Tag Archives: 2023

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: THE ABSENCE OF MILK IN THE MOUTHS OF THE LOST (2023)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Case Esparros

FEATURING: , Gary Wilson

PLOT: A mysterious milkman helps a grieving mother deal with the loss of her child.

Still from absence of milk in the mouths of the lost (2023)

COMMENTS: I could give The Absence of Mil k in the Mouths of the Lost a “” tag, because the average viewer will immediately want to flee during the opening scene of a cow giving birth in real time. But, if you are reading this, chances are you are not the average viewer. Instead, I’ll just remind you that when you brave Milk, you are venturing into the strange and treacherous world of microbudget DIY surrealism—so calibrate your expectations accordingly.

A milkman (when exactly is this supposed to be set?) delivers glass bottles to a house where a young woman bathes in filthy black liquid with a blank expression; she doesn’t answer the bell when he rings. The milkman lives in a dingy basement decorated with pictures of missing children cut out from milk cartons—and a breast hanging on his wall that drips white liquid into a bowl. Meanwhile, in an alternate plane of reality, mute, cigar-smoking, boxer-wearing devils covered head-to-toe in white greasepaint plot mischief against a trio of masked children. The milkman has buzzy schizophrenic hallucinations where he sees a masked woman knitting and delivering electronically altered monologues while walled in by -style “paint-on-the-film” moving canvases. A few dramatic sequences, and much moping about the dilapidated house, advance the woman’s story, until she and the milkman finally meet for an exposition dump to tie (some of) the plot strands together. The children find it almost shockingly easy to best the middle-aged demons that beset them.

Milk clearly suffers from its low budget. The visuals often display thrift-store ingenuity, but the sound can be a serious issue: many sections were filmed without any, and there are several moments when what might be meaningful dialogue is muffled. At other times, the dialogue is both nearly inaudible and digitally altered. It’s needlessly frustrating. It’s also a pity that so much of the middle of the film has such poor sound quality, when in the opening and closing, where Esparos’ musician friends contribute songs (including a deranged cover of the gospel standard “I’ll Fly Away”), the sound mix is crucial and well-executed.

There’s a difference between having a lot of creativity on display and everything clicking. If you can focus on the former, Milk has a lot to offer. Some of the imagery is arresting: the cigar-smoking demons are as brilliantly conceived as they are easily achieved, and sequences like the woman who pierces her milk-bag bra (!) with a knife are hard to forget. And although some of the imagery is shocking, its always purposeful and empathetic. The movie has a good heart. It helps to love cows.

The Absence of Milk In the Mouths of the Lost [Blu-ray]

The Absence of Milk In the Mouths of the Lost [Blu-ray]
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366 Underground

CAPSULE: THE POCKET FILM OF SUPERSTITIONS (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Tom Lee Rutter

FEATURING: Voice of The Shend

PLOT: A narrator elucidates various superstitions whilst they are presented on-screen, with both live actors and animation.

COMMENTS: Crank the understated cheek to eleven and put your brain pan in the oven set to “Regulo Brittania,” because here’s a documentary that’s so quirkily English it could pass as a scone-geared Big Ben clock crowning Queen Victoria. Squeezing Häxan through a blue filter and making heavy use of its “toffee” toned narrator, Tom Lee Rutter assembles a light-minded diversion covering all manner of mankind’s nonsenseries. Why does a bride want “something blue” on her wedding day? Where is the best place to look for faeries? And just what is “Devil’s Nutting Day”? All these questions, and more, are answered here.

You can come and go from this film, as it is broken into easy, bite-sized bits of trivia (and I mean that in the classical sense of the term), and it’s so compact it fits in your pocket for quick and easy consultation. This Pocket Film, by and large, is a documentary, or perhaps more accurately, a primer; but since its subject matter is nonsensical pre- and post-cautions for irrational dangers, it may best be viewed as an anthropological study. A silly anthropological study. The narrator guides the viewer throughout, offering both advice to the viewer and observations of the actions on-screen, these performed in grand early-cinema style by a large cast (including cameos from horror legends and .)

