I'm really glad I caught this movie because it's so damn good I'm afraid nothing else in the festival will top it. A slow-burn psychological horror movie, writer-director team Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz take a relatively simple set-up and milk every thematic and tangible angle for maximum, nails-dug-in-the-chair-arms terror. Identical twins have long been fascinating to horror writers but Goodnight Mommy exploits childhood sibling relationships with great insight and sensitivity, and their mastery of the twins' emotional and physical bond is so complete that when the tables turn, switching the perspective halfway through, the viewer is sent through an intense emotional wringer, especially when the final curtain is drawn and everything changes. The acting is perfect from both the twins and the mother, their turns through the plot sympathetic at one curve and shockingly vicious at the next. The film has the good sense to pick a handful of attention-grabbing objects - a tank full of cockroaches, a sucker-arrow crossbow converted to a real crossbow, a cat found on a pile of bones - and develop their place in the story to their maximum possible thematic potential. The cinematography by Martin GSchlacht is patient and expansive, highlighting some extraordinarily beautiful natural scenery and accentuating the coldly stylish interiors of the family's house. Two pieces of design are especially symbolic: the first is a set of large photographs of women against white backgrounds and blurred into silhouettes, the second a pair of clear plastic globe chairs suspended from the ceiling by chains. The music, by contemporary classical composer Olga Neuwirth is sparse and quite eerie, taking the Vertigo route and appearing during transition scenes or at the crest of dramatic waves. Goodnight Mommy is a brilliant chamber horror movie, one of the best new horror flicks I've seen since the decade began, and it's a wonderful way to kick off my 2015 SIFF experience.
Alleluia - Gloria (Lola Dueñas) is a lonely morgue worker and single mother who is pressured into accepting a date invite from an internet stranger by her friend. Her date, Michel (Laurent Lucas), preps for the meeting with pagan magic and migraine headaches. After a torrid day and night he has to leave but manages to shake some money out of her in the form of a loan for his work. After he never calls back Gloria is distraught and unstable and tracks him down at a bar where he's surrounded by middle-aged floozies. She confronts him and proposes a scheme wherein she stays with him and helps him in his date-'n'-dash scam. She leaves her child with her friend; he starts marrying women with Gloria in tow as his "sister" with the plan of splitting after money is exchanged, but Gloria won't let him "consummate" the marriages, and the two spiral into a deepening conspiracy of murder and madness to keep the spark alive.
Based on the real-life "Lonely Hearts" murders of the 40's and 50's, Alleluia is the fifth movie based on the case after 1950's Lonely Hearts Bandits, 1969's The Honeymoon Killers, 1996's Deep Crimson and 2006's Lonely Hearts. I'm a big admirer of The Honeymoon Killers and was curious to see how a Belgian director could adapt the material to the present day. However, my curiosity was marred by my recent viewing of writer-director Fabrice du Welz's breakout movie, Calvaire, a mostly forgettable backwoods maniac horror flick with a couple really good scenes to its credit. My fears were heightened in the first minutes of Alleluia as I realized both films had meaningless religious references for titles and the current movie started with "Act 1: Gloria". However, I'm happy to say that Alleluia stands head and shoulders above Calvaire and is a bold and creative new spin on the material. While The Honeymoon Killers felt like a docudrama and its situation developed naturally and relatively sanely, Alleluia bets its chips on dark secrets and untreated insanity and beats the house. Lola Dueñas is friggin' terrifying, her barely contained compulsions sending her careening through scenes and at times reducing her to a sniveling child. Laurent Lucas was the star of Calvaire and his performance here shows a great deal of artistic growth, letting him slip comfortably into a grey-streaked, Christoph Waltz-esque lothario with charm and great fragility. The camera is usually jammed close to the main characters' faces so they don't get away, and at times conversations are held where a character looks at the camera while half of their face is obscured by the back of the others character's head. It's a simple and effective symbolic angle, implying either that each of the lovers complete each other or destroy each other - or both. The writing is very sensitive to each character's desires and weaknesses and each scene plays out at a natural razor's edge, the precarious situation coming within a hair's breadth from imploding due to flighty decisions or just weird luck. I do have reservations, though - the mostly crummy music being at the top of the list. There are a couple of surreal moments, such as the two lovers dancing naked around a metaphoric bonfire in ramped fast-'n'-slow motion, and one particular scene involves highly out-of-place and extremely awkward singing. That's all I need to say about that. It also does that thing where the end credits start rolling before the last scene actually occurs, and this time there's no reason for it whatsoever. Otherwise Alleluia is an expert psychological thriller and a great improvement over its director's previous work, and it's always nice when I get to say each of those things.
The Russian Woodpecker - Ukrainian artist Fedor Alexandrovich is haunted by his past - he was among the children evacuated from Chernobyl soon after the explosion that caused the most disastrous nuclear power plant leak in history. As his country's relationship with Russia becomes more strained Fedor becomes fascinated with a possible link between the "Russian woodpecker" - a mysterious, constant radio signal emanating from Russia that is presumed to be for military use - and the Duga, a massive radio tower located near the Chernobyl plant that was decommissioned after the explosion. His investigations reveal that Duga was meant to use radar to anticipate missiles coming from the West (much like the DEW Line the U.S. made above the Arctic circle) and never worked because its signal couldn't pass the aurora borealis, wasting the several billion rubles poured into its construction. Fedor hatches a theory that the people responsible for the Duga's construction engineered the Chernobyl explosion as a convenient cover to decommission the Duga, and his attempts to get his theory heard draw him deeper into the growing unrest between Ukraine and Russia, revealing a threat greater than his peace of mind and how far he will go to get his voice heard.
