Tag Archives: Death

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: WHITE NOISE (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Noah Baumbach

FEATURING: , Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle

PLOT: Episodes from the life and times of a suburban upper middle-class family.

Still from White Noise (2022)

COMMENTS: Noah Baumbach is an important figure in contemporary independent American cinema, so much so that Netflix offered him an exclusive contract for several years. Among the filmic seeds that blossomed through this partnership, White Noise is perhaps the most eccentric affair, at least stylistically. But let’s take a closer look to decode its meaning, aesthetic, and whether it can also be called bizarre.

Based on Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, White Noise is essentially a film about death. The plot centers on a typical suburban nuclear family engulfed in a false sense of security due to their economic and social status. The father, Jack (Adam Driver), is an upstanding member of the academic community,  lecturing as a history teacher specializing in the history of Nazism.

The narrative is divided into three segments: the first serves as an introduction, and the other two are (semi-)self-contained episodes. These episodic segments, mimicking different cinematic genres, disrupt the mundanity of everyday life and subvert ideas of normalcy and idealized unity.

Any illusion of everlasting well-being is dispelled through the constant implementation of memento mori techniques. These reminders of human mortality are everywhere, even when the characters choose deliberately to ignore them. At the university where Jack lectures, a co-professor discusses car crashes as a trope in popular culture; existential agonies lurk under the surface, and an everlasting, almost neurotic, yet deeply human, fear of death governs everyone’s actions.

In the second part, “The Airborne Toxic Event,” the sense of danger obtains concrete form.  Chaos ensues after a local chemical spill, playing out like a mix of apocalyptic fiction and an action-packed disaster blockbuster. In a playful nod to these cinematic traditions, the events that follow are extravagant, yet express a harsh reality about the fragility of the human condition.

“Dylarama” changes genre and style once again. Now we have a noirish revenge-thriller, implementing common tropes of the genre to tackle psychotic paranoia while also attacking any idealized sense of familial ties. The situations culminate in violent confrontations and a mental breakthrough for our protagonists.

White Noise is playful in the way it constantly reinvents itself. That’s why Adam Driver is an excellent choice for the main role, having tested himself in similarly challenging genre-bending films like Leos Carax‘s Annette from the previous year. White Noise‘s style is almost hysterical, with a rapid, often overlapping flow of dialogue and movement. Add the multicolored decor and two nightmare sequences, and this film surely verges on weird.

Yet it doesn’t fully go there. It is ironic, deconstructive, and deeply existential, for sure, balancing mundanity with a sense of dread, yet finding optimism in the end. It’s an eccentric cinematic experience, and it is a solid recommendation for fans of the unorthodox. For hardcore fans of the weird, though, there are better options out there.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The characters are acting like recognizable normal people, but the dialogue they are speaking seems like it’s coming from a beat poet’s fever dream, and the plot borders on the surreal.”– Bryce Hanson, Horror Movie Talk

I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average
Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS (2018)

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

FEATURING: , James Franco, Liam Neeson, , Tom Waits, , Tyne Daly, Brendan Gleeson, Saul Rubinek

PLOT: Six tales of the Old West, including a singing cowboy, an unlucky bank robber, an impresario and his hobbled talent, a tenacious gold prospector, a prospective bride, and a stagecoach full of tired travelers.

Still from The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

COMMENTS: The Coen Brothers have made a remarkable cinematic career out of a body of work that careens from grim realism to wild stylization, often making unexpected stops along that spectrum. Sometimes, their push in one direction has alienated fans of the other; if you like the harsh satire of Fargo, you probably won’t enjoy the heightened mannerisms of The Hudsucker Proxy, and the metaphysical mysteries of A Serious Man might feel impenetrable to lovers of the stoner wisdom of The Big Lebowski. When they turned their attention to Westerns, it seemed like the demands of the genre pushed them toward a more sober, realistic approach, as typified by the neo-noir charnel house of No Country for Old Men and the gritty pastoral (not to mention corrective) remake of True Grit. For the final film (to date) of their storied collaboration, Joel and Ethan returned to the Old West, but found a way to hit nearly every possible take on the genre along the way.

