drownsoda90

"Keeper" follows Liz, a young woman who goes with her boyfriend Malcolm for a getaway at his family's secluded country home for a weekend getaway that soon spirals into a short vacation into hell.

This new effort from Oz Perkins in a way sees the director going back to the basics of some of his earlier work, with a stripped-down narrative and a menagerie of ghoulish atmosphere and imagery. Unfortunately, what we get here is a middling experiment that never quite comes together. Make no bones about it; what this film does well is atmosphere, it deserves some credit for that. The woodsy environs and the rustic-modern house make for an effective backdrop for the slowly-seeping terrors that seem to infiltrate both the home as well as Liz's psyche. Surreal visual motifs recur throughout that seem to be pulled straight from an Andrei Tarkovsky film, and they are admittedly striking.

Tatiana Maslany also deserves credit here for her naturalistic, understated, and quite believable performance as a woman who finds herself in seemingly ordinary circumstances that may not be at all what they seem. Her confusion and, eventually, sheer terror are palpable. Unfortunately, this film simply did not work for me, largely due to its clunky conclusion. The screenplay thwacks us over the head with a reveal that is as predictable as it is baffling, and neither the over-the-top Clive Barker-esque visual effects or the social commentary in the finale are enough to salvage the thinly-sketched narrative.

In the end, I came away from this film with a very divided opinion. As a moody chamber piece, it does earn its flowers largely due to its offbeat atmosphere and Maslany's performance as a woman in a strange place experiencing even stranger events. However, the resolution feels largely unearned and, unfortunately, unsatisfying. For me, this was a very mixed bag of spooky funhouse horrors. 5/10.

"Die My Love" follows young couple Grace and Jackson (Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson), who relocate to Jackson's rural hometown in Montana for a new start. The couple soon welcome the birth of a son, but their relationship splinters as Grace descends into severe mental illness, while an often emotionally-absent Jackson falters in supporting her.

This emotionally exhausting film by Lynne Ramsay (no stranger to darkness) is a psychological rollercoaster that, despite lacking in some exposition, is no less an effective, turbulent, and abstract journey into one individual's mental decline. Many have characterized this film as one about postpartum depression, but I believe this is both an oversimplification and a mischaracterization. As someone whose lifelong best friend has suffered from inconsistently-medicated bipolar disorder for decades, I found that this film succinctly illustrated exactly what this disorder looks like to a level that is uncanny. Grace's temperament and actions throughout reminded me so much of my friend that I found the film at times extremely difficult to watch.

In terms of story, "Die My Love" is fairly sparse. The film mostly consists of a push-and-pull, a chaotic dance between Grace and Jackson that is both exasperating and occasionally touching. There remains a clear sense that, despite their respective flaws and problems, the two deeply care for each other; however, there is a vortex in the room consuming Grace that goes unchecked for far too long. Grace's reality is entirely obfuscated by her illness, while a distracted Jackson is ill-equipped to be a source of legitimate support. His mother, Pam (Sissy Spacek), who is experiencing her own grief, seems to intuitively recognize the emotional forces that are consuming Grace, but her efforts also remain limited due to a number of interpersonal family dynamics.

The storytelling here employs nonlinear and abstract tactics that are, for the most part, effective. I do think it suffers from a lack of exposition, as the audience gets no real sense of who these people were before Grace's decline. Instead, we are dropped into their lives at the precipice of all this turmoil. A few details about Grace's past eventually emerge near the film's conclusion, but it feels like a case of "too little, too late." Perhaps this was done intentionally so as to mimic the unpredictable, hard-and-fast progression of some mental illnesses, but I still felt as though there was an undergirding to the two leads characters that was sorely missed. Despite this, both Lawrence and Pattinson's performances are outstanding, and Spacek serves as a warm (albeit often helpless) maternal figure between the two.

There is a repetitive nature to the events that unfold as the film hurls toward its conclusion which some may find a slog to get through (and I do think it could have benefitted from some slight editing), but I mainly found it a slog because it was a painful and dispiriting viewing experience. Given my experiences with Ramsay's other films, I expected this, but it hit me harder because it brought up many personal memories. Despite what flaws it may have, as an emotional portrait, it is a real gut-punch of a film. 7/10.

"Shelby Oaks" follows Mia, whose younger sister Riley, a paranormal investigator in the early days of YouTube, disappeared in the titular abandoned midwestern town of Shelby Oaks, Ohio. Twelve years later, a disturbing incident reignites Mia's investigation into her sister's disappearance, leading her down a rabbit hole to a disturbing truth from the siblings' past.

I am only vaguely familiar with Chris Stuckmann's lengthy YouTube career as a film reviewer, so I feel I went into this with little bias in or out of his favor. The premise of "Shelby Oaks" is intriguing, and has some solid working elements at play. It begins with a found footage/documentary style mashup introduction to Riley and her group of fellow paranormal investigators, riffing on the mid-late 2000s wild west of the YouTube platform before shifting gears into a traditional narrative format. The found footage element recurs throughout to help unfurl the narrative, and while some have critiqued the film for this shift, I actually think it works fairly well and is the least of the film's problems.

The general format here plays on nostalgia for both millennials who came of age during this era, and for younger generations who have an innate curiosity for a time in internet culture that they were too young (or not even alive) to have bore witness to. There are obvious nods here to "The Blair Witch Project" and "Lake Mungo", and those are only a sliver of filmic references that Stuckmann touches on throughout the film. At times, it even reminded me of lesser-known films like "The Collingswood Story" in terms of tone.

Atmospherically, all of the references and touchstones are well-orchestrated elements of "Shelby Oaks." Derivative? Sure. But derivative can still be done well, and on a visual and atmospheric level, the film is successful. Where it suffers is its rote, scattershot reliance on tropes and uneven pacing, which renders the entire piece often feeling pointlessly stitched together as the story progresses. A derelict prison? Check. A haunted amusement park? Check. A rotting backwoods cabin? Check. As an audience, we tour each of these spooky locales with Mia searching for breadcrumbs, but each visitation feels unfortunately disconnected and arbitrary.

Camille Sullivan gives it her all here as Mia and is convincing, while Sarah Durn's mostly camcorder-captured performance as Riley is ethereal and sufficiently haunting, but the pretext of the siblings' relationship is lacking. The result is a rote and more often than not clumsy "down the rabbit hole" sequence of events as Mia follows clue after clue; the problem is that, though each clue appears to point to a darker truth at the narrative's core, there is no strong sense of danger or dread. It feels very much like a rinse-and-repeat job until the revelation is unveiled, which is a shame because the finale is actually rather surprising and went in a direction I did not anticipate-it's just that the ride there (at least from the midsection onward) feels clunky and is not nearly as compelling as it could have been.

Ultimately, this is a flawed film, though I don't feel that its weaknesses fully discount it. It seems that audiences are divided on which elements work better, with some favoring the found footage segments, while others feel the traditional narrative section that makes up the bulk of the last three quarters is superior. I feel the former is much stronger, but it's not necessarily because of the found footage format itself-rather, it's simply that these moments tend to strike an ominous chord that much of the rest of the film does not. By the end of it all, the payoff is not entirely satisfying because the journey there is ultimately too mechanical. Despite this, though, I do think there are enough strong moments here to warrant a viewing of "Shelby Oaks." That being said, I would note that it is a film that is fundamentally not a sum of its parts. 6/10.