“Istanbul is a place…where people come to disappear.” This is the sad conclusion arrived at by late in this moving film by one of its principal characters, Lia, a stern-faced older woman who has crossed over into the Turkish capital from the Black Sea’s Batumi, a desolate-looking spot in Georgia. A retired school teacher, she has left her home after making a promise to her now-dead sister. The promise was to find that woman’s child, who’s living in Turkey. All Lia has to go on is a name, and the fact that the now-adult child is transgender.
The movie, written and directed by Levan Akin, begins in the messy, tumultuous house where Achi, a young man who’s for all intents and purposes still a boy, lives miserably under the thumb of his older brother. Lia happens by the house, is recognized by one of its residents, and on the spot Achi concocts a tale, saying he knows the niece, Tekla, and has an address for her. He attaches himself to Lia, who accepts his company reluctantly, and soon they’re off, settling awkwardly in cheap lodgings and combing the poorer areas of Istanbul with not much to go on but hope.
The two actors who play Lia and Achi, Mzia Arabuli and Lucas Kankava, are marvels. Kankava has a wide-open face that registers Achi’s boundless naivete, which is always there no matter how cocky or obdurate he makes himself. Arabuli’s own expression as Lia is often pinched, but as time wears on her, and as she starts to let herself go in a “what the hell” sort of way — she likes to dip into a bottle of a fermented drink called “chacha,” a habit she initially tries to hide from Achi — a pained vulnerability makes itself felt. These are two lost souls who make an unlikely temporary fishbowl for themselves, far from homes they may never return to.
On one of their ferry rides, Akin’s camera makes a graceful camera move away from the anxious Lia and Achi and settles on the more content-in-the-moment face of a trans woman, whose story the movie then picks up. This is not, as is soon made clear, Tekla. The character’s name is Evrim, and she’s a woman who’s found a purpose. Near to completing a law degree, she works for a trans rights NGO that also looks into various cases in poorer neighborhoods; at one point we see her springing a young boy and his younger sister, who act on the peripheries of the movie’s central story threads, from jail. She’s confident and compassionate, enjoys a fairly robust sex life, but she’s subject to condescension — at best — from the various authority figures she’s obliged to deal with. Deniz Dumanli’s portrayal of the character is extraordinary, grounded, vanity-free.
Lia and Achi’s story will intersect with Evrim’s, but not right away. Akin is here working in a tradition established in Italian Neo-realism — and by the end of the film, he shows he can turn on the viewer’s tear ducts as deftly as De Sica did in his prime — but his narrative approach brings a vivid freshness to the proceedings. The camerawork he concocts with cinematographer Lisabi Fridell, often shooting through windows and doorways, often gives the viewer a “fly on the wall” feeling, but never becomes voyeuristic. It invites empathy, not titillation. And the movie’s portrait of Istanbul — roiling, unglamorous, and yes, packed with stray cats — makes the city a character in and of itself.
Within the first two minutes of Apple TV+’s “Lady in the Lake,” we learn that one of the series protagonists is dead. We watch as Cleopatra “Cleo” Johnson (Moses Ingram) is flung from the shoulders of an unnamed man into a lake, until her body disappears beneath the murky waters. Throughout her death, her monologue, done through voiceover, makes it apparent that while she may be dead, Cleo will haunt the narrative, and the people who had a hand in her demise. She directs this monologue to one character in particular: the series’ other protagonist, Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman). “You came in at the end of my story” she tells Maddie. “And turned it into your beginning.”
The series is based on the 2019 Laura Lippman novel of the same name, which was inspired by two real-life murders that happened during Lippman’s youth in Baltimore. The seven-part limited series follows Maddie, a Jewish housewife who is stirred out of her weary existence after a young girl from her community goes missing. An avid writer in her free time, she’s desperate to make a name for herself by investigating the girl’s disappearance, but while it initially feels like it comes from a selfish place, perhaps she’s closer to this missing girl than she wants to admit.
On the other side of Baltimore is Cleo Johnson, who Maddie first spots in a department store window. She’s dressed to the nines, almost immobilized through her modeling: a perfect representation of a doll. The way she’s framed in this first scene directly references how Maddie will continue to see Cleo throughout the series, stagnant and a perfect prop to use for her own successes. While this interaction is the only one they directly share, over voiceover it becomes clear that the two will somehow become tethered together. As viewers follow Maddie’s investigation, and her tone-deafness to the struggles of the Black community she moves into, Cleo’s final weeks play out in a similar fashion to Maddie’s.
The two women share little, yet their stories are paralleled. Maddie’s life as a housewife crumbles quickly — within the show’s first episode — and the life Cleo is attempting to build for herself and her children is unwoven by powers out of her control. While Maddie seeks agency by moving out of the suburbs and into a Black Baltimore neighborhood, Cleo’s story becomes gripped and controlled by the men around her. The contrasting of their stories could leave a bad taste in one’s mouth, but as the series unravels, director Alma Har’el handles this story with an appreciated amount of care.
Cleo is often heard recounting the story at hand through narration, but after the first episode she takes a much larger role. Ingram and Portman share almost as much screen time as the other, and the show is all the better for it. Her character’s name, Cleopatra, is one that commands power and it’s fitting for a character played by Ingram, who feels revelatory to watch. With each tear that leaves her eye and each broken word that leaves her mouth, you feel as if you’re watching a star be born. The series is at its most interesting when she’s on screen, and thankfully, it’s apparent that Har’el and her camera both know this.
The camera also frames its surrounding actors and set pieces exquisitely. There are an abundance of club scenes throughout “Lady in the Lake,” but there is a singular sequence featuring Ingram in Episode 3, that is a series standout. After witnessing something she shouldn’t have that begins to haunt her every move, Cleo takes to the club to release her inhibitions. Ingram throws her body around as if she’s exorcising demons, feet thumping on the club floor until it almost drowns out the singer on stage. Har’el frames the surrounding bodies on the dancefloor as if she’s filming churchgoers at a sermon, understanding this inherent link between dance and freedom.
