Tag Archives: Drama

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR (1981)

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DIRECTED BY: David Gladwell

FEATURING: Julie Christie, Leonie Mellinger, Christopher Guard, Debbie Hutchings

PLOT: In a United Kingdom ravaged by disorder and want, a solitary woman is forced by the state to take on a mysterious girl as a boarder; the girl grows up quickly, trying to build a new society in cooperation with a charismatic young man, while the older woman discovers a portal to the past that lets her observe an affluent Victorian family.

Still from memoirs of a Survivor (1981)

COMMENTS: Nobel laureate Doris Lessing once told a group of science fiction fans that the closest she ever got to writing an autobiography was her 1974 novel The Memoirs of a Survivor. The narrator goes nameless in that book, but given that the film adaptation of the work dubs Julie Christie’s quiet tenant with the initial “D” in the endcrawl, it’s safe to guess that she’s meant to be the author’s stand-in. Which is the first of this movie’s curiosities, since D ends up playing only a tangential role in the story that unfolds. What, you have to wonder, was Lessing trying to say about herself?

Two storylines do the lion’s share of the work here. We witness the steady decline of a decently sized English city (most of the location work was done in Norwich) as government structures vanish, resources dwindle, and the populace divides into those awaiting support and those trying to hold the community together on their own. But help is not on the way. We see a man standing next to a placard reading “No News Is Good News” telling a small crowd that a bus is coming to take them… somewhere. Meanwhile, a woman holds out food to a group of feral children, she looking like a typical bird lady and they presenting as rejects from a Quest For Fire casting call. (Every scene with the children is artlessly scored to a cloying rendition of Brahms’ “Lullaby.”) For those trying to keep a stiff upper lip, the end is decidedly at hand.

Of more immediate concern is the arrival of Emily (Mellinger), a teenager whose youthful naivete and optimism are challenged by a society too ill-equipped to give her a chance. Beyond the roof over her head and using her as the occasional sounding board for germinating opinions, D provides her little attention. So Emily quickly takes up with Gerald, a naïve young man whose troublemaking tendencies are sublimated into a growing burden to care for the town’s abandoned children. It’s a daunting task, and his compulsion to help even the most damaged puts enormous pressure on those around him, especially Emily and her unsteady transition into adulthood.

While all this is going on, Christie often feels like a guest star in her own movie. Returning to the screen after a three-year absence, her D is very much a distant observer. She watches the suffering of others but rarely seems to want for much, and Christie is simply too beautiful to pull off the dowdy, threadbare look of her character. In fact, boarder and tenant are moving in two different directions: while Emily invests in the future, D literally retreats into the past. She finds she can pass through the walls of her flat into the Victorian era, where she spies on a quietly unhappy family. A tightly-wound father (played without dialogue by Nigel Hawthorne concurrent with his work on “Yes, Minister”) who may be harboring untoward thoughts about his daughter, a small girl also named Emily. It makes for an interesting contrast, as the child Emily desperately wants to attract her father while the teenaged Emily finds herself drawn to and then repelled by a young man with paternal instincts. But we can never be sure how much of this D sees in her forays into the past, and it’s not something that comes up in her own time, until the film’s final scene.

This is where the movie really plays the weird card, with Christie’s discovery of an egg the size of a room, which is evidently all the persuasion she needs to convince Emily, Gerald, and a host of dirty children to follow her into the portal and leave their broken England behind for good. It reeks of deus ex machina to such an extent that it casts the autobiographical elements in a new light. If Lessing is D, and D’s solution is to escape into an imagined past, it’s tempting to view the author’s whole career as a flight from the ugliness and tribulation of her present circumstances. If that interpretation is right, it’s a powerful self-criticism of her ventures into speculative fiction. But it’s also an abrupt and incomplete finish to the compelling circumstances she herself has created. If you don’t like the reality you’re in, find another one? Perhaps, but I suspect this survivor has postponed a reckoning, rather than come out the other side.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

Memoirs of a Survivor is the sort of film that would never get made these days. It’s grim, thought-provoking stuff… This is not a film with any answers or a trite Hollywood ending; in fact I’m still scratching my head about the ending… there are many elements within the film that are surreal or just plain weird. “–Justin Richards, Blueprint Review

(This movie was nominated for review by Steve Mobia. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)         

CAPSULE: LOVE LIES BLEEDING (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Rose Glass

FEATURING: , Katy O’Brian, , Anna Baryshnikov, Dave Franco,

PLOT: In a small Southwestern city, Lou (Stewart) manages a gym and generally keeps her head down, keeping an eye on her sister, Beth (Malone) and her abusive husband, JJ (Franco), while keeping distance from her dad, Lou Sr. (Harris), a major player in the local crime scene. When Lou meets Jackie, who’s temporarily working for her dad while saving money for a body building competition in Vegas, sparks fly, setting off a conflagration which threatens to burn everything to the ground.

