Review: Talk To Me

Talk To Me
(Structural spoilers)
Cert: 15 / 95 mins / Dir. Danny Philippou & Michael Philippou / Trailer

Reeling from the recent death of her mother, suburban Australian teenager Mia (Sophie Wilde) attends a party with her best friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen) where a seance-type game is being played. A curious ornament of an embalmed, outstretched hand is used as a bridge between the land of the living and the tormented souls of the dead in limbo. The subject who grasps the hand and recites a mantra is then possessed by whichever spirit answered the call, while friends in the room run a timer and break the connection by blowing out the candle before the player is lost completely.

But when Jade's little brother Riley (Joe Bird) persuades the group to let him try, the combination of his youth and a particularly malevolent visitor result in the boy being catatonically hospitalised. Blaming herself, Mia resolves to rescue Riley from wherever his essence is being held, as well finding time to battle her own demons...

PHYSICAL

So, the Philippou brothers' film is, in a very real sense, a ouija-movie. The setup of bored teenagers using a physical artifact to channel the netherworld and then realising they've bitten off more than they can chew and spending the next 80 minutes trying not to go mad or die is a tried and tested formula. Long-time readers of this blog will know my patience with this sort of thing is usually wafer-thin at best.

Talk To Me, however is different. It's different in that it's pretty marvellous, and that's entirely because of how it handles its premise, rather than the premise itself.

A measured first act teases the results of a previous group messing about with The Hand, before taking the time to build up the characters of Mia and Jade. Neither are presented as bratty, conceited or unusually damaged (do remember these are teenage girl protagonists in a horror movie), and we get enough background information that it while may seem unusual for them to be diving into a seance, it doesn't feel unexpected.

ROCKED

But it's at the point of the first ritual that the film starts carving its own path. The teenagers in the room aren't surprised when contact is made with the other-side. The 'things' that the subject sees are visible only to that person; to everyone else it looks as if they're just hallucinating. But several of the kids have seen this before. Indeed, they've done this before; that's the game. This isn't a group of giggling children pushing a glass around a table, it's a quantifiable experience that can't be faked - and it's treated here as a drug as they take it in turns, filmed by everyone around them on their phones*¹ and enjoyed by all. Because as terrified as each of them are when they're 'under', they return energised and wanting to do it again.

More importantly though, this isn't a film about meddling with the occult. Horror works best as metaphor, and Talk To Me is a study of grief, guilt and mental illness, which isn't altogether unusual for the genre. It is more, however, a surprisingly thoughtful muse on the boundaries of consent and where they intersect with responsibility. The film never asks these questions explicitly and it certainly doesn't offer easy answers, but to even raise this in such an under-the-radar way is a smart move, and one which should be lauded.

We see it play out many times. Once the game's participant is safely strapped to a chair (torso only) and the candle is lit, it's that person who has to reach out and grasp The Hand. It's that person who has to utter the words "talk to me". And after the immediate sight of a decomposing corpse in front of them, it's that person who then has to literally say "I let you in". After this point the dead person takes control of their body (hence the strap), and will remain in place until the candle is extinguished. The subject is fully inhabited by the dead at the absolute mercy of their friends, and they've been a willing player in this game of this from the off. They're reliant on those friends having also experienced this first-hand, and understanding the gravity of the situation amid the 'fun'. So who's to blame when the genie doesn't want to go back in the bottle?

While the already-mythologised origin of The Hand is discussed at one point, there's no second-act scene in a dusty hospital archive where Captain Exposition conveniently reels off a backstory. Likewise, destroying The Hand to magically undo its deeds is never mooted as an option, with Mia actually bringing a cause-and-effect approach to studying its mechanics instead. Although by a certain point in the film it becomes clear that the only light at the end of the tunnel might in fact be its own dark place...

READYTORHUMBLE

Talk To Me is different enough in its detail to set it aside from the standard posession-horror flick, but is rooted firmly enough in the social tradition of those to ensure that points of familiarity strike home. There are a smattering of jump-scares but the film certainly doesn't rely on them, infusing the audience instead with a sense of dread and sadness.

