Tag Archives: Magical Realism

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ALLEGRO (2005)

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DIRECTED BY: Christoffer Boe

FEATURING: , Helena Christensen, Henning Moritzen

PLOT: An acclaimed pianist returns to Copenhagen in response to the appearance of an impassable no-man’s land that was created when the musician broke up with his girlfriend a decade prior.

Still from Allegro (2005)

COMMENTS: Allegro is a musical term, an instruction to performers to maintain a fast and bright tempo in the range of 120-156 beats per minute. The first movement of Vivaldi’s “Spring” is allegro, as is “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” by Mozart. (Also at allegro tempo: this.) It establishes a bright, bouncy feel, and while allegro tunes don’t have to be happy, there’s something wickedly perverse about lending the term to the title of this slow, methodical look at a musical artist who has removed all flair and personality from his performances, and indeed from himself. Surely “Adagio” was sitting right there.

Writer/director Boe hints at the outset that we’re about to be treated to a modern fairy tale. Through recurring sketchbook-style animation, we learn about the early life of our hero, an aspiring concert pianist we will only know by his last name, Zetterstrøm, who grows up to become a technically perfect but emotionally flat musician. This seems like it might change when he has a charming meet-cute with a lovely woman named Andrea. They progress to a relationship, despite his clear reservations, and his wariness seems justified when they break up a while later because of his commitment to his career. Leaving Andrea behind, he becomes a performer whose interpretations hit all their marks perfectly but are devoid of emotional engagement. He is so completely devoted to the purity of his work and so determined to extricate any trace of personality that he does Glenn Gould one better by refusing to be seen as he performs. As one music expert tells us, “He is an excellent pianist, technically… but where is his passion?”

Turns out his passion is in Denmark. I mean, that’s literally where he has deposited all of the distracting impulses that he has purged from his system because they harsh his chill. What Zetterstrøm has done, unbeknownst to him, is compartmentalize all his memories and feelings of the intense relationship into a section of Copenhagen that becomes a closed-off, inaccessible disaster area called “The Zone.” (Locals bounce things off the invisible force field that surrounds The Zone for their amusement.) In short, Allegro is a clever piece of magical realism, making manifest the consequences of locking one’s emotions away.

The idea is compelling when described, but less so in execution. The premise is fantastical, but Boe is so committed to the reality of the situation that he devotes much time to the uninteresting business of getting Zetterstrøm to Copenhagen, getting him into The Zone, and finally getting him to understand the implications of his careless soul-ectomy. Yes, Zetterstrøm has intentionally extracted his heartbroken soul, but as played by Thomsen, he’s a pretty emotionally vacant fellow already. It ends up feeling like the function is following the form, and that rather than exploring this broken psyche by viewing it through the prism of an “Outer Limits”-style no-man’s land, Allegro seems to have come up with the strange storytelling twist and retrofitted a story to occupy it.

It is frustrating how much of Allegro is told and not shown. Zetterstrøm is spoon-fed every clue to unlock his stolen past by Moritzen’s ill-defined narrator/journalist/ringmaster, like the minder overseeing an escape room. Zetterstrøm’s performing ability is delivered to us second-hand. His relationship with Andrea is conveyed quickly through a crafty piece of editing that takes the couple’s relationship from its earliest moments to its sad end, but the technique denies us the opportunity to see the relationship for ourselves. Most tellingly, the film’s final revelation resolving the ramifications of his experience in The Zone, tying together the pianist’s emotional turmoil and his professional acumen, is delivered in voiceover.

Allegro goes hard on its unusual premise, and there are some intriguing camera and set design choices that reflect the scattered and troubled nature of Zetterstrøm’s memories. It’s also to the film’s credit that we invest in his relationship with Andrea (the film debut for former supermodel Christensen) despite how little we see of it. Ultimately, however, an appropriately weird idea does not alone make a weird film, and Allegro never quite makes good on what it promises. Contrary to its title, Allegro doesn’t go fast, and it doesn’t get where it wants to go.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…despite its surreal aspects, [Boe] keeps it real, as if Terry Gilliam had adopted cinema verite.”–Amber Wilkinson, Eye For Film (contemporaneous)

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

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: RESURRECTION (2025)

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Resurrection is available to purchase on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: 

FEATURING: Jackson Yee, Shu Qi

PLOT: We follow five dreams of a “Deliriant,” a man who chooses to dream despite a futuristic ban on the practice.

