Tag Archives: Drama

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE UNRAVELING (2023)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

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)

Capsules

CAPSULE: FAMILY PORTRAIT (2023)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Lucy Kerr

FEATURING:

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)

Capsules

CAPSULE: PEDRO PÁRAMO (2024)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

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)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CONFESSIONS [KOKUHAKU] (2010)

2 Comments

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Tetsuya Nakashima

FEATURING: Takako Matsu, Yukito Nishii, Kaoru Fujiwara, Ai Hashimoto, Yoshino Kimura,

PLOT: A schoolteacher informs her class that that two of her students are responsible for the death of her daughter, and she has exacted revenge by secretly exposing them to a fatal disease.

still from confessions (2010)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Confessions offers an unusual mix of styles and goals: a brutal revenge thriller, a screed against the inhumanity of Japanese schoolchildren, a dark and twisted mystery, a gentle teen romance, and a meditative drama paced deliberately enough to make jealous, all living side-by-side within the same film. On their own, none reinvent the wheel, but the resulting bouillabaisse is a creation unto itself.

COMMENTS: The very last word spoken in Confessions is “Kidding.” The word is wielded like a dagger to the heart. There have been no jokes told over the preceding 100+ minutes, and even moments of smiles have been laced with cruelty or cynicism. It’s the final opportunity for the movie to make clear its intentions, and this final utterance establishes once and for all that its blood runs ice cold.

That emotional intelligence is no one’s priority is made clear from the film’s opening gambit, in which nearly the entire first act of the movie is given over to a monologue by Ms. Moriguchi, the class teacher. Her raucous class ignores her announcement that this is her last day, and pays little heed to her mentions of her dead child and her dying husband. It’s only when she happens to mention murder that she finally gets their attention; they are intensely focused as she intimates that the culprits are in the room, and her revelation that she has spiked the class milk supply with AIDS-tainted blood sends them into a complete tizzy. It’s all disrespect until the stakes turn selfish, and Moriguchi stays cool and detached the entire time.

Confessions repeats this theme of heartless self-interest throughout: a mother abandons her child to pursue a career. Another is irritated at having to engage with a new teacher following Moriguchi’s departure: “She only cares about her own child, more than for her students.” Students are jealous of the media attention paid to peers who commit murder. Most tellingly, the two students responsible for the girl’s death react in equally selfish but wildly contrasting ways: one becomes feral and wracked with existential doubt, while the other doubles down on a sociopathic mindset, devising a plan to wipe out the entire school. Of course, there’s a dark irony in the later revelation that this homicidal endeavor is actually central to someone else’s vengeful scheme.

The confessions of the title are ostensibly the admissions by each of the major participants in the story concerning their role in the events depicted. But this is mostly a nod to the story’s origins as a novel, and a means of keeping the tale’s many twists and turns concealed—because confession suggests guilt, and that is something none of the characters feel for very long. In fact, Nakashima luxuriates in both the pain and the fury of his protagonists, frequently lingering in the moment through lovingly detailed slow-motion imagery (often accompanied by Radiohead songs to maximize the drama).

Confessions is an effective piece of cinema, but a grim and nasty work. It’s a cousin to the all-the-kids’-fault nihilism of Battle Royale or the nausea-inducing machinations of Oldboy. (The climactic revelation also brought to mind the notoriously bleak South Park episode “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” which itself has a lofty antecedent in Shakespeare.) It’s a terrifically acted, beautifully rendered world that almost actively discourages revisiting. Not kidding.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Overall, Confessions is a fairly solid, creatively made picture taking a relatively simple narrative, small cast and handful of locations and creating a continuously engaging and interesting film largely through its techniques. That being said, its bloated, confused and downright bizarre plot, coupled by its overextended runtime and curious split, made it somewhat more difficult to fully enjoy.” – William Schofield, Norwich Film Festival       

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

Confessions [Blu-ray]

Confessions [Blu-ray]
  • Best Director (Tetsuya Nakashima) of Award of the Japanese Academy 2010
  • Best Film of Award of the Japanese Academy 2010
  • Best Screenplay of Award of the Japanese Academy 2010
Check Price
Capsules

CAPSULE: PETROL (2022)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Alena Lodkina

FEATURING: Nathalie Morris, Hannah Lynch

PLOT: Eva is unsure of her film thesis subject until she meets a cryptic young performance artist named Mia.

Still from Petrol (2022)

COMMENTS: Petrol. Petrol. Petrol. (“Petrill?”) After twenty-four hours, I’m still chewing over this title, and how it relates to what I saw. It’s a slippery little movie, so perhaps that fuel’s slickness should come to mind. Alena Lodkina’s sophomore efforts defies easy description. It’s a character study, sure; it’s an exploration of filmmaking (our protagonist is a final-year film student); it’s got some inter-generational stuff going on. And it might just be one of those “coping with loss” kind of explorations.

But it’s hard to say. As Eva shyly navigates life—and the pursuit of a film degree—chance intervenes: first, when Eva accidentally comes across a performance arts troupe whilst traveling a cliffside with a small boom mic, capturing the ambient sounds; second, when she observes one of those performance artists dropping a locket in town. When Eva returns the locket, so begins her relationship with an enigmatic (and altogether Artsy) young woman named Mia, who by all accounts is “living her life” and, as evidenced by the narrative’s sometimes desperate indications, is a rather “deep” person.

Frankly, I didn’t find her all that deep; just young and a touch lachrymose—if perhaps occasionally whimsical. Kind of like this movie’s general energy. Magical realism rears its head at least six times. A finger snap brings a picnic spread into existence, pre-referencing a literary passage which appears later in the film; a couple of pertinent winks of the eye—one appearing from a coffee surface reflection—and strange “reflections” from behind make us question both Eva’s and our own perceptions. Who is Mia? What is art? What is film, in the context of art? Are we interconnected?

And so on. Petrol kept my interest, despite me neither knowing too well what was happening nor caring too deeply about it. Eva’s film professor is a highlight, his brief appearance a master class in diplomatic guidance as he civilly remarks that it’s important to have mastery of film rules and tropes before subverting them; and there’s her fellow student with his down-to-earth ambitions to make a movie about an abattoir cleaner contrasting nicely with Eva’s more ephemeral ambitions. But for the most part, Petrol feels like it’s running on fumes: it gets you to the destination, but not without the worry you’ll end up nowhere at all.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Alena Lodkina’s dreamlike film, about a pivotal friendship between two young Melbourne women, has a poetic and sometimes surreal narrative style that conveys a vividly emotional take on the world; it reveals profound truths about the characters, even if the precise detail of their story remains slightly – and deliciously – cryptic… tonally, it recalls the psychoanalytic turn in art cinema of the 1960s and 70s (think Bergman’s Persona).”–Jason Di Rosso, ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) News (contemporaneous)

Petrol [DVD]

Petrol [DVD]
  • DVD
Check Price