The main selling point though, is the superb work of the huge make-up and prosthetics team, and a host of excellent dramatic performances from the cast (especially Sophie Wilde), rather than the players defaulting to 'horror movie shriek-mode'. And ultimately, this also comes down to the deft writing of Bill Hinzman and Daley Pearson, and the focused direction of Michael and Danny Philippou, who've shown that not only can they play with the big boys - they understand the game far more intimately*².

Talk To Me is a very neat little genre movie that's not going to change the world, but is punching well above its weight in an overcrowded fight. I don't need to see sequels (that ending is perfect as it is, thank you), or spin-offs or half a dozen Blumhouse efforts trying to emulate everything this does right, although I suspect all that's coming down the line anyway...

*¹ Okay, so when exactly is this movie set, that the characters have shiny new iPhones and MacBooks, but Jade's still got the Crazy Frog as a ringtone? Is somebody looking after Australia..? ^{[ BACK ]}

*² Which is something of a surprise, because prior to the film there was a short welcome-reel featuring the Philippou brothers and quite frankly they come off like an absolute ADHD nightmare. This was part of Cineworld's Secret Screening programme, incidentally, and between the BBFC card and ten minutes into the movie I counted 19 walkouts. Which is entirely fair enough. There are many people who just don't do horror (there can't be any other mainstream genre so culturally divisive), so getting people out of the house for a mystery movie and then springing something you know for a fact that a few of them will hate seems like an odd move. Because those 19 people won't be coming to the next one. It's also worth noting that the Secret Screenings are no longer exclusive to Unlimited card-holders, so potentially some of those walkouts had actually paid specifically to be there. I hope they got a refund... ^{[ BACK ]}

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer
(Spoilers)
Cert: 15 / 180 mins / Dir. Christopher Nolan / Trailer

Oppenheimer is a three hour, period-set film about nascent nuclear weaponry from a provenly competent storyteller which somehow features neither a young Emmet Brown sitting in a physics lesson nor Indiana Jones in a fridge.

Christopher Nolan is a fucking coward*¹.

*¹ Okay, I'll keep this as brief as I can. The note about Doctors Brown and Jones is obviously a joke. The score is not. I did not enjoy Oppenheimer. Then again, I genuinely believe that it's a film not created for enjoyment in any traditional sense, quite a demanding piece to watch and unsatisfying by narrative necessity. We should certainly expect no less a challenge from Christopher Nolan though, just as we wouldn't want him to be anything other than himself as a filmmaker. I suppose.

Playing with non-linear storytelling once again, Oppenheimer is framed as two separate interviews with associated sets of intertwining and converging flashbacks, each spanning the same twenty-or-so years from different points of view, where the guy we're supposed to be rooting for is demonstrated as being a dysfunctional, womanising moral-vacuum who's figured out how to most efficiently carry out genocide before the nazis and complains non-stop about this before, during and after the fact. Leaving a spray of failed personal and professional relationships in his wake, we see Oppo systematically piss off just about everybody in his life and then act surprised when they take against him...

Of course, this wouldn't be a Christopher Nolan movie without mumbled, unintelligible dialogue from the most important characters, battling here against Ludwig Göransson's piercing, intrusive score in a sound-mix that was finalised while somebody was hoovering. All of this has the pacing and delivery of high-drama, but with the implication of a storyline rather than the exposition of one. I know Nolan doesn't like to spoon-feed his audience, but Oppenheimer doesn't even have cutlery on the table.

You see, despite the device itself having a supporting role on the film's poster, this movie is not actually about Da Bomb. This is just as well, because shortly into the first act Nolan realises he can't narratively simplify for the audience either quantum physics nor the workings of an atom bomb, so quickly stops trying. What the movie actually is, is three clinical hours of dislikeable characters doing unpleasant but necessary admin and then everyone being unable to cope with the fall-out (literal, as well as metaphorical) of that, interspersed with the micro-management of international and domestic U.S. politics of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. So I was hardly expecting Terminator 2, but this is lots (lots) of middle-aged white guys in suits sitting around withholding information and showing they really can't be trusted (I go to the cinema to get away from that), leaving the cinema audience with quite frankly nobody to root for. Other than the demonstrable sociopath the film is named after. I suppose.

In terms of moral debate, Oppenheimer occupies the same shelf as Eye In The Sky and Red Joan, where hand-wringing and thousand-yard stares nudge aside the brutal practicalities of Not Losing A War. I never thought I'd watch a movie where Matt Damon plays the most rounded and sympathetic character, but here we are.