I hadn't heard of either the "woodpecker" or the Duga before this film so I was really interested in both the mysterious military fixtures and the conspiracy woven around them. The problems start when Fedor gets really deep into his conspiracy without supplying enough evidence to support it. I normally complain when movies are too long, but this is a rare instance where the movie was actually too short, specifically too light on evidence and too heavy on loaded speculation and political conflation. His conspiracy hinges on the idea that a man would engineer a massive environmental disaster solely to save his career in the Soviet military-industrial complex. One man they interviewed said that the penalty for misappropriation of government funds in the U.S.S.R. was death, but the Duga was a government project that simply failed, which by definition isn't misappropriation. The latter half of the movie focuses less on the conspiracy itself and more with Fedor's mounting obsession with the threat of Russia invading Ukraine and establishing a new Soviet order, and in the process Fedor begins to think of the explosion as a "genocide" rather than what it would logically be even if his conspiracy was true. In the last third the movie drops all pretense at real investigative documenting and tries to turn Fedor into a near-martyr, showing him speaking during the 2014 Kiev uprising and generally acting like he's about to be assassinated. On top of all of that, the movie never finds out what the "woodpecker" is, instead forcing it into a symbol for an evil Russia trying to invade the rest of the world, a very disappointing resolution to a thread that ended up being the title of the film. Every time a point is brought up the film glosses over breaks in the thread and covers it up with chintzy, sub-X-Files music cues. The pacing is far too fast to establish any atmosphere and seems more like an attempt to shut up any thought about the nitty-gritty incidentals that are the real meat of any plausible conspiracy. Director Chad Gracia occasionally cuts to shots of Fedor walking or standing with a torch, either nude or wrapped in plastic, in a vaguely symbolic gesture that adds up to nothing except to undermine his credibility. It would be one thing if Fedor held on to his idea in the face of minimal hard evidence and his own lack of objectivity and the documentary was able to distance itself from his ideas enough to make him the real subject, but Gracia presents the conspiracy as fact and is too eager to show Fedor about to be crucified for his commitment to the "truth". It's a shame, because I found the history and concept really interesting and would have been entranced if the movie really went as far as it could with its idea even if it didn't have any kind of neat closure. As it stands The Russian Woodpecker is a propaganda piece disguised as investigative reporting and not nearly supported or intellectually satisfying enough to stand with great investigative films like JFK and Zodiac.
The Color of Pomegranates (1969) - I try to avoid calling any film "unreviewable", as most movies are slapped with that label when they're too bizarre or too inconsistent to fit into mainstream film standards and its fans get defensive. I'm sorry you have to hear this, but Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is entirely reviewable, and it stinks. As of SIFF 2015 I may have found a movie that I find entirely unreviewable, but I must confess that I missed the first 5-10 minutes of it due to horrible traffic. I don't think that would have helped. The film, The Color of Pomegranates, is a 1969 experimental exploration of the life and observations of the Armenian mystical poet-singer Sayat-Nova, using stages of his life as a loose structure to place him in a series of static tableaux influenced by illuminated miniatures. At first the scenes resemble an impressionistic portrait of life in the ancient Kingdom of Armenia, and the viewer can delight at the geometric assemblage of each scene and can follow a character of a little boy as he breathes in the sights and sounds of his village. Then the movie continues and any semblance of reality goes out the window. The sections of his life are ordered properly but don't have much flow, rather taking a handful of themes and repeating them ad infinitum through minor variations in set dressing and object placement. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that not even late-60's Armenians would've picked up on all the symbolism in the movie, and the lack of any kind of arc through the broad sections makes each new tableau a chore rather than a delight. The film is interspersed with quotes from Sayat-Nova which I suppose are poetic but are terribly bland and have nothing to do with the scenes they precede. When the film nears its end there are a number of images that could have served as a nice final image, but then the movie keeps going, ending on a last image that has nothing to do with anything and only serves to frustrate the viewer. The closest relative I can think of to this would be Max Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonte (A Week of Happiness), a "collage-novel" consisting of surreal, thematically-linked images collaged together from clippings from Victorian-era catalogs and pulp novels. Each day of the week is given an set of elements and associations and the images all explore these ideas without the constraints of plot and characters, becoming a novel in name only. I love Une Semaine de Bonte and have come to a few conclusions as to why I like that and not The Color of Pomegranates. Firstly, books are read at the reader's pace, and each image can be admired or ignored as to their tastes. With a movie the viewer is trapped into the director's pace and mood, and both of those things in Pomegranates quickly devolve into boredom. I also wasn't expecting Semaine to resemble reality in any way, and the themes given to each day actually affected the images presented. In Pomegranates the quotes do nothing for the images and are stiflingly bland rather than invitations to evocation. The fact that we are seeing actual people in actual settings forces people to desire some semblance of reality, whether surreal artists like that or not, and that expectation worked against the film's intention of being lively counterparts to still images. It also didn't help that most of the people on screen couldn't have looked more bored if they tried.
All of this would have only been opaque and frustrating for me if not for one indefensible detail: the animal cruelty. For much of the film animals are used as props in the tableaux, and when the last third rolls in we are subjected to scenes of people ritualistically sacrificing rams. We don't actually see their throats cut, just the throats about to be cut and then real ram corpses being sliced apart, so some rams must have died for the film. Even more ghastly is one of the last scenes, wherein Sayat-Nova lies down feigning death, when all of a sudden several freshly decapitated chickens are thrown into the scene from off-camera, thrashing about and destroying any admiration I might have had for the filmmakers. I don't care how meaningful or important you think your movie is - there is no excuse for killing or hurting animals for your movie. It's entertainment, and I find killing animals for entertainment completely unacceptable. It's the reason I refuse to give any more money to Lars von Trier movies (after he killed a donkey on the set of Manderlay). The Color of Pomegranates, you're on my shit list.
Blind - Ingrid (Eskil Vogt) has recently lost her sight and is finding it difficult to cope. Refusing to leave her apartment, she tries writing stories to imagine the outside world, creating a love story between a lonely, porn-addicted man (Marius Kolbenstvedt) and the woman who lives across the street from him (Vera Vitali). As her story and musings on her condition and what the outside world must be like her husband becomes a character in her story, and the story's plot becomes corrupted by her own desires and insecurities. As fantasy and reality become disastrously intertwined Ingrid must choose between comforting lies and the uncertainty of stepping out into the real world, if not for her than for the sake of her husband and their marriage.
The main character's lack of sight sets up a unique and fun conceit for metafictional trickery, and right away her story loses track of setting and character - such as a conversation that starts in a coffee shop and switches to a bus, with characters trying to put down their cups and seeing that there's no table. It's a loose, Michel Gondry-esque approach to the world of the imagination that is as thought provoking as it is funny. The movie is good at using this kind of immersive, revision-prone storytelling to expose Ingrid's fears and immaturity, as she moves from a simple love story to suspecting her husband of having an affair with the girl in her story, all the way to making the girl blind and bumbling in revenge. It also reveals Ingrid's sexual frustration and fears of becoming pregnant as a blind woman, as she writes the man of her story as having a crippling porn obsession and imagines her husband having hookers-'n'-blow parties at his office. The dialogue is very natural and perceptive and the acting is realistic in a way that most compliments the quirky, understated mood. My main problem with the film is with its very conceit - there is almost no tension. I'm not saying that Ingrid's psychological hurdles weren't in need of overcoming, but the fact that most of the action takes place in her head while she is in no real danger in the real world makes for a story too microscopic to be gripped by. The largely handheld photography and spare, bland scenery don't offset this issue. Blind is an enjoyable and insightful foray into how blindness can affect the psyche, but the lack of tension means that I'm not going to work particularly hard to see it again.
