent folk offer empathy, support, or accommodations. When asked if he still kissed his wife after her transformation, François replies, “It was still her. It changed nothing.” The movie may refuse to unfurl its metaphor, but its moral is clear. The Animal Kingdom is, ironically, humanistic.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“‘The Animal Kingdom’ is quite emotionally vivid at times, and fine acting supports Cailley’s weird ideas, making the picture feel real while it gradually becomes a fantasy.”–Brian Orndorf, Blu-ray.com (contemporaneous)

The Animal Kingdom [Blu-ray]

The Animal Kingdom [Blu-ray]
  • Cannes Film Festival Nominee: Un Certain Regard
  • Winner Grand Jury Prize-Palm Springs International Film Festival
  • Includes English Dubbed Version
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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ABRUPTIO (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Evan Marlowe

FEATURING: Voices of James Marsters, Hana Mae Lee, Christopher McDonald, Jordan Peele, Robert Englund,

PLOT: Recovering alcoholic Les Hackels finds himself compelled to follow murderous instructions or a bomb implanted in his neck will detonate.

Still from "Aprubtio" (2023)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Violent twists accumulate to breaking point as the plot lurches toward a supernatural conspiracy, with all its hapless character-victims played by humans-as-puppets.

COMMENTS: There’s societal collapse, a shadowy organization texting orders for murder, ill-conceived genetic experiments, a troupe of levitating aliens with tentacles, and perhaps the creepiest babies ever seen. All told, Les effectively handles these challenges with quiet, almost passive, determination. But that’s not what this movie is about—and what this movie is actually about challenges Les far more than the parade of creepy ultra-violence. Abruptio is about heaping great ladles of intrigue and ickiness, poured over the least proactive protagonist this side of Barry Lyndon.

His calm is broadcast through his medium, for he is a puppet—fortunately, the least creepy of the bunch. Puppetry can hit just about any tonal note from cute to uncanny, and the characters in this film all skew firmly to the latter. They are puppeted human actors, similar to Xhonneux‘s oddities in Marquis. The bodies move like ours, but all the heads and exposed limbs smack of prosthesis. Even the occasional bare breasts are obviously latex facsimiles positioned over the genuine article. This visual choice has its  ramifications—the entire film experience is always at least a little “off”—but is something of a blessing when you consider just what we’re seeing.

Les kills off his co-workers with a gas-spewing typewriter case. He massacred an innocent family. And more. He blindly follows orders sent to him from an anonymous contact on his mobile phone, his dispassionate puppet face, and deadpan tone of voice, suggesting a deeply troubled, but deeply tranquil, mind. These acts of carnage and survival are a lot to take in, but there’s a point in the growing grisliness. Why are we enduring this alongside the “hero”? How are these disparate Saw-style acts and executions tied together? What is “Herason”? Why does the digital alarm continue to blink 10:22? And just what does the police chief want him to confess to?

Abruptio smacks a good deal of The Trial, but with ultraviolence. It also brings to mind two films whose titles would give the game away, but I’ll hint that one stars Anthony Hopkins and the other doesn’t. The uncanny journey Les takes has the grinding feel of a video game as he lurches from one nasty imperative to the next, attempting to keep his new ward (a rape survivor who emerges from the background dystopia) calm while dodging encounters with his overbearing mother. The final reveal comes as tragic relief, through procedural electric shock. The ghoulish veneer is stripped off, pieces fall into place, and Les finds himself staring down something a good deal more unpleasant than mayhem, murders, mutants—and the creepiest babies ever seen.

Abruptio is scheduled to screen in Gardena, CA (filmmakers in attendance), Riverside, CA, Kansas City,  MO, and scattered independent venues starting this week; in Seattle from Oct. 4-13; and there’s also a one-night screening at a drive-in in Orefiled, PA on Oct. 10. Blu-rays drop Dec. 10, streaming is still to-be-announced, and you can keep up with added dates by continually refreshing the film’s home page or following their Facebook page.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a film that’s just too weird to ignore… Even viewers who find it too strange to genuinely enjoy will still be suitably perplexed when they watch it. Simply put, this is a film that really does have something for everyone.”–David Gelmini, Dread Central (contemporaneous)

Abruptio

Abruptio
  • Les Hackel hates his life. He works a dead-end job. He discovers a fresh incision behind his neck and his friend says it's bomb.
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