Tag Archives: Psychological Thriller

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CAPSULE: HURRY UP TOMORROW (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Trey Edward Shults

FEATURING: Abel Tesfaye, Jenna Ortega,

PLOT: A pop megastar who’s spiraling downward after a bad breakup has a one-night stand with an unhinged, obsessed fan.

Still from Hurry Up Tomorrow (2025)

COMMENTS: Although Hurry up Tomorrow is pitched as a “psychological thriller,” you may want to dial down your expectations for the “psychological” part, while exercising extreme patience awaiting the eventual arrival of the “thriller” aspect. Capably directed by Trey Edward Shults (They Come at Night), the movie, about a pop star losing his mind, features a ton of style. The concert scenes are decent, but there is also a lot of bold-yet-hazy lighting, disorienting coked-up disco scenes, and a pan to a burning building that’s almost Tarkovskian. The problem is, all this great style is employed in service of a pedestrian script full of music industry cliches, self-indulgence, and less-than-profound psychological insights.

The semi-autobiographical screenplay, written by star Tesfaye in conjunction with Shults and “nightlife entrepreneur” Reza Fahim, makes a stab at serious soul-searching, but fails to connect with the average movie patron. Abel, our star, starts out already at the emotional bottom; devastated by the desertion of an unknown lover, he is not merely vulnerable, but utterly pathetic, demanding his loyal bro manager (Keoghan) call his estranged beau for him, since he’s tired of leaving pleading messages on her voicemail. Abel’s eternal moping eventually leads him into the arms of groupie Jenna Ortega, whom we have previously seen torching a house. (I believe Jenna has a backstory, but frankly, my mind drifted.) She’s not really a character so much as an accusation (her name is Amina, which you might notice is a quick letter shift away from her intended plot function). Ortega gives off big Misery energy, and after an opening hour of Abel pouting, botching performances, and swilling whisky, the third act finally gets the thriller element moving. There’s a dream sequence in there, but you probably won’t remember much about it except that they managed to shoot some quick scenes in a depopulated Los Angeles, in sort of a West Coast nod to Vanilla Sky. In the end, the movie all seems to be some sort of guilty confession from Abel about the way he’s treated women, with some hints about an absent father thrown in—typical “woe is me” multimillionaire rock star complaints. But Amina’s role as anima never really works properly, because (although he has a brief moment as a cad) Abel began the film already debased and contrite. There’s no comeuppance to be had. His character arc is flaccid, because the script wants us to sympathize with him right from the get-go, instead of working through the movie to earn our sympathy.

I confess that I had seen the trailer for Hurry up Tomorrow about a half-dozen times before I was informed that the film’s pop star star was none other than former Super Bowl halftime-featured songster The Weeknd. The movie’s target audience of Weeknd fans will certainly know this going in (and will know that there’s already a final Weeknd album with the title “Hurry up Tomorrow”). Apparently, Abel Tesfaye will be retiring “The Weeknd” moniker to work under his real name henceforth; this movie may be intended as a first salvo in this new phase of his career, which will presumably include a lot more acting. I assume fans will be reasonably satisfied with the offering here; there is one big production number (performed twice to open the fictional pop star’s concerts), samples of songs scattered throughout the film, and an a capella performance at the end that’s meant to be climactic, maybe even epiphantic. As far as his acting goes, Tesfaye is not bad, if not yet up to carrying a major film as a leading man. Casting him alongside top-notch thespians like Ortega and Keoghan may not have been the best way to showcase his talents, since it’s guaranteed his co-stars will steal every single scene he’s in. Hurry up Tomorrow’s title tempts easy put-downs, but the film is totally watchable, if underwhelming; an effort that will likely only score with Tesfaye’s most intractable fans. Others can, and should, skip it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an exciting vanity project with surrealist imagination but stiff writing, no stakes, limited emotional weight and an unclear narrative.”–Maria Sherman, Associated Press/Newsday (comtemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Parmesan74 (letterboxd),” who guessed, based on the trailer, that it “seems to have the potential to be weird.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE SURFER (2024)

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The Surfer is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Julian McMahon, Nic Cassim

PLOT: A divorced father (Nicolas Cage) plans to buy the Australian beachside house he grew up in and teach his son to surf the waves like he did as a boy, but local “surf gangsters” torment him, insisting the beach is for “locals only.”

