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CAPSULE: ALMA & THE WOLF (2025)

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Alma & the Wolf is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Ethan Embry, Li Jun Li, Lukas Jann, Jeremie Harris, Kevin Allison

PLOT: Ren, a deputy in an out-of-the-way town, investigates a dog-killing wolf at the behest of his old high school crush, Alma.

Still from Alma & the Wolf (2025)

COMMENTS: A word of advice: don’t go into Alma & the Wolf expecting a standard werewolf movie, or any standard horror movie, for that matter. Focus instead on Ethan Embry’s fine portrayal of Ren, a peaked-in-high-school separated dad struggling with a drinking problem. You’ll be much happier with that approach.

“Nothing good ever comes from here, but lucky for the wider world, nothing ever leaves,” Ren says of the rural town of Spiral Creek. Ren himself is a former high school pitcher whose career ended prematurely with Tommy John surgery and whose life has been in a downward spiral since. Now a failed husband and deputy cop who’s been on this rural beat forever without much hint of promotion, he’s pinned all his hopes on his son, Jack, who’s following in his athletic footsteps and has serious athletic prospects. Ren is also interested in Alma, who seems (at times) to reciprocate his feelings, despite being a hot mess alcoholic herself. (This is a very boozy movie). Rounding out the small-town cast are a newbie cop Ren can bounce backstory off, a comic relief sheriff more interested in promoting Buddhist breathing techniques than hard policing, and a handful of colorful, trashy yokels.

As good as the acting is—Embry, as mentioned, is excellent, and the rest of the cast supply no weak notes—the special effects are noticeably poor: the mangy wolf costume is neither realistic nor frightening, there’s a head-on-fire effect that looks like it might have been made in ChatGPT, and at one point the use of rubber glass to substitute for a shattered windshield is painfully obvious. Given that Alma is more focused on drama and psychology than actual horror, these slip ups aren’t fatal, but they do imbue the film with a sheen of cheepnis that’s out of step with the professionalism of the rest of the production.

The first weird thing that happens in the story occurs when Ren suddenly promises to kill the wolf for Alma, despite his obvious reluctance and his warning that they’re a protected species and it’s a “class C felony” to kill one. Then comes his first encounter with the wolf, followed by recurring hallucinations where he glimpses the lupine taunting him. As the movie continues, the weird stuff intensifies, from the relatively subtle (whispering voices) to the elaborate (a well-staged pagan dream sequence in the woods with Alma and the talking wolf at a pagan bonfire flanked by a pair of goat-people). By the time we reach the one hour mark, confusion reigns, as the narrative seems to be spinning out of control, and occasionally contradicting itself.

Alma & the Wolf‘s twist ending turned off a lot of people. That’s understandable for viewers who didn’t go in bargaining for a weird movie: the final act makes some of the events of the rest of Alma feel arbitrary and irrelevant, and if you get invested in certain red herrings, you could feel cheated. But although the movie doesn’t quite stick its landing—it’s not tightly scripted enough, and it could have used more foreshadowing—it’s far from as abysmal as its 4.6 IMDb rating would suggest. I admire the ambition and certain aspects of the execution—specifically the performances—and although I wouldn’t give it a general recommendation, I wouldn’t advise you to steer away, either. If you’re in the mood for a well-acted, modestly-budgeted, artistically ambitious psychological thriller, you could do worse than hunting down Alma & the Wolf.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a one-of-a-kind, surreal, nightmarish journey that will give  audiences emotional whiplash.”–Molly Henery, Blogging Banshee (festival screening)

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CAPSULE: SLINGSHOT (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Mikael Håfström

FEATURING: Casey Affleck, Emily Beecham, , Tomer Capone

Still from Slingshot (2024)

PLOT: Nearing Jupiter’s orbit, John develops growing concerns about the structural integrity of his craft and the mental well-being of its crew.

COMMENTS: Laurence Fishburne is obviously enjoying himself. Tomer Capone looks on the verge of a mental breakdown. Emily Beecham is either too wily—or not wily enough. And Casey Affleck, well, it’s kind of hard to say. Some critics have described his performance in unenthusiastic terms, with phrases like “phoned-in” bandied about. However, Affleck’s turn as John the astronaut, a man on a deep space mission kicked in and out of induced hibernation, rang true to me. John’s reactions, and perceptions, are muted, to be sure; but I can’t imagine a better frame of mind for his isolated ordeal.

