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CAPSULE: JOHN LILLY AND THE EARTH COINCIDENCE CONTROL OFFICE (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: ,

FEATURING: Voice of

PLOT: A biography of pioneering cetologist and “psychonaut” Dr. John C. Lilly.

 

COMMENTS: John Lilly may best be known to readers of this site as the inspiration behind the canonically weird Altered States. The real Lilly seems to have lived a life that actually was “stranger than fiction.” A neurophysiologist by training, Lilly began his research career during the height of Cold War paranoia. The term “brainwashing” was first coined in the 1950s, when Lilly’s initial studies of mammal brains were designed to achieve “push-button control of animals and people.” In the 1960s he embraced the use of psychedelic drugs, leaving behind military research in favor of the counterculture. He described his moment of enlightenment as a “very bizarre and weird feeling.”

Almereyda and Stephens’ documentary traces the gamut of Lilly’s life-long research interests, from his early days hooking monkey brains up to cathode ray TVs to a daily self-experimentation regimen involving hourly doses of ketamine. What comes across is a portrait in contrasts. Though he came to see himself as living outside the bounds of mainstream “consensus reality,” American culture readily absorbed Lilly’s ideas.

Lilly is responsible for our belief that dolphins are intelligent creatures, and inspired the Greenpeace effort to “Save the Whales,” igniting an interest in environmentalism. He popularized the analogy likening the human mind to a “biocomputer”; he believed that only through the perception of other realities can we break free from our “programming.”

Lilly’s “feeling of weirdness” resulted from the realization that the animals he had been researching were not just test subjects but thinking, feeling creatures, whose intelligence and sense of consciousness could equal that of humans and, in some cases, even exceed us. After studying the brains of cats, monkeys, and dolphins, he decided to focus on dolphins, convinced they would have some ancient wisdom to impart to human beings.

The film’s makers present all facets of Lilly’s research and impart his intense curiosity regarding the mind and how it works. His evolution from straight-laced government scientist to drugged-out psychonaut proceeds without judgment. In the beginning, Lilly comes across as eccentric even when appearing on ’60s talk shows, likening inter-species communication to an alien encounter. In one episode the host is quick to point out that Lilly is a real doctor and not “some nut!”

The narration touches on important ethical issues regarding animal research, but never delves too deeply. Lilly’s personal fortune gets a

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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER SUGGESTED QUEUE: IRREVERSIBLE (2002)

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DIRECTED BY: Gaspar Noé

FEATURING: , , Albert Dupontel, Philippe Nahon

PLOT: A reflection on the destructive nature of time, centered around a ruthless sexual abuse and a vicious revenge.

COMMENTS: First things first: I balk at calling Gaspar Noé’s classic Irreversible a “weird” movie. Experimental, brutal, shocking, or thought-provoking are all more suitable adjectives. Its “weirdest” element, apart from its anxiety-inducing quasi-infrasound and some improvised dialogue, is perhaps that the movie exists in two versions: a disorienting one where the story is told in reverse and a clearer one, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019, that retains the chronological order of the events.

Another aspect worth bearing in mind is Noé’s intention to blur the boundaries between the real and the fictional. At the time of filming, leads Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel, both of whom offer superb performances as young couple Alex and Marcus, were actually married As a result, their scenes together feel tender and sweet, and they are imbued with genuine love—a stark contrast to the gruesome violence pervading most of the film.

Because, despite all the stylistic experimentation, Irreversible remains grounded in disturbingly realistic ideas. In an interview, Noé bleakly revealed that the film was meant to represent the fact “that people are animals who control themselves to survive in a civilized environment, and not the other way around.” In effect, while the movie is far from being a gorefest, the atavistic behavior that characters display in some of the sequences is chilling. When the outbursts of violence take place, the viewer can’t help but stare in astonishment at the dark underbelly of human nature presented on screen. The horror of the film lies in these very actions and in the realization that they can be triggered any time under the right circumstances.

The central conflict of the movie (spoilers ahead) exemplifies such unhinged violence. It is also literally the central scene, the one that doesn’t change its location irrespective of which version of the film one watches, and the one that is hotly debated among commentators who are undecided whether it’s one of the most powerful scenes in cinema history or simply gratuitous onscreen shock value. It is a crude, ten-minute static shot depicting Belluci’s rape and beating in an underground tunnel, whose red walls become a symbol of hell. This scene constitutes the trigger for Cassel’s revenge on the perpetrator, but it also works on a level beyond the screen, the long static shot directly making us viewers witness to a cruel reality, rendering us impotent before it, just as the victim is.

The other gruesome scene of the film takes place at the beginning or end, depending on the version, at a gay bar called The Rectum (fans of psychoanalysis may find links to the above-mentioned tunnel), where the rapist, referred to as Le Tenia, is blithely clubbing and having fun with other men. Cassel and his friend burst into the bar and, Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER SUGGESTED QUEUE: IRREVERSIBLE (2002) →

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CAPSULE: DIGGER (2026)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Riz Ahmed, , Sophie Wilde,

PLOT: A narcissistic billionaire struggles to control the narrative after his oil drilling operation causes a global catastrophe.