The Surfer (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The metaphor is obvious, but apt: this is a movie where you just catch Cage’s wave and ride it where it takes you, relishing the lack of control.

COMMENTS: As we open, Nicolas Cage (whose character is never named, merely credited as “The Surfer”) merely wants to take his kid (credited as “The Kid”) surfing on the beach where he grew up. He promises, in a bit of ironic foreshadowing, that catching a particularly gnarly wave is nothing short of a “short sharp shock of violence on the shore.” His dreams are dashed when a self-appointed surf cop in a Santa hat informs him that this public beach is for “locals only.” Outnumbered by the surf-gangsters (“Bay Boys”), Cage retreats to the overlook-cum-rest stop where he will spend most of the rest of the movie, anxiously attempting to contact his associate Mike to raise the additional $100,000 he needs posthaste to purchase his father’s old homestead on a cliff overlooking the beach. The Bay Boys’ bullying continues, however. First, Cage loses his surfboard; then, after his car battery and cell battery die, he finds himself stranded and subjected to increasing harassment. All the while, more details emerge suggesting that he may not be the completely together businessman he presents himself as, while golden-hued flashbacks suggest a youth that might not have been as carefree as he remembers.

What follows for Cage is a complete breakdown, as the script strips the bourgeoisie accoutrements of civilization away from him one by one, leaving him—at least temporarily—destitute. Accumulating a series of small wounds and suffering from short-term malnutrition and dehydration as he bakes in the Christmas sun, Cage drifts into a second-act fever dream where his very identity comes into question. About the only local who isn’t outright hostile to him is a scraggly beach bum (credited only as “The Bum”) who bunks in a discarded car in the same parking lot, and who has been bullied by the Bay Boys for decades now. Cage seems doomed to follow in his footsteps.

Theater patrons are advised to wear sunscreen, as the bright cinematography might give you sunburn, and when the screen starts wavering like high tide has briefly crested over the film, you might wonder if you’re experiencing heat stroke yourself. Francois Tetaz’s ultracool score, full of harp arpeggios and wordless vocals, takes its nostalgic period cues more from exotica than surf music, giving it a grandiose moodiness that constantly threatens to teeter into psychedelia. Finnegan’s visuals cross that line in the third act.

Cage himself is relatively restrained, more in Pig than Mandy mode; but of course, restrained for Cage can involve him force feeding a dead rat to a battered enemy. The fact that we expect, and accept, craziness from Cage makes him the perfect actor for this exercise in masculine delusionalism. Research confirmed my suspicions that this script about an upper middle-class man undergoing a midlife crisis explored via a water sport was explicitly inspired by another famous The S____er (among other sources). The Surfer, naturally, doesn’t quite reach its predecessor’s heights; it’s far more scattered, lacking its forebear’s intense focus on a single character, bringing a manospherish cult and hallucinatory red herrings into the equation. But The Surfer (suggested alternate title: The Sufferer) has a similar empathetic effect that hits home for men of a certain age and marital status.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“‘The Surfer’ is weird and wily, and while it doesn’t always connect, it maintains a strange presence that’s intriguing.”–Brian Orndorf, Blu-ray.com

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE UNRAVELING (2023)

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The Unraveling is available for VOD purchase or rental.

DIRECTED BY: Kd Amond

FEATURING: Sarah Zanotti, Sam Brooks, Katherine Morgan, Moiba Mustapha

PLOT: Mary suffers a traumatic brain injury during a car crash and thereafter is convinced her husband isn’t the man he says he is.

Still from The Unraveling (2023)

COMMENTS: Kd Amond pulls off an impressive stunt with The Unraveling. Her latest film skates around genre labels like her protagonist skirts around certainty: the film isn’t really horror, though it flirts with the genre—and the same goes for thriller, drama, romance, science fiction, and, unfortunately for us, weird. This refusal to be pigeonholable (Merriam, get me on the line) is a credit to Ms. Amond, even if it risks alienating fans of specifically horror, thriller, drama, romance, science fiction, and weird movies. We are presented with and, especially, left with a wiggly specimen of narrative, whose unreliability and oddness ultimately makes sense but raises the question: What is The Unraveling for? And, for whom?

