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366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: THE DARK SISTERS (2023)

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The Dark Sisters can be rented or purchased on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Richard Bailey

FEATURING: , Edna Gill, Kristin Colaneri

PLOT: Two sisters reunite by a remote lake some time after a mutually-perpetrated crime.

COMMENTS: Thieves gonna thieve, amiright?

And whether you want him to or not, Richard Bailey is going to make his movies in his own way. Plenty of cryptic—or even patently incomprehensible—films cross our desk here, and we approach each title with an open mind and an eye on purpose. It was only during the final act of The Dark Sisters (and then, only after a politely brazen hint from the filmmaker) that I cottoned on to just what this movie is all about. Bailey is an ideas man, one who has things to say about life and mind, and he is keen to converse with the viewer.

On the surface, The Dark Sisters concerns two sisters attempting to bridge a gulf that has grown between them during intervening years of separation after a grisly experience. Kicking back lakeside for this reunion, things quickly become not what they seem, and even, if I may conjecture briefly, not even what they are. This is a story of two sisters; this is a story of vengeance; this is a story of redeeming the wicked; this is a story of reflections, doubles, synthesis, and the fusion between perception, reality, and memory. And it’s not even really about the sisters, for that matter.

With his poetic-essayical dialogue, lingering shots and scans of a delightful primordial lake, fractured plot structuring, and philosophical musings, Bailey tracks a number of things here. My own takeaway from this methodically furled string of musings and images is that The Dark Sisters is a story about the story—about the act of storytelling, touching on the facets of that that age-old phenomenon and attempting to present this nigh indescribable (and wholly human) pass-time (a designation I use with no sense of flippancy; time is what we have, and pass it we must). Through archetype, rumination, sonic cues, and honey-glazed nature, The Dark Sisters seeks the heart of what occurs when we gather to talk and make sense of ourselves and everything around us.

Listen to our interview with Richard Bailey about The Dark Sisters.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“In some ways The Dark Sisters reminds me of films like Mickey Reece’s Climate of the Hunter. Things aren’t normal, but they’re not full-blown weird or bizarre either. It’s as though everything simply shifted a few degrees away from what we expect them to be, and we have to figure out why.”–Jim Morazzini, Voices from the Balcony (contemporaneous)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ONCE WITHIN A TIME (2023)

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RecommendedWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY: , Jon Kane

FEATURING: Sussan Deyhim, Tara Khozein, John Flax, Apollo Garcia Orellana, Brian Bellot, mystery celebrity guest

PLOT: Curtains open on a glowing, chanting golden tree woman, then children watch a couple with wicker cages around their heads wander through incidents of apocalypse, technology, and wonder.

Still from Once Within a Time (2023)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Simultaneously ancient and hyper-modern, Once Within a Time is as an apocalyptic dispatch from the far reaches of reality. A bold and foolish (in the complimentary sense) work of cinematic art, dense with imagery and symbolism, this is octogenarian Godfrey Reggio‘s first narritivesque film—his vision of what it means to be a human being in the 21st century, teetering on the brink of cataclysm, but balanced by wonder and creative possibility.

COMMENTS: Godfrey Reggio announces Once Within a Time as a “bardic fairy tale”; an imposing description, but one that the film lives up to. Set to a new score by Philip Glass—with snatches of other music floating through the mix—it’s a carnival of free-flowing imagery and ideas, a techno-gnostic hymn about cataclysms and the birth of new worlds. After the red curtains pull back, we are launched into scenes of an Earth goddess singing from her glowing heart, and innocent children spinning on a merry-go-round. Then, Adam and Eve appear, only to have their equanimity quickly destroyed by a digitized Apple. Cell phones recur as dire artifacts: as cages, as monoliths, as bricks on a road that leads to an audience of faceless puppets. We watch a dance of harlequin emojis. Entertainers and demagogues speak gibberish. UFOs zoom into dreamspaces and blast giant robots with their ray guns. Monkeys experiment with virtual reality goggles. There’s a reference to 2001 that will probably draw laughs, and maybe cheers, from savvy live audiences. There is even a special celebrity guest whose appearance I don’t want to spoil, who speaks in John Coltrane solos and acts as a pied piper. And throughout it all, reaction shots of children, bemused, delighted, taking in the helter-skelter as best they can, their little minds gathering fuel… hope for the future.

