3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Backrooms

2026, Kane Parsons (The Backrooms) -- cinema

OK, not going to make the same mistake with a few other recent movies -- when something makes me feel something inside (gross, I know), I need to get it down before it goes away. 

This movie chilled me and enthralled me. And I imagine that is what some of the characters in the movie felt as well. 

This movie is an extreme example of the "don't go into the basement" -- you know you shouldn't go down there, and if you do, something bad will happen. But you go anyway, and the audience yells at you (yes, you have an audience as well) for being so stupid. But... what's down there? Danger! Of course. All the horror of the movie could be washed away by just not going down into the basement!! Well, most.

Many?

I have a pretty good sense of direction, generally better than most people I know. When I emerge from the subway, I always know which cardinal direction I am facing. But, put me into one of those underground malls, with all their weird angles, and corridors looping back on themselves and that sense of direction begins to slowly slip away. If you know the Toronto PATH, you might know what I am talking about.

So, when Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kinky Boots) finds the "soft spot" in the basement of the dying furniture which he runs, and in which he lives, and begins to explore the weird connected rooms and corridors looping back upon themselves, every fibre of my being was screaming "DON'T GO ANY FURTHER !" Oh, I know he was expecting this to be reality, that what he had literally stumbled into would follow the rules of architecture and physics, but I saw the trailers, and also, I already knew this place. The further you go into that place the more likely you are going to go beyond a point from which you can remember the way back. You will most definitely become lost; you will most definitely end up being in there for the rest of your life.

This movie is based on a series of YouTube short films by this film's director Kane Parsons. He in turn drew upon the creepypasta that originated on 4chan with a single image of weird empty yellow rooms with terrible wallpaper and terrible carpet, accompanied by a single paragraph description, mentioning a video-game concept of "noclipping" out of reality. To noclip, in a game, is to accidentally (or intentionally, once enough people learn of the "soft spot") through a barrier, such as a wall or floor, into the spaces outside of the game's content. Sometimes you noclip into a space intentionally built by game developers, but most often you are just breaking the game and end up "falling" forever. Sometimes, you are just suspended ... somewhere. I recall one game where I ended up just under the world map, where my character was swimming. I could hear water, see my character's motions of swimming, but I could not see water nor could I go anywhere. I could see the map just above my head but I could not reach it. I was lost forever. I needed to reload.

Clark should have reloaded. He has noclipped into a place which starts by being familiar (abandoned furniture store) but the further he goes, the less familiar, and the more unnerving it becomes. And there is something in there with him, something that he always ends up fleeing. And yet Clark, an angry selfish man, brings his assistant store manager (really, his only employee with a fancy title) Kat (Lukita Maxwell, Shrinking), and her handy-cam bearing boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms). It should be mentioned that it is the 1990s but the only bearing it has on the movie is the technology, the desire to use the "found footage" motif and to limit communication.

Clark also involves Mary (Renate Reinsve, Handling the Undead), his therapist, who has been constantly reminding Clark that he is stuck, stuck in his anger, stuck in his self-destructive patterns. As a therapist, who also has a book and video tapes, it is her schtick, her selling point, in that only you can choose other doorways in life, but most people keep on walking the same corridors forever. The comparisons are obvious, but handled really really well. Eventually Mary goes to Clark's store to see what he was going on about, before he disappeared. And she finds the entrance, which Clark has conveniently marked out with masking tape, and she finds Clark. It does not go well for either. Mary has her own personal corridors she has been traversing for years and years; Clark's experience exacerbates these and allows ... some closure? 

I have recurring dreams. In this writing I have probably mentioned The City before, but there was always one aspect, which is probably inherent to dreaming, and lends itself to what this movie is proposing, but there were the rooms and corridors of my dreams. There is The Apartment, which has many many rooms, connected to short hallways and stairwells. The entry room, with its big bright windows, leads to the kitchen, but off the kitchen, you reach the TV room with its 70s sunken floor and walls of VHS tapes. From there is a hallway that leads to The Kitchen, a massive room from a house that would have staff. I have never been through the door at the far end of The Kitchen. There is the underground shopping concourse, a cramped series of hallways and stalls selling all sorts of food stuffs like cured meat sandwiches and spices & herbs in bags, and dried goods I don't recognize. There are no straight lines, everything is jammed in together, people shouting, people hawking goods; I never find what I am there for, but I just love the experience of my visits. And there is The Factory, a falling down abandoned space I enter at the waterfront, but then find my way up but into what, I am never sure. Its always via weird tight hallways, stinking rooms full of junk, jammed doors, crawling over refuse to get ... somewhere.

Backrooms exposits that the rooms are memories of real spaces, but the idea that memories are built on how much you forget. Dreams are built on what you remember, but also .... on much more. The movie never explains what they are, why they are really there, who created them, what created them, but introduces it all without any real satisfying ending. We just wake up when the credits roll, confused, disoriented, disturbed and more than a little excited by it all. 

Thanks for seeing it, again, with me, Kent. Also Kent.

KWIF: Disclosure Day (+3)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. A mid-week KWIF as this weekend brings us Supergirl and maybe other distractions.

This Week:
Disclosure Day (2026, d. Steven Spielberg - in theatre)
Toy Story 5 (2026, d. Andrew Stanton - in theatre)
Hoppers (2026, d. Daniel Chong - Disney+)

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I've always considered Steven Spielberg an "aliens" guy (as I think most people do?), even though it'd been a minute since Spielberg last did aliens. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was 2008 and only featured the aliens reveal in the end. He remade War of the Worlds in 2005 and it was over 20 years before that when he did E.T. The Extra-terrestrial. Prior to that it was Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  In a career with 35 movies 1/7th of his output was aliens related. That track record alone wouldn't make him an "aliens" guy, but it's still hard not to think of him that way because, in his presentation of aliens on film, particularly in Close Encounters, E.T. and now Disclosure Day, they seem not the works of a fantasist, but of a believer.

Disclosure Day isn't a preachy movie, and yet it's really trying to sell the audience on the idea that aliens exist and that we should be okay with it (I mean, I get where Spielberg's coming from, as we are a species that is notoriously xenophobic, that destroys what it doesn't understand, and generally rebuffs the unfamiliar in favour of the samey same).  It's a chase movie that posits that a shadowy organization, Wardex, in collusion with the U.S. Department of Defense, has been covering up alien encounters, commoditizing alien technology, communicating with alien beings, and torturing alien prisoners.  At a certain point the "need to know" on all this became tighter and tighter to the point that even the POTUS was eventually denied access (given who sits there now, probably for the best).

As the film starts, Wardex employees have turned up missing, as have Wardex assets retrieved from alien encounters. They're on the hunt for Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor, The Crown), a mathematics and programming prodigy who has escaped with thumb drives of their entire video archives as well as a particular piece of space magic technology. Daniel is on the run with his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson, The Knick), who he learns, in the process of hiding out, used to be a nun. As he discloses to her why he is on the run, that "disclosure day" is coming and all this material will be made public, Jane's faith (and lack of faith in humanity) has her bristling against this course of action.

Meanwhile local Kansas City news station weather person, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt, The English) has aspirations for becoming a news anchor. She has an encounter with a cardinal (the bird, not the Catholic) immediately after which she begins having weird episodes of speaking foreign dialects, and empathically reading peoples minds and finding the perfect path to delivering them comfort, sometimes with words and other times with telepathic images. After trying to give a weather report, only to wind up speaking in an alien language of clicks, she passes out. An MRI shows no anomalies, but the Wardex goons are waiting for her outside her hospital room. With the concerned help of her boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) they get out. Margaret knows something is happening to her, but she also knows it's not a bad thing. 

She gets a phone call from ex-Wardex employee Hugo Wakefield (Coleman Domingo, The Four Seasons), the man orchestrating the whole "disclosure day" event, and he advises her to find Daniel, using her instincts to guide her. 

Daniel gets captured, Jane's on the run, Margaret ditches Jackson, Margaret rescues Daniel and they keep running afoul of the Wardex goons, as their leader, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth, The Staircase) uses alien technology to invade peoples minds and take over their bodies.

This is all happening as U.S.-Russian tensions escalate and the threat of nuclear war and/or World War III looms large. Jane and Scanlon both worry that any disclosure of the existence of extraterrestrial beings will plunge an already volatile world even further asunder.

