(2005)
Dir - Jaume Balagueró
Overall: MEH
While Spanish filmmaker Jaume Balagueró manages to stage a couple unnerving moments in the modestly-budgeted, English-speaking, British co-production Fragile, the end result is detrimentally by-the-books. Everything down to the textbook, understaffed hospital setting, to kids being told by adults to stop talking about the ghosts they keep seeing, to the female protagonist with a personal agenda keeping her involved, to everyone telling that same female protagonist that she is crazy, to the supernatural mystery at the heart of everything, it is just one narrative trope after the other that have been endlessly used in nearly every last movie like this. The scares are equally as predictable, which is not helped by endlessly present, stock horror movie music that only takes a break when one or too loud jumps are of course right around the corner. While this all makes both the story and cinematic presentation unbelievably trite and therefor persistently uninteresting, its a well produced, well photographed film at least. Calista Flockhart turns in a very solid performance as well, though it is ultimately a shame that it is for such a forgettable and generic genre movie.
(2006)
Dir - Christophe Gans
Overall: MEH
French filmmaker Christophe Gans' very earnest adaptation of the first Silent Hill video game, (with noticeable nods to the following two in the series), has some effectively creepy moments and bold ideas, yet it is also unmistakably flawed. Gans was a massive fan of the initial Konami property, aggressively lobbying for the film rights and then spending several years developing the project. He ultimately settled on Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary of all people to contribute on the script while trying to stay as faithful as possible to the source material. On that note, this is another example of two different mediums not necessarily cohabitating together very well. The end result detrimentally feels its length, contains absolutely atrocious dialog, and it all follows a type of video game logic that becomes laughable to those unfamiliar with such things. As far as creating the type of ominous, thoroughly freaky atmosphere that the first handful of Silent Hill games were lauded for, Gans comes about as close as humanly possible to bringing this to the screen. In this regard, the movie is a visually frightening triumph, but all the rusted hell dimensions, blaring sirens, twitching monsters, and Pyramid Heads cannot disguise the predominant shortcomings present almost everywhere else.
(2009)
Dir - Yorgos Lanthimos
Overall: GREAT
Sinisterly disturbed and deliberately impenetrable are adequate attributes to Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth, a movie that is challenging by most conceivable measures. Arthouse cinema in general can often times get lost in its own pretentiousness, where certain films seem to exist for the sheer profoundness they bring to the table. For his third full-length, Lanthimos finds a way to obscure reality from his audience the same way certain characters in it do from their isolated children. The cinematography is frustratingly off, regularly cropping out places and things in the frame that would normally be focused on. The dialog is meticulously puzzling in its clinical delivery so that when emotional moments do occur, they seem more darkly humorous in comparison. Yet the film is neither a comedy or a heavy-handed thought piece on any particular, societal imbalance that is meant to be surreally critiqued. By making everything so obscure and uncomfortably exclusive, Lanthimos presents an unrelenting, alternate world where the human behavior therein can effect the audience in just as unique a number of ways. In other words, different people will undoubtedly come to different conclusions when experiencing it, which is often the kind of response that most good, demanding art will produce.
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