The Gorge (2025)

Two highly skilled and emotionally messed up sharpshooters (Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller) from what a couple of months ago were still the big international enemy blocks are stationed on opposite sides of a mysterious gorge of unknown location that’s covered with mines and auto-firing guns.

They are there to watch out for some kind of threat climbing up from the gorge. Communication between the two sides is forbidden – but apart from a dangerous abyss, there’s nobody around to police these rules.

So obviously, the two fall in love pretty much on first sight (who could blame them?) and end up learning quite a bit more about the place than the powers that be like. Also, they will shoot a lot of monsters and cause a more than sufficiently large explosions.

The Gorge is contrived, The Gorge is more than just a little silly, yet I found myself highly entertained by Scott Derrickson’s mix of horror, action and romance. It’s the sort of film that will always prefer a cool idea to a serious one, but it does so with the sense of joy and excitement, and the hidden glee at hiding away some cleverness you could find in the best films of Corman’s New World cinema phase.

Thus, this feels like the product of filmmakers enjoying themselves with the Apple money they somehow managed to get for making their high budget low budget movie, doing their best to get their audience to loosen up enough to enjoy themselves, as well. That’s how it worked out for me, at least.

Plus, Joy (whom I’d watch in anything, anyhow) and Teller have a pleasant degree of chemistry, there are some fun monster designs, sometimes great art direction, and the action is staged with verve as well as the expected professionalism. What’s not to like?

Some thoughts about The Northman (2022)

Robert Eggers’s insanely ambitious trip into the world of biggest budget cinema in form of a trippy, high production value Norse vengeance movie that actually convinces me that Alexander Skarsgård can do more than be the hot Scandinavian is really quite the film. It is also, alas, one of those perfectly splendid films I only have a couple of vaguely insightful things to say about, even under my customarily loose definition of “insight”.

Which may have rather a lot to do with how much Eggers does here by aesthetics alone: making a film that as once has the air of an authentic saga (at least the Icelandic ones I’ve read), criticises the very toxically masculine bent these things – as well as its none-Norse themed brethren vengeance movies – tend to have, yet also accepting and respecting how its lead finds religious-spiritual fulfilment in the act of vengeance. Eggers is so much on fire here, even the sort of ambiguity about the reality of the supernatural elements this includes, which would usually annoy me to no end in any movie, becomes fitting and simply works. Sure, the magic here is probably only a result of Amleth’s (and yes, there’s rather a lot of Shakespeare in here, if you care to look from the right angle) state of mind, his ecstatic-shamanistic-pagan religion, and drugs, but it is also absolutely real for him and everyone else in the movie, which makes the question of its objective reality inside the fictitious world of the movie pretty much irrelevant for the characters in it.

I found myself particularly excited by the strong mythic pull of the whole affair, Eggers’s ability to turn what would be cheesy, campy psychedelia in the wrong hands, into something that feels absolutely true to the inner world of the characters. And since one of the film’s main thrusts is its insistence on the inner world and the outer world of any given character bleeding into each other to actually create the world as a concept they inhabit, it’s simply true to the characters’ world as something more intense than history (or the idea of historical accuracy). To me, this feels rather a lot as if Eggers were applying Werner Herzog’s ideas about Poetic Truth the great director uses for his documentaries to narrative cinema; and doing it as well as anybody ever did.

The New Mutants (2020)

After a catastrophic event which apparently destroyed her whole township with her family within it, Dani Moonstar (Blue Hunt) finds herself in the clinic of one Dr Reyes (Alice Braga). It’s a bit of a strange place, with Reyes alone taking care of only a handful of patients. Apart from Dani, there are Rahne Sinclair (Maisie Williams), Ilyana Rasputin (Anya Taylor-Joy), Sam Guthrie (Charlie Heaton), and Roberto da Costa (Henry Zaga). All of them are mutants whose lack of control over their powers has cost loved ones (or in Ilyana’s and Rahne’s case, not so loved ones) their lives.

As Reyes tells it, she is supposed to help the kids achieve control over their powers so they can take the next step her mysterious superiors have chosen for them. Not surprisingly given this language, the place is also a cage, surrounded by an indestructible force field, and Reyes changes tack between helpful counsellor and prison warden with disturbing ease.

Ever since Dani has arrived, the clinic seems to have become haunted, too, and the young mutants will have to confront their greatest fears, learn to work together, and uncover the true goals of Reyes. Well, a bit of smooching is also involved, because that’s what future X-Men are supposed to do in their downtime, just ask Chris Claremont.