 

Still from love lies bleeding (2024)

COMMENTS: It’s reductive to call Love Lies Bleeding just a queer neo-noir, but that is basically what it is. It hits all the right noir notes: shady characters mired in shady dealings for questionable reasons. The setting (New Mexico, 1989) brings the “neo” to the noir, along with the fact that the star-crossed protagonists are a lesbian couple instead of the usual heterosexual pairing. And at first glance, it seems that, interesting and entertaining as it is—performances are good all around, as well as Glass’ direction—there’s nothing truly “weird” about this, at least not in the way we at 366 Weird Movies define the term.

However, as an A24 release, it’s at least atypical: it ain’t no Bound, for sure. For one thing, the setting allows for Glass and co-writer Weronika Tofilska to make some cultural commentary. There’s a solid background of violence always hovering about, and Lou Sr.’s club/shooting range is always packed with people eagerly exercising their Second Amendment rights, evoking specters of the wild west. There’s also the gym rat culture: intimidating motivational slogans and steroid use, which is a major plot point in the story.

The weird elements aren’t exactly subtle, but they are startling and metaphorical: a massive ravine in the landscape that reads as rather vaginal and several instances of ‘roid rage. At the bodybuidling competition, Jackie vomits up a full-grown Lou. The climatic confrontation between Jackie, Lou, and Lou Sr. has been called “the most A24 ending of A24 endings.” It works well, as long as it’s not taken literally, and it doesn’t detract from the denouement, which isn’t afraid to put the worm in the apple, as noir endings go. It may not be “weird” in the full sense, but there’s enough weird to notice in this hot, queer neo-noir.

Still 2 from Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

Currently streaming on several platforms like Max, Hulu, and Sling, the film is also on a Region-free Blu-ray with a commentary by Glass and Tofilska, two featurettes—“In the Land of Guns and Muscles” and “Sex, Steroids and Codependency”—and an image gallery. A 4K UHD will be available in January 2025.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… an exciting, instant classic that will hopefully usher in a new era of unapologetically weird lesbian cinema.”–Jourdain Searles, Autostraddle (contemporaneous)

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)

CAPSULE: FAMILY PORTRAIT (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Lucy Kerr

FEATURING: Deragh Campbell

PLOT: An extended family has gathered at a lakeside retreat to take the annual Christmas card photo, but one woman notices that their mother is missing.

Still from family portrait (2023)

COMMENTS: The good news is debuting director Kerr shoots certain scenes with real flair. The film opens on a three-minute tracking shot of a woman trying to herd a family of about 16 or so people, presumably to the location of the titular event. But everyone seems to have their own agenda: soccer balls get thrown in anger, adults keep backtracking, and of course the children all zig-zag cheerfully in and out of frame. The accompanying sound mix begins as a low rumble of wind; gradually indistinct conversations and bird chirps seep into the mix. The procession arrives at the appointed spot and the camera sticks in place, but the low-key chaos continues as everyone mulls about instead of assuming their positions for the photo. The diegetic babble of family conversation overcomes the gentle drone. This is Kerr at her best, generating subtle unease from mundane events. It looks spontaneous, but must be carefully choreographed.

Notably, there is no figure in the assembly that might serve as matriarch of the clan. That fact is the closest thing to a plot hook to be found in Family Portrait. After the opening scene, the movie changes to a series of conversational vignettes about the family and some lovely shots of Hunt County, Texas hill country. (This is the type of slowcore cinema that takes time out to watch an ancillary character silently smoke a cigarette in real time.) Most of these early scenes don’t amount to much besides briefly sketching out the assembly; a notable exception is a discussion of an old family photograph which had been repurposed by a third party, ending with the observation “you can’t always trust photographs.”  A crucial bit of information is dropped when we learn that a distant cousin has just died from a mystery illness. Suddenly, one of the family, Katy, notices that her mother is missing—-but no one else seems concerned about mom’s absence in the slightest. (Look for a couple other “lost” souls and “disappearances” sprinkled throughout the movie.) Katy’s quest to find her mother rises to an obsession, merges with her desire to get everyone together for the photograph no one else seems interested in, and funnels into a low-key panic attack. Other reviewers have emphasized the “surrealism” of the film’s finale, but this is overstated: the ending is an odd bit of alternate reality, circling back to the opening in a transformed fashion, but nothing profoundly weird pops up. More importantly, by the ending nothing has been resolved—and, in fact, precious little has even been suggested.

In many respects Family Portrait resembles Picnic at Hanging Rock, which also dwelt on a mysterious disappearance. But whereas ‘s classic presents a pastoral mystery with no solution, Family Portrait dives even further into abstraction, offering a pastoral scenario in which the mystery is whether there is any mystery at all. The acting is competent and the sound mixing and cinematography in this indie are superlative, giving some scenes a real punch; I just wish the script had provided the viewer a little more guidance. Without more perspective and thematic teasing, the is-mom-missing-or-not ambiguity was not enough for me to hang my hat on.

