Tag Archives: Period piece

List Candidates

FANTASIA 2024: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MONONOKE THE MOVIE (2024)

Leave a comment

劇場版モノノ怪 唐傘

Gekijouban Mononoke Karakasa

AKA Mononoke Movie: Paper Umbrella; AKA Mononoke the Movie: Phantom in the Rain

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

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Kenji Nakamura

FEATURING: Voices of , , Hiroshi Kamiya

PLOT: Two new attendants arrive at Lord Tenshi’s pleasure palace, and a karakasa is poised to infiltrate the world of humans unless it is thwarted by a mysterious medicine man loitering  by the castle doorway.

Still from Mononoke the Movie (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Psychedelic colors and flourishes permeate the grand castle, nearly overwhelming the eye. Mononoke then finishes the job with its massive bursts of vibrant imagery and unceasing kinetics whenever the demon attempts to slam into our world.

COMMENTS: From start to finish—and this includes the credit sequence wherein we circle around a beautifully detailed temple chamber as the characters whiz by—Kenji Nakamura’s Mononoke grabs and throttles the eyes with a palette both wondrous and classic, as fluid images in Edo style play across a rice-paper surface. The mundane is majestic, the majestic is mysterious, and the mystery unfolds in one of the most intense exhibits of swirls, spirals, whirls, and wonderment I’ve laid my eyes on in quite some time. If, perhaps, ever.

While the visuals hog the screen (as they are wont to do), the story is more than just a backdrop for artistic razzmatazz. Taking place during the Edo period, almost completely within a pleasure palace, intrigue aplenty fuels the adventure. Crammed into under ninety minutes, we follow the daily struggles of two new “recruits,” Asa and Kame; we learn dribs and drabs about conspiracies and power struggles; we take in the hijinks of the gate’s guardian as he alternately attempts to shoo away the medicine man (insisting, often and emphatically, he does “not need a love a potion!”) and relishes his company. The plot threads move forward at a steady clip, interweaving delightfully into an iridescent tapestry of secrets, emotions, and supernatural to-dos, all held less and less in check by the palace’s strict protocols and the overarching devotion to duty.

Beyond the mad flights of demonic fancy, Nakamura’s vision dazzles from moment to moment. In colored geometric form, we see the delicious scent of food; the air and gusts loom blue or brown, as the circumstances demand; and the faces of the innumerable women in the background spiral and shift color. This third touch evokes their ambitions, for they are trained to blend beautifully into the background, standing out only if they have authority or are irredeemably awkward (Kame, I’m looking at you). Scenes end with forcefully slamming ornamental doors. We often see the shifty medicine seller in close-ups of his ever-moving eyes. He knows something bad is coming, and only he has the avian-form scales, sheeves of binding paper, and Sword of Exorcism. (That toothful, piebald little weapon is practically a character in its own right.)

This is nutso, this is fast, and it is a full-frontal assault on the eyes. (I opted to sit in the center of the front-most row. I have no regrets.) You’ve been warned, and I’ll warn you further: you will not want to miss out on this spectacle.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“I’m not entirely certain what it is that I just watched but I’m glad that I got to see it on the big screen with good sound… This all stands beside psychedelic imagery that mixes better than one might think – the evils being committed are ancient and incomprehensible.”–Jason Seaver, Jay’s Movie Blog (Fantasia screening)

 

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE VOURDALAK (2023)

Leave a comment

Le Vourdalak

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

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Adrien Beau

FEATURING: , , Grégoire Colin, the voice of Adrien Beau

PLOT: Somewhere in the Balkans, a French nobleman finds himself enduring the hospitality of an isolated peasant family whose patriarch has gone missing.

Still from The Vourdalak (2023)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: There are too few fish-out-of-water “Horror of manners” films featuring eloquent and sickening man-eating marionette monsters. The Vourdalak does its bit to fill this regrettable gap.

COMMENTS: Pity the poor Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfé, an emissary de-horsed by roaming Turkish bandits. Pity, also, Jegor and Anya, a poverty-stricken couple forced to provide for Jegor’s ailing father Gorcha, outré sister Sdenka, troubled brother Piotr, and young son Vlad. Pity all of the rest of them, too, while you’re at it—except, perhaps, Gorcha. Or, perhaps you should. After all, he did clearly write in a parting note that if he were to return after the stroke of six o’clock, six days hence, he should immediately be murdered, as it would not actually be his self, but his body as corrupted by an evil, slobbering vourdalak. It may well have been a good, if superannuated, patriarch who went off to fight the bandits, but whatever returned is creepy, creepy, creepy.