Still from Digger (2026)

COMMENTS: Digger is, nakedly, Tom Cruise’s bid to finally land that elusive Oscar. Give him a producer’s credit and an 8-figure budget. A script for an issue film, but not on a super-polarizing topic like transsexualism: instead, make it a comedy with a populist spin about the ultra-wealthy screwing the little guy. Pair him with a director with a reputation for shepherding highbrow concepts into accessible, Oscar-friendly cineplex experiences. Add a top-notch supporting cast willing to concede the limelight. Throw money at the screen, promising a Vista Vision spectacle like only real Hollywood can do it. Given these resources, Cruise certainly does his part: under what looks like pounds of makeup and a fat suit that makes him unrecognizable except for the occasional Cruisian glimmer in his eye, he blusters his way through the madness, hitting every mark.

And yet, for all of this liveliness, box office receipts and reviews have already dug Digger an early grave. Which may be appropriate for a ghoulish comedy featuring a dying planet, a dying President, and a dying cat.

One drawback is that the film isn’t that funny. Iñárritu has a knack for contrived absurdity, but not for the sort of rollicking comedy that feels unforced and organic. Consider a moment in a high-stakes war room meeting when a general makes an off-color sexist remark, and President Compson (a gaunt Goodman) admonishes him to watch his language because there are ladies present. After a beat where everyone looks around the room in confusion, Goodman chortles, unable to sustain a straight face. That line would have been a screamer in Dr. Strangelove‘s 1960s, but, although it gets a reflexive laugh here, you almost immediately realize it doesn’t reflect contemporary reality: today, there would have been a Susie Wiles in that meeting, or at the very least a Natalie Harp. 

Which leads into the other major criticism of the film: it crams obvious messages into the shape of jokes, rather than finding the humor in the story’s situations. Digger is preachy, almost as hectoring as its caricature of a tycoon. And few enjoy being lectured at, even when they agree with the lesson. The script’s “meta” twist acknowledges this weakness, and comes close to apologizing for it; but in doing so, risks becoming even more condescending, explaining to the audience how satire is supposed to work and how you should process it. The tack the twist takes, however, ultimately serves a narrative purpose that is specific and surprising enough to avoid that pitfall. Still, the overall feeling that the film is talking down to the viewer is hard to shake.

Based on the sometimes brutal notices, that smug tone annoyed many critics. But in truth, it hardly ruins the film, which remains brisk and unpredictable. Digger is still strong when it focuses on uncomfortable truths. The centerpiece is a 10-minute (one take!) Cruise monologue where he speaks before some sort of court composed of a jury of ashen European extras from a film. Having given up on deniability in the face of a tsunami of death and misery directly caused by his choices, Digger surrenders to the inevitable opprobrium and tries the tactic of truth as a Hail Mary. Yes, we wrecked the environment. But what did you expect us to do? Ignore your demands for heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer, jet fuel for trips to Mallorca, and Doordashed Big Macs? Forego squeezing every short-term dollar of shareholder value? Not kick the can of catastrophe down the road? Did anyone ever actually believe there was any way we would not ruin the planet? The message is heavy-handed… but it’s not wrong.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…even when you bump against the Tom Cruise of it all, and there’s no denying the thrill of watching him apply his signature intensity to a role as strange as this one… Iñárritu… fares better when he trades slapstick for Hieronymous Bosch-like surrealism during the middle portion…”–David Ehrlich, Indiewire (contemporaneous)

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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: SISTERS (1972)

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DIRECTED BY: Brian De Palma

FEATURING: Margot Kidder, , , Charles Durning, Lisle Wilson

PLOT: A reporter witnesses a murder through the window of a nearby apartment, but her investigation leads her to a mysterious pair of conjoined twins with a dark and disturbing past.

Still from Sisters (1972)

COMMENTS: Brian De Palma loves Alfred Hitchcock. Everyone knows that. Sure, he’s capable of turning a Stephen King novel into a horror classic or an old TV spy show into a -led blockbuster, but one thing we know for sure is that, once he got over his reputation as a comedy director, there’s nothing he’d rather do than a slavish impersonation of the Master of Suspense. Want proof? All you need to do is look at Body Double. Or Blow Out. Or the twisty thriller that made his name, Sisters.

The thing is, when you actually watch Sisters, what quickly becomes apparent is that De Palma is in conversation with Hitchcock as much as he is in thrall to him. Alfred Eaker compared De Palma to “a free jazz artist, filtering, reworking, improvising, and expanding on a body of filmmakers, which includes Hitchcock (among many others) to craft postmodern compositions that often are warmer and (as blasphemous as it may be to some) more startlingly original than the master.” Eaker also calls Sisters one of the best films of the decade. High praise, but quite defensible given the genuine shocks, eerie backstory, sprinter’s pace, and uncomfortable laughs the film still delivers. In the great tradition of low-budget horror flicks that rise above due to their cleverness and wit, Sisters is a welcome surprise.