This is very much Spielberg (with frequent collaborator, screenwriter David Koepp, and, oh yes, John Williams' latest [maybe last] film score) in Spielberg mode. When you think of a Spielbergian adventure, this slots right into that. Spielberg has long been an incredible populist filmmaker, he wants his films to be (for the most part) enjoyable to the broadest demographics. But that Spielbergian populism, at its peakiest peak, was always very American-centric. For as avid an enthusiast of World War II and aliens as he is, he seems incapable of really expanding his mindset out of the ol' U.S. of A.

So despite having three Brits as the leads of this film, only Firth plays in his natural accent (because the British accent can still accentuate the "villain" motif). Blunt is working in an American dialect I can't quite place, but there's a hint of a twang, while O'Connor's American accent comes off as somewhat flat. 

In dealing with its backdrop of international tensions, we don't get a sense that there's any extension of Wardex outside of America. There's no conceit that they have satellites all over the globe where other alien encounters *must* have happened. Not even a mention. It's like the John Smith idea that America is special and that a resurrected Jesus went there to deliver a whole second set of commandments, just for Americans, because they're special. This is a movie that doesn't tout American Exceptionalism, but it's most definitely the product of creators educated in that sort of groupthink.

Disclosure Day, in its sensibilities feels very of the 1980s, and I can't help but feel had it been a period piece (Spielberg loves a period piece) set in the '80's that it might have played better for me. I get the sense that Spielberg wanted to explore his anxiety around our lack of empathy, our fractioning, our tribalism, and all the unease in the world, and that, in his mind there's one unifying answer, that we're not alone and we should be thinking of something more than ourselves.  It's not hard to extract that message, but it all teeters on the edge of cloying.

The man is a masterful, thoughtful storyteller, but he has a mode he finds himself in regularly, and, while it's been a while, this is that mode. One where his sense of hope and optimism means that conflict is pretty neutered and there's a sever disconnect with reality (how many times should Margaret have been shot dead and wasn't? How terribly sloppy is Wardex as an organization?).  

This is a movie that does not lack for interest, intrigue or excitement, nor does it lack for some really good performances, and intriguing ideas, but for the most part Disclosure Day didn't hold together for me. It did feel like the "aliens guy" was trying too hard to convince me of something rather than let me get there on my own.

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No, I don't know what "HDR"
or "Barco" are...

As an adult person really interested in the collecting of toys (I'm an APRICOT, a term I just made up and is definitely not going to get adopted voluntarily by the collecting community) the idea has been percolating for some time about the potential for a Toy Story feature that takes place in the world of adult collectibles. I love going to toy shows and the idea of putting Woody and pals in the feeding frenzy of toy conventions, with nerdy adults haggling over pricing and condition of figures, or squatting and rifling through a dig bin, well it gives me tingles and has me smiling. But the basics of the idea of Woody confronting "collectibles" was already covered in Toy Story 2, and I'm not sure such an idea offers much more thematically than that (except to say we don't have to grow up and stop playing with toys, and I don't know that it would cover much different ground than The Lego Movie did). Watching Toy Story 5 served to remind me that it is a series about the importance of play for children, and that the toys in these movies have a singular desire to make children happy. Not the inner children of adults but, like, legit kids.

The prior Toy Story movies have centered around primarily Woody or Buzz, with characters like Jesse or Lotso Huggins driving home a particular emotional thread, but Toy Story 5 puts Jesse (Joan Cusack) front and center, pushing Buzz and Woody to the periphery, as Jesse, for as tough a cowgirl as she is, still has a particular traumatic trigger around being abandoned.  She has been basking in the glow of being Bonnie's #1 toy for a couple years now, but Bonnie (Scarlett Spears) needs more than just toys as friends, and as much as Jesse wants to help Bonnie connect with other kids, they're just not interested in much other than screens.

Enter Lilypad (Greta Lee), a web-enabled tablet device for kids that immediately takes the dominant spot in Bonnie's room and pushes all other concerns aside. Lily takes it upon herself to connect Bonnie to other kids from dance class, and for a moment, it seems like Lily is doing what Jesse couldn't. But in order to fit in Bonnie has to be her inauthentic self, and it's kind of a disaster for her. A late night chat with Woody (Tom Hanks) via walky-talky with a shaky connection brings Woody back to Bonnie's room, only to find when Lily returns  Jesse and Bullseye have gone missing, and a lovelorn Buzz (Tim Allen) desperate to find her. 

The human kids in the Toy Story franchise have largely been like deities, gods worshipped by these toys, and thus a bit more abstract. We are typically invested in the world of the toys, less so the world the kids inhabit. But this film places Bonnie as just as central a figure as Jesse, yes inhabiting two different worlds, but symbiotically. One needs the other whether they know it or not.  We get so invested in Bonnie's well being that it's soul crushing when she's rejected by others.  Yes, the toys love her more than existence itself, but Bonnie doesn't know this, they're not the real world to her, just a part of her very vivid imagination.

Picking up the threads of Jesse's trauma from Toy Story 2, she has her own anxiety spirals that as often elicit rage as desperation. She lashes out at Lily, at technology in general, and it's up to a trio of long dormant devices she finds in another home (led by Smarty Pants, a toilet training device voiced by Conan O'Brien) to teach her that technology has its place in a child's development as well, and can just be as important to them as old fashioned role-playing toys.

The undercurrent of the film is casting a critical - but not damning - eye at technology. It's a film that acknowledges the draw of technology and how it can entertain and how it can help a child develop in certain ways, but it is also keen to point out its limitations and even its drawbacks. Writer-director Andrew Stanton sharply observes that while technology may satisfy most kids attention, it won't satisfy all, and some kids (and adults) will prefer playtime to pixels, and wouldn't it be great if technology could connect them.

There is a secondary thread which finds a crate of next gen Buzz Lightyear toys washed ashore on a deserted island, and it slowly starts to arc its way in front of the path of the main story. Rather than being a distraction it's entertaining, exciting and curious, both in the actions on screen and the question of how it could possibly fit in the overall narrative of the story, which it does so pretty nicely.

Did we need another Toy Story movie? While it's doubtful anything will ever hit the resonant high and tumultuous events of Toy Story 3, each entry in the series has validated its existence with a narrative purpose that expands on the themes of the series, builds up its characters even more, and has a remarkable amount of fun in doing so. Five films in 30 years is hardly a flooded market. I'm not sure I want the series to continue if it outlives its cast, but if everyone's game in 2031, I'll be just as happy to see where it goes next.

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In prep for Toy Story 5, I decided to dive into Hoppers, the previous entry in Pixar's dynasty of (mostly) quality product.... I mean, it has been a while since Pixar felt like "Pixar!" where every release was an event worth taking note and going to the theatre, even if you didn't have kids and time to kill.  The breaking point seemed to be in 2015, when The Good Dinosaur not only failed to delight critics, but kids as well. It was Pixar's first real disappointment and the sequel-heavy future looked a bit bleak from there. Not that people weren't excited for Finding Dory or a new Incredibles or Toy Story 4 but with so little new in the tank it felt like Pixar wasn't the place of innovation it once was (I mean, Into the Spider-Verse came out the same year as Incredibles 2 and, as good Brad Bird's sequel was, the Spider-Man movie made it look somewhat antequated.)

While Soul, Luca and Turning Red are all quite good films that sparkle with some of the latent Pixar magic, films like Onward, Lightyear, Elemental and Elio have all felt underbaked or formulae-gone-wrong, just gas-less films that failed to excite critics or audiences (to the point that these four, plus the Cars sequels, are the only Pixar films I haven't seen).

Hoppers' wasn't a return to form for Pixar, but it wasn't a critical or commercial failure either. In one week Toy Story 5 has already outperformed Hoppers' entire theatrical run. But then, Toy Story 5 has history, name recognition, and the might of Disney behind it. Hoppers got a trailer that didn't really tell the audience what it was about and a title which is kind of perplexing. It looked more like a Disney knock-off movie than the next great Pixar film.  

It is definitely better than a Disney knock-off, but it has some hills to climb and it doesn't fully accomplish reaching the apex. 

The title, Hoppers when paired with its protagonist images on the poster and in the trailer, is a head scratcher. Beavers aren't exactly known for their hopping ability.