Still from Resurrection (2025)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Bi Gan dreams better than you do.

COMMENTS: According to Resurrection, the secret to immortality is to stop dreaming. Dreamers, the prologue explains, “bring pain to reality and chaos to history.” Yet despite the obvious benefits of ceasing to dream, some rebels—“Deliriants”—continue to do so, secretly. They are tracked by “the Big Others,” agents who can see through illusions, enter dreams, and gently bring the Deliriants back to reality (i.e., death). Resurrection tracks the dreams of one such Deliriant, who somehow hides inside film, and the Big Other who gently guides him towards fatal reality.

Our Deliriant’s dreams glide through movie history. After intertitles explaining the premise, Resurrection opens with the viewer traveling through a hole burning through a celluloid membrane, that opens onto a cinema whose occupants stare in wonder at us intruders until policemen roughly usher them out the exits. The line between us and the dreamer thus blurred, we travel through five dream stories. Each is organized around a different sense, and each is set in a different cinematic era, floating from silent movies to film noir and ending in 1999’s millennial panic. Some (especially the first) are exceedingly strange. As we travel we will encounter opium addicts, hard-bitten theremin-playing detectives, former monks, con men, gangsters, and vampires, with opening and closing doses of the mysterious Big Other and her esoteric rituals. It’s like a universalized version of Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, and less uneven than most anthology films. Bi Gan’s style benefits from shorter formats. His previous slowcore stories sometimes drifted too far from their narrative anchors, but with the longest entry here being only about 30 minutes, it’s easy to focus on each tale in its entirety before resetting our attention on the next.

But we do not watch Bi Gan movies for the stories anyway. We watch them for the masterful visuals and the “how’d he do that?” camerawork. Although each installment has its own charm, the director puts the fireworks right up front, with a mysterious cinematic prologue which, like the opening of Holy Motors, nods at the movieness of it all. It segues seamlessly into the first dream: having spied an opium poppy hiding in the Deliriant’s eye when examining at his photograph through a microscope, the Big Other wanders silently down Caligari stairwells and past Metropolis machinery and through a storeroom with a Méliès moon until she uncovers the Deleriant, looking like Max Schreck suffering from the plague, offering up a plate of poppies that bloom in stop-motion. Stylistically, this sequence is more avant-garde than anything Gan has tried before: by way of . The other fantastic sequence comes in the last dream, which is another of the director’s celebrated, complicated single takes, following two lovers from a harbor through busy rain-slicked city streets into a karaoke bar and then back to the harbor, where they board a boat and sail off to sea. The shot takes up 30 minutes of screen time, but there’s a time lapse inside the sequence that means the camera actually filmed for much longer.

When is a dream not a dream? When it is a metaphor. Bi Gan’s dreams in Resurrection are metaphors, most obviously, for cinema; the Deliriant’s reveries progress chronologically through different cinematic eras. But falling deeper into them, they are also a complex symbol of the human spirit, that spirit of individualism, imagination, and chaos that opposes religion, politics, and often good sense, yet remains essential to our being. Resurrection is a quiet act of rebellion. Nothing in it directly challenges the status quo, so it is not only acceptable to the ruling party, but even useful as a global prestige item. But the Deliriant’s tragic soul is forged in defiance. And though he must die for it, even the Big Other must honor that spirit.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a cavalcade of strange images that take the language of cinema into [Bi Gan’s] sleeping fantasies and bring it back more vibrant than ever.”–Richard Whittaker, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

Resurrection (Criterion Premieres) [Blu-ray]

Resurrection (Criterion Premieres) [Blu-ray]

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    Capsules

    CAPSULE: ALPHA (2025)

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     Alpha is available to rent or purchase on-demand.

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    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: Mélissa Boros, , Tahar Rahim

    PLOT: Young teenager Alpha gets a homemade tattoo, and her doctor mother obsesses over the possibility that she may have contacted a disease that will turn her into a statue; meanwhile, her heroin-addicted uncle comes to crash in their small Parisian flat.