The first act of The Vourdalak plays much like a period comedy piece, as the hapless Marquis skates between chagrin at his unlucky circumstances, awkward gratitude toward his lowly hosts, and a growing affection for the fay—and disgraced—Sdenka. He flirts, poorly, recounts go-nowhere anecdotes, and at one point, unprovoked, demonstrates his sarabande steps. (This last item turns out to be something of an important plot point, as the Marquis’ dancing chops end up, perhaps, saving his life later in the film.) The awkward whimsy turns dark at the spontaneous arrival, after six o’clock on the sixth day of absence, of a heavily bound, gaunt form: Gorcha, bearing with him the head of a troublesome Turkish bandit to be “hung above the door to send a message.”

The second and third acts chronicle the family’s downfall, as witnessed by the well-meaning, but regrettably inept, Marquis d’Urfé. Familial drama travels alongside familial dread, and the experience is increasingly peppered by Gorcha, now quite obviously—to everyone but his son Jegor—a sinister vourdalak. I couldn’t hope to do much justice in describing this fiend of legend (or, at least, of Tolstoian devisement), but the monster’s effects on the narrative and cinematic experience are alternately jarring and poetical—though, even when poetical, also rather jarring. A human-sized marionette, the creature is voiced and performed, so to speak, by the director, who has given his creation a personality situated somewhere between a mindless blood-sucker and the charming Uncle Irvin from The City of Lost Children.

Much of The Vourdalak‘s strangeness stems from this puppet creature, but the surrounding family add their own little bits of the bizarre. Piotr, the younger brother, is in the habit of dressing as a woman, something never explained and which, refreshingly, never elicits judgment from his siblings. Anja, the wife, maintains a subdued mania until the surrounding tragedies pile on too strongly. And of course, there’s the mysterious Sdenka, who nurses the most life-positive suicidal ambitions I’ve ever heard. Indeed, with its tight cast and ghoulish flourishes, The Vourdalak feels like a hit-and-run by the weird wagon: briefly dazing the viewer whilst doffing its cap with a “Pardon. Excuse me. Sorry!” as it lurches into the distance.

The Vourdalak is currently in limited release in theaters. We will update once at-home viewing options become available.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an intimate, though always dreamlike piece of world-building… what’s key is the strangeness of the setting… the film’s real triumph is in its use of a marionette: it’s absolutely horrible. It makes you recoil, and it’s full of ghastly otherworldliness, just what you need for a Gothic tale like this one.” — Keri O’Shea, Warped Perspective (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: SWEET DREAMS (2023)

Leave a comment

 Zoete dromen

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

DIRECTED BY: Ena Sendijarevic

FEATURING: Hayati Azis, Renée Soutendijk, Florian Myjer, Lisa Zweerman, Muhammad Khan, Rio Kaj Den Haas

PLOT: During the twilight of the Dutch empire, Cornelis is summoned to the family’s Indonesian sugar plantation after his father’s death, only to find that his illegitimate half-brother Karel is to inherit everything.

Still from Sweet Dreams (2023)

COMMENTS: Indonesia is a beautiful country, despite the Netherlands’ 19th-century imperial ambitions. Ena Sendijarevic’s Sweet Dream allows only occasional glimpses of the glorious landscape, instead trapping the viewer in a decrepit mansion peopled by tottering overseers and embittered local workers. This palatial home, its un-worked plantation, and its silent factory, hold untold secrets—and one very open one. The indigenous maid and the transplanted patriarch have a son, whose existence catalyses the unruly collapse of this microcosm of empire.

Three of Sendijarevic’s stylistic choices anchor her film’s covertly hostile tone. An opening foley creation of buzzes, rustlings, and sizzles promises sweeping jungle. Instead, we find ourselves trapped in 4:3 screen ratio of choking flora. The family home should feel voluminous, but each chamber is trapped by deep shots with tight camera edges. The coloring is delightful but blighted. Each room exhibits what was once a glorious coat of paint—a grand maroon hallway, a hunter green dining room, and a bedroom hued like the yolk of an egg—deteriorating badly from age and stifling humidity. Third, the music. Old, old classics, bubbling up time and again, like a remindful dirge.