Mary’s navigation of domesticity is vexed, as her husband (played by Sam Brooks, sporting a haircut I wish I had half the confidence for) fluctuates between a bit too understanding and a bit too controlling. We’re somewhat reliably informed that she recently suffered a traumatic brain injury: hence, her conviction that her husband is not who he says he is, and that her actual husband is a mysterious voice at the other end of her phone, speaking from a parallel reality. We are told she has difficulty with specific faces—while she may respond positively to the voice of her “husband” from another room, immediately upon seeing him she thinks him an impostor. So her days are filled with apprehension and confusion, beginning each morning when she wakes up in a bed with someone she is certain she doesn’t know.

Obviously throwing a baby into the mix is exactly the wrong thing to do, but that becomes a major plot point for the third act. Now, by this juncture the genre nearly tips into the realm of lifetime melodrama (or, considering the introduction of snowscape to the remote home’s exterior, perhaps even Hallmark). While following this pachinko of a plot line, I succumbed myself to Mary’s confusion: where are events heading? That I continued to invest myself in the film’s digressionary tendencies is a credit to Sarah Zanotti, who imbues Mary with a quietly desperate humanity.

To unravel a piece of knit-work is termed “frogging”, and leaping into a metaphor here, frogging is an apt one for Amond’s film. All the ducks, diving, and dodging of a frogger in their efforts to return to an error-free stage of the project are a bit exhausting. In that way, The Unraveling handily conveys its subject’s experience; but the open question I had at the finale was: Has this been worth the energy?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The Unraveling was a strange movie and for a long time I wasn’t really even sure if it could be classified as a horror.”–Daniel Simmonds, The Rotting Zombie (contemporaneous)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE KILLING ROOM (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: Jonathan Liebesman

FEATURING: Nick Cannon, Clea DuVall, Timothy Hutton, Chloë Sevigny, Peter Stormare, Shea Whigham

PLOT: A group of civilians who think they are participating in a paid psychological test have actually been tricked into an off-the-books government experiment testing the limits of human endurance under extreme hardship and torture.

Still from the killing room (2009)

COMMENTS: MKUltra was a CIA program with the modest aims of determining how much the human mind could be manipulated to do the bidding of others. Their goals ranged from developing irresistible interrogation techniques to enlisting unwitting civilians as assassins. (It’s a favorite topic for podcasters; the CBC’s “Brainwashed” is a solid place to start.) In 1972, the director of the project retired, saying that the entire effort had been useless; the CIA responded by giving him its highest honor and then destroying most of their files on the program. It took multiple congressional investigations for any of this to get on the record, and there will undoubtedly be much that we will never know about the American government’s assault on its own citizens.

(By the way, I really have to hand it to the CIA for the masterful troll job they performed in sharing their role in MKUltra. It’s clear that the Freedom of Information Act required them to come clean about their activities, but they certainly weren’t going to make it easy on anyone, hence the brilliantly unreadable online post they created to share the depths of their depravity.)

A pre-title card in The Killing Room makes clear that while MKUltra was publicly disavowed, there’s no way to know for sure that the government isn’t still up to something shady. After all, wouldn’t it make sense that the War on Terror would dredge up some of the old plan’s nastier elements? Thus we have all the premise we need for a familiar tale of regular people discovering they’re in a trap and desperately seeking a way out, with some rumination on Benjamin Franklin’s thoughts about liberty and security for extra seasoning. Think of it as “Cube meets the Milgram Experiment with a dash of Saw” and you’re pretty much there.

As a thriller, The Killing Room is an effectively shrewd piece of low-budget, high-stakes filmmaking. Director Liebesman exploits the claustrophobic setting with a mix of jittery handhelds, obtrusive surveillance footage, and lingering closeups. He also finds a clever balance of techniques to manipulate his audience, from ticking-clock suspense to queasy uses for blood. Most impressive, he kicks off the experiment proper with a brilliantly executed piece of shocking violence, a terrific blend of sound, editing, and acting that goes off like a bomb. Whatever it is, it’s not boring.

This is the kind of juicy-monologue, emotionally heightened movie that actors love to be in, and some really get to strut their stuff here. Hutton, in particular, relishes the darkness and toughness of his Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE KILLING ROOM (2009) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE WOMAN IN THE FIFTH (2011)

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La Femme de Vème

DIRECTED BY: Pawel Pawlikowski

FEATURING: Ethan Hawke, Kristin Scott Thomas, Joanna Kulig, Samir Guesmi

PLOT: A struggling American writer who arrives in Paris hoping to reconnect with his estranged wife and daughter instead finds work as a night watchman admitting visitors to a mysterious apartment, while commencing affairs with both a young Polish barmaid and a beautiful translator who may be keeping secrets of her own.