It's also important to make a criticism here about the festival itself rather than the film - neither the print guide nor the site have any content warnings for any film. There's a blanket warning not to bring babies to films or children under seven, but outside of the occasional mention of violence in some blurbs there's nothing like a ratings system or even a mention of anything beyond content suitable for children. This issue came up in Blind when we first enter Ingrid's story and are treated to a parade of one-second-long clips from hardcore pornographic videos. I understand that the ratings systems in Europe have the acceptability of sex versus violence reversed from our system, but I think this would have thrown the movie's native Norwegian viewers for a loop. You have no idea how awkward it was to have to see a woman blowing a man with no censorship in a theater packed with baby boomers, especially with no prior warning. In fact, one of the last shots of the movie shows Ingrid laying on the floor masturbating in front of her husband. It's nothing I haven't seen before, but I'm a jaded twentysomething, not a fiftysomething mother taking her kids to their first foreign movie. I certainly would have liked a warning in front of Color of Pomegranates concerning the animal violence, as I would have known to not go, but maybe they're under the impression that if they put content warnings in the guide fewer people will go to the movies (which is highly duplicitous). They might also be under the impression that "real" film lovers will watch any movie in spite of possibly objectionable content, but everybody is different and just because one viewer is OK with something doesn't mean the next one will be. It's like a classic problem that comes up whenever an extremely violent horror movie comes out and parents' groups and conservative pundits raise objections: seasoned horror fans will talk about how movies since 197-whenever have featured such-and-such acts of violence and that the current outrage is unjustified. The problem with that argument is that there's a first time for everything and most people aren't horror buffs, meaning that for every viewer jaded by something like the eyeball piercing scene from Zombie there's ten who aren't and would have appreciated not being subjected to something that shocking - and I'm saying this as a fellow horror buff. Whatever the reason the lack of content warnings is going to result in a noticeable number of unhappy parents and inexperienced viewers and there's no good reason to leave them out of next year's guide.
ShortsFest Opening Night - I made an effort this year to attend at least one short film compilation, as I missed all of them last year and there was one short I absolutely needed to see, and luckily I made it to the one showing of it. The Opening Night had seven shorts and the theme was variety, making the 87 minutes an eventful and surprising one.
* First up was A Passion of Fire and Gold, a slow-mo, beautifully-shot portrait of an aging beekeeper. The short places the beekeeper as a species as endangered as honeybees are threatened, unable to inspire many young recruits and facing abandonment by his government and nature. While his plight is legitimate and we need to take serious steps to preserve honeybees and the industry that raises them the short was too brief and too pompous to make much of an impact.
* Next was Live Fast Draw Yung, profiling a Seattle-based seven-year-old child artist who became a Twitter sensation when his dad posted his traced drawings of rap album covers and superheroes. The kid and his drawings were really charming and the short had a great sense of humor about the whole thing, letting the kid be a kid with great effect.
* The next short, So You've Grown Attached, was just awesome: an imaginary friend to an adolescent girl is faced with retirement as the girl becomes interested in a boy who lives across the street. The imaginary friend, Ex, is a great design - a man with a pure black face and electric-light-eyes, dressed in a snazzy suit with "x" buttons on it - and the girl, Izzy, seems to be the coolest girl on the block, reading Skull Slam magazine and living in a zig-zag-decorated room. The short has a feel very reminiscent of classic Tim Burton, specifically Beetlejuice, as Ex reports to a Bureau of Imaginary Friends where a friend named Bearbear (a man in a bear suit) shows him a retirement orientation video about knowing when to let go of your child. The black and white photography and off-kilter production design further recall the likes of Edward Scissorhands and Vincent. Overall an awesome piece of fantasy realism.
* Next was The Youth, a drama about the children of Somalian refugees in Los Angeles. A young Somalian-American man finds himself moral unsure of himself after hearing that a friend of his has secretly gone back to Somalia to join Al-Shabaab, a notorious militant terrorist group active in the country. He meets another friend of his who asks him to lunch and tells him that he has a side business smuggling young Somalian men to Mexico so they can go to Somalia to join Al-Shabaab. The acting and direction is generally excellent and the dilemma of the main character is an intriguing one, and the short ends on an ambiguous note, though I feel like the short might have been a little too sympathetic to the trafficker's side than the filmmakers though it was.
* Amelia & Duarte was a Portuguese animated short that used pixilation, wherein people are used as objects for stop-motion. The story chronicles a breakup in the most whimsically surreal way imaginable - Amelia & Duarte decide to split and go to bizarre measures to totally rid themselves of the other, such as bottling tears, removing their names from books and letters and ultimately putting their memories and sentiments in a box to be filed in a "Lost Lovers Department" storage room. The animation is brilliant and must have been extremely time consuming - not only is pixilation hard as hell that is combined with fantastical scenes such as love letters folded into boats and rocking on the waves of a bed's blanket, capsizing and disappearing into the "sea". A simply amazing piece of animation wizardry that I hope gets some kind of exposure in the West, even if it's just on YouTube.
* The short I was waiting for was World of Tomorrow, the new animated short from the great Don Hertzfeldt. A three-year-old girl (who I think is called Emily but I have to admit I've forgotten) finds a videophone and slaps all the buttons, eventually bringing up a woman who claims to be a clone of her from more than two hundred years into the future. The woman uses time travel to bring the girl into her own time, telling her about astonishing technological leaps such as the "outernet", time travel, clones in suspended animation being put on display in museums and people uploading their consciousnesses into digital formats. Through all of this the girl acts like a little kid, barely understanding anything and goofing off while being told terribly important information, some of it relating to an impending apocalypse that will kill most of human life including her clone-descendant. Hertzfeldt's shorts have consistently been masterpieces ever since Rejected and this is one of his most thought-provoking shorts yet (topped only by the "Billogy" of Everything Will Be OK, I Am So Proud of You and It's Such a Beautiful Day), taking each of its far-out concepts to simultaneously hilarious and disturbing extremes and anchored with one of the most adorable and realistic little kid characters I've seen in an animated short. This was the best of the bunch and I'm happy that it will most likely be available in one form or another for mass consumption. See it, see it, see it.
* The last short was Hand Job: Portrait of a Male Hand Model, and by that title you can tell that it's not the most serious of documentaries. The hand model in question considers himself a serious actor, practicing meticulously and moisturizing between takes in a licorice commercial, and at one point he has a PA feed him lunch while his hands are in gloves. The Q & A after the screening, wherein the director and star of this short were present, revealed that the model was largely a character created by happenstance and in-tune improvisation, and all their ideas and riffing payed off very nicely. A great example of the plausible being taken just far enough to leave viewers scratching their heads - but not so much that they don't believe it's real.