After it has been shuffled through release dates for years for no fault of its own, Josh Boone’s The New Mutants has turned into the last of the Fox style X-Men movies, a state of affairs that has not helped the reception of the film much, I believe. Then there are also the expectations of the first adaptation of a particularly beloved comic to cope with. These expectations, a film can only survive if it is an absolute masterpiece, which the film at hand isn’t. So it’s no surprise that New Mutants hasn’t been a smashing success even with the nerd press or those parts of the mainstream who don’t automatically rant nonsense about the end of cinema through superhero movies.

However, while not a masterpiece, Boone’s film isn’t a bad one at all. At the very least, even if one is unkind towards it, the it is made pretty interesting by the decision to replace some standard superhero movie tropes with (light) horror touches (and a lot of nods towards the third Nightmare on Elm Street). After all, the backgrounds of troubled teenagers in the real world are only one step away from being a horror movie anyway, mutant powers only sharpening the metaphor, as is right and proper for the franchise as well as the specific comics this adapts. The realization of the horror sequences shows rather clearly why the film is only a good movie instead of a great one in my book, though. They are just not that creepy, Boone never quite finding a visual language that makes the weight of horror the protagonists feel towards them completely believable. In part, that’s really a problem of visual choices by the director, in part it’s the film’s very middling effects as well as the less than creative design work done to bring elements of the comics on screen. It’s not Shazam level terrible, but it does weaken the film’s emotional heft considerably.

On the other hand, the film’s narrative (script by Boone and Knate Lee) does have a pleasantly clear idea of what it wants to be about and the ways it believes teenagers can overcome heavy emotional loads (and horror movie scares) through the power of diverse families of choice. There’s an obvious reason why the kids are repeatedly shown watching Whedon’s “Buffy”, and while this sort of thing is obviously a simplification of how we get through life, it does speak to some things I at least believe to be true and important, while treating its characters and their concerns with respect and love.

There is little in the film that doesn’t directly speak to its thematic concerns, leading to a very focused and low key movie that only fulfils the expectations on the amount of action and loudness a modern superhero movie has to show as much as it needs to if it actually wants to get a budget. Though the climactic action scene really not being that great a catharsis it should narratively and thematically be seems to have a lot to do with that budget not being high enough.

Yet still, The New Mutants is a very interesting, and often also a very entertaining, film, ending the Fox X-Men movies on an unexpected yet fitting note.

Three Films Make A Post: Lock The Bets.

To Your Last Death aka The Malevolent (2019): There’s hardly any horror animation coming from the USA, but even with that state of affairs, there’s no reason for anyone not into certain forms of sadomasochism to inflict this thing as directed by Jason Axinn on themselves. The best thing there is to say about the movie is that it managed to acquire some name actors, so Ray Wise rants, William Shatner babbles, Bill Moseley does a great Bill Moseley imitation, and so on. One can’t help but think that actual voice actors would have been a better investment as well as cheaper, but even then, there’d still be primitive animation with bland design and the script to cope with. The less said about the animation, the better; the script tries for the en vogue bashing of the rich but does so with no wit, without even the little insight you need for this sort thing, showing neither intelligence nor coming up with even a single interesting idea.

Emma (2020): Fair warning: I’m not an admirer of Jane Austen’s smug and self-satisfied style of irony that only ever snarks at things but does sod all to change them at the best of times – I’m more of a Bronte kind of guy. However, Autumn de Wilde’s adaptation of Austen’s “Emma” has problems all of its own making, namely a love for emotional abstraction and ironic distance that makes Austen’s work feel emotionally involved, and a tendency to aestheticize every single frame so that it basically screams “2020!” without any reason for it apart from the film feeling the need to tell its audience how very clever it is. It’s like The Favourite without the gall, the smarts, the empathy hidden behind cynicism and without the point in this. However, from time to time – I blame the excellent cast as lead by Anya Taylor-Joy – the film suddenly stops posing for a scene or two, threatening to turn its talking clothes horses into actual people for good, only to fall back into smug self-satisfaction and that deathly distance a couple of minutes later.

I honestly have no idea what the filmmakers were thinking.