This is where “Lady in the Lake” is the best version of itself: when winding plotlines are abandoned for striking sequences that showcase the talents of everyone from the music supervisors to the actors on screen. And this only increases as the show goes on. While its pilot is quite weak, Har’el and everyone involved up the ante with every episode, until it becomes one of the most interesting limited series in a post-“Big Little Lies” world. In a streaming climate filled to the brim with series like this, it takes a lot for them to stand out. Thankfully, it feels as if everyone involved with this project gave it their all, and the result is fascinating to watch.
“Lady in the Lake” is an adaptation done right, and while the blending of the two stories doesn’t always flow as well as it needs to, it’s impossible to not be intrigued by both Maddie and Cleo’s separate lives. The darkness Har’el leans into gives this series some cutting edge that the genre desperately needs, and it allows the story to bloom into something wholly original. From Mikey Madison reciting a haunting monologue from one of Anaïs Nin’s diaries, to Maddie’s fractured teenage memories, it feels like just when we as the audience think we understand where this show is going, the rug is ripped from beneath our feet, pulling us into the dark unknown along with the series’ characters.
“Caveat,” Damian Mc Carthy’s directorial debut, was unnerving in the extreme. So, too, is his follow-up, “Oddity”. “Oddity” is, if anything, even more unsettling. In “Caveat,” Mc Carthy created a creeping sense of dread and outright terror, sometimes from merely pointing the camera at a slightly ajar door. Mc Carthy has patience as a filmmaker. He can wait. He doesn’t try to overwhelm with easy jump-scares. He allows the sense of uneasiness to build and build. Both “Caveat” and “Oddity” share a fascination with potentially supernatural objects, maybe cursed, but also maybe sentient. In “Caveat,” it’s a toy rabbit with alarming angry glass eyes. In “Oddity,” it’s a life-size wooden man. There’s something weird about these objects. They loom large in McCarthy’s imagination.
“Oddity” opens strong. Dani (Carolyn Bracken) is alone in an old stone country house, far from civilization. There’s a loud knock on the door one night. She opens the peephole and a man (Tadhg Murphy) with a wild glare peers through. He has one glass eye. He tells her, urgently, he saw someone enter the house and she is in terrible danger. Dani is, naturally, suspicious of this scary-looking man, and she is hesitant to believe him. It could be a trap. She did hear creaking noises upstairs, though. Maybe he’s right? But does she really want to walk outside with this stranger?
The film then, surprisingly, jumps a year ahead, leaving us in suspense. Dani was killed that night, and the event is cloaked in mystery. Her widower Ted (Gwilym Lee) makes a visit to a little curio shop, run by Dani’s blind twin sister Darcy (also played by Bracken). He has come to deliver an object: a glass eye, the same glass eye worn by the man at the peephole. Perhaps Darcy, who can “read” objects, will be able to “see” through this eye, and figure out what happened to her beloved sister. (Look closely: the terrifying rabbit from “Caveat” is in one of Darcy’s glass cases.) Ted doesn’t seem eager to find out what happened to Dani. He has already started dating someone else, the glamorous Yana (Caroline Menton). Ted and Yana take a weekend trip down to the now-renovated stone house. Darcy makes a surprise visit, and she comes bearing a family heirloom: a life-size wooden man.
Paul McDonnell designed the wooden man, and it is a terrifying creation. The wooden man’s face is awash in agony, his mouth gaping open in a screen. Darcy places him at the table, as though he’s ready for a meal. Yana is freaked out. Ted is a doctor (he works at a hospital for the criminally insane) and is skeptical of all this mumbo-jumbo. He’s got to get back to the city, so he leaves Yana alone there with Darcy (and the wooden man). The wooden man sits at the table all through the dark night. Sometimes, though, he appears to have moved. He’s not where he’s supposed to be. Yana is strangely drawn to the wooden man. What does it mean, what does it convey? The sense of menace in this weirdly-shaped stone house is so thick there’s almost no oxygen. Mc Carthy, again, creates a panicked fight-or-flight response at the sight of a slightly ajar door, or a blank window, an empty hallway. Whatever terror Dani faced on that original night is still alive.
Is the wooden man a protector? Or is he a neutral observer? The rabbit in “Caveat” acted like a canary in a coalmine, alerting people to danger. The wooden man, though, seems more stolid, inert. There are other things moving around this house, there are glimpses of them, maybe caught in a mirror reflection or a flashlight beam. Mc Carthy understands the horror tropes intimately, but he uses them with freedom and freshness, lifting his films out of a specific genre. “Oddity” is a murder-mystery, a supernatural horror, and a home invasion thriller, all mixed together. The glass eyes of “Caveat” travel into the glass eye of “Oddity,” connecting the films spiritually and sensorially.
In “Caveat,” the house was being sucked back into the earth, choked in vines and mold. The house in “Oddity” is a square-shaped structure with an interior parking lot/courtyard, and its renovation has turned it into a work of wonder. An interior balcony stretches above the lower floor. It’s not easy to maneuver around in this space. The characters can’t bolt for the door without exposing themselves. Mc Carthy uses the single settings of his films with sensitivity and creativity. Production designer Lauren Kelly (whose work includes the recent “You Are Not My Mother“) has done a superb job tricking out this stone house in ways that make it a very specific place, a place we have not seen before in film. Gifted cinematographer Colm Hogan makes gorgeous use of shadows illuminated by a fragile flashlight beam, the stillness of spaces, the tension of a static frame. It’s a fraught space, where anything can happen.
The actors are all excellent, with Bracken in particular a standout, playing a double role. Dani and Darcy are two very different women, with different energies and looks and postures. We never see them together, but we never doubt their bond. Menton is great as the increasingly flustered Yana, moving from entitled annoyance to outright terror, as she can’t help but move closer and closer to the wooden man, trying to understand who he is, what he is, what he might want from her.