Accused (Lucia de B.) - Lucia de Berk (Ariane Schluter) is a nurse with an unsettling streak of cases where her patients - all elderly or infants - die under her care. After being put on leave the parents of a recently deceased baby order an investigation and evidence mounts that Lucia may have purposefully killed her patients, and her unpopularity with her fellow nurses and troubled past combine to get her thrown in jail. While most people seem to think that justice was served, an assistant DA (Isis Cabolet), who came up with the idea to convict her through profiling, finds more and more inconsistencies in the prosecution's case, and as the appeals on Lucia's behalf fail the lawyer finds herself working to get Lucia cleared, even at the cost of her career.
The case of Lucia de Berk is the most infamous miscarriage of justice in Dutch history, and it's story made for a really interesting true-crime courtroom drama. The mood of the film is engulfingly gloomy, finely illustrating Lucia as a misunderstood loner condemned through bureaucratic trickery and public hysteria. The direction places its characters in dark rooms and strong angles, forcing the viewer into the same claustrophobia and despair as the characters. The performances are quite good, especially from Ariane Schluter, who seethes with distrust and defeat and carries an enormous weight throughout the film. The main problem with the film is one that I can only guess at - I think this film was whittled down in editing, so much that the meat of the story is largely absent. People writing these kind of movies based on real cases need to carefully pay attention to each detail, as it seems that a lot of interesting details were left out for story expediency. For example, there's a scene where the assistant DA asks the director Lucia's hospital for originals of her patients' files, but the scene has no follow-up and nothing particularly interesting happened in the scene. This could have been a moment to reveal the hospital director's dishonesty, or there could have been been a follow-up scene where there was trouble getting the files or the files were missing. I'm not saying that they were missing in real life - I just wanted to know, as there have been plenty of investigations of conspiracies that revealed missing documentation. Another major element mostly absent from the movie is Lucia's troubled past, mentioned briefly in passing and only referenced through fractured flashbacks. The prosecution brought up her past in an effort to get her labeled a psychopath, but the actual details of her life don't affect her present circumstances at all. That would be fine, but if so why bring them up in the first place, except to pad the film and give us something else to look at other than Lucia's prison cell and the rainy streets of the Hague? If they wanted to explore these issues I would have gladly listened - they seem really interesting on their own. We don't even get a scene where she tells anyone about it, but the movie can't help but keep bringing it up as a distraction. These little issues all come to a head at the ending, which is far too quick and easy a resolution and makes it seem like the public and the federal courts just decided one day to stop thinking Lucia was a murderer. One of the best courtroom dramas I've ever seen is Indictment: The McMartin Trial, which some readers may recall I did an article about. It chronicled the longest, most expensive criminal trial in U.S. history, wherein a family who ran a preschool was accused of ritualistically abusing and molesting the children under their care in the name of Satan. After nearly a decade and millions of dollars wasted, not a single member of the McMartin family was found guilty and the public's fears were chalked up to mass hysteria brought on by the absurd moral panic of Satanic ritual abuse that had been on the public's mind since the 70's. Indictment kept the viewers enthralled by showing every torturous detail of the proceedings and perfectly capturing the emotions and motivations of everyone involved, a task that Accused was either uninterested in or was forced to leave out for reasons I can't imagine. I also don't know why the distributors decided to rename the film something as bland and forgettable as Accused for its English-language release. Accused had a lot of interesting stuff to work with and was mostly enjoyable as it proceeded, but through editing or carelessness it left out too much for the film to be fully satisfying or memorable.
Sleep paralysis is a mysterious and unsettling condition wherein, as a person tries falling asleep, their body becomes paralyzed and they have terrifying waking nightmares, often involving shadow people and threatening situations. The Nightmare interviews eight people afflicted with the condition and explores its variations and mysteries through haunting reenactments and impassioned storytelling.
I'm a big fan of the previous documentary by The Nightmare's director Rodney Ascher, Room 237, which explored the bizarre and mutually exclusive theories about the supposedly hidden meanings of Stanley Kubrick's film of The Shining. That film was less fascinated with the absolute meaning of its subject and more with the interpretations of its interviewees, a bold and sympathetic decision that made the movie a striking examination of the human mind's power to see art as it sees fit. The Nightmare solves my main problem with Room 237 and actually lets the viewer see the speakers, and each of them is interviewed in their own bedrooms under blankets of ominous lighting. Their experiences are all weird and frightening, sharing some common elements such as "shadow people", suffocating paralysis and overwhelming feelings of dread and death. Ascher made a striking choice to have them reenact their dreams on camera (though not all of them, most likely out of respect for their discomfort at the prospect of literally reliving their worst nightmares), and while the production values occasionally seem hokey the effect is unsettling and extremely familiar. These dreams reveal the rudiments of human fear and aspects of our subconscious, such as the common phenomenon of paredolia where people see significance in insignificant images, such as a human face in a light socket. However, the interviewees' ideas for what sleep paralysis "means" range from alternate dimensions to demonic forces and simple bafflement. The director doesn't necessarily agree with any of the subjects more than another, but rather respects each person's predicament and need to find answers in an unsympathetic world, the same tactic as Room 237. The Nightmare ends up being much more dynamic and meaningful than Room 237 by virtue of letting us experience its subjects' terrors and choosing a subject with a great deal of psychological and emotional weight. I personally found myself enthralled with the film because I too have had a kind of waking nightmare called hypnopompic hallucination: while coming out of sleep I sometimes will hallucinate various strange and threatening things in my room, and when I try to act on it the hallucinations dissipate after a few seconds. It's essentially sleep paralysis without the paralysis and not nearly as vivid or specific as anything in The Nightmare, but it's usually frightening and unpredictable and I've gotten close to seriously injuring myself on a few occasions in my attempts to fight whatever is threatening me. In that sense The Nightmare resonated deeply with me, but I can't see why you can't find it just as enthralling as I did. It's a great improvement on Ascher's last film and might end up being one of my favorite documentaries of all time.
Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll - After the peaceful treaty of independence from France, Cambodia saw a surge in popular music influenced by the relatively new genre of rock and roll. A slew of native singers and musicians gained a great deal of popularity imitating and expanding upon rock music, and these artists became entwined with a relatively peaceful and prosperous chapter in Cambodia's history. However, as the war in Vietnam progressed and America started its notorious bombing campaign in the Cambodian countryside, the royal Cambodian government, as well as the vibrant cultural scene of Phnom Penh, was threatened and eventually destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, and an entire national cultural institution was nearly erased from history.
