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Capsules, Channel 366

CHANNEL 366: THE THIRD DAY (2020)

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DIRECTED BY: Marc Munden, Felix Barrett, Philippa Lowthorpe

FEATURING: Jude Law, , Katherine Waterston, ,

PLOT: Sam, a bereaved father, saves a suicidal girl and returns her to her home on a remote strip of land off the English coast, only to discover an undercurrent of violence and a weird theology permeating the island. Months later, mother Helen brings her children to the island for a vacation that quickly goes from bad to worse.

Still from "The Third Day" (2020)

COMMENTS: One of the most beloved tropes of horror is the character who goes somewhere—a room, a house, a portal to hell—that no reasonable, clear-thinking person would dare to tread. Part of the joy of the creepy-town variant is that no place is safe; every entrance you make is a bad idea. When Jude Law motors across the rarely appearing causeway that takes him away from the normal, safe world and into the strange island village of Osea, he’s making the classic horror-movie hero journey—and the classic mistake. And when Naomie Harris repeats the trek three episodes later, the audience has to be flat-out screaming “Don’t go in there!” at the screen. (Osea, incidentally, is a real place. Their public relations reps have much to answer for.)

In some respects, The Third Day is two deliberately different shows. (Actually, three. We’ll get to the third one in a moment.) “Summer”, the first three installments starring Law and directed by Marc Munden, mix a persistent sense of dread with a bizarre color palette. The landscape is a perpetual mossy green and dishwater blue, but other colors are riotously bold, as if the very look of the place is conspiring to keep Law’s discombobulated traveler Sam off balance. (Dropping acid, he will learn, does not help.) It is in this first act that we will learn that this community has a very particular theology that is directly related to Sam and the personal tragedy that his thrown his life into chaos. Though there is violence and shocking imagery, the look of the show reflects the town’s view of itself: a paternalistic flock welcoming a lost sheep back into the fold.

Harris’ arrival in “Winter” (with Philippa Lowthorpe now directing) is a significant contrast. Mirroring the weather, the village has turned cold and cracked, with whatever pleasant disposition that might have existed gone and the entire community in a dither over a forthcoming childbirth. The town is more clearly adversarial now, and unlike Sam, Harris’ Helen is not so easily thrown off her game. Of course, the two outsiders’ fates are intertwined, and it will take a fair amount of recriminations and violence to resolve their situation.

The Third Day falls neatly within the popular “outsider goes to strange little northern European village” genre associated with The Wicker Man or Midsommar, and most of the show’s power comes from an ever-present vibe of discomfort seasoned with folk cult horror that intentionally distances the hero and viewer alike. The island’s faith is a bizarre corruption of Christianity peppered with Continue reading CHANNEL 366: THE THIRD DAY (2020) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: KINETTA (2005)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Giorgos Lanthimos

FEATURING: Evangelia Randou, Aris Servetalis, Costas Xikominos

PLOT: “At a Greek hotel in the off-season, a chamber maid, a man obsessed with BMWs, and a photo-store clerk attempt to film and photograph various badly reenacted struggles between a man and a woman.”

COMMENTS: If I am reviewing a film I enjoy or respect (or better yet, both), I am often apprehensive when I sit down to write about it. This is because, despite having written hundreds of reviews by now, I am always fearful I won’t find my “window” into the movie: that first sentence, or first idea, that opens up the rest of my thoughts as I write. If I am reviewing a film that I did not care for, this is not a problem, as there’s usually at least one withering put-down that acts as my window. With Kinetta, I was spoiled for choices. A high point in the movie came early on when I was relieved to find that I wouldn’t, as I was fearing, have to make use of “Closed Caption” subtitles: it turned out the film already had standard subtitles pre-rigged in the stream. This resolved, I watched and took notes; to my right, my cat, Goose, did the sensible thing and slept soundly through the entire film.