How could all of this end without tipping into cliche? We know Darcy has been right all along. We know Ted is a little sketchy. We know the house is weird. We might know how things will play out. I won’t say more than this: the final frame is so perfect it exceeds expectations. The moment is a call-back, but it’s also a glimpse of the future. It makes me wish I had seen “Oddity” in a packed midnight show. Mc Carthy does the hardest thing of all: he sticks the landing.
Kei Chika-ura’s “Great Absence” is obviously a personal piece, the kind of drama in which one can sense a connection to the subject matter in the subtlety with which it’s handled. Anyone who has dealt with the deterioration of a parent will find something resonant in Chika-ura’s film, one that can sometimes feel self-indulgent in its pacing and length but never loses its nuance, thanks both to its refined direction and a truly stellar performance from the legendary Tatsuya Fuji. The iconic star of “In the Realm of the Senses” won an acting award at San Sebastian this year, and it’s easy to see why. Eschewing the many traps of a complex character, he truly elevates “Great Absence” above the melodrama it could have become, crafting it into a tragic tale of a father and son who may no longer have time to reconcile. How does one reconnect and forgive when one half of the relationship may not have the emotional and mental capacity to do so?
“Great Absence” has a framing device in which an actor named Takashi (Mirai Moriyama) and his producer/wife Yuki (Yoko Maki) are working on an avant garde production of Ionesco’s Exit the King. It’s a play in which a leader and his kingdom essentially vanish, making Chika-ura’s choice a bit on-the-nose given what unfolds in “Great Absence,” a story of a patriarch who has lost basically everything, including his dwindling mental faculties, and how he essentially has one chance to reconnect with a son from whom he’s essentially estranged.
Takashi and Yuki are forced to return to his home by a call to the police after an incident at his father’s home. They come back to find a deeply confused Yohji, a man who no longer seems certain of who is or where he is. They also find that Yohji’s longtime partner Naomi (Hideko Hara) is missing and Yohji asserts that she’s committed suicide. If this all makes “Great Absence” sound like a mystery/thriller, it’s not exactly that movie. Yes, there are secrets and plot twists, but Chika-ura’s style is more deliberate in its effort to create confusion instead of tension. The script jumps back to times that Takashi visited in the past, partially to fill in how tense their relationship was and to give us more details about the missing Naomi, but also to allow the film to unfold almost like the fractured memories of someone near the end of their life. The structure of “Great Absence” doesn’t aggressively recreate dementia like something like “The Father,” but there’s an element of that displacement that’s meant to unmoor viewers.
Takashi is certainly unmoored as he uncovers diaries that reveal elements of his father, Naomi, and his birth mother that he never knew about. Imagine learning great emotional secrets about a distant parent, only to be unable to unpack them because said parent can’t trust their own memories or even sense of reality. “Great Absence” is about family secrets, but it’s more about how those can be shrouded and warped by the cruelty of aging.
While Chika-ura’s direction is strong enough to wonder if he’ll be one of the next Japanese masters, he sometimes gets a bit languorous in his pacing. The version that played TIFF and San Sebastian was reportedly 152 minutes, which means 20 minutes have been cut since then, but it’s still a film that drags in points even at 132.
Still, every time it threatens to completely drift away, a choice made by Moriyama or Fuji will bring it back. Fuji deftly delineates the different versions of Yohji from the taciturn man who pushed his son away to the one crumbling under the weight of emotions that he can’t quite understand. “Great Absence” really conveys the bursts of anger and lashing out that often adjoin dementia, and it makes for a showcase for one of Japan’s best actors. There’s a part of him that wants to reconcile, but he’s not even sure how to handle today, much less all he’s done wrong in his life. The true great absence is one of time, as so many of us will eventually discover there’s just not enough of it left.
In the mode (but not the spirit) of documentaries like “Man on Wire,” “Free Solo,” and “Fire of Love,” “Skywalkers: A Love Story” is less about persistence, curiosity, and daring than it is about two careless adrenaline junkies taking ridiculous risks to get likes on social media. As the title indicates, writer Jeff Zimbalist wants to think of this as a romance about people who happen to climb to the top of tall buildings so they can post pictures on Instagram. His script makes the point over and over that it’s all a symbol of the same issues of intimacy and trust that all couples face. We can never quite settle into the connection to the couple because while it makes it indisputably clear, despite some claims of Photoshopping, that they really do scale the tallest and most iconic structures in the world, there is a discomfiting artificiality to the storytelling.
Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus are Russians who were both captivated by the idea of “rooftoping,” an international fad along the lines of the 1920s flagpole sitters, only hundreds of feet higher, with an infinitely larger audience, and immeasurably more dangerous. Unlike the legendary comment made by George Leigh Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb then-unconquered Mount Everest, “Because it’s there,” the rooftoppers want to climb to the top of skyscrapers to be seen.
It opens with brief 2019 scenes showing Nikolau and Beerkus preparing to climb to the top of the spire of the one of the tallest buildings in the world: the then-almost-completed 2,227 feet tall Merdeka 118 in Malaysia, soon to be featured in an MCU film (“Thunderbolts”). Then we get some backstory on the couple before they met and the literal and romantic ups and downs of their relationship.
Nikolau grew up in a circus family. She loved watching her aerialist parents perform together on a flying trapeze. But her father left for another woman and her mother never recovered. Nikolau was raised by her grandmother and promised herself she would never depend on anyone again. But she struggled to decide on a direction for her life until she began to see the rooftoppers on Instagram. They were all men. She knew what she was made for. “Seeing their passion, their freedom, was magical. They take crazy risks to feel their potential…. I knew I had found my performance. This is my trapeze.”
