KWIF = Kent's Week in Film. TV has exploded with great new and returning shows, so filmic viewing has dwindled in its wake. These are what I managed to squeak in within the past two weeks.
This Week:
Wolfs (2024, d. Jon Watts, AppleTV+)
Doctor Sleep - Director's Cut (2019, d. Mike Flanagan, Blu-Ray)
Oculus (2013, d. Mike Flanagan, Netflix)
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| What a terrible poster |
Jon Watts did three (dare I say it?) amazing Spider-Man movies. But what stands out to me about those Spider-Man films is not the action or special effect, but the characters, the performances, the pathos and the comedy. Sequences don't stand out to me because of super-powered action, but instead because of character engagement, how people are relating to each other in a scene. Watts' gifts as a director aren't necessarily striking visuals, but drawing out fantastic performances from his actors, having young talent hold their own in the same scene as heavyweight veterans.
So Wolfs, being sold as a George Clooney/Brad Pitt reunion, has two such heavyweights, but it's the tertiary lead, Austin Abrams (from the spectacular Xmas teen romance Dash & Lily), is the absolute scene stealer of this film. This kid (playing "Kid"...he's actually 28) dominates every scene he's in, which is kind of hard when you're dealing with such sexagenarian handsomeness on screen.
The premise is the Kid is dead, and the politician who was with him when he overdosed (the everywhere-these-days Amy Ryan, Sugar) calls for help in cleaning it up. Enter the Wolf, Jack (Clooney). He's seen everything, and knows how to handle it. Nothing to worry about. Until there's another knock at the door. Enter the Wolf, Nick (Pitt), called in by the hotel. Two cleaners? Complicated things get even more complicated as a stash of heroin is found, and the Wolfs are charged with working together to find the owners and return it, lest the heat catch up to them. Doubly complicated things get even more complicated when, it turns out, the Kid isn't dead after all, leading to an incredible and hilarious foot chase that had me giggling nonstop (Abrams' verbal noises and the sound design of his sock feet slapping the pavement are just incredible).
It's all framed in a "one crazy night" cinematic fashion, going from location to location, one strange or tense encounter after another, as the odd couple start to find kinship with one another, and even start taking a very unprofessional shining to the Kid. It's a tried-and-true formulae, and it works really well here. Clooney and Pitt have a very easy chemistry with one another, and even when they're not supposed to like one another there's a playfulness to their rivalry.
Written into the script is the fact that both these men are aging. They have wounds and aches and problematic parts which plague them, and as fit as they are, they're still hovering around six decades on this earth. They aren't ready to leave it just yet, but there is a weariness about the life they're leading. It's used for humour, sure, but it's also used (mostly silently) to provide context. Jack specifically looks at the Kid and every time you can read into Clooney's eyes that he will probably have to kill this kid, and he really doesn't want to.
It's a fairly lightweight, breezy watch. There are no Spider-Man vibes to it at all, but Watts draws out a surprising amount of depth from what could have been two very cookie-cutter lead characters.
[I'm choosing to sidestep any particular discussion about Brad Pitt, as it didn't really impact my reaction to the film. There's a recent hit piece on him in Slate poking at the cracks in his well curated image if you want to explore it.]
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Independent of Toasty's provocations, the Blank Check podcast crew have very much championed Flanagan's adaptation of Steven King's Doctor Sleep. I wrote off King years ago (quickly: full of ideas, consistently terrible endings that frequently ruin the whole story), and I thought a faithful adaptation of King's sequel to The Shining would be full of King's sour grapes stemming from the Kubrick film. But these Blankies, these titans of film nerddom, kept bringing it up...for years now. There must be something to it... specifically denoting the Director's Cut being the superior rendition.
So I wound up with a Director's Cut of the blu-ray of Doctor Sleep earlier this year and stashed it for a rainy day. I didn't realize that I needed to set aside over 3 hours to watch it, but was pretty happy I did, almost immediately.
Flanagan's TV storytelling sensibilities from The Haunting of Hill House very much infected this film it seems. While it isn't episodic, per se, it is told in "chapters", and the juggling of a cast set in three different locations from each other (as well as flashbacks) until basically the final hour of the film feels more television than movie.
The story starts in 1980, first with Rebecca Ferguson, who looks flat-out gorgeous in a sort of bohemian aesthetic but is also scary as shit as her character Rose the Hat sacrifices children so her and her coven (including prominently Zahn McClarnan, a Kent favourite) of nomadic, ageless, psychic vampires suck their "steam" and get high. Theirs is a tale of addiction, and the desperation they have in acquiring their hits. At the same time, Danny Torrence and his mom (Alex Essoe, doing a very uncanny valley impersonation of Shelly Duvall) are attempting to recover from the fallout of their time at the Overlook Hotel. It's not going great, but Danny's still learning things from his Shining pal, Dick Hallorann (Carl Lumbly, taking over from Scatman Crothers), despite Dick being dead. It's sort of a force ghost thing.
30 years later Danny's living the life of a junkie (not unfamiliar ground for Ewan McGregor), barely scraping by, when he finally abandons his hedonistic, addictive ways for a small town life, where he settles in comfortably. A few hundred miles away, a young girl named Abra has been exploring her powers, and she may just have the most powerful Shine of anyone. Unlike Danny, she's not afraid of it. She connects with Danny remotely and they become pen pals, of a sort.