The visual aesthetic is faded yet bright, digital but evocative of finely aged film stock. The style and imagery brings to mind experimental films of the 1950s-1970s, specifically : the wicker baskets around the lead adult’s heads like the birdcages of the Pleasure Dome, the UFOs possibly on loan from Lucifer Rising, the whole thing seasoned with occult premonitions of a New Age Dawning. There are fleeting scenes of destruction, decay, despotism, mushroom clouds: but the imagery returns, unfailingly, to dwell on innocent children at play, and themes of creation and re-creation. It ends on a Botticelli tableau, with children as angels and Venus yet to emerge from her throbbing egg sac.

A new Philip Glass score is, of course, something to celebrate. The soundtrack here is more of a suite of short pieces than a large scale composition, moving through numerous flavors to illustrate the Reggio’s many different settings. Glass’ hypnotic minimalism may not get the chance to do its accumulation-by-repetition thing here, but he makes up for with a wider palette of colors: unfamiliar elements like chanting, accordions, and even African percussion offer the composer new settings for his ideas. The contributions of Iranian singer Susan Deyhim (who also plays the tree) are most welcome.

The runtime is listed as 51 minutes, but the credits take up the final 8, so the film itself is a manageable 45-minute experience. Watching this on a big screen with an appreciative audience would be magnificent; it makes perfect sense that it debuted at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art. It is uncommercial, personal, specialized, and fated to be underseen, but Once Within a Time is a major cinema event in 2023. Make it a point to track it down when you can.

Once Within a Time official site for trailer and screening calendar.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…this strange new experiment — less scripted than staged — revisits early cinema with the same doom-laden playfulness that [Reggio’s] previous work used to push the medium forward. “–David Ehrlich, IndieWire (contemporaneous)

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CAPSULE: THE COW WHO SANG A SONG INTO THE FUTURE (2022)

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La vaca que cantó una canción hacia el futuro

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DIRECTED BY: Francisca Alegria

FEATURING: Leonor Varela, Mía Maestro, Alfredo Castro, Enzo Ferrada

PLOT: When her father is hospitalized from shock after her long-dead mother appears to him, Cecilia returns to her family’s dairy farm to care for him.

Still from The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future (2022)

COMMENTS: Fans of cows singing songs will surely be satisfied with The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future; the bovines croon quite well, although it is up for debate just how far into the future their tunes echo. The rest of us will at least be willing to hear the movie out: it contains much intriguing strangeness, while also held back a bit by a tangled thicket of themes and the sometimes underwhelming familial drama.

The film begins with a shot of a mouse corpse that leads to a long pan over a forest floor to a riverbank where a carpet of beached fishes sing a song about death. This is followed by the appearance of Magdalena, who arises from the water wearing a motorcycle helmet and walks silently into town. We then turn our attention to Cecilia, a single mom doctor raising two children. We meet the elder, Tomás, trying on women’s clothes and discussing a vintage newspaper article about a woman who committed suicide by riding her motorcycle into the river. Cecilia rushes to her father’s side after he collapses from shock after catching a glimpse of what he believes to be his long-dead wife, looking just as she did the day she died. Cecilia and her children settle in at the family’s dairy farm, where her brother Bernardo attempts to revive the herd’s failing fortunes while the patriarch complains about his effort. Also on site is superstitious stepmom Felicia, the first to directly interact with silent revenant Magdalena, who gradually reveals herself to the others. Meanwhile, the cows get loose at night, while back in town people stage protests, blaming a local pulp plant’s pollution for the plague of dead fish.