She wanted to outdo the men by climbing higher and more dangerous structures and she wanted to perform for her social media audience by wearing striking costumes (high heels!) and in gymnastic poses requiring supreme balance and flexibility. Now might be a good time to point out that Nikolau is exceptionally pretty.
Beerkus loved the exhilaration of the climb. He tells us the higher he climbed, the more he could breathe. He had the largest number of Instagram followers in Russia. And it was on Instagram where he first saw Nikolau. He was captivated by her posts and invited her to accompany him on a sponsored trip to China to climb the highest construction site in the world. They first met en route. And as soon as the pictures are online, Nikolau gets hundreds of thousands of new followers and some sponsorship offers. What could be a better path to true love?
There’s a rom-com style flutter of clips: they’re in a bubble bath together, they’re dancing, they’re snacking on street food. We see them climbing, posting, and getting thrown in jail. We also see them almost-casually noting that one of their fellow rooftoppers has fallen to his death. But what have they learned from this? Not that maybe this is dangerous and will inspire others to risk their lives. Not that maybe huge world events like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the pandemic are about more than interfering with their social media posts and their rebranding of rooftopping as skywalking. The film would have been much more interesting if they went behind the scenes to show us where all this footage is coming from, especially footage of some very private conversations, and if it engaged with the problem of encouraging copycats who may not be as adept – or as lucky – as this couple.
They are much more upset about losing sponsors than than other rooftoppers losing lives. What they tell us they learn is how to do a better job of staying out of trouble, including dressing like construction workers, covering the lenses of security cameras, bringing bolt-cutters, and planning a climb in the midst of the World Cup, when no one will be paying attention.
It isn’t just the climbers who are nonchalant about the lethal consequences of these stunts: it’s also the filmmakers, merrily accompanying the 30+ hour climb at the end of the film with a jaunty, breezy tune on the soundtrack. The climbs are real, if performative. But the movie itself feels as real as astroturf, with the couple relentlessly reiterating the issue of trust and the willingness to rely on others and ham-handed metaphors about how for trapeze artists the “catcher” (strong man) is less flashy but more important than the “flyer.” One interaction with a Ukrainian refugee who is a circus clown feels almost authentic for a moment, but clearly Nikolau has no idea that she comes across as completely self-centered. Clearly, Zimbalist (a sometime rooftopper) and his co-director Maria Bukhonina have no sense that this movie comes across as manufactured as Photoshop.
When the United States withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, you couldn’t avoid the international coverage of the chaos around that major event, one that ceded control of the country back to the Taliban. When the final plane had left and the journalists returned to their home countries, the story didn’t end. And that’s where Ibrahim Nash’at entered the picture, traveling to Kabul to document the transition of the Taliban from a militia to a regime. His film “Hollywoodgate” rarely leaves the former American base that gives it a title, showing both the mundanity of life on the base and the planning for what could be a violent future for the region, and possibly the world.
One of the most interesting aspects of Nash’at’s film is the question of how much his subjects are playing to the cameras, creating a bit of propaganda embedded in the film’s construction. Opening and closing narration by Nash’at himself speaks to the idea that what they wanted to show him and what he wanted to show may not have been the same thing, and it’s that conflict that gives “Hollywoodgate” its power.
“If his intentions are bad he will die soon.” This is only one of several times that Nash’at captures Taliban members not only speaking about his existence in their space, but essentially threatening him in a way designed to provoke a film that unfolds the way they want it to unfold. Nash’at’s main subject ends up being Mawlawi Mansour, the Commander of the Air Force. Mansour is a confident figure, someone who strides through Hollywood Gate – the spelling of the actual base and the film’s title are slightly different, for the record – barking orders at his underlings, mostly about trying to get it back up and running as much as possible. The Americans left $7 billion worth of American weaponry at the base, including planes and helicopters that they basically dismantled but didn’t destroy, leading Mansour’s team to work diligently to reconnect the right wires to get them airborne. “Hollywoodgate” opens with soldiers finding booze and Red Bull in a freezer; it closes with them showing off their new flying, killing machines. This is how the world changes.
Nash’at reportedly spent a year with the people at Hollywood Gate, and so what he chooses to reveal over barely over 90 minutes is telling. There’s a lot of marching around the base, moments in which it feels like Mansour is trying to show off, but the film also settles on shifts in women’s rights in the country now led by the Taliban – a bunch of men sitting around talking about women while they watch the news. (In November and December 2022, the Taliban banned women from entering public parks or receiving an education.) There’s a cruel mundanity to a lot of “Hollywoodgate,” men who have a lot of opinions and a lot of time to kill when they’re not killing insurgents near the base, practicing with weapons left behind by the Americans, or even creating their own propaganda.
“Hollywoodgate” ends in a sequence that’s striking in its terror, a scene in which the Taliban basically shows off what the Americans left behind for other enemies of our country like Russia and China. It’s one of several moments in the film that feel like it almost shouldn’t exist. We don’t often see the curtain torn down like this, and we’re not often given access to exhibitions of power like this one. On the other hand, it’s a form of propaganda, a show of might to the world that Mansour would probably admire, even as he’s ordering his helicopter pilot to slow down to make it last.
“Hollywoodgate” is a study in cinematic journalism, a way to fill in the gaps in what the horrendous state of journalism lets slip in the 2020s. The writers and news agencies who left Kabul in 2021 only told one small part of a story that’s still unfolding as the new leaders trample women’s rights and fail their own population – Human Rights Watch estimated in March of this year that more than two-thirds of the country didn’t have enough food. It’s a film that feels like an overture to an international crisis, a warning as much as a documentary.
Last year, Hong Kong filmmaker Herman Yau directed at least two of the best action movies of the year. In the 1990s, Yau (“Ebola Syndrome,” “The Untold Story”) helmed sensational black comedies and/or true-crime thrillers about psychopathic skid row loners, some of which are now finding new audiences on American Blu-ray boutique labels. Today, Yau directs Hong Kong and/or mainland China-financed action movies, often focused on a team of diligent, but stressed-out law enforcement officials.