"Hopping" in the movie, however, is the term for putting one's consciousness into the body of a robot animal... something the trailer sort of forgets to talk about. In the film, Mabel Tanaka is a ADHD-coded child with too much energy to burn, and a lot of festering rage. Her grandmother takes her to the glade and teaches her the tranquility of being at one with nature, of listening to its rhythms and just enjoying the peace of the Earth. A dozen years later, grandma has passed and Beaverton's Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm) wants to build a beltway through the glade to make circumnavigating the city a possibility. Mabel (Piper Curda) will do anything to stop him but feels helpless, unable to get anyone else to care about nature.

She discovers her college professor Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy) has invented robot animals that can traverse nature undetected and undisturbed, not only that but the operator is technically inside the robot, acting as the animal. Mabel hijacks the beaver robot and enters the wilderness where she discovers where all the animals that abandoned the glade are now in a concentrated space that's incapable of keeping them all. She tries to rally to animals to fight back for their land, and once again finds apathy...at first. And then...violence.

The thrust of the story is that Mabel is connected to nature and loves it wholeheartedly, and she will do anything to protect it. But her energy is off-putting and tends to deter people from her cause rather than to embrace it or see what she sees. It's a film about how utterly defeating it can be to care, how soul-crushing it seems when it feels like you're the only one who cares about a problem, and how sometimes one's efforts can not only fail, but backfire.

The problem is, as a story it doesn't offer good alternatives. It's a film that acknowledges that we need fighters in the world, and we perhaps need to have more empathy for the fighters than we do, but it doesn't tell the fighters, or the wanna-be fighters how to fight. In fact, it kind of low key shames them, puts them down, and pushes the fighters towards working with the systems that don't really work rather than trying to remake the systems so they do.  The film digs a hole for itself that it's not really equipped to get out of once it jumps in.

The standard Pixar formulae finds its stories taking place in a world that we're unfamiliar with, one which posits that it's existed the whole time only we're just being exposed to it now (the ocean life in Finding Nemo/Dory, the world of toys in Toy Story, the world of bugs in A Bugs Life, the monster dimension in Monsters Inc., the world of emotions in Inside Out etc). In presenting such a world, everything to the last detail needs to be thought through and considered. If a joke is made, the logic of the joke still needs to fit this world or world-within-a-world. In Hoppers it's the animal kingdom, or at least a regional representation. And it's kind of where Hoppers falls short in its Pixarness.  My buy-in into this world fell apart almost immediately as Mabel witnesses the mammal King George (Bobby Moynihan) leading the wilds in a rousing routine of jazzercise.

There's a clear divide that there's civilization in a city, and the place where wild animals live outside of it. But where the human dwellers may feel divorced from the bushes outside its streets, the animal kingdom considers humanity to be a part of it. There are royalty in these realms - mammal, lizards, amphibians, fish, birds and insects each have a king or queen (and yet no human king, until beaver-Mabel presents Mayor Jerry as "king" to the humans). There's just an internal lack of consistency to how this whole civilization works and while it's not fatal to the film, it does raise too many questions whilst watching to just fully relax into the story.

Similarly, I could buy into the idea of the hoppers, and even the idea that once your consciousness is placed in the animal robot you can understand other animals (but not humans) but then to have earpieces and communication with humans that cross the divide is a step too far. It's basically an invention that lets humans and animals communicate, which is a much bigger deal than the hoppers technology, quite frankly.

Toy Story 5 has a couple of animals in it and their renderings feel lightyears (pun intended) beyond the animals we see in Hoppers. The animation of Hoppers is fine but doesn't escape the conventional soft-edged trappings that CGI animated movies has largely been stuck in for over 20 years (but thanks to Spider-Verse and K-Pop Demon Hunters we seem to be finding a pathway out of) so in a way, despite being generally entertaining and with a welcome ecological message, it has a generic feel. 

[Toasty's take - we agree, I think]

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Normal

2025,  Ben Wheatley (Kill List) -- download

Once again, I am struck that I should get around to watching Kill List. In fact, I didn't even know I was watching a Wheately movie until the credits rolled.

I did not have Bob Odenkirk as Action Hero on my movie bingo card. He comes along once again with Derek Kostad to write & produce an ultra-violent action flick starring an aging, unlikely protagonist. This time he's Ulysses Richardson (Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul), a sheriff-for-hire, come to Normal, Wisconsin Minnesota (once again, Winnipeg) to temporarily fill the role until the elections happen -- the previous sheriff froze to death. That aspect of Old West Meets Modern American Policing still weirds me out -- they do not have to be trained police officers, just win an election. Anywayz, Normal is ... well, normal. Mostly; some small town weird. Ulysses comes to this job with his own shaky past, seeking to escape something. But he's a likeable, nice guy, happy to do this job and then move on.

Then he's nice to the wrong person, a likeable bank robber who, along with her boyfriend, must be in desperate straits to resort to such drastic measures. Things don't go well and an alarm is sounded, one the sheriff's office has hidden behind some junk because, well, that alarm would never dare go off. Ulysses goes into the bank to talk the couple down when... his own deputies begin opening fire with automatic weapons, and the new sheriff is just as much a target as the rest of the people in the bank. There is something in there that nobody should see, let alone an interim sheriff.

You see, the movie opened with the punishment of two Yakuza thugs, and if we paid attention, we will see that they are standing guard in the bank. It doesn't take much to get that likely the Yakuza has some holdings in the bank, enough that if its revealed, everyone must die. This is where the movie bleeds quickly into the lunatic fringe, more a farce of comedic-action than any reality we could accept. But that's OK, as it kind of works. Ulysses ends up working with the bank robbers against ... the whole town. Pretty much everyone in town made a deal with a Yakuza oyabun to stand guard over a vast fortune in gold, cash and weapons hidden away in a small Minnesota bank vault. Its weird, unrealistic but in the context of the movie, it kind of works.

So, outside, a snow storm rages (a terribly depicted spray-on snow storm) which has knocked out communication lines (in)conveniently leaving Ulysses and the couple, Lori (Reena Jolly, Meet Me Under the Mistletoe) and Keith (Brendan Fletcher, Violent Night), having to fight it out with the well-armed townsfolk all night. Meanwhile, the robbery alarm has gone all the way to Japan so the oyabun and his crew are one their way. What was expected to end in a massive bloodbath actually gets interrupted by a ... stalemate and awkward agreement between Ulysses and the townsfolk he hasn't killed yet, to stand up against the Yakuza. If the oyabun and his visiting crew all die, then no one can report the town's failure and they can resume standing guard over the fortune. 

Yah, its all a bit weird thin stretch but somehow Wheatley sells it. It doesn't hurt that Odenkirk comes across as likeable and capable, and since he has killed the mayor pretty much immediately, the surviving townsfolk are sort of lacking leadership. Except he doesn't stay and the movie doesn't sell the idea he would accept the killing in defense of so many many townsfolk. I know, I know, in these movies, the Protagonist slaughters dozens of NPCs in a matter-of-fact manner, but since the establishment of Ulysses character (his shaky past) involved him killing someone that needed killing, that a mass slaughter (in self-defense, of course) would get him past that is ... a weird spin. And that they actually let him leave with the knowledge of what is going on in Normal. So, not normal.

But, I do like my quirky violent romps.

I should mention. There is a side-character side-plot, wherein Alex (Jess McLeod, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma), the adult child of the late-sheriff is trans / non-binary. Its a toss away acknowledgement, where Ulysses apologizes for misgendering them and then immediately finds an ally in his bloodbath, given they had been advising their father against the agreement the town had, and that is what got the late sheriff killed. I really liked that they made gender a part of the character, but moved quickly past it. Yes, it does feel like an insertion, but its the acknowledgement of normality in an otherwise abnormal Normal. And they use a tender scene of acknowledgement and acceptance as the exposition dump, Alex filling in Ulysses on what the what is in Normal.

KWIF: Obsession (+4)

 KWIF=Kent's Week in Film. This week's batch of films is actually last week's batch of films. At least two days of this week were spent laid up on the couch with post-Gamma Knife-related side effects (migraines, earaches, discombobulation and fatigue). They've largely tapered off, but my ability to focus has still slipped, so I need to practice getting back at this review blog writing thing. This week's theme...toxic relationships apparently.