Having a fairly thorough personal knowledge superstitious troubles and solutions, the cinematic interludes—and the sage counsel from Shend, narrator-extraordinaire—all ring true. Most pertain to the Death and the Devil, and their various agents. Saint Agnes was new to me—along with her ritual of the “dumb cake” (Shend is silenced by an on-screen lady as he is about to explain; and for good reason: it is a dumb ritual, after all); and while I always know to cover my mouth when I yawn, I know now that it’s to block off my “soul hole,” thus preventing the Devil from sneaking inside of me. Around a third of the way in we meet a new font of information, the “Hand Maiden,” who gives a five-minute refresher on various hand gestures and their purpose (“Whenever in doubt, you can always use Jazz Hands!”)

With old and new “information,” The Pocket Film of Superstitions never bores, often tickles, and is always very, very British. It closes on the declaration, “we leave you to ponder the great weirdness of man,” having provided a good many explanations, of sorts, pertaining to some couple dozen irrational behaviors, reactions, and practices. Not a terribly long film—running for a sensible hour and a half—its breeziness wafts gently, and winkingly, over the viewer. And while it occasionally risks sailing into twee territory, Rutter holds the rudder just firmly enough to prevent Pocket Film from inducing true groans of regret.

The Pocket Film of Superstitions is currently on the festival circuit, and is expected to debut on streaming (and physical media?) by the end of the year or in early 2025. It next screens at the BUT (B-movie, Underground and Trash) Festival in Breda, the Netherlands, on August 29, followed by a date at the Amazing Fantasy Fest in Buffalo, New York in September. You can keep up with the schedule at The Pocket Film of Superstitions‘s official Facebook page.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It won’t be for everyone, but if you have an interest in superstition and folklore as well as a taste for English humour, The Pocket Film of Superstitions will be right up your alley. And for those who keep saying the genre needs something different, this is the kind of different it needs.” — Jim Morazzini, Voices from the Balcony (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE VOURDALAK (2023)

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Le Vourdalak

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Adrien Beau

FEATURING: , , Grégoire Colin, the voice of Adrien Beau

PLOT: Somewhere in the Balkans, a French nobleman finds himself enduring the hospitality of an isolated peasant family whose patriarch has gone missing.

Still from The Vourdalak (2023)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: There are too few fish-out-of-water “Horror of manners” films featuring eloquent and sickening man-eating marionette monsters. The Vourdalak does its bit to fill this regrettable gap.

COMMENTS: Pity the poor Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfé, an emissary de-horsed by roaming Turkish bandits. Pity, also, Jegor and Anya, a poverty-stricken couple forced to provide for Jegor’s ailing father Gorcha, outré sister Sdenka, troubled brother Piotr, and young son Vlad. Pity all of the rest of them, too, while you’re at it—except, perhaps, Gorcha. Or, perhaps you should. After all, he did clearly write in a parting note that if he were to return after the stroke of six o’clock, six days hence, he should immediately be murdered, as it would not actually be his self, but his body as corrupted by an evil, slobbering vourdalak. It may well have been a good, if superannuated, patriarch who went off to fight the bandits, but whatever returned is creepy, creepy, creepy.

The first act of The Vourdalak plays much like a period comedy piece, as the hapless Marquis skates between chagrin at his unlucky circumstances, awkward gratitude toward his lowly hosts, and a growing affection for the fay—and disgraced—Sdenka. He flirts, poorly, recounts go-nowhere anecdotes, and at one point, unprovoked, demonstrates his sarabande steps. (This last item turns out to be something of an important plot point, as the Marquis’ dancing chops end up, perhaps, saving his life later in the film.) The awkward whimsy turns dark at the spontaneous arrival, after six o’clock on the sixth day of absence, of a heavily bound, gaunt form: Gorcha, bearing with him the head of a troublesome Turkish bandit to be “hung above the door to send a message.”

The second and third acts chronicle the family’s downfall, as witnessed by the well-meaning, but regrettably inept, Marquis d’Urfé. Familial drama travels alongside familial dread, and the experience is increasingly peppered by Gorcha, now quite obviously—to everyone but his son Jegor—a sinister vourdalak. I couldn’t hope to do much justice in describing this fiend of legend (or, at least, of Tolstoian devisement), but the monster’s effects on the narrative and cinematic experience are alternately jarring and poetical—though, even when poetical, also rather jarring. A human-sized marionette, the creature is voiced and performed, so to speak, by the director, who has given his creation a personality situated somewhere between a mindless blood-sucker and the charming Uncle Irvin from The City of Lost Children.