“Customs Frontline,” a Hong Kong procedural that pits the local customs department against a ring of international weapons dealers, continues this trend. It’s also unusual given that it’s not only a star vehicle for Nicholas Tse, but also the first project that Tse’s worked on as the primary action choreographer. “Customs Frontline” is not quite as thrilling or as relentless as Yau’s other recent successes—particularly “Moscow Mission” and “Raid on the Lethal Zone”—but it still delivers more twists and surprises than you might expect from this tip of sudsy, formulaic cop drama.
In “Customs Frontline,” Tse plays Chow Ching-lai, a frustrated but loyal Customs Department officer on the trail of the mysterious Dr. Raw (Amanda Strang), a well-connected arms dealer smuggling guns and other weapons through Hong Kong. Chow wants to nab Dr. Raw for personal reasons that coincide with his professional responsibilities since Raw’s operation was being pursued by Cheung Wan-nam (Jacky Cheung), Chow’s unstable but sympathetic boss. I say “was” because Cheung suffers an unfortunate fate early on in the movie.
Cheung not only urges Chow to take his job more seriously—“Respect your uniform!”—but also inspires his subordinate by persevering despite a previously undisclosed bipolar diagnosis. Cheung also discovers a well-positioned mole within the Customs Department, leaving Chow to figure out how to stop Raw, who’s currently arming the clashing (and fictional) African nations of Hoyana and Loklamoa.
The first half or so of “Customs Frontline” sets up Cheung’s character as a figurehead for his department, plagued as it is by a generic sort of bureaucracy, largely represented by Kwok Chi-keung (Francis Ng), the bureau’s paternal, but unfriendly co-commissioner. A handful of shoot-outs and chase scenes break up these unusually drawn-out establishing scenes, most of which coast on Cheung’s charismatic performance. Still, while it takes a moment before Tse’s character takes over his own movie, his fight choreography eventually gets a decent showcase.
It also helps to see the movie’s action scenes as punctuation for its kitchen-sink style of hard-boiled action. Every character has a backstory, including Dr. Raw, and they’re mostly endearing despite a lack of psychological or emotional complexity. Instead, a pile-on of pulpy twists and turns makes “Customs Frontline” a largely compelling potboiler. Both parts of the movie, the one led by Cheung and the one led by Tse, feature unusual details that will leave you guessing, like: why are we still talking about Cheung’s emotional intelligence, or who is Dr. Raw’s dad, beyond a supposedly beloved and respected weapons smuggler? There are crypto-currency bribes, a violent suicide, presumed inter-departmental sabotage, and, oh yeah, sometimes computer-generated cargo ships and tank-sized jeeps explode or flip over from end to end.
Tse shows promise during his fight scenes, though his choreography’s never as convincing as his stolid body language and shameless action figure poses. He’s a little too stiff to carry the movie on his own, but he gets a lot of help from his co-stars, including Karena Lam, who plays Customs department officer Athena Siu, Cheung’s patient, devoted partner.
Yau’s still the real MVP of “Customs Frontline,” given his comfort and knack for unabashed sensationalism. Car stunts, including a chase where one vehicle gets boxed in by four others, often bring out the best in the movie, but they’re not the only standout moments. Yau notably brings out the best in his actors, particularly Cheung, whose extreme close-ups highlight his repertory of mercurial facial expressions. Yau also has a gift for escalating violence, which isn’t nothing given the probable limits he had to work with as a Hong Kong filmmaker who, like a lot of his peers, now has to cater to the mainland Chinese market and its government’s influence. In the 1990s, Yau stood out from his peers with trend-chasing thrillers. The Hong Kong film industry may have changed considerably since then, but Yau’s still doing what he does.
If anything, what’s most impressive about “Customs Frontline” is that it never slows down long enough for you to question its sketchy, cornball logic. “Customs Frontline” may not make much sense, and it doesn’t exactly move with fluidity or grace, but it does move, and often hard and fast enough to get you from one spectacular flare-up to the next with style and chutzpah to spare.
I haven’t had a drink in almost fifteen years, and during the last days of my drinking champagne certainly wasn’t doing the job for me anymore. So upon being called to consider this movie, I feel a little like a more extreme version of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man in the World” character, who said, “I don’t always drink beer, but…” Anyway.
I have relatively fond recollections of Veuve Clicquot being a relatively affordable REAL CHAMPAGNE, as opposed to its cheap bastard cousin, sparkling wine. Back in 1985 you could get a 375 ml bottle for about 15 bucks, a real bargain for a fledgling freelance writer from Jersey romancing a real New York City Girl. It goes for about 40 bucks now, which I guess I could afford, but I don’t drink, the New York City Girl stopped imbibing herself, and my wonderful wife prefers brandy, whisky, or beer even, which she purchases herself.
It is a French story, obviously, but an international production, directed by Brit Thomas Napper and starring the American Haley Bennett in the title role. Its inspiration is the real life of Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot, whose husband François (Tom Sturridge, seen vividly in flashbacks) dies when Barbe is only in her twenties. She is nevertheless determined to keep control of François’ wine-making concern. This being the 18th century, moving into the 19th, we get a lot of “well that’s just not done” from tut-tutting males, including the folks at Moet, who want to butt Barbe out. François’ father Phillipe (Ben Miles) is a little queasy about this. But Barbe insists that not only can she do the job, but she’s also the only person who really understands the job. Why do we create, Barbe asks in voiceover at the movie’s beginning. “We” being humanity. Her answer is “it is so that we might uncover the secrets of ourselves.” You can only make champagne in the Champagne regions of France, but making it is, indeed, an act of creation. While the movie initially offers little beyond the dreamy foofaraw too often used to describe “creative process,” it eventually does pay attention to the practical aspects of winemaking, which in the case of Barbe and François, can have decidedly eccentric, or considered-by-the-squares-to-be-eccentric, components, like talking to the vines.