While the two timeline strands are clearly delineated by the use of colour, the content in each rarely seems complementary or interactive enough to warrant the effort. Like several of the director's recent pieces, the presentation seems needlessly fiddly yet is perhaps the only thing saving a story which would otherwise be grindingly linear. But without a solid grounding in the U.S. politics surrounding the Second World War, it all comes out as a mess anyway. It certainly feels like there's a price of entry here that's separate from the one printed on the ticket...

Biggest bugbear: We know that test-bomb's not going to destroy the world, lads; we're all here in 2023 watching the film and we'd probably have heard about that before now.

Second biggest bugbear: So what are these clandestine, closed-room hearings for, exactly? What are the nefarious powers in faceless American government trying to do to Mr Oppenheimer, who single-handedly won all of that very specific part of the late-war for them? Are the Suits trying to have him silenced? Discredited? Ruined? Killed, even? No, they're trying to remove his security-clearance. They want his badge back, that's all. They don't want the guy swanning around the lab like he owns the place ten years after he built them a super-bomb and has done nothing since but wear out the buttons on the highly-subsidised coffee machine. Just have a bit of dignity and retire, Oppo. Jeez...

Oh and bonus points to Kenneth Branagh, failing to control an accent in a built-up screenplay. Again. Proof positive that our celebrated auteur director was either distracted on-set, or deaf.

In short (and I'll bet you wish you hadn't clicked into this footnote now), Chris Nolan has not made a genuinely great film since Inception. There, I said it. ^{[ BACK ]}

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: Spider-Man - Across The Spider-Verse

Spider-Man:
Across The Spider-Verse
Cert: PG / 134 mins / Dir. Joaquim Dos Santos / Trailer

It's an odd one alright. I complain quite vociferously about the lack of new available content at my local 'small' five-screen cinema, while simultaneously seeming to ignore popular mainstream releases which should by all accounts be right up my alley. There are fatigue-related reasons that Sony's new Spider-Man movie opened at the beginning of June and it's taken me six weeks to get round to watching it.

While I didn't actively dislike its predecessor Into The Spider-Verse, the film was definitely saddled with the burden of being Sony's Spider-Man rather than Marvel's one. And Sony's output is increasingly like a 1980s pop band touring provincial venues with only one original member, and they're not even the best part of the band but they are somehow the one who won the legal rights to use the name. The 2018 animated feature was too long, too messy, too loud and with too much shit thrown at the wall in an attempt to make something stick.

With all this in mind then, I can confidently report that Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse is at least tonally consistent as a sequel.

MILES

The storyline follows on from last time, with Earth-1610's Miles Morales being back in his own world and struggling to find a trajectory as he nears the end of high school while moonlighting as Spider-Man. Meanwhile, Earth-65's Gwen Stacy battles with her own issues as Spider-Woman, living with a father who's unaware of her secret identity and determined to catch 'The Spider' for the murder of Peter Parker. But when a Renaissance version of The Vulture starts tearing through the multiverse, the multiversal 'Spider-Society' is tasked to stop him - which will mean reluctantly recruiting Morales to help...

In theory this is all fine; in practice it's too much simultaneous Content™ again. Visuals which would look outstanding for a three-minute music video become utterly exhausting over two hours. Each and every frame here is a work of art, they just make no sense when they're strung together too maniacally to keep track of. There's more detail than the eye can follow through the film's hyperactive editing, and the whole thing turns into the visual equivalent of white noise. Ironically for a film this active, it creates a soporific effect as the brain starts to shut down rather than keep attempting to process the information. Perhaps I just need to watch it on a smaller screen.

Part of the USP with the animation is that its art style is constantly changing, often within the same scene. Initially it seems to be doing this to reflect the character whose point-of-view we're experiencing, but scenes later in the movie only feature two people yet cycle through half a dozen looks. This precocious presentation results in a film which feels like watching a group of first-year art students have a collective seizure. Elsewhere, earnest and spirited vocal performances are rendered unintelligible by an atrocious sound-mix, poorly placed over intrusive, percussive soundtracking. And since around 60% of the dialogue here is catch-up exposition, Across The Spider-Verse basically has to be enjoyed (...) as a visual experience.