I didn't know a lot about Cambodia or its relationship with the Vietnam War before seeing this documentary, so the near-deluge of information was as educational for me as it was engaging. Don't Think I've Forgotten is among a new documentary tradition inspired by hyper-dynamic documentaries of the 2000's like Bowling for Columbine and The Kid Stays in the Picture, using a combination of interviews, archival footage and computer-manipulated album covers and photographs, keeping the pace fast and the flow of information constant. The first half of the film is all about the growth of Cambodian rock music during peacetime, and the mood is wickedly fun; the second half is about how the Khmer Rouge took over the country and destroyed everything the musicians had built as well as killing anyone who held on to the pre-Rouge way of life, and the mood shifts appropriately to capture one of the worst massacres in human history. The film features a wide range of interviewees, including some of the original musicians, relatives of musicians who were killed or disappeared, and even a son of the deposed king of Cambodia, and in many ways we're lucky to have seen them - most of their fellow countrymen were simply killed. It's a very well-told and harrowing story that I'm glad was brought to the big screen in such an entertaining fashion. Plus, the music rocks. And rolls.
Turbo Kid - In the far-off future of 1997, Earth is a world ravaged by nuclear radiation, almost totally devoid of life and drinkable water. What few people remain have to scavenge from whatever technology survived the apocalypse and are always searching for a source of untainted water. A teenage boy (Munro Chambers), fascinated by the old Turbo Rider comic series, comes across a strange girl his own age named Apple (Laurence Leboeuf) and finds himself fighting against the evil Zeus (Michael Ironside) and his horde of psychopathic killers. Will the Kid be able to save mankind and be able to fully realize the heroic powers of the Turbo Rider?
Much like last year's festival favorite The Babadook, Turbo Kid is expanded from a short film, in this case "T is for Turbo", the directors' (Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell) entry in the anthology horror film The ABC's of Death. I saw The ABC's of Death and actually didn't remember their entry when I went to see this, but it doesn't matter - Turbo Kid is a great feature film in its own right, actually leagues better than it's parent short's original home. It's a loving homage to 80's post-apocalyptic movies like the Mad Max movies, Escape from New York, Def-Con 4 and dozens more, taking a charmingly simplistic approach to its wasteland setting and science, such as giving the villain a machine that grinds up bodies to get their water content and the hero a Power Glove-esque weapon that blows people up with electrical blasts. All the clothing and tech is leftover from the 80's, so everything has a chintzy, plastic look and Saturday Morningy primary colors. Everybody rides on child-sized 80's bicycles and their helmets look right out of the cockpit to the Captain Planet ship. All the violence is tremendously over the top, every wound shooting geysers of blood and common sense taking a back seat to comedic dismemberments and flying body parts. For crying out loud, a character is stabbed all the way through with a plastic unicorn! The effects, aside from a few uses of CGI, are all practical and pretty impressive and remind us how effective it is to see an actual (fake) head get cut in half and spin around while spurting blood everywhere. The acting is excellent, especially from the two leads and the always-awesome Michael Ironside, his menacing presence a great reminder of his memorable performances in Scanners and the like. The best part of all of this is how the film knows its ridiculous elements are self-evident, and everyone else plays the movie as a straight dramatic adventure. Munro Chambers's performance as the Kid is so serious and careful you'd swear the movie was a serious sci-fi flick from 1982. This restraint in performances and overall presentation, combined with a gorgeous, soaring synth score, makes for a really solid action-adventure film with a fun comic-book feel and professional production values. I was fortunate enough to see Turbo Kid at a midnight screening and the audience got exactly what they wanted and much more - it defines what an affectionate parody should be and made for a joyous theatrical experience.
Satellite Girl and Milk Cow - KITSAT-1, an outmoded, nonfunctioning South Korean survey satellite, turns back on and picks up a song sung by a young man, Kyung-Chun at a keyboard playing in a park. It decides to go to him and plummets to Earth. Meanwhile, the young man is turned into a cow by a mysterious black smoke and is hunted by a walking incinerator and a man trying to use magic to pull his liver out with a plunger. The satellite crashes down nearby and transforms into a girl, and meets Merlin, the legendary wizard, who has been transformed into a sentient roll of toilet paper. Can the unlikely trio stop the liver thief and the incinerator, turn Kyung-Chun back to a human, find out KITSAT-1's new purpose, all while the satellite girl and milk cow find themselves falling for one another?
I don't know how on Earth Hyeong-Yoon Jang, the writer and director of this movie, came up with all of that malarkey but by God does it all pay off. Having a distinctly fairy-tale feel, what with the transformation, simplistic mythology and classic heroic arc - but set in a very modern time and place, Satellite Girl and Milk Cow takes on its bizarre content with great humor and extremely likable characterizations. The key to its success is how its characters react realistically to all the crazy horsehockey that's going on around them, keeping the core of the movie grounded enough for the audience to explore the movie's ideas along with the leads. At its core the movie is a love story - Kyung-Chun was transformed into a cow because of his broken heart, and KITSAT-1 (renamed Il-Ho) finds herself forgotten and lacking in purpose now that her mission is over and she's crashed to Earth. The set-up leads to an enormously charming and effortless love story, and the cow and girl couldn't be more likable if they tried. The film also adds a lot of relatable and funny details to how the characters work through their predicaments, such as how the first threat after the incinerator for Kyung-Chun is how he's supposed to pay rent if he can't go outside during the day to work. At one point Merlin makes him a human suit out of paper, but it rips in the rain, and in a late scene we see him drying a few of them on clothesline. Another great detail is Il-Ho's rocket arm, which detaches and makes for a fine missile. She has several of them readied and eventually gets a poster tube with a backstrap to carry spares. The movie also knows precisely what to explain and what to leave to the imagination. Why is Merlin in South Korea, and why was he transformed into a roll of toilet paper? Shut up, that's why! The figure out that Kyung-Chun can be milked, and they sell his milk on the street to make rent payments. How is this possible? Shut up, that's how! There's a kind of child logic familiar to fairy tales that goes hand in hand with logic logic, making the mood deliciously quirky. I really hope Satellite Girl and Milk Cow gets some kind of American release as it's a wildly creative and charming modern fable that surprises at every turn.
The Astrologer (1975) - I usually write my own blurbs for my movie articles in an effort to reflect what the plot really was rather than what the marketing department wants potential viewers to think the movie is about. With The Astrologer I'm at a total loss, and in this case that's cause for celebration. Never officially released in theaters, The Astrologer was only shown on late-night TV during the latter half of the 70's until disappearing completely, until it was found in the collection of the American Genre Film Archive. Thank God for that blessed rediscovery, because The Astrologer is a boon to bad movies, making recent unearthings like An American Hippie in Israel and Gone with the Pope look like overhyped chumps. Written and directed by and starring one-time-at-all-of-those Craig Denney, The Astrologer is an explosive tall tale disguised as a biopic of Denney himself (well, Craig Marcus Alexander, which is admittedly a more attractive name than Denney). While there is a sort of bizarre True Hollywood Stories feel to the rags-to-riches-to-rags story no blurb can do real justice, let me try to explain the movie the best I can without doing a full blow-by-blow.