Whoever provided the summary on IMDb (which I lifted straight from the site, for the second time only), is a very well-spoken person. That is exactly what Kinetta is “about”, and no amount of “walk time” padding or shaky-cam “fight” footage can stop my train of thought from slapping quotations around everything in a vain attempt to convey how mind-numbingly pointless this cinematic exercise is. Of the three leads, the least charismatic (the “BMW”-fanboy, who may be a cop [?]) gets by far and away the most dialogue. Cameraman, with beard, has perhaps half a dozen short lines, but comes across as the only reasonable person of the bunch. The scene in which he saves the hotel maid character from a drug overdose makes for the only worthwhile stretch of movie—right in the final minutes. But well before that point, a question came unbidden to my mind, “Why don’t the MST3K or RiffTrax people make better use of their skills by tearing art-house garbage to pieces?”

I dove into this review because it was put out there by Management toward the top of the to-do pile. Though I’ve seen one of the director’s more recent movies (with other 366ers, no less), I was totally unfamiliar with his name. So I say to you, Mr. Lanthimos, as I am sure you are reading a review of your (kind of) feature debut from fifteen years ago: good job on overcoming the naysayers. While the likes of The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Lobster prove you know how to make really good movies, Kinetta stands as proof-in-celluloid that you can make a really horrible one if you put your mind to it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Viewing ‘Kinetta’ with the benefit of hindsight, you can see inklings of visual and staging ideas that Lanthimos would explore more fully later on… But time hasn’t made it more than a cryptic curiosity.”–Ben Kenigsberg, The New York Times (2019 revival)

366 Underground, Capsules, Interviews

366 UNDERGROUND: MY NEIGHBOR WANTS ME DEAD (2019) WITH BONUS INTERVIEW

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DIRECTED BY: Nick Gatsby

FEATURING: Eric Willis, Scott Mitchell

PLOT: A hapless tenant finds himself dying at the hands of his neighbor over and over again.

Still from My Neighbor Wants Me Dead (2019)

COMMENTS: There’s a grandeur that kicks off Nick Gatsby’s first feature film that is both beautiful and disorienting. Haunting choral music, haunting wind sounds, and a haunting, burning moon (?) behind scraggly, leafless branches. The moon turns green, and there is a cut—appropriately—to psychedelically-lit puzzle pieces. This abstraction crops up throughout the rest of the film: interesting shots cut up by post-production static, over-exposure, jump cuts, and—my favorite—hilarious intertitles. With what seems like zero dollars on hand, but plenty of focus for fastidious editing and micro-effects, Gatsby has put together a creative anomaly; I wouldn’t describe it as a movie, per se, but it would hold its own among the video installations I’ve enjoyed at various modern art museums.

The story, such as it is, remains basic: a man mysteriously appears in a chair, slumped over. He awakens and is quickly menaced by a (largely) unseen neighbor. He’s about to be killed, and on a very short timer. Looming butterflies act as harbingers. Skulls appear, tiki bars are disregarded, and only in the fifth iteration do things seemingly fall into place.

Watching My Neighbor Wants Me Dead with a group was apt, as the chatter (pleasant though it was) acted as something of a distraction. And wouldn’t you know, the film’s tagline is “A film about distractions.” More than most (more straight-forward) narratives, My Neighbor lends itself to multiple interpretations. I saw it as a meditation on depression: the protagonist continually tries and fails to survive and get out of his door. Distractions subsume him: the promise of a “Tiki Bar,” threats from his neighbor, and even idly wandering through his barren apartment. Knowing a thing or two about depression myself, I know that one of the main challenges it presents the sufferer with is distraction: a simple, but driving distraction from being able to just face the day.

Gatsby earns plenty of bonus points for style, and several more for the oddball humor sprinkled throughout. There’s a cartoon intermission, plenty of ragtime music, and obscenely pictographed phrases during the intertitles. The ending did elicit a bit of, “Well, I should have seen that coming…”; but seeing as how I didn’t, I can’t complain. I am glad to say that I look forward to Gatsby’s next (great?) outing.

BONUS INTERVIEW: In the final minutes of the screening, filmmaker Nick Gatsby mysteriously appeared, telecommuting from his bunker in Colorado. The 366 crew all chipped in questions for him about his film. Continue reading 366 UNDERGROUND: MY NEIGHBOR WANTS ME DEAD (2019) WITH BONUS INTERVIEW →