Bennett is better than decent in the title role; her characterization grows deeper as she seeks out love in the midst of her work struggle. Her business gets a boost due to the Champagne mania that seizes Russia during the Napoleonic Wars. But she’s also chained to the past, and one of the more interesting features of the picture is how François is depicted as the film’s flashbacks continue: at first he’s erudite, charming, idiosyncratic; increasingly, he’s temperamental and maybe a little nuts. Barbe tries to honor his ambition while coming to terms with having been pinned under her husband’s irrational thumb. The movie itself doesn’t capitalize on this intriguing dynamic as much as it might have, and despite various unusual touches, including a music score by The National’s Bryce Dessner, not necessarily the first guy you’d tap to do a period picture, “Widow Clicquot” ultimately resolves as a conventional portrayal of a woman’s determination. It would be reductive to call it a “girlboss” story, but it wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate to, either.
I didn’t believe a single second of “Crumb Catcher.” It begins with a nauseating blitz of woozy frames: Shane (Rigo Garay) and Leah (Ella Rae Peck) are taking post-wedding photos, holding each other arm-in-arm in a stilted, forced manner. They relate to the photographer the different versions of how they met. Shane is an author, Leah works for him. No, actually. Leah works at a publishing house that represents Shane, who is nearing the release of an autobiographical book. They met at an office party where Leah was perturbed and impressed by Shane dancing with the office’s many women employees. Now, they’re hitched. As Shane’s nerves get the better of him, causing the self-conscious author to storm off to the newlyweds’ room, you wonder who pushed him to marry the bossy Leah.
You can then imagine my surprise that the film doesn’t pull the rug out from under you. There are no ulterior motives, no marriage of convenience or circumstance, no aims at becoming a power couple. Rather we’re mostly meant to believe that Shane and Leah truly care for one another. That belief, unfortunately, never takes, causing writer/director Chris Skotchdopole’s debut feature to be a labored attempt at an absurdist suspense-thriller.
Skotchdopole nevertheless persists: Hours later, Shane awakes in the hotel room. An aggravated Leah is in a hurry for the couple to hit the road, especially since a creepy waiter attempted to strike up a conversation with her while Shane was sleeping. They bump into that waiter, John (John Speredakos), again, in the parking garage as they wait for Shane’s ’78 Oldsmobile to warm up. John apologizes for a mix-up with their cake topper, offering up a bottle of champagne as recompense. This waiter doesn’t appear dangerous, more obnoxious than anything else. He’s the type of guy who doesn’t know the conversation ended ten minutes ago, who often believes he’s offering pearls of wisdom when he’s actually selling spoiled goods — such as him denigrating a Latino co-worker for being as incompetent as he expects.
Still, he appears only to be a passing nuisance. As is the odd text Shane receives from an unknown number: We need to talk about last night. It’s probably the wrong number, he thinks. And by the time Leah and Shane arrive at their Executive Editor’s woodland house — a luxe space adorned with abstract expressionist paintings that leave Shane bewildered — he has mostly put the thought out of his mind. The couple quickly settle into this guest space for a honeymoon that is interrupted by headlights in the driveway: John has arrived with an invention he wants the couple to invest in, and his wife Rosie (Lorraine Farris), who has an incriminating video that could destroy Shane’s marriage, is with him.
Much of the film’s suspense is predicated on Shane’s fear of Leah learning his secret. Shane is so frightened, he allows the frazzled and desperate John — who happens to be sporting a concealed gun — to essentially call all the shots. Shane acquiesces to John’s demands to demo his product and for money. He even pumps up John’s fragile ego by intimating that his terrible invention has potential. Every time John returns to Shane, asking for more, Shane is pulled deeper and deeper into John’s harebrained scheme. It’s an overwrought dance between Shane, John, and Rosie that struggles to keep one’s interest — primarily because you never quite buy why Shane is jumping through so many hoops.
Once again, this is all dependent upon the idea that Shane and Leah are indeed in love. They are so in love that Shane is scared to death of their marriage ending. These two, however, have zero chemistry. Garay plays Shane as wide-eyed and nervous, while Peck portrays Leah as a manipulative powerbroker. It just doesn’t make much sense. What kept them together beyond being a one-night stand? What do they actually find interesting about each other? Leah tells Shane how fascinating it is that he’s unlovable, but that isn’t nearly enough. We know they’ve been together for five years. But they feel like strangers. The film gives some indication that Leah might be forcing Shane to mine his tragic backstory — he has an estranged relationship with his alcoholic father — because she knows it’ll sell. And yet, the film doesn’t wholly push that thought forward. Rather it gestures at the possibility without grappling with the fallout from that reality.
The film makes other gestures toward the couple’s racial optics. John’s microaggressions, for instance, become flat out aggressions. Shane is put in a situation where he may be framed for a crime simply because of the color of his skin. As he speeds toward safety, it feels like the film is playing with whether Shane wants to save Leah because he loves her or because he will be the prime suspect in any crime involving her. It all feels labored despite being so underwritten. The same might be said of the overactive camera, which oscillates between a rush of fractal images and honeyed compositions that feel like they’re trying too hard to instill mood and tone. The editing is just as exaggerated, punching in a superfluous flashback to kick off a car chase.
The title of “Crumb Catcher” is all too apt. Skotchdopole sprinkles bits and pieces that add up to very little. The subplots dangle, the suspense unravels, and the primary relationship never takes off. What you’re left with isn’t an arresting piece of filmmaking, but an idea that is stretched beyond the ability to naturally hold one’s attention without relying on loud filmmaking and even louder themes. You can see every seam in this movie precisely because there are so few seams holding it together. It is the pitch of something without the landing of it.