This Week:
Obsession (2026, d. Curry Barker - in theatre)
Over Your Dead Body (2026, d. Jorma Taccone - amazonprime)
Dead Again (1991, d. Kenneth Branagh - netflix)
Roommates (2026, d. Chandler Levack)

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When films are unexpectedly successful well beyond any executive or critical projections, it's usually because they're meeting a moment in the culture. They are films for their times. This is even more true of horror films, where often the film is a metaphor or moral fable disguised under more visceral gore and/or frights. Curry Barker's theatrical debut, Obsession, has now grossed over 200 million dollars domestically, and 300 million worldwide (and was made for a paltry 750,000) with no franchise or name recognition behind it, and it's done so by meeting a moment.

If you, like most people, are inundated with headlines every time you open your browser or social media, you've heard about the loneliness epidemic, or that young men are in crisis, or that young women would rather just not date these days.  Perhaps you've heard of the manosphere, or trad wives, or the various right wing movements trying (and succeeding far too much) in stripping away the rights of women, and trying to resurrect old ideas of gender roles where women are dutiful and subservient to men.  Obsessession is borne out of these trappings without explicitly addressing any of them head-on.

Bear (Michael Johnson) is not shown as being a message-board obsessed incel, but he is hopelessly pining over his friend and coworker Nikki (Inde Navarette). They are pals, doing trivia night after work, and going to parties, but Bear wants it to be more than what it is. Desperately. But he's too shy to make a move. Even when Nikki confronts him as he drops her off at her place, asking him bluntly if he likes her, he still can't admit it.

The thing men -- especially young men -- fear the most, is being emotionally vulnerable. There's the old Seinfeld joke about people being more scared of giving the eulogy than being in the casket, but I think men are more scared of admitting their romantic feelings to someone than they are of public speaking or dying. Cowards. We're pretty much all cowards. (More times than I can recall [mainly because I'm old and don't recollect well anymore], I have been told by someone they were interested in me, and I cannot recall there ever being a situation where, over the many crushes I've had in my life, having actually admitted that to said crush without them first having opened up to me. Not even to my wife [though she said it was pretty obvious, but that's besides the point]. That's pretty shameful, if I'm being honest. Shameful, and embarassing to realize that I was basically a romantic coward, afraid of opening up and afraid I couldn't handle the rejection.)

So, sitting in his car in shame over the missed opportunity, Bear tears open the novelty gift he bought for Nikki, the "One Wish Willow", a small twig that the colourful packaging says will grant the bearer one wish after snapping it. And so he wishes Nikki would love him more than anyone. *Snap* Seconds later she's tapping at his window and coming onto him. He can't believe it, but he's going to take it. Cue the montage to perky music of their new, happy life together... although moments within the sequence show Nikki helplessly unable to resist just staring at Josh.

In perhaps Barker's best directorial moment, Bear's buddy (and coworker at Andy Richter's music shop) Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) pulls Bear aside and just has to ask...how? How is this happening? How did this happen? He knows that Nikki told their friend Sarah that she only liked Bear as a friend just days before they started going out. Bear, you can tell, has a modicum of guilt, genuinely suspecting that the One Wish Willow was legit, but at the same time still can't get over his biggest want having come true. The whole time this conversation is going on, Nikki is in the background, quite out of focus, just staring at Bear, an intense, haunting, almost spectral presence.

Nikki's obsession with Bear, continues to ratchet up, getting more and more overbearing (no pun intended...or maybe it is?) and Bear's happiness starts to dwindle under Nikki's oppressive, destructive and harmful behaviour.

If we were to step back, maybe not even 10 years ago, this would be the story of a toxic relationship, about women who control their men through emotional manipulation and illnesses (feigned or real). The hallmarks of emotional abuse are there -- violent outbursts followed by extreme moments of contrition and tenderness and sexual advances. I've definitely heard about such stories, and to a lesser degree, been there myself. Yet, despite Bear being our point-of-view character, he's not the protagonist. He's the antagonist. Nikki is the victim of this story, having been stripped of her agency, and everything her body is doing is beyond her control, serving only Bear's whims with nearly no ability to advocate for herself.

In the film's funniest scene Bear calls the service line for the One Wish Willow, only for an apathetic voice on the other end to tell him the only way to reverse the wish is for someone else to wish it so...that, or Bear dies.  And in the most haunting scenes of the film, more than once, Bear hears Nikki's real voice while the "other her" is asleep, or distracted, and he knows, he's fully aware that the Nikki who is his girlfriend is not really the woman he though he was in love with. And yet, to even attempt to undo his wish, to free this woman he said he loves, takes him weeks to come to that decision, and begrudgingly so. Only when it's at its most extreme does he even truly try.

He may not be a Jordan Peterson-watching douche, but under the nice guy persona still lies a man who thinks that, maybe, it's best if a woman is his possession.

Barker's film is not scary so much as upsetting and disturbing. Barker's "monkey's paw" tale is not in any way original (I believe I saw a Twilight Zone episode recently with much the same plot), and Barker's direction is solid even if lacking much standout style. But it's the way in which the story is told, where the camera's sympathies lay that makes this different, and that is what meets this moment. This is Nikki's tale, moreso than Bear's, and Navarette is an immediate superstar in the role, having to switch moods at the snap of a finger, and go from extreme perkiness to extreme rage while still retaining that sense of helplessness in her eyes. It's an astonishing performance, frankly.

Much like when Zach Cregger's Barbarian became a phenomenon (though still paling in comparison to what this film has earned), all eyes will be on what Barker does next. Is he a one-hit wonder, or does he have the juice to make more films that audiences and critics will respond to. The insane success of this film almost suggests that whatever he does will have a lot of expectations and pressures put upon it, hopefully he can meet the moment with his sanity intact. 

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Based on the 2021 Norwegian film The Trip, Over Your Dead Body is a nasty dark comedy about a married couple who have such severe communication issues that they'd rather just plan each other's murder than talk it through.

Unlike Obsession, there's no moral fable here, it's really a War of the Roses(/The Ref)-type story where the unhappy couple in question need to find themselves in the most extreme circumstances in order to open up and connect with each other again.

Dan (Jason Segel) is a failed film director stuck working in commercials. Lisa (Samara Weaving) is a wanna-be actress who has been unemployed for too long for Dan's liking (and is possibly cheating on Dan with her scene partner in acting class). They take a heated road trip out to Dan's father's lakeside cottage "upstate" (this was shot in Finland, and I had an impossible time ignoring that fact...the setting here doesn't look like anywhere in North America I've seen), where they've planned for each other's murder (having ham-handedly established with colleagues and neighbours the possibility of hiking or hunting excursions going wrong over this weekend).

While they had prepped for murdering each other, which is a pretty raw taste to accept as comedy, it is humorous the reactions they both have once they discover the other's plans. There is some comedic mileage to be had in the scenario.

What they hadn't planned on was a pair of escaped murderers Pete and Todd (Timothy Olyphant and Keith Jardine) and the prison guard, Allegra (Juliette Lewis) who helped them get free (according to Allegra, her and Pete are in love... Pete's less convinced). And so it becomes a fight for survival for Dan and Lisa against hardened criminals, and their only path forward is together.

This is not a gentle movie. The violence hits hard, real hard. It's not cartoonish, it's traumatic. This isn't Looney Tunes comedy, it's serious damage, bruising, cuts and far, far worse all shown in pretty graphic detail. It's far too extreme, and far too nasty to be funny, so it's all the more impressive when the funny can creep through it all.

Segel has become a master at emotive comedy, his malleable face can represent such despair, depression, resolve, joy, whatever the case may be, while his eyes can convey something completely different. He makes Dan into an impotent man who can't seem to stand up for himself or follow-through on his decisions, but you also start to buy into his stepping up. Segel can sell that every time, and he can undercut it just as easily. Weaving has become a top notch take-no-shit lead, while also having a wryness that lends itself quite well to comedy. She does sarcasm and snark as well as she can take a hit and project her rage (which she got a lot of experience with in the Ready or Not movies). The age gap between them is addressed, but they are a pretty evenly matched pairing.  It's just then so disappointing that I really didn't like either Dan or Lisa all that much... I was sort of rooting for them, but where they wind up in the end is more scary than heartwarming or delightful. 

