Tag Archives: Drama

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CAPSULE: AN EVENING SONG (FOR THREE VOICES) (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Graham Swon

FEATURING: , , Peter Vack

PLOT: Barbara and Richard, married writers from the East Coast, move to the Midwest and hire Martha, a quietly pious local, as their maid.

COMMENTS: One narrator evokes simple matter-of-factness; the second narrator segues into a reminiscence of another world; and the final narrator readily apologizes for what he’s about to do. These three voices in Graham Swon’s feature, An Evening Song, are its body, spirit, and mind; with the three characters—an innocent country local named Martha, the disillusioned writer-prodigy Barbara, and her mentally restless husband, Richard—conveying the film’s philosophical pull and tug. Events do literally happen in An Evening Song (indeed, it is loosely based on real events and individuals), but Swon has crafted more of a meditation oscillating around a narrative through-line than a traditional drama.

Over the course of eighty-odd minutes, Swon’s players perform the strange and gentle decline of a marriage on the rocks. Relocating to the Middle of Nowhere, Iowa, two different writerly types observe their hired help from their own perspectives. Barbara, having begun to give up on life more than a decade prior, has reached a critical stage of ennui that is only slightly alleviated by the discovery of this mysterious, scarred country girl, who seems to embody a delightfully unsolvable riddle. Richard, devoid of any bent towards mysticism, is commendably observant and empathetic, and entranced by Martha as well—but as a riddle to attempt solving. Under the couple’s gaze, Martha gazes back: she perceives Barbara’s ethereality with admiration, but also perceives Richard’s constantly ticking pragmatism with appreciation. We have here a love triangle, of sorts.

But in what way? Swon raises many questions in this film—and wanders (with purpose) down many avenues. Richard, bless his heart, accommodates to his utmost, and for all we can observe is impossible to offend, disappoint, or anger. (This is for the best, no doubt, as he has found himself dropped right in the middle of two particularly conundrous individuals.) Barbara does love Richard (maybe, probably), but longs for a life in the mystical “nowhere” reminisced throughout her narrations—which Richard cannot provide. Martha, on the other hand, does: her piety and humility raise her to ineffable heights in a dream she conveys to Barbara during a climactic, quiet encounter in a placid field, after which the story pivots and moves irrevocably toward the dissolution of Barbara’s will to remain on this plane of existence.

The song continues, narrations bump up against one another and fuse, with all three becoming harmoniously concurrent during a contemplative, sleepless night-and-day meshing of perspectives. This film is no Eraserhead, to be certain; but it is a curious experience. With full marks for dreamy ethereality, Swon’s pocket-sized meditation manages a tension from its competing and complementary voices, creating something nearly imperceptible, maybe close to a nothing, but which lingers in the mind like a mystifying apparition.

An Evening Song (for Three Voices) completed a short run in New York last week and will play at the Acropolis in Los Angeles for one night only, May 29. We’ll let you know when it’s available online.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Stylistically, Swon’s film shares an aesthetic kinship with some of Guy Maddin’s films, but it is far less accessible… The ambition and craftsmanship are laudable, but the hallucinatory haze too often produces a sensation of narrative drift. Recommended with the above caveats for experienced patrons of unconventional cinema” — Joe Bendel, J.B. Spins (contemporaneous)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

CAPSULE: INVENTION (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Courtney Stephens

FEATURING: , Sahm McGlynn, James N. Kienitz Wilkins

PLOT: Actress Callie Hernandez comes to terms with her eccentric father’s death, while portraying the character Carrie Fernandez who inherits her father’s patent for an “electromagnetic healing device.”

COMMENTS: Brought to our attention by a reader who noticed some uncanny similarities to Certified Weird curiosity  After Last Season, Invention tells a story of death and medical experimentation. Both films are low-budget explorations of weird science, but the comparison ends there—in Invention‘s favor, as the more coherent and watchable film (although After Last Season earns the award for weirdness).

In real life, actor-writer Hernandez is the daughter of Dr. John Hernandez, an alternative medical guru who hosted a program on local television. Six months after his death, Hernandez began collaborating with director Stephens on a script inspired by her mourning experiences. Actual footage from her father’s VHS archives made its way into the film. The story becomes a dual narrative about Hernandez and her fictional counterpart, “Carrie Fernandez,” the daughter of elusive “Dr. J.” When she unexpectedly inherits a patent discovers upon his death, she discovers her father secretly invented a “vibronic” machine.