GINA

My real problem is bigger than all of this, though. The following is not limited to Spider-Verse, but certainly includes it. Put simply, multiverses are hands-down the worst thing to have happened to superhero cinema, and that's only getting more problematic. The concept works in print where the possibilities and limitations can be explored at a more careful pace (indeed, with comics it becomes needed as characters are relaunched for evolving audiences after years of literary service; multiverses allow for a soft-reboot), and I've admittedly enjoyed it at certain points previously. But the cinematic iteration of the superhero-multiverse has fast become the equivalent of 3D, a knee-jerk fad to be ordered at an executive level in lieu of creativity. And it's already on its arse.

As well as encouraging filmmakers to overindulge in distracting cameos and needless fan-service, the open-ended structure of parallel realities means that narrative decisions in one movie can be ret-conned, undone or just flat out ignored in the next (yes I'm looking at you, Gamora). When consequence is removed from the storyline then none of it matters on an emotional level, and cinema is supposed to be about empathy. But hey, why mine for a deeper pulse when you can just make the whole thing bigger and louder with more slightly-different versions of the same thing*¹? Audiences know by this point not to expect restraint from corporations desperately trying to keep their intellectual property fresh, and the race for More Stuff™ has become just as repetitive as the origins-formula it was trying to supersede.

Even more ironically with Across The Spider-Verse, Miles Morales (and by extension, the whole audience) gets a whole lecture about 'canon events' - concurrences which need to take place across every iteration of the hero's life (here it's the death of Uncle Ben, or equivalent guardian in each timeline), otherwise their path will be too different from all the other spider-heroes and things will become too unpredictable. What this deftly - if unintentionally - illustrates is that Sony are happy to bring in about a hundred different Spider-Mans from all the corners of the property they've got the rights to but are too afraid to do anything different with the character. Spidey's backstory is permanently locked into our pop culture at the same level as Bruce Wayne's, meaning nothing can be changed on a fundamental level without Sony taking a massive gamble in pissing off the legacy fanbase and also not enticing new viewers. In other worse, Spider-Man is precisely the wrong character with which to explore the multiverse. Well done, guys.

DICKIE

Truth be told, when Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse slows down and actually concentrates on its character-work, it is pretty superb. But the fact that this only happens twice in over two hours means that the film, on the whole, isn't. A textbook example of Style Over Substance. In all honesty, it feels like I'm done*².

All I really want out of Spider-Man is a third Andrew Garfield flick to close out his trilogy, and a new set of live-action movies for Miles Morales where possibilities can be broadened. And what are Sony bringing to the table instead? How are they maximising on their end of an historic deal from Marvel currently enjoyed by no other studio? With shit-Dracula and shit-Tarzan. We get the protagonists we deserve.

To make matters worse, I just know that Me in some other part of the multiverse is enjoying the good stuff...

*¹ "more slightly-differing versions of the same thing" is, to be fair, Marvel's entire cinematic business-model. And I have to admit it's done them well for at least the first ten years of the MCU... ^{[ BACK ]}

*² It's worth noting of course that this is Sony's mess, not that of Marvel Studios. But Marvel's name is on the can and they signed off on this - they do have that veto. Which means they are in a large and instrumental part responsible for it. And even that'd be easier to forgive if Marvel hadn't put out Eternals under their own banner. If they can be slack in what they serve up, they can expect consumers to give few fucks in return... ^{[ BACK ]}

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.

Review: Mission Impossible, Dead Reckoning Part One

Mission: Impossible
Dead Reckoning, Part One
Cert: 12A / 163 mins / Dir. Christopher McQuarrie / Trailer

Things have finally heated up inside the cinema as well as out and the war is truly on for Summer box-office dominance, as the major studios triumphantly present their long-planned showcases for audiences who stopped going to the pictures in 2019. You love to see it. Paramount's saviour is, once again, Tom Cruise - perhaps the last of the great bankable movie stars who manage to get bums on seats purely by being themselves again in a slightly different hat. Anyway, there's a new Mission: Impossible flick out...