At first glance, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs appears to have all the elements to please fans of traditional Westerns: a showdown in an empty street, a wagon train weaving across the plains, a lone man doing battle with an entire tribe of Indian savages, panning for gold, stagecoaches, poker games, and a hangman’s noose. Far from playing to the crowd, however, these six vignettes are haunted by death and regret. There’s at least one fatality in each story, and the survivors come to a reckoning with the actions that have kept them alive. To the extent that any of these needed to be Westerns in the first place, it’s to highlight the harshness and swift cruelty of this place and time. There is a moral code, it’s unforgiving, and it is strictly enforced.

The opening chapter, which gives the film its name, is by far the most stylized of the set. Nelson does not merely play a cowboy but an archetype, wearing a suit of brilliant white, strumming a guitar and speaking directly to us of his philosophy. It’s cloyingly familiar, until he wields his pistol and reveals himself to be a whirlwind of brutality. What ensues is essentially one joke, but it’s a good one told very well: the fella in the white hat is extremely violent, morally repugnant, and dies quickly and without a trace of heroism. It’s a nose thumbed at Gene Autry and Tom Mix and every Hollywood fantasy of the West. In that regard, it perfectly sets the table for what is to come.

The next two stories demonstrate a dark humor that suggests sometimes you can’t win for losing. James Franco’s thief immediately finds himself in over his head in what should be a simple bank Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS (2018) →

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: HAUNTERS OF THE SILENCE (2025)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Tatu Heikkinen, Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen

FEATURING: Tatu Heikkinen, John Haughm, Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen

PLOT: Strange events beset a grieving husband in the wee hours of the night leading into October 31st.

Still from Haunters of the Silence (2025)

COMMENTS: The facts, as best they might be determined, are these: 1) the unnamed lead character has lost his beloved wife, and 2) his night-vision exterior surveillance camera picked up more than just a midnight rodent behaving in a silly manner. As for the rest of Haunters of the Silence, it’s just about all up for interpretation. A faded photographic image loses a balloon, a father (?), and finally a boy; ceremonial drumming may be a temporary cure for mind de-anchoring; and if a dream facsimile of your dead wife mutters “It’s okay”, perhaps it’s best to take her at her word.

Or not.

In the hopes of better explaining the Haunters of the Silence experience, I quote from director Tatu Heikkinen’s IMDb bio: “His work embraces abstraction and emotional stillness—rejecting the fast-paced editing in favor of grounded, contemplative storytelling.” This statement, as reflected in Haunters, is true in many ways. Heikkinen (and his real-life wife and co-director, Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen) embraces abstraction and emotional stillness. Abstraction comes in many forms, many of them being unlikely camera foregrounds framing background action, for instance, but also long stroboscopic sequences, and plenty of forays into straight-up dream imagery. (The protagonist retreating through a large storm drain through the center of the Shadow Man’s menacing outline in the cosmos is of particular note.)

Haunters of the Silence does have fast-paced editing, though. Shots hastily flicker from one to the next, which might risk leaving the viewer disoriented if weren’t for the meticulous, subtle, and grounding sound design: the listener, as it were, is rarely if ever jarred from the dream-logic ordeals put before them. This sensory-tension works nicely with the temporal-tension: time does not pass per usual in this film, and the Ancient and the Modern co-exist, with incense-burning and buzzing smartphones pulling upon each other across the millennia of human ritual.

As the reader will have noticed, my remarks fell into abstruseness more quickly than usual here, but I blame that on what I saw (and heard). Haunters of the Silence is a weird thing to experience—and it is more in the realm of an experience than a customary film. Tatu Heikkinen and Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen have built a precise sequence of sounds and images, which is as often baffling as it is beautiful. I give nothing away with this observation on the final scene when the Shadow Man emerges through the bedroom door of now-waking protagonist: life—like time, memory, and grief—does not finish so long as we are on this Earth.

If not longer.

Currently streaming on Relay, check the Haunters of the Silence official website for future updates.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Haunters of the Silence is avowedly experimental; this is not a narrative piece of filmmaking in any recognisable way, so this review opens with a proviso: it will not be for everyone, and in fact it will probably appeal to a very select band of film fans.” — Keri O’Shea, Warped Perspective (contemporaneous)