by Oscar O’Sullivan

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Monday – The Sixth Sense

A film that surely needs no introduction. Um. The Sixth Sense. M. Night Shyamalan’s breakthrough hit is famous for having a twist that has been chronically spoiled in the intervening 20 years – if by some chance you are one of the few people who does not know what happens in this film, watch it immediately! I can only imagine how satisfying the final moments would be to witness unspoiled, a twist that isn’t simply shocking, but genuinely recontextualises the film. Knowing the ending in advance, I was aware and observant of the strange knots that the scenario twists itself into to conceal the truth without actually concealing anything. Even without the twist, this is a beautiful and moving drama. Child psychiatrist Bruce Willis has been in a deep depression since the suicide of a former patient, driving a wedge into his marriage and making him doubt his ability to help anyone. When he meets troubled, lonely child Haley Joel Osment, he throws himself into his work with renewed vigour as he grasps for one last chance to redeem his past failings. The only wrinkle – his newest patient believes that he can see and speak with the dead, throwing Willis for a loop and forcing him to question whether or not there’s more in the world than he would have once believed. Willis is magnificent – while he’s almost always great on screen, Shyamalan seems to bring out something special from him – but Haley Joel Osment is the standout, one of the all-time great child performances. He plays nuanced, difficult emotions with the skill and ease of a veteran actor, creating an intimate portrait of a child from a broken home who nobody even tries to understand. Leaving aside his supernatural affliction, this is kind of the ultimate ‘bullied child’ story, sure to strike a chord with anyone who’s ever felt even a little bit different from their peers. While the ghostly scares are more than a little hokey, the terrified reactions from Osment sell the situations nicely. Rather than fear, the tone Shyamalan shoots for here is sadness, with sweet moments throughout to keep the spirits up. The simple confidence of Shyamalan’s camera moves through major moments without drawing attention to itself. Quietly beautiful, deeply affecting, perhaps juggling too many balls at once, but never dropping one. Again, if you’ve inexplicably avoided over two decades of pop culture spoiling this film, get on it before someone tells you that Bruce Willis is the kid’s real father – oops! 9/10.

Tuesday – Mulholland Drive

Leave logic at the door – Mulholland Drive is the pinnacle of the film-as-dream, where nothing should be taken at face value and meaning shifts from moment to moment at the whim of the dreamer. The real question, perhaps, would be this – who is the dreamer? Is it the film’s protagonist, played by Naomi Watts, a young woman with aspirations of Hollywood stardom who gets caught up in in an intrigue involving amnesia, hitmen, organised crime and mysterious nightclubs? Many of the film’s most tantalising connections are grounded in her experience and perspective, making her the obvious answer. Or is writer and director David Lynch the dreamer? After all, this entire experience has sprung from his mind, with signs and symbols that only begin to make sense when you apply the context of his previous work – just as we can have recurring dreams, Lynch draws upon prior meanings to inform the present. Or are we the dreamer? The subjective audience, unable to influence or control the arc of the dream, applying what we see and feel to the truths of our own waking lives. What never fails to astound me when I think of this film, which by the way I hold as one of the five best ever made, is that it was never meant to be a film – shot as a television pilot, the beginning of a vast and sprawling mystery, retooled into a concise feature-length fable with a beginning, middle and end. And is that not just the most dream-like thing of all? The unfinished dream, awakened from before its natural conclusion, forever lost in the subconscious mind. Who hasn’t imagined their own ending to a dream such as this? The mind naturally strives for conclusions, closure, reason – when none are provided, we contrive our own. Mulholland Drive provides answers, but it also tells you that you’re more than welcome to ignore them. No single reading or theory will ever fully encapsulate this film, which is why it retains its power over twenty years later and will do so for a long time to come still. 10/10.