Yella (2007): But let’s end on a less annoyed note. Nominally, German director Christian Petzold’s Yella reworks the basic set-up of the grand Carnival of Souls here, but in practice he’s using just as much of Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, showing himself in typically German fashion more interested in the psychological than the ghostly and weird. This is still a wonderful film, mind you, just don’t go in expecting a movie that’s in dialogue with Herk Harvey’s film. What we get is a sort-of thriller about love grown bitter, abuse and most of all the horrors of late capitalism and how they twist and shape people, all embodied in a great, nuanced performance by Nina Hoss.


As is necessary for this sort of material, Petzold is great at handling ambiguities, portraying states of mind, personality and world that have drifted into liminal spaces. Small town Germany and the kind of German city Petzold usually treats always have that quality of liminality, an air of irreality one has to have experienced to believe, so they are a perfect fit for a cinematic ghost story. It sometimes still surprises me so few German filmmakers make any ghost stories.

In short: Glass (2018)

Warning: I’ll spoil some elements of the film; I’d argue there’s not much to actually spoil here, though, for the idea of spoilers does suggest the existence of dramatic tension to be spoiled.

After the nearly good Split, I, the eternal optimist, was hoping its sequel, Glass, might just be that curious beast – a second M. Night Shyamalan movie making good on the great genre director The Sixth Sense had once promised.

What I then watched was pretty much the opposite: a slow and tedious crawl playing out like a bad bottle episode of a TV show that takes more than two hours to get through what’s at best a thirty minute plot (which often seems barely to exist at all anyway). You’d hope the film would at least enhance this non-experience via the mysterious arts of characterisation and mood-building, but the little personality anyone on screen shows belongs to a cast just a little too good to feel quite as empty as they are written. Why you’d cast Samuel L. Jackson, Anya Taylor-Joy and Bruce Willis and then have them proceed to basically do no acting whatsoever, or why you’d let James McAvoy double down on his obnoxious performance in the first movie is anyone’s guess. But then, this one was written by someone (cough) who seems to believe he is - in a superhero movie in 2018 - doing something cleverly deconstructive by pointing out tropes the audience by now knows quite well from film where things are actually happening to keep them from falling asleep, and by doing a plot twist (that’s barely even a twitch) that consists of the film saying “Gotcha! You thought it was this standard ending trope! Instead I’m using this different yet even more standard ending trope! And I’m doing it as slowly and dramatically awkward as possible”!


Dramatically awkward is the watchword for the whole film. Glass is full of scenes that are slow (so slow) while having no apparent function in the narrative at all, going on for what feels like an eternity, pretending to do something immensely deep and clever the audience needs time to grasp while actually presenting not much at all. It doesn’t help here that Shyamalan seems to have lost every bit of dramatic instinct he once had. Take the triple “tragic” death scene before the end that gives two of the main characters and about a hundred of McAvoy’s personalities and their respective supporting characters way too much time to die (oh so slowly), drawing things out until even the last possibility of reacting to this nonsense with anything but laughter or eye-rolling disappears. I honestly have no idea what the filmmaker was thinking with these scenes. But then, I have no idea what he was thinking with the rest of the movie either.

Split (2016)

Three high school girls (Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson and Jessica Sula) are kidnapped by a mysterious man (James McAvoy). It soon becomes clear that he suffers from dissociative identity disorder – which may or may not exist in real life – and tries to hit the world record with 23 different personalities. Some of them – called “The Horde” by their peers even though a trio does not a horde make – have enough of everybody but their psychiatrist (Betty Buckley) not believing their disorder actually exists, and are trying to bring forth a 24th personality, known as The Beast.

The Beast, it will turn out, is a super-powered cannibal who follows some bizarre pseudo-philosophy positing that people who haven’t suffered severe enough traumata in their life are only good to be eaten because they’ll never be able to acquire super powers. Seriously.

I know, I know, I’m writing about an M. Night Shyamalan movie again, even though it’s clear by now that the man’s sensibilities work like the noise of chalk on board on me. However, Split turns out to be one of his more palatable movies for me. I wouldn’t call it a good film, mind you, but at least this one is just a handful of better directorial decisions, a minor re-write, and losing about twenty minutes of runtime away from being one. It’s what I’d call an interesting effort, and one that’s nearly on to something with its attempt to examine the connection between trauma and superpowers quite a bit of superhero comics do indeed suggest. It’s just too bad the film mostly does said examination through a very slow and even more obvious series of flashbacks concerning Taylor-Joy’s character, incessant insane ranting by McAvoy, and some pseudo-scientific warbling from the psychiatrist.