Much of The Vourdalak‘s strangeness stems from this puppet creature, but the surrounding family add their own little bits of the bizarre. Piotr, the younger brother, is in the habit of dressing as a woman, something never explained and which, refreshingly, never elicits judgment from his siblings. Anja, the wife, maintains a subdued mania until the surrounding tragedies pile on too strongly. And of course, there’s the mysterious Sdenka, who nurses the most life-positive suicidal ambitions I’ve ever heard. Indeed, with its tight cast and ghoulish flourishes, The Vourdalak feels like a hit-and-run by the weird wagon: briefly dazing the viewer whilst doffing its cap with a “Pardon. Excuse me. Sorry!” as it lurches into the distance.

The Vourdalak is currently in limited release in theaters. We will update once at-home viewing options become available.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an intimate, though always dreamlike piece of world-building… what’s key is the strangeness of the setting… the film’s real triumph is in its use of a marionette: it’s absolutely horrible. It makes you recoil, and it’s full of ghastly otherworldliness, just what you need for a Gothic tale like this one.” — Keri O’Shea, Warped Perspective (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: ANIMALIA (2023)

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Oumaima Barid, Mehdi Dehbi, Fouad Oughaou

PLOT: A pregnant woman in Morocco is stranded away from her rich husband when an apocalyptic religious event sweeps the globe.

Still from Animalia (2023)

COMMENTS: Pregnant Itto, a poor Berber girl who has recently married a scion of a wealthy and influential family, is basically happy in her luxurious new life—despite feeling that her mother-in-law, in particular, will never completely accept her. An ambiguous global emergency disrupts her peace, however, separating her from her husband and forcing her to flee into the countryside, where she must confront both sexual prejudice and class resentment. Soon after, she has a hallucinatory experience of a cosmic, religious character, before reuniting with her rich family, who feast on as they always have despite the fact that the world appears to be coming to an end.

The effects of the worldwide disruption are kept as minimal as possible, which makes it seem even weirder and more inexplicable. Animals are acting strange, especially dogs, who now roam about in packs on rooftops, befriending some people while attacking others. Certain small towns are eerily deserted: have the residents all fled, or is there some other explanation for the depopulation? The movie includes one major special effect, a giant column of smoke wreathing around a glowing green core rising from the desert. A news report, broadcast in a now-deserted store, indicates that the source of all the strangeness appears to be linked to certain vague “presences.” Are the visitors aliens from outer space, or are they supernatural beings, angels or djinn? The script is studiously ambiguous on this point, requiring viewers to make their own judgements.

The film’s Islamic approach to mysticism is refreshing, and, in the end, undogmatic. A bitter, but honest, atheistic Berber is one of the most sympathetic characters. Another passing character caught in the maelstrom stresses that God is “elusive, like a black ant on a black stone on a dark night.” Alaoui stages a midpoint psychedelic sequence simply and effectively through a combination of ecstatic cinematography, double exposures, and trancelike music layered with the sounds of whispers and gently bleating sheep.

Technically, Animalia is advanced, especially for a modestly budgeted affair from first-time1 feature maker Alaoui. In only her second film performance, Oumaima Barid astounds, carrying the film, making Itto far more resourceful and resilient than she initially seems. The bleak but majestic Atlas mountains are beautifully photographed by cinematographer Noé Bach, with the dusty location lending a Mad Max ambiance to the pre-post-apocalyptic tale. Despite all this excellence, the slow pace and ambiguity ensure that only art-house aficionados need apply; this is one of those movies that polarizes awestruck critics and uncomprehending general audiences. But if you get on this film’s wavelength it might mesmerize you: thinking of Alaoui as a feminist, Muslim Tarkovsky is not a completely out-there comparison.