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The opening credits to Kenneth Branagh's 1991 neo-noir Dead Again features a montage of old timey newspaper headlines that tells the story of German composer Roman Strauss' arrival in America, his whirlwind romance with Margaret, their marriage, her death, Roman being accused of murder, his conviction, and his death sentence. You'll be forgiven if it seems like you missed a predecessor story (called Dead maybe), and it is pretty crucial setup.

The film proper then starts, in black and white, where we meet Roman Strauss (Branagh) on death row. He's getting trimmed, given his last rights and last supper, and being interviewed by Gray Baker (Andy Garcia) who wrote some (all?) of the articles we saw in the intro. Roman's cell is lined with Baker's articles as well. Baker asks Strauss if he really killed Margaret. He smiles, whispers something in his ear, then pulls out a knife from his last supper and charges forward. Quick cut to present day,in full colour. A woman (Emma Thompson) wakes up screaming. There's a chair propped under the doorknob of her room. Eventually nuns and others find their way in. 

Apparently this woman arrived at this orphanage with amnesia and was given care and a room, but the cold hearted priest who rules the place seems to have little compassion for her situation (the nuns, on the other hand, worry for her safety...women taking care of women). The priest calls in a favour from former tenant of the orphanage, now a private investigator, Mike Church (Branagh again), to help figure out this woman's origins. When they meet, there's an immediate attraction, both ways.  She winds up staying at his place because the sanitarium is just chaos.

With the help of Pete, a colleague in the media (Wayne Night, as an affable creep), they get the woman's story out, and eventually Mike and "Grace" (he gives her the name just to call her something) meet Franklyn Madison (Derek Jacobi), an antiques dealer with a hypnosis side hustle. In unrestrained sessions with Grace, Franklyn starts to reveal that her nightmares are actually past-life traumas, which we experience in brilliant black and white, seeing more to the story of Roman and Margaret Strauss' life together, and possible motivations for her murder at, presumably, Roman's hands.

Twists and turns, drama and intrigue. It's all very pulpy and, if I'm honest, a little cheesy, but at the same time so aware of what it's trying to do and having fun doing it. It's a throwback story with a throwback style set in two different time periods that's trying to marry both Hitchcock's earlier style with his later period one, strapping in an additional layer of the fantastical, and mostly succeeding.

Branagh's American accent is pretty dicey but surprisingly his Mike Church is a decent and respectful guy, very careful not to take advantage of this traumatized woman (in contrast to Pete, who, while relatively harmless, seems unable to contain his many lascivious thoughts from coming out of his mouth). Branagh and Thompson were newly married at the time, so there was a palpable chemistry between them that comes across on screen, the innate attraction being essential to the past lives plot (for the record, they divorced in '97). But Thompson is the dominant player in the movie. Yes, everything revolves around her, but she's not a passive character... well, eventually.

When the story starts, "Grace" is mute, unable to speak, barely able to communicate, and seems bewildered by everything. I was truly worried she was just going to be in neophyte mote, a spin on the "born sexy yesterday" trope where her mental state and lack of communication skills are irresistibly attractive to the men around her. But once she does start speaking, she's a total Emma Thompson character, smart, sophisticated, and challenging. As discombobulated as her life has become, once she's able to display her personality she's exactly who you want Thompson to be playing. And in playing Margaret in the flashbacks, she has to be a character of the 1940's, where there was more deference from women to the men in her life, and yet she still has such agency. I can't help but feel that Thompson did a pass on the script (credited to Scott Frank, Out of Sight) to make these two characters more...her. And yeah, it really works. I know exactly what this film would look like with Grace and Margaret in less confident hands.

Dead Again doesn't get brought up much. It's not a lost classic, and it's not totally forgotten, but it's just a tiny little blip in both Branagh and Thompson's incredible careers. It's a bit of a wisp of a film, fun but not fun enough to obsess over. Rewatching it won't reveal hidden depths, it's all on the surface, but it's really not trying to be anything else other than what it is.

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Canadian music journalist-turned-writer/director Chandler Levack has become a must-see filmmaker for me, although I can't seem to put my finger on why.  Her first film, I Like Movies, I found compelling and anxiety-inducing, and her sophomore effort, Mile End Kicks, was a level-up, doling out a big bale of Canadiana that felt incredibly cool, and both modern and retro all at once.  The alluring Canadian-ness, I guess is the pull of Levack, but there's definitely a vibe to her first two films (despite being tonally different) that seems unique.

So with Levack being called up by Adam Sandler himself, requesting that she direct this script about warring roommates in a college dorm, a script written not by Levack but by SNL staff writers, and starring Sandler's daughter as well as going straight to Netflix...well, I worried that Levack would get swallowed up by this big American machine and there would be nothing visible of her in this film.

If I'm being totally honest, there mostly wasn't, and yet, in tiny little ways there was.

The film's framing device finds the Dean of Student Life (Sarah Sherman) relaying to two warring roommates (Storm Reid and Ivy Wolk) the tale of the most epic roommate war of all.  It starts with high school outcast Devon (Sadie Sandler) making her first real friend at college bootcamp in gives-no-shits Celeste (Chloe East). She asks Devon to be her roommate and Celeste agrees, but warns Sadie that she's not looking for a fairweather friend, but a ride-or-die bestie. She's been burned before, or so she says.

But spending a few afternoons with someone who is utterly carefree can be exhilarating, living with someone like that can be exhausting, and typically a one-way exchange. As much as Celeste is wildly inconsiderate, messy, taking up space, borrowing Devon's stuff and low-key manipulating her, Celeste also pulls Devon out of her shell by dragging her out place, pushing her out of her comfort zone and cheerleading her on to do more. So while Devon rather rapidly becomes tired of Celeste's behaviour (and for good reasons), she also finds moments to appreciate what Celeste brings into her life. 

Levack's prior films have centered around selfish characters who the director has had overwhelming empathy for. When we watch Lawrence be his worst self in I Love Movies or Grace do her own thing to the detriment of everyone else in Mile End Kicks we're still on board with their journies. Roommates is Devon's story, and Celeste is the antagonist, but Levack can't help but have empathy for Celeste, and that conflicts with her purpose as chaos agent in the story.

At a certain point it seems like Devon is the one who is being selfish... she only knows about Celeste what Celeste has told her and never probes deeper, basically too worried that asking more intimate questions will push Celeste away rather than bring them closer, but also getting too self-involved in her new college life (and too used to being in solitary mode) to know how to relate to being with someone so different from her.  And the advice given to her to, you know, talk to Celeste is just ignored. (This is all not too dissimilar to the confrontation between Grace and her Montreal roommate in Mile End Kicks, which may or may not explain why certain things do or don't happen the way they do in this film....Is Levack avoiding repeating herself?)

And so things fall apart, to extremes. And in the end Celeste is truly painted as the villain, the nightmare, the bad guy, and when she gets her comeuppance, the script wants us to laugh at her, but Levack can't seem to let go of her empathy.  

The cast, outside of its young leads, is low-key stacked with comedic talent, including Nick Kroll and Natasha Lyonne as Devon's parents, Carol Kane as her grandmother, Jeanine Garofolo as her architecture professor, as well as other nepo-babies like Please Don't Destroy's Martin Herlihy and Francesca Scorsese. It's easy to be dismissive, but everyone delivers in this film, a testament to Levack's direction.  It's amusing enough and entertaining enough, but it doesn't find its core, it doesn't know where its heart is. There a pull between a script that needs to be a big dumb broad comedy and a director who just wants to be grounded in what's real about the characters and the situation. 

This was good for Levack to cut her teeth on the Hollywood machine, to try something different, prove that she can handle bigger budgets and scale, but hopefully she can continue to do things her way on a larger scale from now on.

Chiplog: San Carlo's la Vita e Buona Tomato flavour AND Muji Garlic Sauce Flavour / French Jura Cheese Flavour

Toasty and I were to meet up, but I thought I was early and had to bide my time (I didn't, I actually just didn't see that he replied almost instantly, and my notifications were turned off...moops) so I "killed time" by exploring the local Eataly where I came across some Italian chips with (marginally) different chip flavours... this is one of those flavours (the only onion-free one)

Pre-chip: I recall coming across tomato flavoured chips before, I think Lays brand at one international grocer or another, but they must have had onion powder in them otherwise I would have tried them before. These are onion free. I wish I could say I was excited, but I never really liked ketchup flavoured chips (not that "ketchup" and all its vinegariness is the same as tomato flavour), and I'm not the hugest fan of tomato. I kinda wish that the Italians had like a tomato sauce flavoured chip.