Dr. J’s story is reminiscent of Wilhelm Reich, another traditionally educated medical professional whose career took a strange turn when he began developing outré theories (whom readers may recall from the Certified Weird film WR: Mysteries of the Organism). Dr. J’s device isn’t sexual, but Carrie finds out the FDA recalled it for its dubious medical value.

People of a certain age will remember seeing television personalities like Dr. J on public access, programs that were a bewildering mix of actual facts, bizarre theories, and advertising for various New Age products and therapies. I distinctly remember flipping past these types of shows on PBS back in the 1980s and ’90s (to a kid, they were incredibly boring). I can only imagine what it must have been like growing up with someone like Dr J for a father. Invention gives the viewer a pretty good idea, though the film mostly focuses on the absurdities of dealing with the loss of a parent in a death-phobic country like the United States.

Invention excels at black humor, maintaining a consistent tone of deadpan awkwardness as Callie/Carrie endures stilted conversations with funeral parlor staff and estate executors, while navigating the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of corporate bereavement policies. As Callie encounters the various people connected to her father’s mysterious machine, she tries to learn more about it, but conflicting stories emerge. Some of Dr J’s friends and patients remain convinced of his misunderstood genius; others politely refrain from calling him a crackpot to his grieving daughter.

Brief scenes of intensely colored video and animation emphasize Carrie’s descent into this psychedelically-tinged world of alternative medicine, as does a tea party in an “Alice in Wonderland”-themed corn maze. The intertwined narratives of Callie and Carrie, united by archival television footage, blur the boundaries between fiction and reality, as Dr. Hernandez essentially plays himself in both. But aside from the animated sequences, the film’s style remains realist. It hovers at the edge of the rabbit hole without ever tumbling in.

Many viewers will probably leave this film wanting to know more about the mysterious machine, but it remains cryptic. A series of cathode-ray tubes connected by a ring of coiled wire and staged in a red-walled room, it looks suitably science-fictional, and its main champions are a little too “woo” to be believed. Callie references Nikola Tesla’s theories when trying to defend to father’s vision, but she doesn’t seem entirely convinced. Even after she begins using the machine, she never reveals whatever effect it may or may not be having on her.

Hernandez looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t remember what else I had seen her in—probably because she was buried under layers of mascara in Under the Silver Lake (as Millicent Sevence, another daughter in mourning for her eccentric father). She also co-starred in Benson and Moorhead’s The Endless. Which is  to say, Hernandez has some fledgling weird credentials. Courtney Stephens has been assistant director on a number of pictures. I’ll be curious to see how both their careers develop. Invention has weird potential; perhaps someday we’ll see something full blown weird from its creators.

Invention is currently playing in limited cities across North America, with a wider release planned for Summer 2025.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This strange, personal movie is a mind meld between the experimental filmmaker Courtney Stephens (‘Terra Femme’) and the actress Callie Hernandez (‘Alien: Covenant’)… ‘Invention’ is committed to finding its own wavelength.”–Ben Kenigsberg, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan, who suggested “If After Last Season left an impact on anyone, it would probably have to be Courtney Stephens and her film Invention from 2024. The trailer is a pretty strong homage: minimalist keyboard music, cardboard in the background, CGI dreams, questions that go nowhere, and shot on film.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

 

 

Capsules

CAPSULE: ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL (2024)

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On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is currently available on VOD for purchase or rental.

DIRECTED BY: Rungano Nyoni

FEATURING: Susan Chardy, Elizabeth Chisela, Doris Naulapwa, Esther Singini

PLOT: A middle-class Zambian woman finds her uncle’s dead body lying in the road, and then is reluctantly tasked with hosting his funeral arrangements.

Still from On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024)

COMMENTS: Returning late at night from a costume party (in a bizarre rhinestone mask and trash-bag jumper that looks weird but turns out to have a perfectly logical explanation: the outfit’s from a popular Missy Elliot music video), Shula comes across her Uncle Fred’s dead body lying in the road. She immediately puts on the same grim expression she will wear throughout the rest of the film: the look of a woman who is intensely annoyed that she will now be obligated to pretend to care. After reporting the body, she has to put her career on pause for a drawn-out funeral that involves housing dozens of mourners, enduring a lot of crawling and wailing from the women of the family, cooking and serving meals to the men, observing complicated and inconvenient taboos and obligations, and trying to keep quiet about the terrible secret about Uncle Fred that everyone knows (and which will be revealed early on even if you don’t guess it).