This penultimate instalment sees Ethan Hunt and his ragtag IMF team trying to prevent various world- and criminal-powers getting their hands on 'The Entity', a lengthily described yet sketchily defined self-learning, fake-news generating Artificial Intelligence, which could either destroy humanity or just convincingly swap-out the faces of everyone on ITV (whichever is the most inconvenient), activated by a two-part interlocking key*¹ that's been stolen from a Russian nuclear submarine. As McGuffins go, this one is nailed so firmly onto the zeitgeist that it's actually kinda quaint...

NOTED

Before we get into specifics, it should be noted that Dead Reckoning is incredibly solid. It's just never more than a Mission: Impossible movie. And while it's certainly arguable that it doesn't need to be, the whole thing plays out with breathless adrenaline and surgical flair, yet no real emotion at all. There's never the sense that this is leading to anything bigger than in previous entries (no matter how much Lorne Balfe's score swells), and for a screenplay which spends so much time harping on about its past, you'd be forgiven for expecting it to mean more, somehow...

There are slightly too many characters for the (admirable) simplicity of the story, each set-piece is slightly too long, and every rubber-unmasking is unintentionally funnier than the last.

Simon Pegg gets the lion's share of the comedic quips (delivering them perfectly, it has to be said) and a high-speed chase across the Italian cobbles in a yellow Fiat 500 brings some much needed silliness to the mood, but overall Christopher McQuarrie has gone for brooding intensity over fun. Again, whether levity should even be necessary is a debate for more scholarly viewers, but Dead Reckoning is far more slick in the moments when it's got a grin on its face.

GOODYEAR

Cinematographer Fraser Taggart puts in solid work all round with framing, composition and deftly following the action, plus capturing the immersive yet distinct colour palettes of the many locales. Unfortunately his work is slightly undone when it comes to the melee scenes (of which there are many), where Eddie Hamilton's editing fast-cuts between angles so quickly that the whole thing loses coherence rather than adding excitement. And because these physical sequences are often used to move the story along, the script then requires regular industrial-sized injections of exposition from Simon Pegg and Ving Rhames, as they sit in front of generic nonsensical laptop displays and explain to other characters where we're all at and what's happening next.

The choreography and stunt work itself is - it should go without saying - beautifully executed of course, huge in its scope and minute in its detail. At this point in 2023 however, the thought occurs that since Fast X has already shown us pseudo-family-bonding and destructive car chases, Mr John Wick has brawled and shot his way through half of Europe and Indiana Jones has had a prolonged train-top fight for a powerful golden artifact on a steam engine which is hurtling towards a bombed viaduct... well, what is Ethan Hunt bringing to the party exactly, except for all-of-those-again?*²

ANCALENDAR

Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning is great on a technical level, but unambitious on a narrative one. There's plenty in there to come to the cinema for, and yet little take away. Since the audience only trusts four characters at the start of the movie (and that only really raises to five), there's little jeopardy in tantalising that others 'might be a bit shady'. They're all a bit shady mate, that's why we're here. But Esai Morales going full Bond-villain as the marvellously camp Gabriel lifts that end of things considerably.

Decent, but the series has been better than this*³, so next year's finale has its work cut out.

Oh, and I'm taking points off for McQuarrie chickening out of a potentially brilliant and literal-cliffhanger ending, instead resorting to a damp squib of a decompression coda accompanied by another two minutes of expository voiceover...

*¹ SPOILERS, highlight-to-read: Apparently the powers-that-be are desperate to get their hands on both halves of this key, even though they're shown in the first act as having an exquisitely detailed 3D model of it, so they could just print that and then cast their own copies. There's something about some red and white 'dragons egg' jewels in the key's handle which light up when it's assembled, probably acting as a verification system, but this isn't explained in any practical sense either. We see two guys using it at the start of the movie and they literally insert the key into a lock and manually turn it. Lads, Timpsons are open until 6, they can run one of those out for you...
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*² Look, I know it's not Bruce Geller's, Erik Jendresen's or Christopher McQuarrie's fault that the action sequences of Dead Reckoning have been undercut by its own release-date but seriously: we've already seen most of this, and in films which weren't afraid to also make us laugh. I mean if they'd had Ethan Hunt punching a giant prehistoric shark at the end, at least he'd have got his foot in the door before Jason Statham...
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*³ The first two Mission: Impossible films are the best ones and for wildly different yet complementary reasons thank you I will not be taking questions at this time.
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DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.