Ingredients: vegetable oils, "tomato taste seasoning" (celery, sugar, corn flour, lactose, tomato powder, citric acit, salt, spices, msg, onion powder [...heeyyyyyy what? Fuck!] and paprika). I think I need to have my glasses on when I'm reading labels now.

First smell: Oh, you know they smell good because I can't eat (too many of) them. Weirdly they smell like baked potato chips, with a hint of sweetness and yeah, of course that onion powder is coming through a tad too. 

First taste: Um. Yeah, tomato, with a hint of onion...and celery, and yeah, the sugar is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I think I like it.

Aftertaste: The starchiness of the potato is the lingering flavour, which is always nice when a potato chip reminds you it's a potato chip. And it's a different type of potato that I'm used to in a chip, which is always a nice surprise, and what makes it worth trying international chips from time to time.

Mass consumption: This isn't an American potato chip, so it's rather lightly flavoured. It's not an assault on the taste buds, but there's just enough pleasant flavouring to keep you coming back. But I *shouldn't* eat too many of these because the onion powder will make me regret eating them... and while the flavour is good, it's not worth barfing at 3 am.

Final thoughts: I really like the potato San Carlo is using for their chip, so much so that next time I'm going by an Eataly I'll pick up a bag of just the plain salted chip. As for this tomato flavour, yeah, it's really decent. If I could actually eat these in larger doses I would actually probably put this on the *occasional* roster for when I just want a little something different.

Rating: 7.3

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Since the last chip flavour was a bust, I decided to bust out another package of chips I just so happened to come across today. Toasty needed to do a little pickup at Muji, the Japanese mini-department store (clothes, kitchen goods, stationary, travel gear, cleaning supplies, toiletries, snacks and more). Despite their drab exterior, I couldn't help but eye up the potato chip flavours on hand (and on sale!). And, well, there was a surprise in store....

Pre-chip: Looking at the back of the package of Garlic Sauce flavoured potato chips, I noted one very interesting factoid: "Made in France". I cocked and eye, noticed the minimal ingredients and wondered... are these just repackaged Brets? I'm so curious to find out.

Ingredients: Potatoes, sunflower oil, salt, garlic powder, natural flavouring (contains milk), butter.

First smell: Whoof. Garlic powder smacks you right in the face.

First taste: oh...oh no. It's like a smoky or fried garlic and... I'm only a mild garlic fan. This is not Brets. I was so wrong.The flavouring is too strong, and the chip is not as solid as a Brets rippled chip. Not what I was expecting. It hits you as much in the nostrils as it does in the taste buds.

Aftertaste: Garlic is a lingering smell and taste, but the scent lives longer than the taste.

Mass consumption: No. This one's not for me. Real garlic fans may like this but totally not for me.

Final thoughts: I had hoped they would be like Brets' Aioli or Chip Sauce flavour, but no. No no no no no. Woof. I went from being really excited to kinda repulsed in one chip.

Rating: 4.4

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Ok, one last bag...

Pre-chip: I had tried a Jura Cheese flavoured chip in the past, and, surprise surprise, it was a Brets. I have a draft post for those chips from 1 year ago (plus a day) that I never did finish writing up. I didn't even record my thoughts on the flavour...I'm assuming I liked it because I ate it all up without pausing to write about it. Or maybe I had too many thoughts and couldn't get them all down. So, I can't really compare...or maybe memories will come flooding back instantly.  I dunno...

Ingredients: Potatoes, sunflower oil, French Jura cheese powder, salt, whey powder, natural flavouring, dextrose, white pepper, and tumeric (for colouring)

First smell: there's more than a hint of ripe, sharp cheese. My dog perked up and took some deep sniffs with great excitement. 

First taste: Cheddar cheese is the typical chip cheese, but the jura powder gives a familiar smack of cheesiness with a nuttier flavour. It's also just a bit bolder and more fragrant than cheddar so the is a lot going on on the taste buds.

Aftertaste: The jura cheese powder flavour continues to feed back your taste buds as your saliva hydrates the powder, it's not quite as appealing as the slightly salty smack when you pop a chip into your mouth, so...

Mass consumption: yeah, you just want to keep eating, especially to explore the flavour at their maximum potency.

Final thoughts: I like these. They're interesting. Jura is not the most familiar cheese flavour for me so I don't quite have the palate for it yet. I know I ate the bag of Brets Jura flavour in one sitting, but I just can't do it with this one. It does seem more potent than my vague recollection of my time with the Brets' flavour last year (but my memory isn't really trustworthy at this point) so it's just a little more difficult to plow through a bag.

Rating: 7.3 

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I actually started my evening with another Eataly snack, the Favolosi Fava bean snack, lemon pepper flavour. I loved the flavouring, the bean... really dries your mouth out and is kind of unpleasant to eat.

Not the best night of snack adventuring, I must say.

Ah-Ah-Argento #5: The Five Days

aka Le Cinque Giornate
1973, d. Dario Argento - blu-ray

Dario Argento's filmography is pretty consistent genre-wise. He works is the realm of horror, mystery and paranormal fantasy, usually a blend of any two, or all three. In that regard, The Five Days, is not just an outlier, but it is the outlier in his film canon.

The Five Days is a historical comedy, taking place at the onset of the Italian war for independence. Argento isn't exactly known for his period pieces, or his comedies, considering he had never attempted one or the other before, and, in part due to this film's commercial failure, he would never try again. It would be considered his "lost" work since it never really got much international distribution until Severin Films remastered it and released it on 4K and blu-ray in 2022. Casual fans of Argento didn't really know of its existence (or if they did, since it was such a tonal outlier, didn't care so much).

The Five Days opens in a prison in Milan, circa 1848. It a rotty, rat-infested dungeon of a place, with shaggy dirty men wiling their time away sleeping on hay-covered floors. If you look closely, there's a guy pooping in a bucket. Two men, patriots, talk of their impending escape, how the revolutionaries will break down the walls and provide them freedom...but they must be careful to ensure only their fellow patriots are let loose, for these other hardened criminals escaping to the streets would sew chaos, which is not their objectives. The Austrians must go! Milan for the Milanese!

But when a cannonball rocks a hole in the wall, the only man to escape is petty thief Cainazzo (Adriano Celentano), and from there it's a series of farcical events he finds himself thrust into as he searches the streets of Milan in the midst of a revolution for the criminal who owes him money (who just so happens to have become a leader of the liberation).

Until this point, Argento's films have all been murder-mysteries, Giallis that find someone thrust into the unintentional position of playing detective to solve a murder (or murders). That style of film, for Argento, is a patient one, one in which Argento can plan long tracking shots, or stage precise set-ups of his camera creating artistic compositions. The patience of his crime, and later, horror films is for the purpose of mood, of impending dread, and, on occasion, subversion or relief from the dread.  Here, there is no time for patience.

The Five Days moves at lightning speed. Title cards represent the many chapters of the film, but within each chapter is so much forward momentum. Cainazzo finds himself swept up in the revolution even though he's definitely no patriot... but, it turns out, he's not not a patriot as well.

Much of the film winds its way into a buddy comedy, as Cainazzo, fairly early on in his exploits, comes across the Roman baker Romolo (Enzo Cerusico, Il Tram). While Cainazzo is no thinker, he looks like Plato next to the simplistic Romolo, who follows him around like a lost puppy. There's real big-dog, little dog energy to their dynamic.  

The hapless duo at one point find themselves helping a pregnant woman deliver a baby, helping to build a barricade for a countess (far too enthused by all the conflict going on), and getting swept up with a vainglorious baron who is leading his own rebellion against the Austrians. They find themselves, more then once, caught up in the center of a massacre, sometimes on the side of the aggressors and sometimes on the receiving end. Cainazzo is none-too-enthused by either scenario. Along the way they get entwined with the elites of Milan who, if they're not boastfully leading the way, are otherwise pretending like nothing impactful is really happening. Argento, more then once, lays heavy criticism on the conflict, heavily indicating that the rich used the poor to drive the Austrians out of the city so the rich could benefit more from their absence.  