Sweet Dreams‘ occasional twitches from traditional period piece make this film, if not outright “weird,”  then certainly eccentric. Sitti and Reza are Indonesian natives; the former works as a maid for the Dutch family (and is mother of the natural son), the latter is an erstwhile plantation worker. They share good-natured barbs, have an ebb-and-flow appreciation of the other, and are bilingual. A love scene between the two—classily shot, unlike an early encounter between Sitti and the patriarch—features a gushing synth score and a magically luminescent moon. Another night, Sitti dreams of Reza as a slumbering behemoth beneath vibrant moon, resting herself serenely in the palm of his semi-closed hand.

I found myself so wrapped up in the hazy claustrophobia and painterly images, that the title’s punnery didn’t hit me until well after the film; and, grim punning aside, a darkly humorous streak runs throughout. The mother writes to her son in the Netherlands with good news and bad: his father has died. The bad news is that he must come immediately to the plantation. The Dutch dolts spend much time ordering holes dug around the property, the location of patriarch’s corpse having slipped the mother’s mind. Dutch boy’s wife is afflicted further and further by mosquito bites. Dutch boy himself devolves mentally as he comes to know his half-brother—one for whom Papà crafted a toy by hand.

Sweet Dreams, alongside the soggy decrepitude of the manse and the eye-popping lushness of surrounding jungle, is heavily symbolic, even obviously so—though is no worse for its sleeve-worn metaphors. Like the family, the colonizers’ time is coming to an end, with strange fate and ill machinations auguring a discouraging future. But decay will be supplanted by the younger generation, the new generation, rising from the flames of the by-going era.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“More poem than conventional narrative, Sweet Dreams explores the tropes of the colonial fable with a romantic eye and a sharp wit. There is a little sympathy present even for its most monstrous characters, but very little mercy for anyone.”—Jennie Kermode, Eye for Film UK (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: SHADOW OF FIRE (2023)

Leave a comment

Hokaje

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

DIRECTED BY:

CAST: Shuri, , Ouga Tsukao

PLOT: Amidst robberies and other exploits, a young boy tries his best to survive in the black market area of a ravaged town in post-WWII Japan; his path intersects with other struggling characters, including a war widow and a man who recruits him for an unknown enterprise.

Still from Shadow of Fire (2023)

COMMENTS: Shadow of Fire is the latest offering by Shinya Tsukamoto; more specifically, the Tsukamoto who brought us films such as  Kotoko, Fires on the Plain, and Killing. These late-career outings see the director opt for a more conventional register, while keeping more or less all of the trademarks that define his peculiar filmmaking style.

In the immediate aftermath of WWII, an unnamed war orphan makes his way through a devastated town’s black market, eventually finding refuge in a tavern kept by a woman who has resorted to prostitution after the loss of her husband and her son. She soon develops a motherly affection for the boy; the inn also begins receiving frequent visits from a young soldier.

In spite of all the differences that separate Shadow of Fire from Tsukamoto’s earlier work, the sensibility of the Tetsuo director is still on display here, not only in certain aesthetic choices but also in film’s core themes: for instance, the emphasis on the thinness of the barrier between what we call “human” and whatever lies outside its fragile boundaries. The soldier who finds shelter in the tavern undergoes, at a sudden reminder of his wartime torments, a quick transformation, unlike those in the director’s more fantastical productions, but no less terrifying precisely because of how plausible it is. (One can only imagine how many veterans underwent similar transmogrifications.) Equally notable is how repressed subjects (in this case, war traumas) are always ready to burst forth violently and dramatically—this time, not through physical mutations or explosions of steel and monstrous flesh, but in eruptions of emotional intensity. Shadow of Fire portrays an environment of disquieting uncertainty that underlies even its warmer moments, such as the familial bonding that develops between the three characters, with horror always on the periphery, looking to intrude at the slightest invitation.

In moments like these Tsukamoto’s DIY approach reveals its strengths. The handheld camera adds immersion and immediacy, and a visceral sense of physicality that heightens the brutality. The more discrete scenes might not be pulled off as efficiently, but they are as satisfactorily executed as in a piece by a more traditional filmmaker.