A quote from Denney's disembodied narrator voice sums it up: "My whole life has been based on lies. It still is!" The movie starts with a prologue where we see Alexander as a teenager stealing wallets and getting busted, and segues to its present where Alexander is working as a carny fortune teller. Normally I wouldn't care if a "(Actor) at age X" actor was better looking than their older counterpart, but I'd like to point out that Denney has several unappealing shirtless scenes in the movie he wrote and directed. After a few years of nickel-and-dime work he befriends an oil magnate couple who decide to hire him to help out smuggling precious gems from Kenya. They hired a carnival fortune teller to help smuggle gemstones, and not once does Alexander use any astrological predictions to do this. Not just that, though - their search for diamonds and rubies lead them to look for lost, cursed rubies in an ancient temple, leading to scenes that those boys in Mississippi who made a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark in their backyards call cheap. The oil husband is killed by rubber cobras, and the wife drowns in quicksand after Alexander saves her from a rapist...that he traded her to in order to get a boat. He then sails to Tahiti to fence the gemstones, but a Kenyan police officer (who was somehow a police officer and the warden of a jail) tracks him down. I must mention here that this movie shows that Kenya has professionally made stone prisons but their police stations (which just say "Kenya Police") make their signs out of bamboo and are littered with tusks and furs. The policeman hires a local woman to seduce Alexander and lead him to selling the gems to him, but she suspects the officer of shorting her cut and shoots him in the head. Alexander fences the stones and then we're subjected to at least five minutes of seemingly endless padding of Alexander riding a sailing ship, steering the ship, walking up and down the ship's stairs with and without his shirt, and flyover shots of the ship. This scene goes on for so long that the stock music has enough time to completely finish, as if Denney wanted to squeeze every last second out of the music because, dang it, he paid for it. He gets back to his native Long Beach and immediately sets out to become a world-famous astrologer, eventually making a movie about himself...called The Astrologer...a movie that has better opening credits, content and writing than the movie we're actually watching. That movie grosses $145,000,000. In 1975. This leads to him getting a swanky mansion (complete with a "cosmic mirror" that goes unexplained) and a TV series as well as a gig working for the U.S. Navy using astrology to predict something involving submarines. He also rediscovers his ex-wife, a woman he married and divorced back in his carny days, now a drug-addled whore in a decrepit room filled with empty beer cans and a mirror with "God is Dead", "Shit on Life" and "Hell is Earth" written on it. They get remarried, but as Alexander's ambition and ego grow his finances run dry and he turns into a hollow, monstrous shell of his former self, losing everything he has made and finally sitting in misery as a King Lear quote is superimposed on him.
This was the best theatrical experience I've had all year and will likely have this entire year, a jaw-dropping bad-movie masterpiece that needs to be released on video immediately. Watching this movie with a theater full of people was an incredible experience, each flub, eccentricity and baffling decision met with whooping laughter and screams by everyone present. There are so many ridiculous elements and moments in this I'm not sure what stands out the most - the fact that someone would make a Baron Munchausen-level fake biopic about themselves, the fact that the story and production elements (hackneyed adventure plot, old-fashioned wipe effects, galloping racism and sexism) make the movie about as modern as the 30's while dealing with such a post-hippie subject as pop astrology, the god awful editing and horrible acting, especially from Denney, who has only one facial expression, and it's the wrong one - but my audience ate up every second of it and applauded more than I've ever heard at a movie when the credits rolled. Even just the fact that near the end a character yells at Alexander "You're not an astrologer - you're an asshole!" and the whole theater (including myself) burst into applause cements The Astrologer as a new classic in so-bad-it's-good vintage cinema. I understand why SIFF didn't supply voting ballots for the archival presentations (as they want their awards to go to current movies) but if The Astrologer was up for competition I would have awarded it a million stars and carried the print above my head on a golden throne through the streets. The Alamo Drafthouse guys need to release this movie for home video ASAP because I'm about ready to call The Astrologer the cult find of the year. Filmed in Astravision!
Liza the Fox Fairy - Plain nurse Liza (Monika Balsai) has a lonely life caring for an elderly invalid woman, her only comfort an imaginary friend that takes the form of Tomy Tani (David Sakurai), a 60's Japanese pop singer Liza's patient likes. Liza is fascinated by a cheap paperback romance novel and believes that if she recreates a scene where a young woman meets the man of her dreams on her 30th birthday at a restaurant she'll find true love. One day she goes to a local burger joint, and while she's out her patient falls out of bed and dies, leaving Liza her flat in her will. Liza's further attempts to find her true love only bring her a series of strange, accidental deaths which the police can't help but attribute to her, going so far as to have Sergeant Zoltan (Szabolcs Bede Fazekas) move in to her apartment as a boarder. Unbeknownst to everyone is that the deaths are all caused by Tomy, who is actually a spirit of death and is using the deaths around Liza to convince her that she's actually a cursed Fox Fairy, and all those who fall in love with her are doomed to die. Will she be able to break the curse and find her true love, or will Tomy take her for himself to the land of the dead?
While not as overtly bizarre as Satellite Girl and Milk Cow, Liza the Fox Fairy is still based on a lot of odd ideas and, like Satellite Girl, almost everything pays off quite well. The combination of a modern-esque Hungarian urban setting with Japanese folklore is an odd one but well balanced, and writer-director Karoly Ujj Meszaros and co-writer Balint Hegedus drench their goofy, magic realist plot in charmingly retro, Amelie-inspired production design and moods. Much like Amelie Liza features simple characters navigating through a quirky, adventurous love story and shares that film's love for cartoony characterizations and sexual mischief. The series of potential lovers Liza subjects her self to are as unappealing as they are loony, such as a man who eats so much his stomach expands several inches and a mousy virgin who hides in his office's cabinets. Liza doesn't shy away from using occasionally graphic violence to heighten its black humor and features several head wounds (including cactus spikes), a gunshot through the hand and an impromptu tracheotomy with a Japanese dagger and a straw. A great running gag is the collection of white masking tape outlines of where dead bodies were found that accumulates in Liza's apartment throughout the film. There's a candy-colored, retro unreality to the production design, the centerpiece of which is Mekk Burger, the local burger joint that Liza goes to for dates and has chintzy announcements such as "Sideburn Cola and Menu - 1.50". The real question is this: which one is better, this or Satellite Girl and Milk Cow? While Liza has fewer plot holes than Satellite Girl the latter had a bit better handle on its mood and humor - Liza is a bit too fakey to really get invested in, while Satellite had more natural characterizations and acting and I found myself rooting for its lead couple much more than in Liza. I think the main issue is that Liza herself is a dull and overwhelmingly morose lead, not nearly as proactive or sympathetic as Satellite's Il-Ho and Kyung-Chun (even with how much of a coward Kyung-Chun was). That isn't to say that Liza the Fox Fairy isn't worth seeing - it's a very enjoyable adult fable with tons of quirky humor, creativity and likability, and my reservations about it are ones most viewers will find pretty minor. If it gets a real stateside release I'd highly recommend it, as it's hard to find a movie like this handled so nicely and entertainingly.