Animalia is many things: a drama about a woman in peril, a critique of modern Moroccan society, a science fictional fantasia about the end of the world, a spiritual meditation. And yet, I think of it primarily as an existential story. No matter where Itto goes, something separates her from others: she’s poor to the rich, rich to the poor, always caught in-between. Animalia is about the forces that separate people, and how they nevertheless find ways to connect despite being ultimately alone in a universe that’s impossible to fully comprehend.

Animalia is currently playing in art-house theaters, and available from some on-demand providers (see below.)

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“An increasingly surreal, even psychedelic journey with strong elements of socioeconomic and religious critique, this very accomplished movie packs a lot into just 90 minutes—it is, in every sense, a trip.”–Dennis Havey, “48 Hills” (festival screening)

  1. The scenario is basically an expansion of her 2019 short “So What If the Goats Die,” which we once featured as a Saturday Short but which has unfortunately been since blocked from general viewing. ↩︎
Capsules

CAPSULE: QUEENDOM (2023)

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Queendom is currently available for VOD purchase or rental.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Agniia Galdanova

FEATURING: Jenna Marvin

PLOT: A queer Russian performance artist fears for her freedom as she clashes with the law.

Still from Queendom (2023)

COMMENTS:  wrote that the responsibility of the artist is to “keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.” It’s difficult to imagine anyone embodying this principle more explicitly than “drag” artist Jenna (sometimes spelled “Gena”) Marvin.

I put “drag” in quotes, because, although her act is drag-inspired and drag-adjacent, that term hardly describes Marvin’s bizarre performance art. The locals who are discomfited by her appearance clearly recognize that she is challenging gender norms—she is frequently met with the Russian word for “fag”—but her costumes are so otherworldly and alien that they don’t meet a strict definition of cross-dressing. Tall, lithe (almost a ballerina body), and completely hairless, Jenna adorns herself with elaborate makeup and an assortment of bizarre sartorial choices including ruffs, duct tape, giant pipe cleaners, tentacle fingers, surreal latticed headgear, and so on. The only consistently feminine element are the high heels that accessorize every outlandish outfit.  She ventures out in public to, at best, stares, and at worst verbal abuse and harassment. She also makes short films for Tik Tok and Instagram—often set in amazing Siberian wilderness locations—where she takes out her frustrations by thrashing around in the mud in wild interpretative dances. Most dangerously, she attends protests against the Putin regime. In one, she dresses in a stilleto-heeled mockery of the Russian flag, which gets her thrown out of college; when the Ukrainian invasion comes, she walks down a Moscow street nearly nude wrapped in homemade barbed wire, which earns her a citation from the police and the threat of a court date.

With no narration and only a tiny bit of direct questioning from the documentarian, Queendom is almost entirely a fly-on-the-wall affair. It conveys enough information to keep you grounded in the developing story, although some knowledge of recent developments in Putin’s Russia is helpful. Anti-LGTBQ sentiment is encoded into the law there; faces of protestors or Jenna ‘s artistic collaborators are often blurred or carefully kept out of frame out of a sense of caution. But the social ostracism Jenna faces is perhaps even more telling. (“We have fear and subservience in our DNA,” Jenna’s friend tells her, referencing the country’s Soviet legacy.) Jenna’s contentious relationship with her grandfather—who, we gather, raised her—takes up a large portion of the story. Grandpa supports her, in his way, but does not pretend to understand either her sexuality or her creativity. His main concern is that, if she’s going to continue dressing as a freak, she better figure out how to make some money at it.

In the end—mild spoiler alert—Jenna does not go to prison or (worse) succumb to conscription, but is able to flee Russia to a European capital where she feels at home in a far more tolerant society. She has more courage than most of us, but does not, like Alexei Navalny (whose protest she attended dressed as the flag) have the ultimate courage to become a martyr. And who among us would? If I were in her heels, I would have fled far faster. She may have a duty to keep a margin of nonconformity alive—but she also has a responsibility to keep herself alive.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…more than a mere cabaret act, Marvin’s myriad outfits are a thrilling combination of theatricality, circus craft, avant-garde performance art, high camp, and something more otherworldly besides — as if H.R. Giger and Derek Jarman had a grotesque, unsettling baby… as well as the straight documentarian footage, there are surreal vignettes, Marvin creating visual art with her outfits and her emotions.”–John Nugent, Empire (contemporaneous)