The Five Days borrows liberally from Buster Keaton's The General, by Argento's own admission (in the bonus features on the blu-ray, Luigi Cozzi, who co-wrote the film's treatment, further stressed how much they were trying to make an Italian version of that film). The screenplay was co-written by Argento with political socialist writer and poet Nanni Balestrini, as well as consulted heavily with professors of Milan's history for detailed accuracy.  These outside influences find a film at odds with itself. It wants to be a retro-styled slapstick comedy, it wants to be a historical drama, and it wants to be a political commentary, but the tonal shifts it needs to be all three create such whiplash as to make the film an highly uneven viewing experience.

The attention to detail is pretty phenomenal, it is an appropriately big production with fantastic wardrobes and redecorated streets to make everything feel as it would have 130 years earlier. Argento staged his first-ever battle scenes and mob scenes and worked on a scale that, by his own admission, made him uncomfortable (and he would never truly attempt again). He had a steady hand in legendary Italian cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller, so the film looks amazing, especially in its restored form.

Celentano was a massive celebrity in the 1970's, both an actor and a pop star (I've been familiar with him for over 20 years, every since friend and reader GAK introduced me to Celentano's proto-hip-hop gibberish track Prisencolinensinainciusol, having dozens upon dozens of times watch him perform this song in a few different settings, as archived on youtube), and here makes for a pretty winning and game lead. It helps that Celentano is handsome, incredibly fit, and those pantaloons hug him juuust right. Not to be overshadowed, Cerusico is every bit as endearing as he was in Argento's entry in the Door Into Darkness anthology, while playing a wildly different role. Here, a loveable doofus, as opposed to Il Tram's savvy police detective.

These two scruffy, handsome leads are a pleasure to watch, and each vignette, on its own, pretty much works, but they all don't work together. The speed-ramped slapstick shenanigans contrast against the messages about the abuses of the poor by the wealthy, how liberation would only be for the few, not the many. The brutal realities of war, the cycles of violence, revenge and rage are presented here, quite intentionally, as not exciting or glorious, and the men who proclaim themselves as liberators have darker cores to them.  There's also an undercurrent to this film where the only women featured are either made horny by the heroism and/or bloodshed around them, or they are victims of assault by the supposed "good guys" (not our main characters). The pregnant woman is the only exception. I found the segment of the countess (Marilù Tolo) getting all hot and bothered by the tumult pretty funny (to a point), but the widow (Carla Tato) who just witnessed her husband hanged as a traitor and escaped death as a result of Cainazzo and Romolo's intervention working through a flurry of emotions before taking Romolo to bed was pretty confounding. The assault on a Milanese woman by the baron was both egregious and direct to the point Argento is trying to make about "heroes" of war, the elites and their entitlement. For a director who generally shies away from gratuitous sex or nudity, these scenes, especially when taken as a whole, are pretty unfortunate.

At first it seems like Cainazzo's sympathetic criminal is going to get swept up into the fervour of the moment, to become an unexpected leader and hero of the rebellion, but that is not Argento's story. There's no heroes in war, no glory, it's all a con job. "We've been conned" are Cainazzo's final words, as the city celebrates their victory over the fleeing Austirans. "They've conned us" he says, pointing to the men in the formal wear and high-hats, the elites who did not fight, now basking in the glory of the war that just passed. Cainazzo cannot sit with it. He also doesn't make the big speech at the end...he is not a big speech maker. All he can speak is the truth he sees, that many, many, many people died and he truly doesn't see what for.

By no means a bad film, but also by no means a great one, there's plenty to be both impressed and disappointed with in The Five Days. It is probably the most maintstream effort Argento ever attempted, so it's pretty ironic that it was the least successful of his films during this period of his career.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Kraken

2026, Pål Øie (The Tunnel) -- download

Blah blah, insert some repetitive commentary about Norwegians being the only one doing disaster movies these days. But this isn't a disaster movie, is it? No, but kaiju are a type of Natural Disaster, wouldn't you say? And it matters not, as I am always there for a giant monster story, except maybe the Russian movie of the same name that came out the year prior, which struck me more as a mockbuster of this one.

This is where I admit I was entirely suckered by "Clash of the Titans" and their subbing of Cetus (Greek tentacle monster) for The Kraken, which is actually of Norwegian origin.

Johanne (Sara Khorami, Troll 2) is a marine biologist sent to a fish farm in Sogneford, a Norwegian fjord know for having the deepest waters. Something has been causing strange fish behaviour and die-off's which everyone assumes is linked to the revolutionary technology being used at the fish farm, a device that utilizes sonic waves to shake off "fish lice". Think of this as the same ecological impact as fracking, but water-based -- locals are upset with it but its allowing the fish farmer company of bring in Japanese investors, hoping to expand to other fjords.

It starts with disappearances and unexplained deaths -- tourist kids on their jet ski, local kayakers. Meanwhile something is hinky as Johanne investigates the fish farm itself; we immediately do not trust technician Georg (Jon Erik Myer, Furia), while Johanne clashes with the lead technologist Erik (Mikkel Bratt Silset, The Tunnel) who happens to be her ex and has utilized technology they developed together, but eventually abandoned. Meanwhile the daughter of the owner of the fish farm is playing junior eco-terrorist and poking her nose where it shouldn't be.

The movie breezes past any real suspense, doing a cookie-cutter approach to monster movies: unexplained deaths, grim body discoveries, shady corporate antics, old men with monster history, well-meaning scientist, even a Jaws-like "no, we can't close down the water". It all culminates in a silly battle with the kaiju itself when it attacks the fish farm -- the fish-lice tech was going way beyond its self-imposed safety specs and had awakened the beast from its slumber in the deepest parts of the fjord. Stealing cues from Deep Rising, the tentacles "chase" people through duct work and our heroine whispers, "We need to stay quiet !" Why? Tentacles are not ears, unless this movie is postulating that kaiju octopuses listen with their entire body? No matter, they run and hide, bad people are pulled under and Johanne destroys the tech just in time. BUT her and Erik rig up the remaining tech to turn it into a ... bomb? What? How? Whatever, she escapes on her own to trigger the device before being dragged down herself, a heroic sacrifice to save the people of the fjord. Does she kill it? Send it back to its slumber? Who knows; whatever "logic" is at play, it would be tossed aside for any planned sequel.

It was a silly movie that took itself way too seriously, and while it had earnest well-done performances, the characters were all paper thin and the dialogue was common place. The CGI was decent enough but the destruction was far too reserved for a kaiju movie. And yet... I liked it?

Poster commentary. IMP Awards only had the Russian movie. I was amused that Google offered me many versions of the "Kraven" movie poster... only one letter difference, right? The tag-line "only 5% of the ocean has been explored..." has very little to do with this movie.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Train Dreams

2025, Clint Bentley (Jockey) -- Netflix

Stubbing this out, even though I have not yet finished the movie, as the voice of it has sent me down a rabbit hole for the adapted novella's author, one Denis Johnson. I read mostly pulp fiction: scifi and fantasy and horror and crime. Rarely do these works have a "voice" but I just absorbed Johnson's "Car Crash While Hitchhiking" and its nothing but voice, as strong and clear as Will Patton's narration of the Bentley film. I imagine the film director felt it was necessary to capture the author's voice, as while I imagine the soul & plot has been captured in the movie, all too often the author themself is absent from the medium.

This was a sad movie, but not in a bad way. To misquote Kent, the movie is "contemplative & meditative." It chronicles the life of an average man, not a simple man, but also one not complicated by intricacies. He was a loner, often lonely, but not an unfriendly man, dismissive of company. He was a logger, but much of the life portrayed he is apart from that. His life has poignant tragedies, but what life doesn't. Robert Granier (Joel Edgerton, It Comes At Night) was just a man who lived through better part of the 20th century, observing civilization grow up around to him, connected by train tracks and technology, but despite his contributions, never really became a part of it.

I am going to have to let the movie settle into my brain pan for a while, before I complete this. Later. Unfortunately, doing that let all the storied thoughts in my brain seep out. I have to say, it had a great impact on my while watching, and in the days not long after, but... now, its mostly gone. I won't let that judge my fondness for the movie. I suspect that in watching the movie, and in reading a bit of Johnson afterwards, I found another place in my mind, one I don't often travel to anymore. And I left the memory of that movie there, when I returned to the anxiety & stress of my real world.