In any case, the drama is genuinely compelling: in particular, the plotline involving the boy’s dalliances with a mysterious man with whom he tags along for a mission whose nature is never disclosed, apart from the fact that it requires the boy to carry a pistol. Tsukamoto maintains an effective sense of tension and intrigue until this arc’s climax, which ties in with the film’s overarching themes of the lasting effects of trauma and dehumanization.

The film’s entire POV is the boy’s, much like in the masterful Soviet war film Come and See. While the adults surrounding him deal with a variety of war scars, his plot arc mirrors his condition as an orphan. Throughout his journey, he finds himself successively abandoned, first by a new mother figure (who unexpectedly rejects him after their time together), and then a masculine figure who accompanies him for a tragically short but intense stint.

The film’s coda may be unnecessary, but further testifies to Tsukamoto’s compromise to conventional narrative film trappings, attempting to close all of the plot’s loose ends and develop them to a conclusion (that is, within the climate of uncertainty that envelops the entire scenario).

Shadow of Fire will please Tsukamoto fans who have stayed on board for his more “sober” output, like his post-2010 war films or, for a less recent example, 2004’s Vital. While the director’s style might not always lend itself seamlessly to the premise at hand, and the content might inevitably lead to cliché and over-trodden territory, the power of certain scenes is undeniable. Shadow is a worthy addition to the Japanese icon’s resumé.

The reviewer saw this film at Fantasporto’s 2024 festival; U.S. release plans are uncertain at this time.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It is not an easy watch, but, driven by performances that range from haunting and affecting, to terrifying and grotesque, it is a powerful one.”–Wendy Ide, Screen Daily (festival screening)

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MARKETA LAZAROVÁ (1967)

1 Comment

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

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Frantisek Vlácil

FEATURING: Frantisek Velecký, Magda Vásáryová, Ivan Palúch, Josef Kemr, Michal Kozuch, Pavla Polaskova

PLOT: In the early Middle Ages, a pair of brothers rob a caravan under protection of the King, setting off a chain of events that eventually leads to the kidnapping of Marketa, a virgin pledged to the convent.

Still from Marketa Lazarova (1967)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Dreamy pagan sequences adorn a stylized and hallucinatory landscape in Vlácil’s stark medieval epic.

COMMENTS: Although Marketa Lazarová is almost universally praised, everyone remarks on its confusing narrative. The film, which begins with a highway robbery and kidnapping, starts off with a lack of context, and the remainder of the story is fragmented, peppered with abrupt changes of scene, and with dreams, visions, and flashbacks which are sometimes impressionistic, sometimes indistinguishable from reality. The plot elements are comprehensible—a petty noble goes too far and angers the king, a virtuous maiden is snatched from her home—-but the main problem is keeping track of who is who, and where their loyalties lie. If you are prepared for confusion, you can soldier through it and the parties should sort themselves out within an hour or so. But if you would like some guidance, I’ll start this review with a short overview of the major players to get you oriented.

Despite providing the film’s title, Marketa Lazarová herself is not a prominent character until the film’s second half. The story atually centers on her eventual abductor, Mikoláš, a lanky and handsome man in a tight beard. Mikoláš’ brother and partner in banditry, Adam, is easily identified because he has only one arm (although watch out for flashbacks where he has two). Although they behave like highwaymen, Mikoláš and Adam are pseudo-nobles, the sons of Kozlík, a bald and bearded feudal yeoman who rules the walled town of Roháček. Long-haired temptress Alexandra, a brunette contrast to Marketa’s blond innocence, is their sister. In the first chapter the brothers kidnap Kristián, a German youth of noble blood, intending to ransom him. Meanwhile, Lord Lazar rules Obořiště, Roháček’s rival village; he is Marketa’s doting father. Mikoláš spares Lazar after catching him scavenging the wreckage of the caravan the Kozlík clan intends to loot, but later regrets his mercy when Lazar refuses to provide assistance against the king. In revenge, Mikoláš kidnaps the virginal Marketa, whom the (relatively) pious Lazar has pledged to the nunnery. The relentless Captain “Beer,” the king’s military representative in the region, is easily distinguished by his bushy mustache. These are the major players; many minor characters enter and leave, but if you can keep these straight, you should be able to navigate the main thrust of the tale—though details are often elusive.

The narrative confusion matters less because the film is so beautiful. The black and white vistas show off the wintry Bohemian countryside, bare interiors where scar-faced men in furs and chainmail Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MARKETA LAZAROVÁ (1967) →