West of Redemption - Hank (Billy Zane) and Kelly (Mariana Klaveno) are living a normal married life in a small town in Eastern Washington. One night during a rain storm a stranger, Rick (Kevin Alejandro), comes to their door asking to use the phone, as his car has run off the road and he needs a tow. Hank obliges, but when Rick says his name to the tow company Hank knocks him unconscious and ties him up in the barn, unbeknownst to Kelly. Rick claims that he has no idea who Hank is or why he has him tied up, but Hank insists otherwise, harassing and torturing him to know why he came to his house. As each man reveals more about their pasts their true relationships become enormously tangled, and there may be no exit that leaves them without scars.
I made a promise to myself that I'd see at least one movie this fest set and filmed in Washington and I'm glad that the one that I saw was excellent. West of Redemption is a great example of a Rug Puller movie, where each time you think the situation has been established the movie pulls the rug out from under you and everything changes, much like The Sixth Sense or Shutter Island (or, more bafflingly, Inner Sanctum). The set-up is simplicity itself, but each layer that gets removed only makes things more complex and thought-provoking, and the writing is so good that the viewer never feels cheated, only like they want to immediately watch the movie over again to catch all the clues. A big part of why this works is that the central performances are all excellent and extremely precise, knowing fully that a false move could ruin the mystery. Billy Zane is one of those actors I always assumed was in stuff, and everyone else seems to know his name, but I was a little shocked to discover that he's barely been in anything that I've seen, and his performance here is proof of his great talent. He makes for a charismatic and natural lead while also exuding a real menace and psychological mystery, a crucial combination for this film, as we aren't supposed to like that he is keeping a stranger hostage but we're supposed to see a sympathetic vein running underneath it all. Likewise I was blown away by Kevin Alejandro as Rick, a man racked with a bad past, money problems and mental health problems and barely holding it together in the face of all that and being tied up in a stranger's house. Mariana Klaveno also turned in a fine performance even when her character didn't have as much screen time in the main action as the other two, but don't let that statement lead you to believe that her character isn't in the movie or absolutely crucial to the plot. The setting has a kind of bleak, dull mood that only adds to the desperation of the situation, the dry grasses and overcast skies of Eastern Washington acting as a reflection of internal desolation. If I have any big complaint it's the camerawork and editing, which was pretty mediocre and made it seem like they didn't do any storyboarding and just went with whatever could keep people in the shot and not look exactly like the last shot. I'm sorry I've kept this one so vague but the journey of discovery the viewer goes through as the characters' pasts and intentions are laid bare is really remarkable and should be experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible. I hope West of Redemption gets a wider release because it's a great local movie and a great example of how limited means doesn't mean a limited movie.
Next Time I'll Aim for the Heart - Franck Neuhart (Guillaume Canet) is a dedicated member of the Gendarmerie. He is also a serial killer who picks up young women and shoots them, occasionally sending in taunting letters to the police. As the murders pile up the Gendarmerie takes charge of the investigation, resulting in Franck investigating his own murders. As Franck struggles to keep his secrets secret he also has chances at a normal life, but is there any true escape from what he's done...and what he might do next?
Based on the real-life murders by Alain Lamare in the late 70's, Next Time I'll Aim for the Heart is a brilliant portrait of a serial killer and his struggles to maintain a composure of normalcy in the face of his uncontrollable homicidal actions. Created through a combination of interviews, case files and empathetic speculation, the film uses every detail it can to paint a harrowing portrait of Franck's daily life, including his relationships with family and friends (and a young woman who may be in love with him), his near-zealous dedication to his job and his self-destructive acts of "penance", including whipping himself with switches and wrapping his arms with barbed wire. The ways in which Franck covers up his crimes and evades his own law force are fascinating, such as insisting that the cars he keeps stealing to avoid capture are rentals because he gets to choose a new one when he feels like it, and a scene where he hides in a pond with a plant stalk as a breathing tube for several hours, coming out half-dead from the cold and inactivity. There are a lot of little scenes that reveal fascinating psychological quirks, such as one where he sees an ad for a prostitute and upon arriving there and waiting with her "host" discovers that there is no prostitute and the old man who lives in the apartment lied just so people would come visit him. Franck is so angered by this he throws the man to the floor and kicks him mercilessly, as if the possibility of contact with a woman destroyed was an unforgivable betrayal. An interesting subplot is the relationship with his young nephew whom he sees occasionally and takes for outdoor adventures. He tries to teach him tricks for hunting and living outdoors, and there's a tenuous line in these scenes between teaching the boy to be resilient and resourceful and merely passing along the curse to a younger generation. All of this is anchored by Canet's brilliant, complete performance as Franck, controlling one minute and barely keeping composure the next, struggling to appear sympathetic to others and not let his obsessions get the better of him. It's probably the best performance I saw this SIFF and got him a Cesar nomination for best actor, and if it gets any kind of release in the States I hope that the Oscar committee takes note. The other great performance is the setting, France's largely rural Oise county in the dead of winter. Director Cedric Anger (great name, BTW) uses wide angles to envelop the viewer in the vast forests and fields of the landscape, the ground riddled with muddy potholes and the plants dusted with frost. A couple of the shootings occurred on empty country roads with no trees around, putting Franck and his actions totally alone in the world. One astonishing shot follows his car from behind as he shoots a girl and dumps her body out the side door, speeding off, and the camera follows his car while also turning to see the body, and this unbroken take is as riveting as anything I've seen in SIFF. In many ways, such as the chilly atmosphere and droning, strings-and-organ-based score, the film is reminiscent of Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners, one of my favorite movies from 2013 and a great example of how much horror can be drawn out of natural decay. Both movies also capitalize on one of the reasons we find serial killer movies so fascinating, their portraiture of life outside of society. Movies like Monster and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer spotlighted people on the fringes of life, living out of storage units and skid rows and killing because they have nothing to lose. Likewise Franck's daily life at his job and with others is a thin veneer, as his killing episodes have to be covered up immediately, often wrecking his schedule and having to hitchhike to get around. It's the particulars of a serial killer's existence that allow us to test ourselves and wonder how thin the line between us and a killer is, and if we would be able to get away with a horrific crime. Next Time I'll Aim for the Heart is a new standard in serial killer films, as thoughtful as it is unsettling, that kept me totally engrossed from the first scene to the last.