    Still from alpha (2025)

    COMMENTS: Alpha, the movie, is sick with contagion and addiction. In this diseased alternate-reality Paris, an Arab single-mom doctor tries to protect her improbably-named daughter Alpha from the dangers of the outside world. When the girl experiments with her limited teen freedom, getting a rustic homemade “A” tattoo on her arm at a party while intoxicated, her mother freaks out: where did the needle come from? Was it properly sterilized? Because, you see, there is a blood-borne disease going around which slowly turns those infected into statues. It primarily affects homosexuals and intravenous drug users, but unsanitary tattoo needles are also a disease vector. Fear that she may be deathly ill, and ostracism from her schoolmates once the rumors start circulating, aren’t the only stresses in Alpha’s life; her emaciated, estranged, heroin-addicted uncle, who is a stranger to her, has also moved into the small flat as he tries to get clean after a lifetime of relapses. At school, Alpha also keeps inconveniently (and humiliatingly) bleeding from her slow-to-heal tattoo wound; curious, although also seemingly tangential to the film’s main theme.

    Despite the magical-realist plague and some confusing flashbacks, Alpha essentially plays out as a coming-of-age family drama. The three principals all do fine work, with Rahim (whose visible ribs suggest must have laid off baguettes for months in preparing for his junkie role) a particular standout. Cinematography is crisp, and needle drops from Portishead and Nick Cave add an undeniable (if possibly anachronistic) coolness factor.

    Despite mostly eschewing the horror elements this time to focus on familial drama and teen anxiety, Ducournau retains her talent for conceiving scenes that are, on the surface, completely innocent, but which hint at deep perversions: in this case, a bit where Alpha’s jittery uncle white-knuckles his way through opiate withdrawal, while the anxious Alpha tries to fall sleep in bed next to him in their shared bedroom. The dreadful atmosphere of rising pandemic feeds into Alpha’s developmental worries. Growing independence, annoyance with lame and overprotective adults, and awkward liaisons with hormonal boys hardly override fears of death and an unstable adult roommate constantly on the verge of fatal overdose.

    Alpha is well-written, well-acted, well-shot, well-scored, and has an serious emotional core… and yet, for some reason I can’t find it in my stony heart to unconditionally recommend it. The problem here is that, while Titane succeeded because it was a weird movie that slowly developed a deep emotional appeal, Alpha underwhelms because it starts as a humanist drama and then tacks on unnecessary surreal accoutrements. While Ducournau’s two previous efforts were weird movies that provided accommodations for art-house patrons, this one is an art-house movie offering accommodations for fans expecting something strange. Other than allowing an excuse for some cool makeup, the marbelizing symptom of the central disease adds little to the movie’s emotional or aesthetic effect. Had Ducournau made a standard drama, she might have gained a more appreciative audience… though at the cost of her reputation as one of the few provocateurs willing to ignore the inconvenient blah-ness of reality. Still, even if Alpha is not entirely a success, it’s a good film, and we’re happy to note Ducournau hasn’t sold out to the commercial allure of realist cinema. Let’s hope this is a temporary retreat, and she’ll relocate the bloody pulse of deep, dark weirdness for her next project.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “Strident, oppressive, incoherent and weirdly pointless from first to last … Julia Ducournau’s new film Alpha has to be the most bewildering disappointment of this year’s Cannes competition; even an honest lead performance from Mélissa Boros can’t retrieve it.”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (festival screening)

    Capsules

    CAPSULE: A USEFUL GHOST (2025)

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    Recommended

    DIRECTED BY: Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke

    FEATURING: Davika Hoorne, Witsarut Himmarat, Wanlop Rungkumjad, Wisarut Homhuan, Apasiri Nitibhon, Gandhi Wasuvitchayagit

    PLOT: A man falls for a vacuum cleaner possessed by the ghost of his dead wife, despite his family’s insistence on exorcising the interloper.

    Still from A Useful Ghost (2025)

    COMMENTS: An exorcist stands mouth agape as a vacuum cleaner uses its spinning brush attachment on an ecstatic man’s nipples. In the context of A Useful Ghost, what is strange about this scene isn’t the human/machine coupling so much as the exorcist’s reaction. A night duty nurse is barely surprised when the same vacuum asks her for her husband’s room number; she tells it matter-of-factly that visiting hours are over and that, under hospital policy, ghosts cannot qualify as relatives. In this alternate version of contemporary Thailand, ghosts roaming among the populace are taken for granted. The central family’s spotless-but-haunted factory is shut down because, according to the inspector, “A ghost is even less hygienic than a speck of dust.”

