Dir - Yorgos Lanthimos
Overall: GOOD
The latest from the innately quirky filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, Poor Things fuses his singular brand of boundary-pushing singularity with Alasdair Gray's 1992 novel of the same name. In development for nearly a decade and a half, Lanthimos continues his partnership with screenwriter Tony McNamara, cinematographer Robbie Ryan, and actor Emma Stone, the latter who turns in a showy and transformative performance as a sexually promiscuous science project with a childlike ignorance and stubborn curiosity for independent enlightenment. The fact that her character has the body of a pregnant woman who committed suicide and the brain of said pregnant woman's unborn infant implanted inside of her is just one of many ridiculous details to a series of hilarious events that escalate as a bizarre coming-of-age/Marry Shelley's Frankenstein/feminist parody hybrid. Aesthetically, it is a tour de force for Lanthimos and Ryan, who shoot a sprawling, steam punk Victorian London with gorgeous flash, making every nuance pop off the screen like a demented and lush fairy tale. It is an expansive oddity that intellectually examines the human experience of both men and women, all while matching the pretentiousness of the materiel with a presentation that pokes fun at itself as much as it provokes.
Dir - Robert Morgan
Overall: MEH
For fans of British stop motion animator Robert Morgan, his apply titled, full-length debut Stopmotion will arrive with a certain degree of anticipation. After three decades of exclusively working in short films, his eccentric, grimy, and disturbed aesthetic is finally brought to ninety-three minute life with the assistance of co-screenwriter Robin King. Yet even though it is a visual and atmospheric triumph that delivers on the promise of its singular filmmaker, it is still a frustratingly unfocused endeavor. Concerning a struggling artist's decent into obsession and madness, (which are often times logical bedfellows for physiological horror such as this), Morgan sticks within his comfort zone by making the protagonist a stop motion animator herself, one who has lived in the shadow of her mother's lauded craft. Aisling Franciosi creates a compelling performance in the lead, but the material that she has to work with seems to hint at something more profound than it ever arrives at. This may be intentional; to present a surreal, nightmarish landscape where creativity can only truly manifest itself via emotional detachment and physical suffering to the point where the results are more due to a broken psyche than anything tangibly on point. It has a bizzaro-world flare that rarely lets up, but the style is far more inciting than the narrative.
Dir - Paco Plaza
Overall: GOOD
Pulling off a nifty M. Night Shyamalan maneuver in its final scene, Paco Plaza's Sister Death, (Hermana Muerte), is an ideally spooky nunsploitation movie that benefits from an intriguing, be it conventional supernatural mystery at its core. Set in 1940s Spain as a newly arrived novice, (who is dubbed the "holy girl" in her youth for allegedly receiving a vision of the Virgin Mary), embarks on her teaching post in a former convent where something otherworldly is clearly afoot, Plaza slowly teases what appears to be your usual crop of arbitrary ghost encounters via nightmares, noises, and poltergeist activity that only occurs when the plot requires something scary to happen. Thankfully though, the director and frequent Álex de la Iglesia collaborator Jorge Guerricaechevarría's script switches gears abruptly in its last act, (broken up into three chapters here), which reveals some harrowing events via flashback that shed unsettling light on the proceedings. Aria Bedmar is wonderful in the lead, suffering more than just the usual tests of faith for a cinematic nun and eventually undergoing a transformation that is both satisfying and emotionally ravaged. There is nothing unique here and Plaza still cannot resist the urge for a predictable jump scare here or there, but its presentation is more sincere than schlocky and all the better for it.
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