The Price of Fame - Eddy (Benoit Poelvoorde), a small time thief, has just gotten out of jail and goes to stay with his old friend Osman (Roschdy Zem) and Osman's daughter Samira (Seli Gmach). Neither one of them has much money or optimism, and Osman is especially distressed as his wife is in the hospital awaiting an expensive hip operation and the family doesn't have proper insurance. One day they hear that Charlie Chaplin has just died, and his body has been buried in a local cemetery, and Eddy gets a wild gleam in his eye. Eddy proposes that he and Osman rob Chaplin's corpse and hold it for ransom, and Osman reluctantly agrees after a few too many failed meetings with bank loaners and frustrated hospital staff. The steal Chaplin's coffin away in the night and bury it in a nearby field, but as their attempts to collect the ransom don't go so well the pair find themselves in way over their heads, and as the heat closes in they will be forced to question what they owe to Chaplin and society, and what society may owe to Chaplin.
Much like Aim for the Heart The Price of Fame is based on a real-life crime from the late 70's (though this time the setting is French Switzerland), but here the mood is the complete opposite. The film is an inspiration in the realm of understated comedy, the quirky happenings of the plot complimented by enormously likable and overwhelmingly human characters and some really sharp, deadpan comedic dialogue. Eddy, Osman and Samira have some of the best comedic chemistry I've seen in years, highly reminiscent of the three leads from Jim Jarmusch's Stranger than Paradise and well deserving of some awards. One thing the filmmakers were very good at was picking distinctive looking actors for the roles, something that silent films relied on heavily, and because of their memorability the filmmakers are able to get away with a handful of extended sequences where the film simply observes the characters with no dialogue and fairly static action, such as a long shot of Osman driving a car and the final scene with John Crooker (Peter Coyote), the Chaplin's right-hand man. That isn't to say that the film has little story expediency - the story is very well paced and allows little details to come to the forefront without being distracting or unnecessary. Another detail is the use of 60's & 70's giant Michel Legrand, famous for his scores to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and others as well as countless pop songs, as the score composer. His score for the film is sweeping and nostalgic, often adding a huge gesture to scenes wherein not much is really happening, a kind of wry irony that had me grinning heartily. All of this is key to the film's real aim, to be sympathetic to the little people who society ignores and rejects. Eddy and Osman are totally pushed aside by the system by their criminal record and ethnicity respectively, and the film makes a big statement about how Chaplin's signature character, the Tramp, is an important reminder that all mean are created equal regardless of their lot in life and should be treated as such, a message that goes well with a crime that is more sad and desperate than a danger to society. As heavy as the message may seem the mood never gets weighed down, and The Price of Fame rises up as a delightful, humane comedy, and I hope to see all of these actors again soon in the future. Just try not to dwell too much on the way-too-fast, way-too-unlikely ending, which is actually more akin to the resolution of an old comedy short than a docudrama. Actually, ignore that last sentence.
When Animals Dream - Adolescent Marie (Sonia Suhl) finds herself struggling to maintain an interest in life in her dull little town by the sea, especially having started a new job at the local fishery. She quickly finds herself the victim of harassment, both verbally and physically, not the least of which is due to her invalid mother (Sonja Richter) who the locals suspect deeply of things which must not be mentioned. What troubles Marie the most is her mysterious rashes that start growing hair, and one night her father and their doctor pin her to her bed and try to force medicine down her throat. The pair is stopped by Marie's mother leaping from her wheelchair and killing the doctor as if she were a wild animal, and the mother's true colors, as well as what's in store for Marie, are revealed. As Marie's condition worsens she finds herself unable to cope with hiding her newfound personality, and her mother's suicide makes this impossible...and lashing out necessary for her very survival.
In spite of some really nice seaside locales and a fruitful concept, When Animals Dream is little more than a mediocre werewolf movie all dressed up with nowhere to go. Better horror films of earlier years, most notably Carrie, have used the conceit of adolescent hormones and budding sexuality as a catalyst for horrific powers, but this film has just about nothing to say on the subject aside from the timing of having Marie's lycanthropy spring up at age 16. It really doesn't help that Sonia Suhl acts Marie as a wet sock stuffed in a bottle of diluted white vinegar, and the excuse of here being withdrawn and sullen isn't enough. Likewise all the characters in the film are about as flimsy as they come, ranging from Stock Bully to Stock Hot Boy to Stock Angry Townspeople to Stock Uninspiring Ending With No Pacing Or Denouement Or Anything Whatsoever Why Did I Watch This. All of this makes When Animals Dream really really REALLY reminiscent of Let the Right One In, a movie of which I seem to be the only person in the world who wasn't a fan, but even I found more depth in that movie than this one. The only really good element of the film it's Lars Mikkelsen as Marie's dad. You might remember Mikkelsen as Viktor Petrov in season 3 of House of Cards and here he stands tall as the only sympathetic, compelling character in the film. Mikkelsen makes Marie's dad a dedicated, brave and caring father and husband who simply won't let his neighbors give his family any shit. Unfortunately his involvement doesn't save the film and When Animals Dream was sadly the most uninspired film I saw this SIFF, doubly disappointing as it was the last film I saw. I almost went to either The Blue Hour or Deathgasm (I couldn't decide) but this film put me off driving for the better part of an hour to park in a crammed Seattle neighborhood to watch another possibly disappointing horror movie. Hopefully next year my run will go out with the bang.
*****
Overall this was a pretty great run - most of the movies I saw were either excellent or really dang good. There were a few stinkers but that's to be expected when one sees 14 movies and several short films in the space of three and a half weeks. So without further adieu, here's my entirely subjective, most likely anger-inducing rankings, and let's look forward to SIFF 2016!
Features:
1. The Nightmare
2. Next Time I'll Aim for the Heart
3. Goodnight Mommy
4. The Price of Fame
5. Turbo Kid
6. Satellite Girl and Milk Cow
7. Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock & Roll
8. West of Redemption
9. Alleluia
10. Liza the Fox Fairy
11. Accused
12. Blind
13. The Russian Woodpecker
14. When Animals Dream
Shorts:
1. World of Tomorrow
2. Amelia and Duarte
3. So You've Grown Attached
4. Hand Job: Portrait of a Male Hand Model
5. Live Fast Draw Yung
6. The Youth
7. A Passion of Fire and Gold
Archival presentations:
The Astrologer - 1,000,000 stars
The Color of Pomegranates - shit list
~PNK