Early on in the film, we are provided a good enough reason for this trip to Europa, a planet-sized moon orbiting Jupiter whose gravitational pull is to be utilized as a “slingshot” to send the exploration craft (dubbed “Odyssey”—’cause why not?—and frankly, the kind of name I can see a big-tech consortium thinking as both classy and clever) to the methane-rich moon in question. However, there’s a strange malfunction early on. Is it an impact? …Sabotage? John’s captain, Franks (Fishburne, delightful), is adamant that they crew should trust the vessel’s sensors when they say there’s nothing to worry about. The onboard astrophysics expert, Nash (Capone, frazzled), is immediately certain the team is heading toward their death. And John kind of just floats between the two views, while occasionally seeing and hearing hallucinations about the girl he left behind.

Slingshot is firmly along the indie lines of Moon, but with three closely knit characters growing more and more anxious. The vessel design takes inspiration from 2001: A Space Odyssey (and writing that just now, I notice it also drew the shuttle’s moniker from that film), so everything looks like whizzy, astro-chic IKEA. The sharp delineation of the craft makes for a nice contrast to the fuzziness of the narrative. Director Mikael Håfström begins the story mid-voyage, catching the audience up with extensive use of flashbacks. (I had mixed feelings about this, as the film might have played better with scanter backstory; that said, plenty of viewers are less forgiving of ambiguity.) Tensions rise, orders are disobeyed, and—trapped on some glorified tin some hundreds of millions of miles from home—we mysteriously find a firearm’s been thrown in the mix.

So we have here a chamber drama with an unreliable narrator and the pleasure of three very different actors having the screws turned on them. It’s a small movie with simple pleasures, and a triple-shot of plot twists wrapping up the low key adventure. Disagreeing with other reviews, I think Casey Affleck should be commended for his subdued performance. To reference another Kubrick film, he’s much like Barry Lyndon in this way: he will take the good and bad developments with equal magnanimity, never batting an eye because: he’s there. And this is happening. We should all aspire to be so calm when our habitat is mysteriously smashed and those in charge menace our survival with deadly weapons.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“At its best, the film manages to capture the forlornness and desperation John experiences on his long, strange trip, and Affleck does a good job conveying that tone as he keeps waking up and going to sleep, over and over.”–Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter (contemporaneous)

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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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates, Shorts

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: LA CABINA [THE TELEPHONE BOX] (1972)

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“La Cabina” is officially available on YouTube from the Spanish Radio and Television Organization (rtve)

DIRECTED BY: Antonio Mercero

FEATURING: José Luis López Vázquez

PLOT: A man becomes trapped inside a telephone booth, with no prospects for escape.

Still from "La Cabina" (1972)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: “La Cabina” is distilled horror, a bizarre situation boiled down to its most basic elements, unfolding briskly but methodically as it approaches a surprising but inevitable climax. You’ll never really understand what’s going on, but you can utterly empathize with the threatened protagonist and the way his plight only grows more alarming. 

COMMENTS: The fifth and final season of “The Twilight Zone” was noteworthy for giving one of its episodes over to a French short film adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s darkly cruel “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” With potent visuals and a classically unsettling twist ending, “Occurrence” was a perfect fit for the show, and also went on to nab that year’s Oscar for Best Short Film. It’s fun to imagine an alternate universe where the show continued for years, because “La Cabina” would have been the absolute highlight of a prospective Twilight Zone Season 13. The Spanish short contains all the elements that make for a great episode of the show, right down to a shocking twist that rivals those found in such classic installments as “Time Enough At Last” or “To Serve Man.”

The setup for “La Cabina” is devilishly simple. In the space of a couple minutes, we meet our hero as he sends his son off to school, and then watch him enter the telephone box that we’ve seen a team of workers construct. From there, the film rests on the shoulders of López as he watches helplessly from his Plexiglas cocoon while onlookers laugh at his predicament, good-naturedly try to help, then surrender and lose interest as their efforts bear no fruit. Known in his home country as a comic actor, López adroitly conveys the poor man’s journey from irritation to fear to despair without a word of dialogue. His distress is especially acute as those same construction workers return—not to extricate him but to hoist the box onto a flatbed truck for a long journey to points unknown. Even as he tries to communicate with a similarly trapped traveler or exchanges pitiful looks with a collection of circus freaks who have now found someone they can pity, López never lets you forget that he’s a decent fellow who has found himself in an especially bad spot, which helps to sell the story’s final transformation into surreal horror.