Wednesday – Red Dragon

Proof that no matter how good your source material is, there’s always room to create a stinker. We need only look at the previous adaptation of this same novel, Manhunter, for an idea of what this story looks like when done right. While it may seen unfair to compare it to a previous adaptation, it’s also inevitable, especially since Manhunter actually predates the Anthony Hopkins Hannibal Lecter films by a few years – the entire purpose of this film was to retell the prequel with Hopkins, completing the trilogy. When making Manhunter, Michael Mann explained that he very intentionally limited how often Lecter (played by Brian Cox) was on screen, as he worried the character would distract from the larger story if the audience is given too much of him. He was right – Red Dragon is a Hannibal-centric telling of a plot that Hannibal plays only a small role in, with the additional scenes added for this film only serving to highlight how pointless this focus is. The character who loses the most in adaptation is lead Will Graham, played here by a barely interested Edward Norton. Unlike the original film, where his inner turmoil and self-doubt inform a cold, reserved performance by William Petersen, Norton plays it like any other Hollywood cop, snarky and self-assured, paying lip-service to ideas of trauma and empathy that the film fails to communicate effectively. Also lessened from the original portrayal is Dollarhyde, the central serial killer of the story. Manhunter‘s Dollarhyde is uniquely complex in a way that Ralph Fiennes’ portrayal here completely misses the mark on, instead implying a generic split personality where an “evil” Dollarhyde tells the poor helpless abused little boy what to do. This is emblematic of the film’s biggest sin – taking a strange, empathetic masterpiece of a character study and turning it into just another dumb-as-a-box of rocks Hollywood cop versus killer action movie. A disgrace across the board. 2/10.

Thursday – Pan’s Labyrinth

A film of two halves, in more ways than one. Obviously there is the dual storylines, a young girl journeying into a world of forgotten fantasy while the adults in her life are locked in a political struggle. This is a world where Fascism has won the literal battle, and now begins the ideological war, Franco’s soldiers attempting to enforce their way of thinking as the norm. Anything that conflicts with the new thought, for example, children’s fairy tales, is spat upon and cast out. In this way, the thematic purpose of the contrasting tones is clear – Ofelia’s journey towards the Underworld is a metaphorical escape from the world around her – but in the first half of the film, her story is too disconnected from the adults for it to feel as impactful as it should. So for an hour, we are left with a compellingly dark children’s fantasy fable, with truly exceptional effects and design work, that is constantly cut away from to show us a mundane, uneventful account of life in Fascist Spain. The second half, however, is where the dual stories are properly synthesised. Ofelia is wrenched away from her fairy tale world by developments in the Fascist camp, as the mundane stakes of the adult story suddenly escalate and the film as a whole develops from a twee diversion into a genuinely moving masterwork. I was particularly interested in the villain, Capitan Vidal, who unfolds from a generic military baddie to a fascinating symbol of the self-defeating Fascist mindset. It’s mentioned off-handedly in an early scene that his father died on the battlefield, leaving him obsessed with the idea of legacy above all else. He throws himself recklessly into a skirmish with the Anti-Fascists, not only willing but eager to die for his cause, and tells the Doctor to prioritise the life of his unborn son above that of his wife. His motivations speak to the Fascist mindset as a whole, a dead-end ideology that seeks to idolises the past and can only perceive the present moment as something that the future should be able to idolise in turn. Fascism has no concrete idea of what the future will look like – only that they should be remembered by it. At the film’s climax, as the Fascist camp is raided and overwhelmed by guerilla fighters, Capitan Vidal barely seems to notice. He doesn’t care that his compatriots have failed, that the ideology he championed is being overthrown, that the future will not be Fascist. His one focus is recovering his son, his personal vanity demanding that no matter what becomes of the world in the future, his descendants will say that he fought and died for something. Pan’s Labyrinth, despite a long and painful teething period at the start, comes into it’s own beautifully by the end of the story. 8/10.

Sunday – Bubba Ho-tep

A low-budget film that promises the moon and miraculously delivers, Bubba Ho-tep is a cult film with more merit than that designator implies. The pitch alone guarantees, if not quality, then at the very least entertainment – an aged Elvis Presley impersonator who claims to be the genuine article is rotting away in an old-folks home when the sudden appearance of a magical mummy forces him to step up and take care of business to save his fellow fogeys. The film does a lot with a little, set largely in and around the retirement home with a limited cast and an even more limited special effects budget that they stretch and squeeze to create some solid visual scares, with the editing especially doing much of the heavy lifting. And somehow it has a real heart to it, thanks mainly to star Bruce Campbell, who plays the scenario with the utmost sincerity. Thanks to him this isn’t just a movie where Elvis fights a mummy – it’s a thoughtful and witty character study that sincerely questions what sort of life an elderly Elvis would have, whether he would regret leaving behind his fame and family, and how he would reckon with his rapidly approaching demise. Also he fights a mummy. Adding another layer of irreverent fun is The King’s best friend at the home, a black man who believes that he is John F. Kennedy. Actor Ossie Davis doesn’t bother with an impression, instead choosing to focus on the selling the character’s belief in his own circumstances as he deadpans “They dyed me” in response to the obvious fact that JFK was a white man. The film ends with the promise of a sequel titled Bubba Nosferatu and I believe that nobody should rest until this sequel is produced! 7/10.