8 years later, Danny is clean and sober and stable, and though the "weird girl" at school, Abra is generally comfortable and confident in life. But when she sees Rose and the crew sacrificing a young boy to steal his Shine, she can't let it stand and gets Dan involved. From there it's a cat and mouse game between all the players, the advantages ever shifting.
For the film, Flanagan takes King's sequel novel in earnest and also makes it a sequel to the Kubrick film via visual reference: Danny's parents are visual cues (Henry Thomas is made up to look like a haggard Jack Nicholson and the sort of confusing uncanny valley of it all is deftly used), and Flanagan reshoots some of the Overlook Hotel sequences as they suit certain narrative purposes in the story but serve to only remind that this lives in the shadow of greatness. In some respects, I felt the film at times leaned a little too heavily on the references, repeating things where there could have been more invention, and Essoe's impersonation of Duvall I found highly distracting.
But Doctor Sleep could live outside of the Shining, outside of needing it as a reference, at least in the Director's Cut. You'll have a head start if you're familiar, but it does fill in the gaps if you're not.
It's remarkable to me how sinister Ferguson's Rose is, how credible a threat she and her coven feel, and yet the peril that young Abra could face never actually materializes. Where Danny has cut himself off from his powers for decades, Abra has been exploring, and she is powerful. She is so powerful that Rose, as dangerous as she seems, is barely a credible threat to her. So it falls upon McGregor to be both the protector and the prone, he's the one most susceptible to the villainous troupe, but as the adult in the situation he's also responsible for protecting Abra from these vampires.
I really dug this world of "shine" and "steam" as fleshed out by King and Flanagan. I understand why some may see any form of sequel to Kubrick's masterpiece as blasphemous, but it's a pulpy story with a lot of world building around these superpowered individuals so it makes sense why I keyed into it so readily. It feels like a space that has rules and boundaries, and different levels of access. If the logic isn't overtly presentd on screen, then it seems for damn sure Flanagan has it all figured out in his head.
But it's not just about the flights of fancy. At the core of Danny's story is the cycle of abuse, trauma and addiction. The supernatural elements do undercut the potency a bit, but it is a key element to the story and generally it cohabitates well.
Doctor Sleep isn't a horror movie. At best it's a supernatural suspense film in the guise of a legasequel (it fits all the earmarks of one), but has a quite satisfying ending (is it King's ending or did Flanagan refine it). I don't doubt that King has an Abra novel in him that will go bonkers-wild in exploring the world of Shine in the modern day (whether it gets made into a halfway decent film or not).
[Toastypost - we agree]
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| do all of Flanney's posters have a "hands over the eyes" thing? |
If I'm being perfectly honest, I do remember when this was coming out. My crush on Gillan was already on firm foundation, but my disdain for stupid-sounding horror movies was stronger than whatever libidinous impulses might draw me to watch a particular performer in a film. An evil mirror? Come on....
What I *just* realized whilst watching Oculus is that most, if not all horror movies sound stupid if you distill them down to their most basic premise. It's all in the execution.
Oculus takes place over two time periods following siblings Kaylie and Tim. The younger versions, around 12 and 10 respectively, have just moved with their parents into a new home. Their prosperous father, Alan (Rory Cochrane) has deferred to his wife Marie's (Sackhoff) decorating tastes, which is largely antiques. A gorgeous, massive wood-framed mirror is the centerpiece of Alan's home office.
In the modern day, Tim (Brenton Thwaites, Titans) is just being released from an institution where he's been in its care since childhood, having shot his father and experience severe trauma. Kaylee (Gillan) is there to pick him up, and immediately throws him back into the fire. They had made a promise as children and now she intends they keep it.
In their old vacant family home she has set up an elaborate, controlled scenario, with once again the mirror as centrepiece to the experiment. Cameras positioned everywhere, with timers set to go off reminding them to eat, drink, change out data storage, etc, and should all else fail a massive homemade swinging anchor set to a timer that will bash the mirror to bits should they be unable to.
This tantilizing scenario, elaborately, painstakingly detailed by Kaylie, poses the question for the audience: what is this all about? Certainly it's personal for the two of them, but Tim's time in the facility has reshaped his understanding of their shared history. The memories of that horrible time just a manufactured trauma response to the ugliness of an abusive father who killed their mother.
But the film jumps back and forth in time, revealing the "truth", or as much of it as the mirror's distortions will allow. And therein lies the problem for our protagonists, just as it was a problem for them and their family as children... the mirror's evil deceives, spreads lies into the mind, makes one think they're seeing what's not really there.
Flanagan's deft use of his two time periods comes to a head in the third act when the lines between them literally blur. Adult Kaylie might cross her 10 year old brother, or Tim might be running down a hallway just as 12-year-old Kaylie slams a door he's running past. At certain times it's unclear which time, which reality we're in or whether the time periods have merged. Flanagan's use of deceit is pretty masterful here, even if the conclusion is all but inevitable.
As far as horror goes, it's not far afield from the James Wan camp, dark, but playful, in structure here rather than tone. The finale feels like a bloody homage to Rod Serling, a real downbeat ending that also seems like the only place it could go.
I'm definitely in for more Flanney!
[ToastyPost - we agree]
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