Visually, this is one of Shyamalan’s successful efforts. His films usually look slick, but here (as at the beginning of his career), the slickness goes hand in hand with an ability to craft at least decent suspense sequences and even the creation of a nice atmosphere of doom. That last one is certainly helpful when it comes to building up to the appearance of The Beast, nearly convincing one that something of apocalyptic important is going to manifest. Unfortunately, The Beast manifest is just James McAvoy mugging into the camera.


Which brings me to the film’s most surprising weakness, an inexplicably terrible performance by a really fine actor, one which becomes even worse in contrast to the measured and thoughtful ones by the always wonderful Taylor-Joy and Betty Buckley. But then, going all Nicolas Cage on us when asked to play a guy with dissociative identity disorder whose main on-screen personalities are going to be a nine-year-old, a gay fashion designer, some mumbly psycho, a woman (sorry, that’s her defining character trait apart from being evil too), and a superpowered cannibal with a messiah (well anti-Christ, because this is a Shyamalan joint) complex, is an understandable acting choice. It’s also the completely wrong one, because it stretches the suspension of disbelief asked of the audience beyond breaking point by showing off how contrived and absurd the whole thing is instead of giving it the humanity a proper acting job instead of a circus show might have provided. Of course, it usually is the director’s job to realize this sort of thing and influence an actor accordingly, last time I checked, so I suppose that’s, alas, how Shyamalan wanted it.

Three Films Make A Post: BIG MEETS BIGGER

The Maus (2017): Using genre cinema and elements of the fantastical strictly for parable and allegory is usually the best way for a genre film to get friendly nods from critics who prefer their movies Serious and Meaningful. As Yayo Herrero’s film demonstrates, there is an easy trap to fall in with this approach, asking an audience to somehow connect with a film whose characters aren’t people – aren’t even supposed to be people – but stand-ins for groups of thousands or more individuals and/or mouthpieces for ideas.

Consequently, here, the two Serbian characters are human monsters, the Bosnian woman traumatized into violently striking back, and her German boyfriend just not able to understand because nobody murdered his family. A series of clichés which I believe amply demonstrates how shallowly this film that’s supposed to be about ideas approaches its historical target, turning a complex and horrifying part of recent history into something that’s pat and easily understandable, not reduced to its basics but simplified until the whole noble gesture of this being a Meaningful movie about Serious things seems rather dubious. Why, I can’t help but think if the film had been about specific people instead, it might have been able to actually say more about the world they inhabit and the forces that shaped them.

Habit (2017): Staying in the realm of not terribly convincing genre filmmaking, how about this poverty porn/horror movie by Simeon Halligan? If you went and told me a film concerning a cannibal sex cult running nightclubs and bordellos could be quite as bland and bloodless as this one, I wouldn’t have believed it. Alas, bland and bloodless it is, selling its argument that life as a modern city poor, the inevitable emptiness only lightened by drunken debauchery (don’t tell filmmakers not all of us lower class people are self-destructive alcoholics), can easily push one into enjoying the supposed feeling of life that comes with being a cannibal (the film tells yet doesn’t show that feeling, obviously), with all the energy and depth of an empty battery.

There’s absolutely an exciting, insightful film to be made out of the basic set-up and its basic interests, but that film would have some life to it, and would probably have a point its actually trying to get across beyond: being poor is really bad for your mental health. Who’d have thunk?

Thoroughbreds (2017): Fortunately, I can end this post on a satisfying note, namely with this nasty black comedy about the friendship between two teenage female upperclass sociopaths (Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy in performances that are in turn disturbing, sad, and funny). The film recommends itself not only through the performances of its wonderful leads, but also through its sardonic portrayal of the young women’s upperclass world, the kind of privilege that seems bound to create sociopaths while only willing to notice them when they are acting out a little. It’s the old ditty about the terrors lurking beneath the surface of a supposedly normal world given a large twist of class consciousness, and presented with dry wit.


Director Cory Finley’s clinical style of direction will not be to everyone’s taste but to my eyes, it seems the perfect approach to telling the tale of two people who only ever perform emotions.

The Witch: A New-England Folktale (2015)

New England around 1630. The family of William (Ralph Ineson) and Katherine (Kate Dickie) goes into voluntary exile from their main settlement for theological reasons I never got a grasp on and which the film might have kept purposefully vague, given how focused and clear everything else about it is, even its ambiguities.

