Dir - Alex Ross Perry
Overall: MEH
Overall: MEH
Indie writer/director Alex Ross Perry's mumblecore psychological drama Queen of the Earth has been compared to John Hancock's 1971 film Let's Scare Jessica to Death in that they each concern a woman with mental health issues gradually succumbing to madness in an isolated summer location. Perry's work here, (and mumblecore in general), also has aesthetic similarities to regional low-budget filmmaking that came in the wake of New Hollywood's emergence, which is to say that the same story could have easily been told the same way five decades prior. In any event, the results here are uneven at best. It is a performance triumph for its two leads in Elisabeth Moss and Katherine Waterston; best friends who are perpetually defensive with each other, each one suffering an emotional breakdown a year apart, which is something that the movie cross-cuts between. Moss is the primary focus as well as the one who exhibits more severe deterioration, going as far as to collapse on the floor at a party, convinced that everyone is grasping for her like ghouls, Rosemary's Baby style. Unfortunately, Perry's monologue-heavy dialog is pretentious and unnatural, plus nobody on screen seems to like each other most of the time, despite how we are told that they are either lovers or friends. On top of the largely inaudible dialog, (the sound design is particularly poor), it is a meandering and melodramatic watch.
Dir - Adam Mason
Overall: GOOD
Overall: GOOD
Sans a few plausibility jumps which were bound to find their way into the proceedings granted the risky nature of the premise, Adam Mason's Hangman is a mostly white-knuckled thriller that makes fine use of the found footage gimmick. The entire film is comprised of footage that was shot by a home intruder, but the way that it is edited together is as unsettling as his actions themselves. Our unnamed and almost entirely nonspeaking antagonist pauses, zooms, and rewinds certain moments that give us all the information that we need as to his motives, all the while the hapless family that he is playing a long, clandestine, and terrorizing game with never catches on, until it is too late of course. Though there are some sporadic moments of brutality, the presentation wisely steers clear of torture porn exploitation, which is something that it easily could have indulged in. Instead, it gives us a disturbing front row seat to a killer's stalking agenda, something that is bound to creep out any viewer that is procrastinating about installing a security system in their home. Still, there are some hangups to the plotting, namely how increasingly brazen the villain becomes, including moments that we do not see where he apparently has nightly chats with the family's youngest son who just assumes that he was talking to a guy in his dreams. Mostly though, it passes the icebox test without insulting the viewer.
Dir - Sonny Mallhi
Overall: MEH
The first effort behind the lens from producer-turned-director Sonny Mallhi, Anguish is not a remake of the lousy 1987 film of the same name by Bigas Luna, but instead a sobering possession story that is primarily concerned with working through grief and mental illness hardships. It has some familiar motifs that had been used before and since with stories of departed spirits who are unable to move on and locate a host body to linger in, and Mallhi takes a dour approach that is appropriate for the sincere material, yet also wields nothing unique as far as horror tropes go. These genre-pandering moments are both infrequent and unconvincing, (psyche-outs, jump scares, chase sequences, and an emotionally invisible protagonist who shares little to none of the supernatural turmoil that she is experiencing with others), but Mallhi's script plays the psychological card so prominently that his stylistic be it hackneyed choices seem appropriate. At the same time though, it is clear that Ryan Simpkins is not merely suffering from her own neurodivergent ailments since the otherworldly aspects take center stage, which seems like a missed opportunity to explore how immeasurably more difficult it would be for a teenager on the spectrum to deal with intruding influences from the after life. Mallhi's movie does go into all of this, plus the performances and tone are nothing but consistent, yet it feels both rushed and stuck in the weeds at the same time.
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