There are theories about what it all means. It could be an allegory for life under the regime of Francisco Franco, when people could be snatched off the street, never to be seen again. Or it might be a metaphor for the uncertainties of life, as a normal day can easily take an unexpected and even tragic turn. It could also be read as an “Everyman”-type tale expressing the notion that when fate comes, nothing can save us. That a very basic tale about a guy who gets stuck in a telephone booth can carry the weight of such interpretations is a testament to the sturdiness of Mercero’s storytelling. “La Cabina” is truly remarkable, though, for the wonderful outlandishness of its “what-if” premise. 

“La Cabina” left an impression in Spanish pop culture, so much so that López could reprise his role in a commercial for a telecommunications company more than two decades later. It’s not as well-known on this side of the Atlantic, but for aficionados of the horrifying twist, it’s a can’t-miss look at the shocks that can arise out of the most banal moments in life. Sure, you can learn the lesson about keeping an extra pair of glasses for after the nuclear armageddon. But the dangers of making a phone call? “The Twilight Zone” can hardly compete. 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…La cabina continues to be no less entertaining when simultaneously becoming more and more weird and shocking… If you see the film for the first time, at the end, you may not be excessively surprised but you’ll be most likely wondering how it’s happened you haven’t seen La cabina before.” – John Moscow, Review Maze

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Atlas Obscura – Surely one of the only short films in history to earn a public monument, the city of Madrid commemorated the 50th anniversary of “La Cabina” by constructing a replica of the title box a stone’s throw away from the original shooting location.

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

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CAPSULE: TOMMY GUNS (2022)

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Nação Valente

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DIRECTED BY: Carlos Conceição

FEATURING: João Arrais, Gustavo Sumpta, Anabela Moreira

PLOT: A group of Portuguese soldiers living an isolated existence find themselves haunted by Angolan ghosts.

Still from Tommy Guns (2022)

COMMENTS: It’s difficult to discuss Tommy Guns‘ plot for fear of giving too much away. It’s not the appearance of ghosts/zombies near the end of the film that causes an issue; there is another, even less expected third act twist to contend with. We’re safe in saying that the film opens in Angola in 1974, one year before it gained independence from Portugal, as a title card announces that fact in the first minute. The movie then proceeds with what is—slight spoiler here—a thirty minute prologue showing the death of an innocent victim of the ongoing violence, a burial in which an elder warns that the corpse’s spirit will rest uneasily, and an odd riverbank encounter between a lone Portuguese soldier and a local woman that ends with him eating her necklace.

Afterwards, we switch focus to a group of young Portuguese soldiers, a company of eight men led by a strict and ruthless Colonel, who spend their days in some remote outpost doing not much of anything. The film was leisurely, yet confusing, throughout the prologue; it slows down even further in this segment. Although the troop chases, and catches, a traitor, and there is one brief ghastly apparition, relatively little happens throughout the middle of the film: it’s an accurate depiction of the drudgery of military life, endless training and waiting and little action. Things finally heat up when the Colonel decides to import a stripper for the restless (and horny) young men, leading to a third act payoff that’s fairly satisfying. Connections to the opening are ambiguous, but potentially meaningful (a quote from Horace could be significant).

Conceição’s film, only his second feature length effort, is ambitiously structured and deals with Portuguese colonialism in a way that will be most meaningful to those well-versed in this history. The writer/director was born in Angola during the conflict detailed here, moved to Portugal as a teenager, and has traveled back and forth between the two countries since, so this particular slice of colonial history holds personal significance to him. Many events are symbolic: I suspect the encounter between the soldier and the Angolan native represents Portugal’s treatment of her colony, and the idea of the dead returning to trouble the living has obvious significance. Nonetheless, the movie’s awkward pacing makes it difficult for the director’s ideas to penetrate the malaise: little happens for long stretches, causing your mind to wander. Some characters (like the white nun from the opening) are superfluous, mere local color; more economical storytelling would have helped the message land harder. Some critics have complained about the disjointed nature of the script, but the film doesn’t really switch genres as violently as advertised; the early war drama and the later zombie element feel of the same somber piece. In fact, despite the appearance of the walking dead, it would be difficult to categorize the film as “horror” in any meaningful sense: it seldom strays from the path of magical realism it sets for itself. The resulting experiment feels weighty and worthwhile, but, unfortunately, not always engaging.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Conceição has created a smart, strange film that is disjointed because colonialism is a thing of disjointed desires, histories, and deaths.”–Noah Berlatsky, The Chicago Reader (contemporaneous)