Review: Creepy Puritans and "The Witch"

Though we'd already seen The Witch at festivals I sent a friend to see it this weekend, a non-horror guy, to see if he'd like it. Meet Eric Blume. - Editor

The Witch debuted last January at Sundance and finally got a wide release via A24 this weekend.  It’s borderline shocking that this movie is being treated like a Hollywood horror movie, because it feels more like a foreign film, with the same essential disdain of fanatical religiosity that’s usually reserved for something like Cristian Mingiu’s great 2012 film Beyond the Hills.  And in tone, it’s thoroughly austere:  we’re thrown into the 17th century setting with as much reverence and severity as we are into the 19th century world of The Revenant. I read somewhere that the latter was tough to shoot… The Witch must have been so, too, with everyone making a lot less money to be miserable.

The plot centers around a Puritan family who is banished from their community and forced to move to an area bordered by an ominous-looking forest.  In the movie’s first ten minutes, the family newborn is snatched up by something living in that forest, and the family unravels from there.  It’s a contained universe from which Eggers gets maximum tension, putting a slow squeeze on you from the start and never quite letting go.  

The film plays beautifully off of how incredibly creepy the Puritans were.  But Eggers doesn’t stop there and also harnesses what's creepy about the woods (specifically, their insulation); farm animals (their seeming placidity); and twins (everything).  He even conjures memories of how creepy Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is.  The Puritanism is the front-and-center text, but the puritan (small p) is the subtext, and Eggers puts the characters’ guilt, shame, confusion, and marriage to sin into a continuous wash cycle.  The family dynamics feel true and perverse, and the performances he captures from all six actors are whoppers.  Lead Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays the oldest daughter, has the baby/sinner face of a young Michelle Williams and carries the movie with complete authority.

Visually, the movie looks as one might expect, with the drained-color palette that’s popular in non-Puritan horror movies.  But early in the picture, Eggers and his cinematographer Jarin Blaschke use streaks of daylight on the actors that due the period costumes occasionally recalls a Vermeer painting, without being self-conscious about it.  The filmmaking team seems to have made The Witch with their hearts in their throat, and their full-throttle approach gives the movie a genuine force.  It’s not a major picture, but the debut of perhaps a major talent.  Eggers comes at the film not just to scare you, but to make you feel dread in the best sense.  The culmination at the end, while true to its horror roots, has a release with a surprisingly exultant comic edge to it.  Eggers has a nice sick streak.

Did you see The Witch this weekend? Sound off in the comments. (Previous posts on The Witch)

Berlin: Fire at Sea

Amir Soltani is covering the Berlin International Film Festival for The Film Experience this year, our first time at Berlinale!. Tonight, previous Venice winner, Gianfranco Rosi's Fuocoammare.

Gianfranco Rosi shocked the film world with his Golden Lion win at Venice for Sacro GRA a few years ago. At Berlinale, the true shock would be for his latest film, Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare), to leave the festival empty-handed. The Italian maestro’s seamless hybrid of documentary and fiction is a self-reflexive and compassionate meditation on Italy’s crisis of cultural identity in the face of an unprecedented wave of refugee migration.

Click to read more ...

Berlin: "Midnight Special" with Michael Shannon & Kirsten Dunst

Amir Soltani is covering the Berlin International Film Festival for The Film Experience this year, our first time at Berlinale!. Tonight Jeff Nichol's follow up to Mud.

With Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter and Mud, Jeff Nichols has become one of the most intriguing, and divisive, American directors working today. His latest film, the unclassifiable Midnight Special, will no doubt continue the same trajectory. Starring his favourite actor Michael Shannon, along with Joel Edgerton and Kirsten Dunst, this religious fable in the mold of science fiction is a crowd-pleaser that, despite a crucial directorial misstep, delivers a thoroughly riveting experience.

More...

Click to read more ...

Berlin: Tunisia's "Hedi"

Amir Soltani is covering the Berlin International Film Festival for The Film Experience this year, our first time at Berlinale!. For his first dispatch, he’s reviewed Tunisia’s Hedi

Although Hedi (Inhebbek Hedi) is Mohamed Ben Attia’s first feature film, it comes with the pedigree of being co-produced by the Dardenne brothers, and it’s not difficult to see why they were drawn to this story. Hedi (Majd Mastoura), a 25-year-old, Tunisian car salesman, would fit neatly into the gritty, realist universes of the brothers’ working class protagonists. A slow-burn study of an unhappy young man on the verge of getting married, Hedi builds up to an intensely emotional, rewarding finale that is once personal and political.

Under the overbearing, towering influence of the family’s matriarch, Hedi is the second of two sons whose father has passed away. Whereas the elder son has moved to France and lives with his French wife and daughter – much to his mother’s chagrin – Hedi remains in Tunisia, working a job he neither enjoys, nor seems to flourish in. He is engaged to be married to Khedija (Omnia Be Ghali), a modest, traditional girl whose dreams about married life and her insistence on celibacy are equally endearing and claustrophobic to Hedi. Yet, what seems like a monotonous, unsatisfying existence is set ablaze when Hedi meets Rim (Rym Ben Messaoud), a travelling dancer at a local hotel, mere days before his planned wedding.

Mastoura plays Hedi with stoic detachment, an approach to the character that allows the audience to project onto him a whole range of emotions that Hedi cannot express. As the film progresses, and different facets of the oppressive environment and communal culture in which he lives are revealed, the character, and Mastoura’s performance, become increasingly more identifiable. The movie isn’t as generous to its secondary characters, rarely affording any of them the chance to establish themselves without relation to Hedi, but the uniformly strong performances of the cast, particularly the warm and enchanting Ben Messaoud’s create fully realized characters.

Ben Attia’s sharply constructed film uses visual markers to put us in Hedi’s headspace, with subtle shifts in the rhythms of the film’s handheld cinematography and brief glimpses into Hedi’s hand-drawn comic strips. His rooted but trembling ties to anachronistic traditionalism become symbolic of the country at large. This is a piercing character study, a deeply felt film about the complications and confusions of youth that, through its focused lens, rewards the audience with a story about the broader implications of liberation from tradition, on a personal level and, allegorically, for the North African country at large.

Review: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

This review originally appeared in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad...

Lily James, from Cinderella to Zombie Slayer

“Pride and Prejudice,” Jane Austen’s classic novel about the Bennet sisters and their suitors, has one of the most famous opening lines in all of literature.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an adaptation Jane never could have seen coming despite her gifts, twists the opening line so that we’re no longer talking courtship but hunger; zombies in want of brains. So let’s twist the line again. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that pop culture, possessed by the love of fanfic, must be in want of works in the Public Domain!’

more...

Click to read more ...