With “Oddity,” Damian McCarthy has crafted one of the year’s most delightfully spine-tingling horror films, an supernatural whodunit that’s equal parts EC Comics and Edgar Allan Poe in its high-speed collision of cursed curios, haunted houses, restless spirits, and murder mysteries.
In theaters this Friday from IFC Films, which will then partner with Shudder for the film’s streaming launch this fall, McCarthy’s enjoyably classical creepfest opens with a woman alone in a remote country house and a knock at the door one night. Though the woman, Dani (Carolyn Bracken), is unsettled by the stranger she finds on her front step, she’s even more disturbed by his frantic insistence that someone else who means her harm has already snuck inside. She must let him in, he says, or something terrible will befall her.
“Oddity,” leaving Dani’s subsequent night of terror unseen, then leaps ahead a year to introduce her twin sister, Darcy (also played by Bracken), a blind medium who runs an antique shop and still harbors suspicions about what really happened that night. Dropping in unannounced on Dani’s widower, Ted (Gwilym Lee), and his new girlfriend (Caroline Menton), who are spending the one-year anniversary of Dani’s passing at the since-renovated house, Darcy brings with her a terrifying family heirloom: a full-sized wooden mannequin, with its mouth open wide as if in a silent scream.
For the Irish writer-director, bringing together as many unsettling ingredients as he could into a suspenseful horror-thriller was the most challenging aspect of “Oddity” — and in no small part the reason he set out to make it. “Caveat,” McCarthy’s feature directorial debut, was similarly creepy and contained, following two people trapped in a crumbling estate filled with dark secrets; a marvel of unsettling mood, it was made economically and thrived within those constraints. Even before hatching the story for “Oddity,” McCarthy had an ideal starting point — a converted barn in West Cork in Ireland, where he’d built the sets for “Caveat.”
Harnessing an atmosphere of slow-creeping dread through evocative lighting and immersive sound design, even as his story rattles through clever setups and nerve-jangling scares at a ferocious pace, McCarthy has constructed a midnight movie meant to be experienced with a crowd — as certified by the audience awards that “Oddity” picked up from South by Southwest and Outlook amid its buzz-building film-festival run.
“Oddity” was also a selection of this year’s Chicago Critics Film Festival, where it screened at midnight to an enthusiastic crowd at the Music Box Theatre. Ahead of the film’s theatrical release, RogerEbert.com spoke with McCarthy about his journey through horror filmmaking, necessity as the mother of invention, and the secrets of a great screen scare.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
I know your parents owned a video store in Bantry, in West Cork in Ireland, where you grew up. How did that factor into your introduction to filmmaking?
When we had that store, it would have been in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. We had it for 10 years, so I would have been 10 or 11 years old. All of my time was just spent inside that shop after school, waiting for my mom to finish work. You could be quite stimulated all afternoon by all that old ‘80s VHS horror, and my dad is a big horror fan, so the shelves were always fairly well stocked with good horror films from the ‘70s and ‘80s. My parents were pretty good with letting me watch everything but, with the films I wasn’t allowed to watch, I was reading the VHS boxes and seeing how they’d sell the story with the blurbs on the backs. Sometimes, when you aren’t allowed to watch something, that will fire your imagination, just reading it and looking at the few images that they’d release. I think it set me on this course to want to make my own films.
Was horror always the genre you felt compelled to work within?
I was lucky in that horror is one of the easier genres to make when you don’t have any connections in the industry and you don’t have any budget. Everything is limited, in terms of equipment. That’s not the reason I do it; that’s a cynical reason to want to get into horror filmmaking, because you can make things cheaply. I just really love the genre. Horror films had a huge impact on me; obviously, I was scared watching horror films, until I started rewatching them and asking, “How did they do this? How did they scare me?” I was trying to break it down. That love of horror turned into me wanting to see if I could do it myself.
One of your early shorts, “He Dies at the End,” really establishes the tone you explore in “Caveat” and “Oddity.” It’s this taut, darkly funny story, and the jump-scare you deploy in its final moments is remarkably effective. There’s a jump-scare in “Oddity” that similarly rattled me, involving a camera’s shutter sound, which led me to wonder what you see as the secret to crafting those types of standout moments.
Thank you for that, and I’m glad you liked “He Dies at the End,” because it was the first short film I made that I actually felt worked. I could never get any of my shorts before that to screen at film festivals, which is very disheartening when you’re working so hard. “He Dies at the End” is four-and-a-half minutes long, starring my best friend, and it was entirely about building up tension. The suspense of the tension became more important than whatever was going to release that tension at the end, which definitely became the way I’ve approached filmmaking since. It’s all about suspense.
When I think about jump-scares, sometimes I think about the cat jumping out of the locker or somebody waking up and realizing it was just a dream — something really silly and lazy. But one of the best-crafted jump-scares would be Sadako coming out of the TV in Hideo Nakata’s “Ringu.” There’s nothing jumpy about it, though; it’s so slow, so suspenseful, with this creeping dread coming at you. There’s no real release with that; it’s all atmosphere.
Whereas a scene with a scare at the end, I’d think about “Alien,” where Dallas is creeping around in those tunnels and you’re moving between him, the guys monitoring him, the little blip on the motion detector, and then finally that reveal of the alien right behind him. If that scene had just been him wandering around, with no sense that anything’s coming together, and then the alien is just there, it would have been startling, but it’s not very scary. It’s just suddenly there, so you get a shock. There’s no build-up to when it’s going to happen, and I think that’s the difference between a good horror film and a bad one.
You filmed “Caveat” on the grounds of Bantry House, in West Cork. As I understand it, there was a room there, in old stables that had been recently renovated, that inspired “Oddity” and served as its central location. What was it about that space that drew you to make two films around it?