I’ve tagged this movie as magical realism—it’s a rule that we must do so for any moderately strange movie hailing from south of the U.S. border—but at times, Cow feints towards actual surrealism. If Magdalena’s strange and unexplained return from the dead was the only thing going on here, Cow probably could be confined to the realm of magical realism; but the magic here extends beyond the realistic. There are, of course, the choirs of singing fish and cattle. There is Magdalena’s strange relationship with technology: she’s obsessed with cellphones and her mere presence turns on microwaves. A mysterious wound appears on Cecilia’s head, quickly healed and never explained. The zombie mom briefly takes up with a lesbian motorcycle gang. So, despite a primary focus on drama, things do get weird.

But The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future arguably attempts to deal with too many themes at once. The family dynamics are the primary focus, with the mystery of Magdalena’s death and return illuminating and catalyzing the interplay between the others. Ecological collapse forms the background: the deaths of fish, the disappearance of bee colonies, a sickness affecting the cattle herd.  There’s a nod to issues of how conservative Latino societies deal with LGBTQ members, and even a critique of industrial dairy farming practices. But, although everything connects, to a large extent, spreading all of these concerns over the course of a 90 minute movie means that each one gets short shrift: we never uncover the source of the river’s pollution, Tomás’ transgenderism subplot feels imported from a different movie, etc. Furthermore, the big family secret is not weighty or surprising enough to justify its delayed reveal; it’s delivered in a single sentence. Still, Cow works out well in the end, generating an optimistic feeling of rejuvenation and resurrection. The postmortem resolution of Cecila and Magdalena’s relationship loosely parallels the notion that there is still time for us to atone for our sins against the environment.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Rife with evocative symbolism, Chilean director Francisca Alegria’s feature debut is an audacious, surrealistic expression of acute ecological distress and various ideas pertaining to contemporary agita.”–Kat Sachs, Chicago Reader (contemporaneous)

 

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CAPSULE: THE DREAMS OF RENE SENDAM (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Joshua Zev Nathan

FEATURING: Jake Smith, Sophia Savage, Darwin Luján, Becca Huerter

PLOT: A socially awkward poetry student pursues relationships with classmates which mix up in his mind with his dreams.

Still from The Dreams of Rene Sendam (2022)

COMMENTS: Microbudget features require a different set of expectations from the viewer. Watching and appreciating them is a learned skill, not something that comes naturally to modern filmgoers accustomed to plots which are advanced by CGI as much as dialogue. Movies like The Dreams of Rene Sendam, therefore, aim at a niche audience. You need to be able to handle a minimalist presentation and develop an appreciation for what filmmakers can accomplish with little means. These films offer their audiences not spectacle and diversion, but authenticity and passion. Even when they don’t entirely succeed, I often develop a soft spot for them simply because they have more personality than big budget, focus-grouped features developed with corporate blandness. Such is the case with The Dreams of Rene Sendam.

Rene Sendam is a character study/romance infused with the spirit of poetry—in the wispy, hazy, undergraduate free verse mode. The main character is a poetry student, trying to pick up other poetry students in poetry class while we hear lectures and verses from a poetry professor. Unfortunately Rene, while quietly handsome and a sensitive soul, is so shy and awkward that he gives off creepy stalker vibes. His only friend is religious zealot Jim (Darwin Luján, who gives the film’s best performance, taking a word association game to apocalyptic lengths). As Rene wanders through the film writing poetry, he searches for what he really wants—love—as occasional surprising bouts of nudity and sex interrupt the proceedings.

Despite featuring in the title, Rene’s dreams aren’t much integrated into the film’s artistic framework. The fact that he sometimes (rarely) has vivid dreams that we are privy to is just a character trait, like bushy eyebrows or a love of houseplants. Although the logline brags that Rene’s “dream world threatens to rupture reality and put his friend’s life in danger,” the unruptured reality is that the simple love story that the script wants to tell could easily be rewritten to omit the brief flights of fantasy without changing anything. Unlike a low-budget feature like Strawberry Mansion, the microbudgeted Rene Sendam has no money to create dream sequences, so we get simple hallucinations like dinner served on a beach. This movie’s dreams are so like its realities that there’s little ambiguity to the proceedings.