    The exorcist’s reaction is strange because it challenges the deadpan style first-time director Boonbunchachoke adopts for this tale. Characters in A Useful Ghost do not show any emotion unless and until it is absolutely necessary. Therefore, when this exorcist stands, mouth agape, he does so with no alteration for the duration of the scene, flanked by characters whose faces reveal less visible shock. At first, the anti-naturalistic acting seems contrived, but as the film goes on and the tone turns from ridiculous to sombre, its effect becomes hypnotic, evoking an elegiac, ghostly world where genuine feeling is slowly leeching away into a void.

    You see, despite the fact that the premise suggests a whimsical romantic comedy, A Useful Ghost takes a darker turn in its second half after the ghost wife (Nan) proves her worth to her husband’s family though her spectral talent for entering others’ dreams and gathering intelligence about the reasons for their hauntings. This useful talent, and fortuitous connections, give Nan standing in society. Despite the legal impediments of ghosthood, she’s too valuable to be exorcised. But, although Nan is motivated solely by the noble desires of love and duty to family, her persistence in this world is predicated on her utility to those in power. The compromises she must make inevitably stresses her relationship with her principled husband. When the 2010 massacres become a major plot engine, the dynamic shifts from romantic comedy to political screed, and the film raises an unusual question: is it possible for a ghost to be a quisling?

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “Transcending novelty is only possible when you convince us to stop saying ‘wow, that’s so weird’ and begin genuinely investing in the characters. Boonbunchachoke does an immaculate job of threading that needle…”–Christian Zilko, Indiewire (festival screening)

    Capsules

    CAPSULE: ADAM’S APPLES (2005)

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    Recommended

    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: Ulrich Tomnsen, , Nikolas Bro

    PLOT: Priest with a troubled past tries to provide a way to redemption for a young neo- Nazi.

    Still from Adam's Apples (2005)

    COMMENTS: An aggressive man arrives at a chapel as part of a social reintegration program. Accompanied by two other ex-criminals, he will strive for personal redemption under the guidance of an enigmatic priest with some controversial methods and a tragic past.

    Sometimes redemption is just an apple pie away. A trivial purpose, the baking of an apple cake, motivates the young neo-Nazi protagonist, and becomes his path. However, this tale is not really about him, or at least not only about him. He is mostly a vessel to introduced us to his mentor, the  priest, a tragic figure hauntingly performed by one of today’s most acclaimed European actors, Mads Mikkelsen (a close collaborator of director Jensen).

    And what a personality this priest is! Even though he has been struck by many misfortunes in his life, he maintains a sense of confidence in himself and in God’s plan, while striving to remain a role model for others. Not everything is as it seems, though, and it is gradually revealed that his calmness is an effect of his constant denial to acknowledge burdensome tragedies. He will have to confront his demons, abandon hope, and embrace stoicism if he wants to obtain true happiness and find salvation. Shots of the priest in his car—either as a driver or as a passenger—masterfully convey the ups and downs of his mental state.

    What we have here is not exactly a character study, however. Hints of the supernatural and the magically realist, like crows and worms that try to prevent the baking of the apple pie mentioned above, give this tale the sense of a religious parable. Moreover, the movie draws a comparison between Mikkelsen’s priest and the Old Testament’s Job, making this movie akin to a modern retelling of the classic tale.

    From start to finish, this is a grim and haunting cinematic experience, an art-house oddity with parabolic tones and much religious symbolism. It is recommended mostly for fans of religious dramas in a contemporary setting; ‘s Calvary (2014) and the Danish series “Ride Upon the Storm” by Adam Price are similar, even when they stray away from the weirder aspects of this work.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “The performances are spot-on, as all play this darkly funny material as if they are in a deadly serious Shakespearean drama, highlighting the situation’s absurdities and asking us to consider how much our reality is shaped by our preconceptions, beliefs and, yes, faith.”–Dan Jardine, Cinemania (festival screening)

    Adam's Apples

    Adam's Apples

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