Tag Archives: Family

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CAPSULE: RABBIT TRAP (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Bryn Chainey

FEATURING: Dev Patel, Rosy McEwen, Jade Croot

PLOT: In the Welsh countryside, the lives of a musician and sound engineer are interrupted by the appearance of a mysterious child imbued with supernatural awareness.

Still from Rabbit Trap (2025)

COMMENTS: They emerge from the Welsh countryside, bearing questions and a rabbit offering. They know the purpose of plants and the dangers they can keep at bay—or entice. They coming knocking with joy, and with fervor. They wonder at a strange man in his 30s, who apologizes a lot even while he may tackle an unsuspecting kid.

The film is set in the mid-1970s. The man is Darcy Davenport (Dev Patel), a sound engineer married to underground music sensation Daphne. For reasons omitted, they’re deeply out of the way of any neighbors, exploring each other, sonic phenomena, and melancholia. Darcy spends his days wandering about with his boom mic and recorder in hand; Daphne futzes around with microphones, synthesizers, and oscilloscopes, trying to craft something interesting. Enter small child. This child, the “they” mentioned above, is ambiguous in a number of ways. They’re boyish, girlish, a bit unearthly—indeed, no other pronoun would suit them, and perhaps no proper noun, either, as they never reveal their name. Events turn strange as the group—in varying ones, pairs, and trios—explore sounds, visions, faerie rings, and even more terrible dangers of the woodland.

The denouement suggests we may have witnessed a metaphor, but in the spirit of the film’s general turbidity, I will merely mention that it is there, and that I shan’t be scrutinizing events further. Chainey has achieved something impressive through his story, as has Jade Croot with their performance: summoning a deep well of mystery, uneasiness, and candid emotion. The hazards of Nature where it straddles the veil are frightening and glorious, and Rabbit Trap‘s dangers should be approached with an open mind—and open ears.

 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a vague but effectively unsettling slice of trip-folk horror about what happens when the world refuses to leave… Equal parts Ben Wheatley’s ‘In the Earth’ and Jerzy Skolomowski’s ‘The Shout,’ ‘Rabbit Trap’ is the sort of experience that could be better explained by certain mushrooms than even even the most detailed internet explainer. It’s definitely the sort of experience that’s best enjoyed by accepting those terms as soon as you can.”–David Ehrlich, IndieWire (contemporaneous)

Rabbit Trap [Blu-ray]

Rabbit Trap [Blu-ray]

  • Elijah Wood’s SpectreVision
  • Fairy Folklore
  • “Particularly Frightening and Very Haunting” – Slashfilm

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Capsules

CAPSULE: FAMILY PORTRAIT (2023)

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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)

Apocryphally Weird

1*. THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS (2001)

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Katakuri-ke no kôfuku

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Keiko Matsuzaka, Shinji Takeda, ,

PLOT: The Katakuri clan retires to a remote mountain area to run a bed and breakfast, but the place seems cursed, as every guest who stays there dies. The Katakuris try to cover up the deaths to avoid bad publicity, while frequently bursting into song and dance numbers.

Still from The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)

BACKGROUND:

  • The Happiness of the Katakuris is actually a remake (some say a “very loose” remake) of a Jee-woon Kim’s (non-musical) Korean black comedy The Quiet Family.
  • Miike made Katakuris the same year as Visitor Q, an even blacker comedy which also deals with the theme of a “happy” Japanese family. Katakuris and Q were two of a remarkable eight movies the prolific auteur released in 2001.
  • The Happiness of the Katakuris received the highest number of total votes in 366 Weird Movies first Apocryphally Weird movie poll, making it arguably the most popular weird movie left off the 366 Weird Movies canon.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: We’ll have to go with that little claymation yōkai/imp that pops out of a random diner’s soup and falls in love with her heart-shaped uvula—with bizarrely comic results.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Claymation infatuation; reanimated corpse song and dance

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The Katakuri clan came about as close to making the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies Ever Made as possible; we held off honoring them partly because their movie, while weird indeed, was overlong and uneven, and partly because Takashi Miike was already well-represented with three Canonically Weird movies, and it was time to give someone else a shot. The movie’s inclusion on the secondary list of Apocrypha titles was assured, and it’s a highly appropriate choice for the inaugural title in our runners-up category.

Short clip from The Happiness of the Katakuris

COMMENTS: The Happiness of the Katakuris begins with a four-minute scene, which really has nothing to do with the rest of the Continue reading 1*. THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS (2001) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS (2001)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Kenji Sawada, Keiko Matsuzaka, Shinji Takeda, Naomi Nishida,

PLOT: The Katakuri clan retires to a remote mountain area to run a bed and breakfast, but the place seems cursed, as every guest who stays there dies.

Still from The Happiness of the Karakuris (2001)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: They don’t come any closer to making the List on the first ballot than Katakuris. The only thing that holds it back is a dreadful unevenness, combined with the fact that there are already so many Takashi Miike films either already on the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies Ever Made or still out there in contention.