The director’s statement about the film give some backgrounds and hints about the ideas that were going through her head when she made Family Portrait, and may prove helpful to some who are bewildered by a movie that comes close to being an experiment in non-narrative cinema.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The art of surrealist filmmaking is one that has become a rare commodity in the modern cinematic landscape, with filmmakers like David Lynch having a more infrequent presence. With Family Portrait, however, debuting writer-director Lucy Kerr looks to revive this mysterious and ominous atmosphere through the similarly innocuous titular gathering. And while it does succeed in creating a bizarre atmosphere that captures plenty of simmering tension, it’s trapped between being a proof-of-concept short film and a feature-length effort.”–Grant Hermanns, Screen Rant (contemporaneous)

CAPSULE: PEDRO PÁRAMO (2024)

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Rodrigo Prieto

FEATURING: Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Tenoch Huerta, Mayra Batalla, Ilse Salas, Roberto Sosa, Dolores Heredia

PLOT: A man travels to the Mexican ghost town of Comala searching for his father, Pedro Páramo.

Still from Pedro Paramo (2024)
Pedro Páramo. (L to R) Tenoch Huerta as Juan Preciado, Mayra Batalla as Damiana in Pedro Páramo. Cr. Juan Rosas / Netflix ©2024

COMMENTS: Trekking through an endless expanse of desolate desert, Juan meets a man leading a train of burros. Juan explains that he’s going to Comala searching for his father, Pedro Páramo, to fulfill his mother’s dying wish. The traveler knows Pedro Páramo—pretty well, it turns out—but warns Juan that the village is deserted and his father is long dead. Juan nevertheless enters the town and finds lodging with a psychic woman who just happens to be an old friend of his mother’s (and, naturally, of Pedro Páramo). In the eerie silence of the abandoned town, strange things begin happening; then, with little forewarning, the movie shuttles us into flashbacks from Pedro Páramo’s life.

These flashbacks are presented in an entirely different style and tone from Juan’s experiences during what turns into an eternal night in Comala. The town is now drab, dusty, and decrepit, lensed in weathered browns and worn grays, but in its heyday it was lush and green and thriving. The flashbacks flow in a nonlinear stream, and there are brief moments of disorientation as the audience figures out who the characters are and at what stage of life; but the past holds no spectral magic, unlike Juan’s present. An unflattering portrait of Pedro Páramo emerges: an ambitious man, driven by greed and lust, who brings tragedy to the town. He fathers many children (mostly though seduction, adultery, and rape), kills many rivals, and has a contentious relationship with the town priest, who has as much reason to resent him as to fear him. Pedro Páramo seems to represent Mexico’s landed class, and will clash with a group of armed peasant rebels—although he chooses not to fight them, but tries to negotiate while hoping for a chance to betray them. You search in vain for a reason to like Pedro, but even his genuine loves, for a rapist son and for his childhood sweetheart, are tinged with perversity and instinctual evil.

While both parts of the film—the magical realist ghost story and the completely realist generational saga—are engaging in their own way, there is a serious imbalance between them that turns into a major flaw. The film is caught between two worlds, but chooses one over the other, as it abandons Juan’s mystical experiences in Comala at about the halfway point—just as they reach a peak coinciding with a vision of a cyclone of naked bodies spinning in the desert air over the town square. I am not sure how the original source novel handled the frequent switching between Juan and Pedro’s perspectives, but it feels wrong here; as we watch the second half of  Pedro Páramo’s story play out, we keep expecting to return to check in with Juan, and that never really happens. His absence is particularly hard to take if the part of the movie that really interests you was the encounters with the town’s many ghosts, rather than the tragic backstory.

This odd pacing decision is a blow to the film, but not a fatal one. By the time Juan disappeared from the story, I still wanted to see how his father turned out in the end. Like most petty tyrants, he comes to a bad end, but only after too long of a life spent enjoying the fruits his wickedness.

Pedro Páramo was adapted from a famous and influential 1955 Mexican novel by Juan Rulfo, which was lauded by writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges. It has been adapted once before, for Mexican television. Prieto, the acclaimed cinematographer of Brokeback Mountain, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Barbie chose this novel as his feature directing debut. Naturally, the film looks amazing, and the cast of Mexican actors unknown north of the border put in excellent work, particularly the stoical Manuel Garcia-Rulfo in the title role. The film debuted at the Toronto Film Festival and then was snatched up by Netflix, who did it a disservice by not giving it a U.S. theatrical release (therefore making it ineligible for awards season consideration). At least more people will have the chance to view it on the mega-streamer—assuming they can find it buried in Netflix’s content graveyard, international art film quadrant.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s hard not to get lost in ‘Pedro Páramo’ even as the movie eventually gets lost in itself, taking on a more classical cinematic form that doesn’t fully click. Thankfully, its surreal allure — buoyed by a sense of tragic longing — is powerful enough to echo throughout its runtime.”–Siddhant Adlakha, Variety (contemporaneous)