Sisters does wear its forebears on its sleeve, with allusions to Psycho, Rear Window, and Vertigo among the most recognizable (to say nothing of the unmistakable sounds of Bernard Herrmann, who De Palma lured out of semi-retirement to lend his trademark screeching violins to the soundtrack), but the student demonstrates more facility with modern sensibilities than the Master, with powerful insights into racism and misogyny, comfort with sexuality, and  willingness to indulge the supernatural. Most notably, he’s found a subject that would absolutely appeal to Hitchcock, turning the true story of the conjoined Krivoshlyapova twins into Kidder’s pretty girl with a very dark past. Where Hitchcock made do with doppelgängers and confused identities, De Palma uses a genuine medical curiosity as his launchpad.

Mind you, none of this theft homage would mean a thing if the film didn’t work on its own terms. De Palma opens with a classic bit of misdirection, aping a “Candid Camera”-like show to introduce our charming hero couple, coquettish Kidder with her Québécois accent and babe-in-the-woods demeanor and the charming, unsuspecting Wilson. Their romantic whirlwind occupies the first third of the film. Wilson is an almost perfect gentleman, while Kidder tries to explain away her unusually possessive ex-husband (Finley, whose Slugworthian vibes never let up). If De Palma steals anything from Hitchcock, it’s the value of a full-blown paradigm shift that justifies admitting no one after the first act.

The film sputters a bit in Act II as the baton is handed over to Salt, who is a fine heroine but suffers from the script’s need to isolate her by setting her adrift in a sea of backstory and mansplainers. (Fun Easter egg: the headline of the news clipping from her column adorning her back wall reads, “Why We Call Them Pigs.”) It’s the final act, when she finally discovers the strange truth of Danielle and Dominique’s unusual condition and upbringing, that pays off in the form of the one scene that owes nothing to Hitchcock: a nightmare sequence in which Salt imagines herself as Kidder’s conjoined twin and gets the scoop on just what screwed up the twins so many years ago. It’s a moment that DePalma gets to claim all for himself.

It’s hard to deny that Sisters is De Palma doing Hitchcock. The parallels are just too obvious, right through to the final joke of the unclaimed MacGuffin. The truth, though, is that he does Hitchcock extremely well, with a freshness and modernity that the Master’s later works struggle to capture. If this is mere copycattery, audiences were right to demand more of it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“From start to finish, Sisters is weird, but it rarely feels like it’s just for the sake of being weird… the story is infused with so many off-kilter details that even when you know what’s going to happen, you can never predict how you’ll get there.” – Jenna Stoeber, Polygon (Blu-ray)

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

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Sisters (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

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    Capsules

    CAPSULE: BOUCHRA (2024)

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    Bouchra is available for purchase or rental on-demand.

    Recommended

    DIRECTED BY: Orian Yani Barki, Merriem Benani

    FEATURING: Voices of Yto Barrada, Marriam Benani, Dounia Berrada

    PLOT: A New York-based Moroccan coyote film director develops an autobiographical movie exploring her relationship with her mother.

    Still from Bouchra (2024)

    COMMENTS: Directors Barki and Benami built a reputation for cinematic weirdness with their previous collaboration, the 2020 short-film series “2 Lizards,” which was featured on ‘s surreal mixtape program “Off the Air.” Bouchra, the team’s animated feature film debut, centers on the titular heroine, a young Moroccan woman living and working as a film director in New York City. The narrative alternates between her present life and her past in Casablanca, blurring reality with reconstruction as Bouchra attempts, through her work, to process her relationship with her semi-estranged Moroccan mother. The tensions between them stem from taboos surrounding Bouchra’s sexual identity that went unaddressed and ignored for years. Through calls with her mother in the present day, and reconstructions/reminisces of a short lesbian affair in Casablanca, these issues gradually come to light. Plus, the characters are all anthropomorphic animals of various species.

    Like Endless Cookie (2025), Bouchra stands out due to the dissonance between its stylized animation and its grounded themes. The aesthetic—furry-inspired anthropomorphic animals in a neon-soaked, almost cyberpunk-like urban environment—can be off-putting at first. But this isn’t sci-fi or high fantasy. Naturalistic dialogue, overlapping and full of awkward stuttering, hints at something closer to reality. This is, essentially, a tale of familial ties, sexual orientation, and the way traditional societies consciously exile whatever disrupts the status quo. It is an empathetic tale, eager to show compassion and understand easily-disturbed norms. The furry aesthetic reveals the queerness of the bodies, their hairy, androgynous nature. This is especially apparent in two short, tasteful yet erotically-charged intimate segments. The dark color palette of New York contrasts with the warmer tones of Casablanca. Often, the uncanny, detailed digital character animations are juxtaposed against real background photographs of Morocco, for a documentary-like feel.

    In the end, this movie can be viewed not only as American independent cinema, but also as Moroccan Diasporic Cinema. And since Moroccan cinema isn’t that common, this work can be recommended to fans of world cinema adventures.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “Bouchra is filled with… small incidental details that dominate one’s attention, puncturing the otherwise fairly banal sheen of the piece as a whole and revealing a distinctive, weirdly effective work struggling valiantly against its miniscule [sic] budget.”–Grant Watson, Fiction Machine (festival screening)

    I think this movie is weirder than average
    I think this movie is better than average