by Oscar O’Sullivan

You may notice that I have watched much, much fewer films this week than I ordinarily would. No, I have not come to my senses and found better uses for my time – a ridiculous thought. I was busy with a different but related way of wasting my time – making a movie. The People’s Picturehouse 48 Hour Challenge was a non-stop weekend of writing, shooting and editing to create a five-minute film. Myself and the rest of the team are delighted with how it came out – watch it or perish!!!!

Monday – Aliens

A classic film that I’ve wanted to watch for a very long time, it’s perhaps inevitable that I was a little disappointed. Going full action movie was a valid (and clearly profitable) decision, but also makes this feel fundamentally disconnected from the film it follows up on. Ripley goes through the same story again, only this time the ‘fighting back’ section of the adventure is far bigger and much more bombastic in it’s execution – wonderfully entertaining action, but the fear is largely gone. The Xenomorph is reduced from a mysterious and monstrously invincible stalker to a brainless horde of grunts who can be blown away en-masse and are mainly a threat due to their overwhelming numbers. Likewise, the themes are varied and well-done (motherhood, military interventionism, corporate greed), but entirely surface-level and obvious, leaving nothing for you to chew on once the film is over – it’s an entirely self-contained experience, for better and worse. The one area where it matches the original is in the visuals and production design, adhering to the tactile retro-futurist aesthetic of brutalist interiors and intricate machines. James Cameron is a master of making science fiction worlds look and feel completely real, and as meat-headed as the film is, the rousing action spectacle is undeniably gripping. I only hope the rest of the sequels are more Scott than Cameron. 8/10.

Tuesday – The Happening

M. Night Shyamalan – the most unfairly maligned director of all time? Over a decade of being the favoured punching-bag of internet critics has seen him saddled with a stigma that may never fully disappear even after his last few films have recaptured some of that early acclaim. The Happening was released in the middle of his era of ‘decline’, and is infamous as a ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ movie. I am strongly of the opinion that this label is a complete oxymoron and symptom of the need to project good taste at all times – if a film is good then how can it be bad! Pick a lane! This is a surprisingly gripping disaster mystery, a bizarre road trip through rural America as a dwindling group of characters avoid a mysterious suicide-inducing plague that strikes suddenly. The feeling of panic and helplessness as everyone struggles to keep up with a rapidly-evolving situation with no real facts feels resonant in the wake of our own sudden and mysterious pandemic, and the pace of the film keeps the energy up from start to finish. It’s also enjoyably nasty, with deaths so over-the-top and gruesome that you don’t know whether to laugh or look away. People have ragged on Wahlberg’s performance, but I thought he was surprisingly natural and endearing, a rare subdued turn from an actor best known as a raging action jock. However Zoey Deschanel was acting like her character was permanently concussed – in a way it worked for the tone of the film, but was also distractingly strange. There are a lot of incongruous moments and some dodgy executions here and there, but I found the sum of it’s parts to be a film that was both entertaining and moving, an unqualified success in what it was clearly aiming to be. 8/10.

Wednesday – La Chimera

Get lost Chalamet – Josh O’Connor is the young actor to watch. After his breakout role as a charismatic loser in Challengers, he is equally gripping in an entirely different way here as a criminal archeologist in rural Italy. An Englishman abroad, he is perpetually uncomfortable – his home is a shack, his clothes never quite fit, his Italian isn’t quite perfect, his friends are fair-weather, there’s always a sense that he’s just barely tolerated by most everyone around him. He’s a haunted figure, running away from something that the audience is never fully privy to, flashes of dreams and hallucinations giving tantalising glimpses for the viewer to piece together. The film abounds with inexplicable moments and bizarre formal choices, but never lingers on or draws attention to them, treating them as a natural part of the world onscreen. These moments are like the relics the characters hunt for – unusual treasures buried just under the surface of the everyday world. The gang sees themselves as roguish adventurers, dodging cops and making their fortune by digging up and selling artefacts on the black market, but the film pulls back the curtain partway through to explore the sinister side of the profession – these objects they steal once meant something to somebody, and perhaps its better to leave the dead in peace. O’Connor has a connection to death that the film only hints at, an implied supernatural ability that gives him the power to sense where tombs and ruins are buried. His heart is among the departed, shying away from the world of the living, unable to stay still and put down roots. La Chimera is a gripping, ethereal drama, darkly funny, beautifully shot – one of the best films of the year so far. 10/10.

Thursday – Manhunter

Can we ever truly know the mind of another? Manhunter posits that we can – and maybe we shouldn’t. FBI agent Will Graham is drawn back to service after an extended leave of absence as he recovered from his run-in with genius psychopath Doctor Lecktor (ignore the spelling, this is the Hannibal we all know and love). His physical injuries were one thing, but the mental scars are what have stuck to him – Will investigates via empathy, putting himself into the mindset of his targets to intuit their motives and recreate their steps to uncover evidence that may have been missed by straightforward forensics. The film creates a manhunt that takes place entirely in the world of thought and conjecture, every instinct proving eerily accurate as Will becomes dangerously immersed in the psyche of the ‘Tooth Fairy’, a home-invader who strikes every full moon and stages bizarre tableaus with corpses and mirrors, so-called because of the deep bite marks he leaves in his victims. The film flips the script partway through by showing us the ordinary life of the mysterious killer, revealing him as a lonely video technician who finds himself unexpectedly romantically entangled with a blind co-worker. Even though we know this man is a deranged killer who has murdered women and children for his own twisted pleasure, his scenes are a love story told entirely in earnest, and his monstrousness is transformed from something horrifying into something tragic – Will himself lays it out when he says that his heart bleeds for the abused child but wouldn’t hesitate to put down the twisted person that child grew into. It’s one of the most gripping explorations of empathy ever put to the screen, and absolutely gorgeously shot, a serious contender for Michael Mann’s best looking film. 10/10.