Like its protagonist, Rene Sendam always has good intentions, even if it doesn’t always deliver on them. To its credit, its dramatic scenarios have enough variation to keep you reasonably engaged. Ultimately, however, the film lacks the budget to realize its purposelessness.

Trivia/disclosure: a 366 Weird Movies writer worked as crew on this movie and appears as an extra. I was not aware of this fact until after it had been selected for review. It is available for purchase, or try it for free on Tubi.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“While it doesn’t all work and is a bit too ambiguous for its own good, the extremely adult unrated drama ‘The Dreams of Rene Sendam’ gets points for sheer ambition.”–Russ Simmons, KKFI (contemporaneous)

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: KING JUDITH (2022)

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King Judith can be rented or purchased on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Richard Bailey

FEATURING: , Joanna Schellenberg, Jenny Ledel, Emily Ernst, Rhonda Boutte

PLOT: A police detective investigates a car crash which ends the lives of three women and triggers the disappearance of a fourth.

Still from King Judith (2022)

COMMENTS: Viewer discretion is advised: this film is best viewed as a treatise on American feminist folklore. The plot’s threads remain unwoven until a quiet reveal at the finish, and even then the pervasive mystery is not put to rest. This method of storytelling is in keeping with the Southern Gothic style, relying heavily on ambience and spirituality—both religious and otherwise. The ethereal-but-anchored tone also echoes the subject matter: ghosts, memories, and revenants. And despite the sun-infused imagery and wispy, often (overly) poetical dialogue, there is a sense of unspecifiable loss wrapped around the ambiguous happenings.

The facts at hand are scant. Known: three women died in a car crash while en route to a “macabre literary festival.” Known: the sudden appearance on the road of a fourth woman, recently evicted from her tent-home of twenty years, triggered the crash; this woman’s whereabouts are unknown. Known: this tragedy is followed by a series of deaths-of-despair on the parts of several ostensible witnesses. Through the detective’s interviews with the victims’ friends and associates, and obliquely pertinent poems sent to her by an unknown observer, the meandering turns of events are uncovered. But what it all adds up to remains opaque, both for the film’s protagonist and for the audience.

While enduring the first third of the movie, I felt a growing apprehension—the bad kind. I feared I would have to spend an entire review dumping on an unlucky indie filmmaker. The opening mystery-tedium and the lead actress’ unconvincing performance (imagine a keen twelve-year-old girl attempting to come across as a thirty-something “seen-it-all” kind of cop) nearly sunk it. To my relief, King Judith manages to transcend both the sum of its parts and its myriad flaws. (As with anything “Southern” or “Gothic”, patience pays off, in this case handsomely.) The second act opens with a bar scene in which writer/director Bailey at last finds his storytelling voice. What follows is an encounter where an awkward fellow beautifully regales a childhood ghost experience, and the young woman he’s speaking with (one of the three car-crash victims) in turn share the amusing story of the “Mounted Aristotle” caper from Alexandrian times.

King Judith never fully shakes off its pretensions; there are too many random shots of poetical movement in front of poetical backdrops, plenty of “quirky” artist characters, and dialogue of the “…reckless urges to climb celestial trellises, and slide down them” variety by the bucketful. The grandiloquence is heading somewhere, however, and its meandering way covers interesting intersections of folklore and psyche, feminist and otherwise. And Richard Bailey’s detective-story frame is apt. In the world of memory, tales, history, the supernatural, and the hereafter, there are “no answers to our questions, only rewards—fascinating details, luminous things; on and on it goes: the work of gathering clues.”

Kind Judith is currently streaming for free on Tubi.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a weird little film that mixes folklore, and Southern Gothic, with a dose of women’s studies, and comes up with something that feels almost like a stage play that was adapted for the screen.”–Jim Morazzini, Voices from the Balcony (contemporaneous)