In this place and time, this means the family goes right into the wilderness, settling down near a patch of woods. Things don’t go well at all for the family. Katherine’s baby disappears into the woods while Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), the family’s eldest and the closest we have to a main protagonist, is playing with it near the woods. The child is just silently taken when Thomasin closes her eyes while playing peek-a-boo with it. William tries to explain the inexplicable with what we must imagine to be the sneakiest wolf in existence, but in truth, it was taken by the witch living in the woods to do what witches traditionally do with babies.

The loss of the child throws Katherine into deepest depression and certainly doesn’t make for an easy relationship between her and Thomasin. All the while the family’s crops are hit by some kind of sickness and during his attempts at providing meat, William doesn’t turn out to be much of a hunter – or the woods are against him. There’s even worse waiting for the family, and things will truly fall apart.

Generally, stating that a film isn’t for everyone is stating pretty much the obvious, yet I still feel the need to explain that Robert Eggers’s The Witch will most certainly not be for everyone, though for those of us who can appreciate it, this is an incredibly affecting and effective movie. If you’re going into the film expecting something even vaguely following the rules of modern mainstream or the slightly different ones of much of modern indie horror, you might be sorely disappointed, for this is a film that seems very little interested in genre conventions good or bad. In fact, for parts of the running time, The Witch approaches its horrors from the perspective of a historical psychodrama, though one that tries its hardest to share in the historical views of its characters concerning the supernatural.

Herein lies one of the film’s biggest strengths: while all of the supernatural or possibly supernatural occurrences here can be explained as outward manifestations of/metaphors for all the fears the characters’ faith brings with it and/or (the film is very conscious of the fact it is both) just barely helps them cope with, and everything they repress and leave unsaid, they are also presented through the mind set of the film’s characters. For them witches do exist as a matter of course and a black he-goat might in fact be the devil, so the film does indeed show us witches and the supernatural the way the family sees them. Eggers keeps to this approach stringently, successfully putting quite a bit of effort into making beliefs that are a difficult pill for most of its prospective audience to swallow real, even trying to keep the film’s dialogue as close to the written sources of the time to add a further level of authenticity and strangeness.

At the same time, the film – clearly very consciously – avoids treating characters who are deeply religious and superstitious in a way that can sound just plain insane to you or me as the Other, people for us to gawk or snigger at and feel superior to. Not just by sharing their view of the supernatural world for ninety minutes, but also by approaching them with a psychological realism that turns what might be difficult to relate to into something deeply human, with this only further pushing the audience into nearly sharing the characters beliefs and world view and understanding them for ninety minutes or so. These people may believe in things that sound strange or outright insane to us, yet there’s quite a bit less dividing them and us than we might pretend. With this understanding quite naturally also comes empathy, and with empathy comes an intense emotional wallop once things become increasingly intense and horrifying for the characters, who are not only beset by a witch but also their own failings. And, going by William’s Puritanical conviction of the essential sinfulness of everyone, those failings are as myriad as they are painfully human.

In this context, as a (non-New) atheist, I found it incredibly refreshing that the film neither just assumes an audience will (or needs to) share its own spiritual assumptions nor goes the route where beliefs we don’t share are things made for ridicule that make those carrying them less than human. It is very uncommon for a film to show characters like these as anything other than mere fanatics, and fanatics exclusively, so it is particularly affecting how clear the The Witch is about this being a loving family, with William not the clichéd religious patriarch who rules with an iron fist, but a decent man who truly loves his family and cares for them while struggling to keep with the demands of his faith and the harsh life he has damned them to. Of course, love doesn’t necessarily save anyone or anything.

I was also deeply impressed by the actors, who have to bring life to dialogue written in – and at least partially quoted from – the style of the time and place as it has come down to us in primary sources and need to go through intense, often painful, emotional scenes without sliding into the melodramatic or overly artificial. Anya Taylor-Joy is absolutely brilliant, and even the younger kids – Harvey Scrimshaw in particular - do some fantastic tour de force stuff here.

Eggers’s direction is on the same level as his script and the actors are, bringing all kinds of feelings to life – the loneliness and oppression of the woods (a place that can’t help but suggest the supernatural), the hard life the characters live even without folkloric witches besetting them, but also the moments of joy and love. There’s so much going on here without the film ever feeling overloaded that it’s a joy to watch. Or rather, a harrowing experience full of emotional tension and horrors, but you know what I mean.

The Witch also happens to be rather brilliant at being a horror film, creating a world so real – even if it is very much un-real – its horrors become just as real, even if they are as strange as those in the film’s folkloric sources. I, at least, won’t forget this one quickly.