Dir - John Krasinski
Overall: WOOF
The Office's John Krasinski took on A Quiet Place, working on a spec script before re-doing some of it and ultimately getting his wife Emily Blunt on board. Yet with everyone's powers combined, it is an absolute failure. The premise basically sets up all the pieces for this to be Boo Scares - The Movie. So in utilizing arguably the very, very most despised cliche in all of horror cinema as its main selling point, (big) strike one. As the story continues on its way though, crater-sized plot holes begin sprouting up though. Anyone who can watch this movie without constantly being taken out of it by asking very logical questions like "wait, what?", "wait, why?", "wait, isn't...?:, "wait, I thought...?", and so on and so on is too busy either texting on their phone or eating popcorn. Then to top all of this off is cringe-worthy ending, completely lazy, generic-as-can-be cartoon monsters, and maybe the worst sound design in all of motion picture history. It was clearly meant to be relentless in its construction, but all of that tension-building is simply wasted by, well, every single other thing about it.
Dir - Steven Soderbergh
Overall: GOOD
A filmmaker as prolific as Steven Soderbergh has more than dabbled with some thrillers in his career, but Unsane comes the closest so far to being a bona fide horror movie, be it one without any supernatural elements anywhere. It mostly achieves its objective to be rather heart-racing. From a psychological standpoint, Soderbergh and screenwriters Johnathan Bernstein and James Greer take awhile letting on what is actually happening. Though keeping us in the dark for the first act does not wield any amazing twists or anything later on, it does create the necessary mood to make us ultimately sympathize fully with the plight of Claire Foy's Sawyer Valentini. Foy is rather top-notch here, (the occasional British accent slip notwithstanding), being as helpless, logical, unhinged, and fierce as she needs to be. The script is a bit too forced at times though, with some monologues and character exchanges coming off rather overtly screenplayey. The only real problem with Unsane is in some of the details to the situation that are a bit too unrealistic to buy into. Without getting into spoilers, how those that are fucking up Sawyer's week are managing to get away with it is stretched thin enough to notice some plot holes. Still, for Soderbergh to indulge himself a bit by essentially shooting a B movie on an iPhone 7 Plus, he gets away with it as the student film look and presentation is more interesting than not.
Dir - Ari Aster
Overall: GREAT
It certainly says something positive that several landmark horror movies readily come to mind when viewing Hereditary, another astounding debut, this time from New York filmmaker Ari Aster. Masterfully constructed and anything but a pandering throwback, cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski deserves a standing ovation for his contribution to the film's suffocatingly menacing mood. There are layers to this movie that require several viewings to expose and the deliberate misdirection that Aster utilizes make it as suspenseful as possible while keeping its mystery thoroughly satisfying. A film this dramatically powerful would be a disaster if not for top-notch performances which it has across the board. Far more than she even did in her star making turn in The Sixth Sense, Toni Collette is superb as an emotionally destroyed, mentally damaged mother, yet Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, and Milly Shapiro each rounding out the family are also pitch-perfect in their respected roles. To give the film a few strikes for a single boo scare or a rather standard, contemporary horror soundtrack is probably fair, but so, so much is done exactly right that its status as an instant masterpiece is equally just.
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