Guinea Fowl has a few easy-to-identify dream sequences, and occasional odd touches (the partially flooded rooms of Bupe’s college dorm.) It features an indifferent, collage-like timeline: there’s little to orient you, as Shula changes location from house to hospital room without much explanation, and the nights seem to stretch on forever so you can’t tell how much time really passes. It’s the kind of “surrealism” mainstream critics eat up: mild, restrained, tasteful, and purely decorative. What’s more interesting here than either the base drama or the absurdist accoutrements, at least to outsiders, are the funeral procedures themselves, which mix Christianity with older traditions and culminate in a trial-like meeting between Fred and his wife’s families where they angrily argue over dividing up his possessions (without any visible concern for the many orphans he leaves behind).

I’m a tiny bit baffled by the universal critical acclaim Guinea Fowl has received; I’m not surprised that most critics loved it, but I am surprised that every critic on Rotten Tomatoes loved it (not a single reviewer found themselves the slightest bit bored at times?) It’s an aggressively niche movie; as a female-centered art-house drama from Africa, it couldn’t force it’s way into many stateside theaters even with A24’s marketing muscle behind it. It sports hallmarks mainstream critics love: realist drama, feminist and ethnographic themes, an uncontroversially important subject. But, while undoubtedly well-made, it strikes me as too obvious and uneventful, with the advertised surrealism and absurdity insufficiently fierce to raise it above similarly themed dramas. But I’m clearly in a minority in confessing only a distant, cool admiration for Nyoni’s sophomore film.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There are surreal and absurdist touches throughout Nyoni’s second feature… she has a perfect sense of how to blend no-nonsense realism with its more magical counterpart.”–David Fear, Rolling Stone (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: OMNI LOOP (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Bernardo Britto

FEATURING: Mary-Louise Parker, Ayo Edebiri

PLOT: A retired scientist uses pills that send her back exactly one week in time to try to find a (time travel-based) cure before the black hole growing in her chest kills her.

Still from omni loop (2024)

COMMENTS: Omni Loop wisely puts its best scene up front. In a hospital corridor, a doctor delivers a diagnosis worthy of : Zoya has an incurable black hole growing in her chest. As he delivers the news that she has only about a week to live to her stunned daughter and husband, a crowd of doctors, nurses and orderlies in the background erupt in shouts and applause.

Sadly, this may be the last time you laugh during Omni Loop, which teases itself as a fantastical comedy, then turns into a serious seep dramatic dive character study. The inexplicable black hole and a pill that enables time travel (rewinding the swallower’s life by exactly one week) is joined by one other worthy absurdist touch: the Nanoscopic Man, a victim of a scientific experiment (and a quantum 21st century update on a classic sci-fi B-movie hero).

Now, the black hole and the Nanoscopic Man are two elements worthy of a weird movie, but like the film’s flirtation with comedy, weirdness is not something Omni Loop is willing to lean into. In fact, these plot pieces are completely superfluous; if you just replace the black hole with cancer and the Nanoscopic Man with any sort of scientific gizmo that performs the same function, you will have essentially the same movie. And perhaps the movie would even better without its scintilla of surrealism, which distracts you from taking the characters and their world seriously. The science fiction angle, as well, is barely addressed—there is no transformative technology and no meaningful special effects, its just two women talking about arbitrary scientific theories necessary to advance the plot—but sci-fi at least supplies the film’s essential premise.

That’s not to say Omni Loop is a bad film. On the contrary, it’s cleverly constructed, even if the script seems bit padded at times. The performances are excellent. Mary-Louise Parker conveys the proper sense of a smart, driven woman who’s also understandably conflicted, at times sad, at times weary of living through the same week over and over for what could be several lifetimes worth of research. Edebiri does as well as possible with a less-developed character (a little time could have been taken away from Zoya and devoted to Paula’s personal trauma in order to raise the stakes of the story). The film even raises an interesting moral dilemma: what happens to all those alternate timelines when Zoya takes the pill and resets her personal history? In attempting to save a single version of herself, is she creating an unforgivable multitude of grieving families spread across multiple realities? In the end, the movie settles into a message that fits organically into Zoya’s persona as a high-achieving scientist who’s left it all behind to raise a family, and who’s struggling with regret over missed opportunities. The movie’s resolution is unambiguous, and the resolution of Zoya’s internal struggle feels a bit obvious, but the core message is a meaningful. It’s just a shame that the movie is intent on hopping about through distracting comedy, absurdism, and science fiction, instead of focusing on what really matters to it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The result, pleasant enough but frustratingly bland, exists in a soupy, ill-defined emotional middle ground—occasionally amusing but not quite funny, and unable (or unwilling) to substantively commit to thoughtful, penetrating melancholia…  Given the relative lack of absurdism present elsewhere, these [weird] bits aren’t so much whimsical background details as candy sprinkles on a savory casserole.”–Brent Simon, AV Club (contemporaneous)