For “Caveat,” it was really just out of necessity. We didn’t have a budget, making that film. Everything was a favor, and I was writing it around anything we could build, borrow, or steal. My best friend Fintan Collins, the star of “He Dies at the End,” is not an actor, but he’s a really good carpenter. He built all the sets for “Caveat” in the same room that “Oddity” is set in.
I spent so much time in that room, because I’m friends with the family that owns it, and they allowed me to build my sets there, that I started thinking, “This room’s actually really nice. Once we got rid of the sets and wrote something around this room we have access to, it could be visually quite interesting for a haunted house film.” That’s very much where “Oddity” came from, and it was written specifically for that room. I sometimes think that, if I wasn’t able to get access to film there, I don’t think I would have made the film. It had to be there. When you’re making a film, you sometimes get a vision, and that’s just how you see it. I only saw “Oddity” as taking place in that room; very luckily, they didn’t have a problem with me coming back to make another film.
It’s really about the atmosphere. I mean, the house is very old. There’s a lot of history there, but I don’t think any of it is too dark, in terms of ghost stories set around the place. It’s more the feeling of the atmosphere; I thought it would lend itself really well to the story. Lauren Kelly, our production designer, wanted the room to feel very cold and masculine; she had this idea that, for the character of Ted, it would be an extension of his work life and feel like a psychiatrist’s office, quite clammy and cold.
“Oddity” has these elements of slasher, supernatural, psychological, and folk horror. Tell me about balancing out all of those ingredients.
When I was writing the script, after “Caveat,” I was just trying to find a way to mix together all these things that I love. Not to sound too pessimistic, but I do feel that, every time you make a film, it might be the last one you get to make. And it’s going to take two years to make one, so you’re always trying to put in as much of what you love as you can, to bring together all these things you’d yourself love to see.
With “Oddity,” I liked all of these scenes and liked all of these characters, and I liked that there was a bit of a slasher element to it, but I knew I didn’t want to make it only as a slasher film. There’s a big haunted-house side to supernatural horror, but I felt like I’d done that with “Caveat,” so the challenge of the script was making all of these subgenres somehow fit within one mystery, to create a type of whodunit. Luckily, it worked, or at least I have not heard anybody saying it’s too jarring. I did put the work in, while writing and designing “Oddity,” to make all of these things go together.
Carolyn Bracken’s performances as Darcy and Dani are both wonderfully creepy; tell me about your experience working with her.
She had been in another Irish feature film, Kate Dolan’s “You Are Not My Mother,” and I thought she was great in that film, which has this really physical presence to it. I got the script to her, met her, and she was lovely. She has great imagination and asks really good questions, and she had a good take on both characters. I was very lucky, because casting really is luck-of-the-draw.
She did have a lot of work to do in the film because she’s playing two characters. She is your protagonist but, at the same time, there has to be a little bit of an edge to her, because when she shows up at that house, you don’t know why she’s there. Clearly, there’s odd behavior with that character; you do want to be on the backfoot a little bit, to figure out what’s going on with her. She’s very secretive, and Darcy’s clearly up to something, and it’s not until we get further into the film that we start to reveal what that is. She was fantastic. All of the cast was absolutely amazing to work with; the script is one thing, but then it’s what they bring to it that I love. I hadn’t thought of all these really good takes on the characters, and Carolyn had loads of them.
“Caveat” featured this drumming bunny that acted as a conduit, of sorts, to cadavers. “Oddity” has this unnerving wooden mannequin. What is it about these cursed objects that appeals to you?
This was probably something I stumbled onto with “He Dies at the End.” Even though it was just this guy sitting at his office desk, he’s got a few ornaments and office decorations on his desk. I just found that shooting them up close seemed to create this weird, eerie feeling. Even when I was editing that short film, back in 2008, I found these images quite stimulating. There was something really weird about that; suddenly, because of this close-up, it had taken on a life of its own, somehow. And so it’s something that I’ve continued to do. Every script I have, there’s something in there that’s not a character, not an actor, just this weird, inanimate object or prop. There’s something unsettling about them, even if I don’t exactly know why.
With the mannequin, specifically, it’s seated at the main table for much of “Oddity,” but you find ways to establish this sense of an uncanny energy emanating from it. There’s something creepy and powerful about the mannequin, and I’m curious what you wanted out of its appearance and positioning through “Oddity.”
We were trying to tease the audience into wondering when something was going to happen. Because I knew he was going to sit at the table for a lot of the film, whether or not something would happen in the third act, I knew he would always be a centerpiece. Other characters would be moving around him, other horror sequences are happening and scaring people, and this wooden man would always be sitting there, seeming to be doing very little but still somehow coming across as unsettling.
That was the challenge that I set for myself, really: could I put something visually out of place in the middle of this room and let the film unfold around it? Even the characters would get a little bit tired of looking at him, because he’s not doing anything. We shot scenes where his head would move left to right, as you see with possessed dolls in horror films, but the temptation was more to leave him sitting there as the centerpiece. He’s very much designed in that way, to look as pained and tortured as we could make him.
Between “Caveat” and “Oddity,” as well, your features are distinguished by such rich, immersive sound design. What can you tell me about your approach to that craft, and what was required to design the sound of this film, especially with all the creaking and groaning atmosphere of the house?
It was always that we were trying to keep in mind how rural the house was. There’s always this hint of an eerie wind, blowing through the house, very low. But, at the same time, we knew that we had to restrain ourselves at times, because we were trying to build up to that third act. We never, especially with the score, wanted it to suddenly become like an action movie, where all the horror would disappear and, suddenly, things would be moving a lot quicker. It was about trying to save a lot of that really creepy sound design for that third act, to have somewhere to go as we were building to it.
Sound design, for me, is as important as the image, if not more so. If I get scared watching a film, I can turn off the sound and continue to watch it. But if you close your eyes, it’s almost worse, because you can hear it, and now you’re imagining things that are probably worse than what you’re seeing on screen. [laughs]