COMMENTS: The Happiness of the Katakuris begins with a four-minute scene, which has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, in which a claymation imp rises from a woman’s soup, falls in love with her heart-shaped uvula, and flies away with it. Unlike the serious and searing Audition, where the director springs the weirdness on an unsuspecting audience in a blistering last act, Miike does not allow anyone here to complain of stealth weirdness. After this bizarro prologue, the story about clan of hoteliers who break out into song whenever their guests die seems refreshingly sane and conventional.

The movie settles down into a narrative after that introduction as we meet the Katakuris: a patriarch and matriarch still very much in love, a feisty grandpa, a son with anger-management issues, and a desperate-for-romance daughter and her love child (who serves as the film’s narrator). The characters are well-drawn and likable, but ill-starred, as the location of their bed and breakfast proves too remote for foot traffic (and also too near an active volcano). When they finally do get a paying customer, he’s only checked in to commit a gruesome suicide (also the occasion for the film’s first musical number). The songs are definitely Karakuris’ high points; the dancers aren’t professionals, but neither that fact nor the unfamiliarity of the language to non-Japanese speakers impedes Miike’s imaginative stagings, which are decorated with simple special effects and colorful, kaleidoscopic green-screen backgrounds. The most memorable moments are a matrimonial fantasy that sends the bride spinning through space with her dashing half-Japanese sailor groom; a disco-ball love ballad between Masao and Terue with the cheesy production values of a 1980s K-tel records commercial; the final number, a direct parody of The Sound of Music; and any time the corpses peek out of their graves and try to dance along.

It may seem strange to criticize a project this deliberately loose and goofy for its aimlessness, but it really is a weakness in this case. Katakuris has energy, but lacks focus. It never decides whether the semi-serious family drama or mordant black comedy is most important, and the claymation action interludes just knock it farther off its axis. There isn’t much of a conclusion, just a series of incidents that eventually fizzle out. It’s much better in its parts, especially the musical numbers, then it is as a whole. But those parts are strange enough to make it a hard-to-forget oddity.

The Happiness of the Katakuris is actually a remake of a Jee-woon Kim’s (non-musical) Korean black comedy The Quiet Family. Miike made it the same year as Visitor Q, an even blacker comedy which also deals with the theme of a “happy” Japanese family. Arrow Video just released a 2-DVD or 1 Blu-ray special edition of the film, although most of the extra features appeared to be recycled from the 2003 Eastern Star DVD release.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“As weird movie openings go, this one’s in a class of its own. The rest of Miike’s musical extravaganza isn’t exactly your usual collection of song and dance numbers either.”–Mark Stevens, BBC (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: RICKY (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: François Ozon

FEATURING: Alexandra Lamy, Mélusine Mayance, Sergi López

PLOT:  A single mom factory worker gives birth to a very special baby; of course, every mother thinks her baby is miraculous, but in this case the press thinks so, too.

Still from Ricky (2009)


WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  A minor but sometimes effective meditation on motherhood, Ricky might not be good enough to make this exclusive list even if it were extremely bizarre. Its “what if” premise and strange, vacillating tone is just off-normal enough to place the movie within the weird genre, but it in no way pushes the boundaries of the bizarre.

COMMENTS:  If you’ve read other reviews of Ricky, you might have already discovered what it is that makes this baby special; only a few critics have managed to keep the film’s turning point a secret. I don’t think it’s necessary to give away the surprise to discuss the film, but you might be able to figure it out anyway from context. It’s less important precisely what it is that makes Ricky a special baby, which is mainly a matter of concern for the special effects crew, then it is to consider the role Ricky’s “specialness” plays in the story: a metaphor for the wonder with which a mother views her own offspring. The wizardry that brings the baby to life is inconsistent—the analog elements are neat looking, if unconvincing, while the digital realizations are just unconvincing—but that’s not what most people will find unsatisfactory about the film. Ricky begins life as a dreary domestic drama, then shifts gears about halfway through and tries to be a whimsical semi-comedy before gliding into a mystical, suspiciously happy ending. As the movie gets weirder the tone gets lighter, but the hard realities of the earlier drama still weigh it down. The two hemispheres of the movie work against each other; the part of the movie that’s well done is kind of boring, while the more intriguing portion often seems thrown together on the fly.

As stressed lower-middle class parents Katie and Paco, Alexandra Lamy and Sergi López are believably flawed: they bicker and accuse each other, they sometimes neglect Katie’s older child Lisa, and they can be irresponsible parents (no pediatrician for Ricky?), but in the end they fight through their own limitations to do the right thing for their offspring. Lamy sells the film’s potentially ridiculous emotional climax and makes it affecting; a poor performance would have turned it into pure camp. It’s a serious and thoughtful movie with points to praise (particularly Lamy’s performance); but, even as an experiment in deliberately inconsistent tone, it’s hard to say the film works on the whole. In the end, Ricky never really gets off the ground.

The movie begins with an out-of-sequence prologue that’s incompatible with the rest of the story. Although the scene frustrates and confuses some viewers, it’s a great tear-jerking moment for Lamy; and, more importantly, by it contrasting the grim reality of single parenthood with the fantasy that follows, it’s the key to the film’s psychology.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The film is bewildering. I don’t know what its terms are, and it doesn’t match any of mine. I found myself regarding it more and more as an inexplicable curiosity.”–Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times (contemporaneous)