Still from The Woman in the Fifth (2011)

COMMENTS: For anyone who is used to seeing Ethan Hawke as an American writer slumming it in Europe in the Before trilogy, The Woman in the Fifth is a real shocker. From the moment we meet Tom Ricks prevaricating in the customs line at the Paris airport, we’re witnessing a much more pathetic, more desperate character than the one who romanced Julie Delpy. Soon enough, we learn some uncomfortable truths about our hero. His wife is decidedly not happy to see him, his daughter is surprised he’s not in prison, and the loss of his luggage leaves him with virtually nothing in the worst part of the city.

Of course, Hawke is the beneficiary of some extraordinary luck. On the one hand, the owner of the flophouse where he winds up is willing to trust an American, accepting that the wayward writer will eventually pay him (and holding his passport until he does). He even helps him out by giving him a job monitoring a security camera and buzzing in dodgy visitors. But despite being down and out, Ricks’ one novel has provided him enough notoriety to get him invited to a fancy soiree where he meets up with the sophisticated and mysterious Margit, a woman who would be perfect—if she was willing to say anything about herself at all.

If Margit seems to good to be true, well, let’s just say that the film agrees. There’s a reason why she’s tight-lipped; without giving anything away, it’s safe to say that there are some commonalities with films like A Beautiful Mind, Swimming Pool, or even Jacob’s Ladder. Yes, this is a movie with twists, playing with our sense of reality and exploiting our inherent trust in Hawke despite his character’s very evident flaws. A good portion of the film is taken up by curiosity over just what is going on, and that turns out to be the biggest misdirection of all.

The Woman in the Fifth is adapted from a novel by Douglas Kennedy, and it seems to have all the makings of an airport potboiler along the lines of Gone Girl or The Woman on the Train. The wild card here is writer-director Pawlikowski, who is deeply uninterested in any of the book’s trashy adornments. The thriller elements start to pile up: we learn that Ricks’ wife has slapped him with a restraining order. There are hints of impropriety that caused him to lose his teaching post. Strange noises come from that room he’s monitoring, and he even spots stains on the floor that look like the kind you’d get by dragging a bloodied body. Following a spat, his neighbor at the inn winds up dead under very mysterious circumstances. Heck, his daughter goes missing. All of this plottiness swirls around, and Pawlikowski genuinely does not care. Most of this will go unresolved, because the main attraction is Hawke and his choice of the reality he will choose to occupy.

For a film whose narrative sets up so much and delivers precious little, The Woman in the Fifth is quite watchable. Hawke gives a nicely calibrated performance as a man who is probably losing his grip but is quite certain he’s in control. He’s balanced well against Kulig’s hopeful innocent, and especially against Scott Thomas’ cool manipulator. By way of example, a scene in which Margit welcomes Ricks into her home for the first time and unhesitatingly surprises him with some digital stimulation could be unnecessary or even crass, but she fixes on him so intently, with the curiosity of a scientist, that it packs the moment with potency. Margit is a small presence in the film, but Scott Thomas makes a meal of it, appropriately taking command of Hawke long after the truth of her identity is revealed.

The weirdness of The Woman in the Fifth may depend heavily on expectations. If you’re looking for the story to pay off its mysteries, it probably feels like a cheap ploy, and may even leave you extremely angry. If, however, you recognize Hawke’s steady march to oblivion as a creation of Pawlikowski’s particular sensibilities (he would delve into further emotional straits in Ida and Cold War), then you’re likely to have a more satisfying watch. Either way, it’s a very different experience from wondering what will happen to the Ethan Hawke character who is destined to miss the last plane from Paris.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The movie seems to exist in some kind of liminal space that feels like a literary device… the story does attain a kind of closure, and even resolution, but it does so in a touch-and-go way that leaves us curiously dissatisfied. It’s like if Hitchcock’s Notorious morphed into Tarkovsky’s Solaris, only not nearly as interesting –- not nearly as cinematic — as that.” – Bilge Ebiri, They Live By Night (contemporaneous)

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

The Woman in the Fifth / La Femme Du 5ieme

The Woman in the Fifth / La Femme Du 5ieme
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