Three Films Make A Post: These aren't everyday people and this is no ordinary movie.

The Babysitter (2017): Kid (Judah Lewis) learns his beloved/lusted after babysitter (Samara Weaving) and her friends are satanists of the type really into human sacrifice and playing truth or dare to warm up; also, milking the blood of the innocent. A night of somewhat bloody mayhem ensues.

Given his usual predilections, this shallow horror comedy directed for Netflix by the name-disabled McG is downright un-annoying, keeping the pseudo-hip ad-man style the guy’s been using for a decade now somewhat in check enough to actually tell a straightforward tale in an effective, well-paced manner. The film generally manages to ignore all the best opportunities talking – or making decent jokes – about all kinds of interesting stuff connected to the meaning of being a grown-up, burgeoning sexuality and so on and so forth and trades it in for pretty young people, a lot of blood, and an okay rollercoaster-style time. It’s a perfectly okay way to spend (less than) ninety minutes with pretty, moving, mildly bloody pictures without much behind them.

Kwaidan aka Kaidan (1964): On the absolute opposite of the horror movie spectrum stands Masaki Kobayashi’s venerable classic of a horror anthology based on Lafcadio Hearn’s versions of Japanese ghost tales. It’s slow-moving, artfully stylized, mixing moments deeply informed by Japanese theatrical forms with techniques right out of the German expressionist handbook as well as others as state of the art of filmmaking in 1964 as you’d expect of a Japanese film. It’s a movie that manages to be at once deeply rooted in traditional Japanese culture and aim for the universal as it is expressed through ghost stories, filtered through a the work of a man who wasn’t Japanese by birth. Given its three hour running time and its calm and theatrical air, one might fear this is the kind of “classic” mostly feeling worthy and dead like certain museum pieces do, but in truth, the film’s still challenging and moving, at times creepy, at other times bizarre, and absolutely daring in the way Kobayashi expects his audience to follow him in seemingly peculiar directions. Of course, following him is extremely rewarding.

It Comes at Night (2017): Supposedly the straightforward horror follow-up to Shults’s incredible Krisha, this is actually a film that seems to very consciously – just look at the title and what doesn’t happen in the film! - evade explanations and exposition that would help an audience make sense of its in theory simple viral post-apocalypse tale. What exactly is the nature of the illness striking the world? Is it a metaphor for inner tensions and fractures of the film’s characters more than an actual disease? Are the nightmares of the film’s viewpoint character (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) only an expression of his anxiety and fear, an early symptom of the infection, or a hint at the supernatural? This and more the film’s not going to explain. What you get instead is a movie about a breaking and broken family unit during an ambiguous apocalypse, filmed with a mounting sense of dread and acted brilliantly by Harrison, Joel Edgerton, Carmen Ejogo, Riley Keough and Christopher Abbott, moving slowly but surely.


I’m not completely sure the film needs to be quite this ambiguous about so many things, but as a mood piece and a portrait of human self-destruction, the film’s very successful to my eyes.

In short: Krisha (2015)

I believe there’s hardly a more typical stage for an US indie movie than a family thanksgiving dinner, but then, that’s probably the only thing in Trey Edward Shults’s film you’d describe as typical. Made for a piddling sum, mostly with members of the director’s family - like the director’s aunt Krisha Farichild in a truly incredible performance in the title role - and close friends in front and behind of the camera, this is a heart-breaking film about everything that divides us from the people we are meant to be closest to. The film charts breaks and breaking points between and inside of its characters relentlessly, finding the moments of greatest hurt without expositing about them, and without ever looking away. Yet Shults never loses compassion either, not just for Krisha, a recovering alcoholic making a doomed attempt to mend bridges where she should probably rather first have tried to secure phone lines, but for the people she’s hurt, too – usually for everyone at once, making it nearly impossible for a viewer to make it easy on herself and choose a character as The Bad Guy. This makes for harrowing viewing, to say the least – though the film can at times be drily funny too – as painfully honest art sometimes does.

Stylistically, Shults often uses techniques usually connected to the horror genre, not as a way to distance himself ironically from what he is showing nor the audience from what it is seeing, but because what we are seeing – or rather experiencing – indeed is a horror film for everyone involved. In fact, I suspect adding a masked killer to the proceedings would probably improve the characters’ day immensely.


Emotionally, Krisha is as touching as films go, demonstrating how great, involved filmmaking and what I can only describe as conviction and clarity of vision can move the most jaded viewer.