I came at this movie thinking it was going to be about trains and about trees, and about a great tragedy. But while it is about these, they are not its core. The train trips are linkages, the trees are ever present, as Robert only leaves the forest once, late in life. The tragedy is great, very great, perhaps the greatest impact on his life, but its not the only impact the movie portrays. In fact it begins with an injustice, a short scene where European railway workers murder a Chinese worker, and Robert does not stop it; the scene leaving us to wonder, was he about to help the killers? This act haunts him, literally, forever. 

Its hard to relate this movie by its plot, by its story, because that is not what it is about. Already adapted from condensed source material, the novella, it is not seeking narrative arcs. More, its giving us a mood through translation of words to screen, sometimes helped along by Will Patton's voice-overs, an actor already know for reading Johnson's voice. In some ways, I drawn to this by it being akin to the vignettes I write, small condensed images in hand-written word, nary a plot to be found. Being formed around Johnson's beautiful prose, Bentley creates his own beautiful imagery in sunlight, in shadows among trees, in steam & smoke, in people's faces. 

One of the strongest things from the movie that stayed with me, are the images of Robert's musings. He is often lost in thought, staring out at the world, not really part of it. He is re-playing times, voices, images from his past constantly. Robert is a man of many thoughts, but few words. I think that is where the train dreams come from, because like myself, when he is forced to a time period when all he can do is think, sitting in his seat, watching the world pass by outside the window, he slips into a dream like state, of ponderances. 

Next time I watch a movie like this, I will set myself aside, stare out a window and keep this laptop handy...

More Backrooms

the original backroom image

I eat this stuff right up. My brain, during its formative years, was trained by comic books and Star Wars, the X-Files and Twin Peaks, Unsolved Mysteries and In Search Of... to consume lore and be enthused by the unknown, the weird, and the askew.  Watching Backrooms in theatres, cold, having no experience with the horror sub-subgenre or Kane Parsons work as Kane Pixels on youtube didn't matter in the slightest. Backrooms provides very little in the way of answers, and any answers it does provide are pretty much formed with question marks at the end. Speculation, not answers. 

What was clear about the cinematic Backrooms was that we, as an audience, may not have gotten satisfying answers as to what was going on, nor do any of the characters truly understand what's happening, but it's absolutely clear that Parsons himself knows precisely what is happening. And he's not telling, he's showing, but in pieces.

What I wasn't clear on while sitting in the movie theatre, thoroughly absorbed in Parson's uncomfortable alt-reality, was whether Backrooms was its own thing, a soft reboot of the work he did online, or if it was just a part of it. It the days since, consuming Parsons' Backrooms youtube videos, a few other videos from avid fans who obsess over the details of Parsons' Backrooms, and interview videos and podcasts with Parsons himself, it's clear it's definitely just one part of the whole. You don't need to have seen the web series, but if you want to know more, it will definitely tell you more.

Parsons' youtube series, which he started working on at 16, opens with a group of kids in 1990 making a horror movie with a camcorder, when the kid with the camera falls through a soft spot in reality and finds himself in the backrooms. It is then 9 minutes this "character" exploring digitally created spaces (using Blender, open source 3-D modelling software) through the camcorder lens, digital tracking fuzz laid over top of it all to really give that grainy and retro vibe.  It's effectiveness is at least 50% sound design, just the ominous buzz of fleurescent lighting, a pervasive humm (very Lynchian), the characters' shuffling footsteps, the haunting howls of *something* in the distance.  It's intense and captivating, and then the thing from the distance is right in front of you. It's completely channelling first-person shooter vibes, sans the action. If you turn the corner and something unreal is in front of you, there's no shooting, the only choice is to run away. It's something that will happen again and again in this series.

That might sound repetitive, but it's not the only trick up Parsons' sleeve.

While that first video was just a thing Parsons made adapting the ideations on backrooms on message boards into a video, the second video Parsons release is a sub-3-minute montage of images of all sorts of retro imagery of odd spaces and pre-90's technology and people using such technology (with their eyes or faces blacked out) and out of context bits of text...all once again seeming like it's being played on a grainy video, its haunting soundtrack warbling in and out.  The next video, once again playing like a worn-out video cassette tape features more imagery of blueprints as a creepy-as-hell digitized voice starts to explain about magnetic distortion experiments that revealed the backrooms and the plan was to use such spaces as ...storage. We then see the video from 1988 of the third test showing the opening of a portal.

Currently, there are 22 videos in the series and many of them are just short moody atmospheric pieces, showing imagery that is meant to expand and connect the lore of Parsons' Backrooms together, others are more FPS exploration videos, and still others are communications from Async, the in-world corporation that is trying to figure out how to monetize the backrooms while also studying them.

There is a multi-video narrative arc around the hazmat-suited teams that explore the spaces, and how one of them, Peter Tench, disappeared one day while exploring the backrooms. Given what the Async team already knew about the dangers of the backrooms, they presumed Tench dead, when in reality he had been pushed forward two months ahead in time. Tench found his way into an Async control room and triggered an alarm. But his reappearance led to other, more dramatic problems. And more questions.

The distortion of reality in the backrooms, it's reinforced in both the web series and the movies, has pretty disastrous effects on the mental state of people who find themselves alone in the space for any extended period of time. As we see multiple times through the web series, there are multiple (increasing) soft spots in reality that people (and birds) fall through, some of them with video cameras.

As a physical exploratory space, there isn't much logic to the backrooms, why they twist and wind and connect the way they do, but as you dive into the series you can begin to intuitively grasp what it is even if it's not easy to describe with any surety. The repetition of certain areas, or certain types of areas, intones that there's a reason for them. A sequence in the film finds the camera panning down from a room in reality to that same room layers and layers deep into the backrooms, the distortion of the reality of each room more and more evident the further down you go, almost like echoes, growing fainter the more it reverberates.  This is what makes the backrooms so compelling...that you can almost grasp what's going on, but just not quite.

There are multiple types of creatures in the backrooms, including weird mould/fungal monsters, distorted remnants of half-remembered people, and haunting creatures that are dark Ids made real.  Some of them wail, some of them mimic human speech, some of them do both.  While the backrooms are seemingly endless, it doesn't seem like you can exist within the space long without encountering one of these beings, and they're not docile, even if some of them are ...edible? The very first creature in Parsons' first video is pretty doofy, but each monster after that has been effectively creepy.

Parsons works not just in Blender, but multimedia. There are videos that feature real people in real environments, and real people in digital environments. Real images are manipulated into surreal images, and Parsons' use of electronic music, typically slow, eerie, haunting chords, contributes deeply to the atmosphere (at times the music will drown out the words spoken in the video, implying that mood is more important than what's being said, or, perhaps, toying with the audience by further burying information behind the sounds). Parsons uses voice actors throughout his productions to varying degrees of effectiveness, but he always nails the tone, so even mediocre vocal performances get a pass.

Especially with the first-person-shooter (in this case the "shooter" is the video camera) videos that track through the backrooms, it's often too evident that it's a digital reality. This is no shade on Parsons who is very effectively working with the tools afforded to a teenager, but wow, is it ever a level-up to see these environments cast into reality on the big screen. And the realization of the backrooms from digital into actual sets is phenomenal. 

The film adds the next layer to the Backrooms mythos. While the youtube videos explores the mythology behind it all, the film explores characters and how they are affected by - and affecting - the backrooms. This idea, barely hinted at in the youtube videos, is the sole thrust of the movie. But, again, answers are actually shadows of answers. Satisfaction not guaranteed.

In interviews Parsons has said he would like Backrooms to continue as an anthology TV series, and that seems like the obvious direction for this to go. But given its thunderous success at the box office, it's more likely a second feature will happen before a TV series (let's get real, a streaming series) does. 

I am all-in on this ride. While I worry that maybe Parsons doesn't yet have the life experience or awareness to handle much outside this sphere of creepy, moody, atmospheric pieces, it's clear he's very assured and purposeful in his direction and that he has many talents when it comes to putting vibes and aesthetics together. He's cultivated a pretty substantial audience for a reason, so talent is not lacking. With this property, at least, he seems to know exactly where it's going, if maybe not entirely what it's saying.