Dir - Alexandre Aja
Overall: GOOD
The latest from French genre filmmaker Alexandre Aja is the claustrophobic sci-fi thriller Oxygen, a movie that manages to bypass its gimmick in a rather engaging way. Premise wise, a character waking up in a mysterious location and spending the entirety of the film trying to unlock the mystery of where they are and how they got there has an aura of familiarity to it, but the gradual unveiling of information here also has a riveting payoff that primarily hinges on Mélanie Laurent's wonderful performance. Virtually the only character on screen, it is a challenging role to be sure and one that she thankfully excels at by making the audience invested in her desperate plight even as both we and her have the same extremely limited amount of knowledge to work with. Aja maintains a literal ticking clock level of suspense and Christie LeBlanc's script is basically one incremental plot twist after the other. A rather tight, polished production all around with some attractive futuristic visuals to boot, it essentially checks off all of the boxes for what one would expect for an enclosed "nightmare in space" movie.
Dir - Edgar Wright
Overall: MEH
Edgar Wright's first direct foray into horror, (forgoing the comedy of his most famous work in Shaun of the Dead), is the dark, bloody, swinging 60s, London love letter Last Night in Soho. Considering that the counter culture drug scene had one of its home bases around said era, it is a clever move to take a psychological approach here that becomes almost overwhelmingly trippy. By the third act in particular, the incessant visions suffered by Thomasin McKenzie are quite exhausting, which is mostly a problem due to the fact that they are also not very frightening. Hallucinations of jittery, obscured zombie creatures mixed with monotonous flashbacks of Anya Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith provide more annoyance than anything. The messy, twist ending also does not really land, coming off a bit bloated. Though the script and horror elements are ultimately underwhelming, Wright's flashy visual aesthetic is rather impressive as he seamlessly weaves his two lead actresses together in an engaging manner with a retro soundtrack that is persistently used to wondrous effect. The cast is all around sufficient as well, with veterans Terrance Stamp and Diana Rigg, (in her final film appearance), turning in performances that are subtle in their disturbing quirkiness. Wright is too good of a filmmaker to drop the ball completely and there are definitely some effective qualities present, but the sum of all of the parts fails to fully elevate it above its flaws.
Dir - Scott Cooper
Overall: MEH
Based off of Nick Antosca's short story "The Quiet Boy" which was published in a 2019 edition of the online magazine Guernica, Antlers is a rather sub-par monster movie. The first foray into horror, (at least from behind the lens), for co-writer and director Scott Cooper, it has a pedestrian presentation and premise of a small town besieged by a torso-mutilating creature. Other tripe details like a stupid school bully, a dark secret locked up in a room in a house, Native American legends, ghostly flashbacks, and an emotionally disconnected teacher with a traumatic past ultimately bonding with an emotionally disconnected child who also has a traumatic past means that there is certainly a lot of familiarity on display. Cooper's direction is sufficient in a standard, point A to point B context, but nothing is done with the well-worn tropes to elevate them anywhere above providing a casual yawn from the audience. On the plus side though, the performances are fine and the atmosphere is consistently drab. Plus the practical effects are rather excellent, benefiting further by having the monstrous wendigo kept primarily unlit and ergo, more mysterious. Too bad that the film's narrative is far too boring and half-baked to engage with, making the whole far more forgettable than anything else.
No comments:
Post a Comment