Omni Loop [DVD]

Omni Loop [DVD]
  • "… a really well-done piece of Sci-fi story telling" - RogerEbert.com
  • 100% Rotten Tomatoes Score!
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Capsules

CAPSULE: LOVE & CRIME (1969)

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Meiji · Taishô · Shôwa: Ryôki onna hanzai-shi

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Rika Fujie, Yukie Kagawa, Yoshio Kodaira, Teruko Yumi

PLOT: His wife’s suicide inspires a mortician to consider four famous Japanese crimes of passion.

Still from love and crime (1969)

COMMENTS: The fact that Love & Crime begins with a gory autopsy of an attractive nude woman should let you know where it’s coming from. Even more perversely, said autopsy is performed by the decedent’s husband—shouldn’t the morgue have a rule against that?—and he’s not as visibly torn up about it as you might assume. The verdict is suicide, complicated by the fact that another man’s semen was found in the body.

Instead of  a) mourning or b) launching an investigation into his dead wife’s private life, the doctor instead opts to c) travel around Japan and interview people associated with infamous recent crimes of passion, in hopes of gaining insight into his wife’s psychological state (?) These consist of the noirish story of a seductress in a love quadrangle who directly and indirectly murders to gain possession of an inn, the case of Sada Abe (who cut off her lover’s penis and whose story would later form the basis for‘s In the Realm of the Senses), a serial killer rapist, and a woman who becomes a killer after her husband develops leprosy.

These case studies are all told as flashbacks, and each of the flashbacks themselves consistently include at least one more flashback. This confusing structure can make the stories difficult to follow, especially for modern Western viewers who aren’t the least bit familiar with the true crime inspirations. (At least one reviewer didn’t realize the beheaded woman and the leper’s wife were the same story, and it’s not hard to see how the confusion arises.) Adding to the disjointed feel, the third story—that of the postwar rapist—is completely out of tone with the other two. It’s the only one in black and white and the only one where a male killer is the chief subject. And while the previous two stories ranged from naughty to gruesome, this one is brutally unpleasant and unrewarding. Unlike the more story-based segments that came before, it’s essentially a series of repeated rape/killing re-enactments, with the perp using exactly the same m.o. each time. Why was this segment even included in the doctor’s purported search to find the root causes of female crime? In a classic bit of patriarchal logic, our doctor wonders, “Did the evil that lives within all women cry out to him? Is it women’s bodies that drive men to madness? Or rather, is it women themselves that they drive mad?” Huh?

The wraparound story is terrible, a shameless and poorly-though-out pretext for introducing scenes of sex and violence. But Ishii nevertheless proves a talented stylist. The camerawork is superior. Scenes are thoughtfully framed and staged. There are numerous artistic closeups. At trial, Sada Abe recounts her love affair and as she becomes absorbed in her memories, the background spectators fade into shadow and the camera zooms in on her schoolgirl-prim, spotlit face. The score, which utilizes what sounds like footsteps echoing down a hallway and other atmospheric noises as percussive effects, is impressive. These sleazy misogynist melodramas don’t deserve the cinematic style Ishii expends on them. Fortunately, the prolific director would find material worthier of his talents with his next two projects, the adaptation Horrors of Malformed Men and the supernatural samurai film Blind Woman’s Curse.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an entertaining mix of sleazy exploitation and arthouse-style direction that, if light on the social commentary you might expect, delivers a solid mix of lurid thrills and strong production values.”–Ian Jane, Rock! Shock! Pop! (Blu-ray)

Love And Crime [Blu-ray]

Love And Crime [Blu-ray]
  • Director Teruo Ishii delivers four dramatized tales of real-life crimes of passion involving women across the ages in this grotesque anthology.
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