Dir - John Adams
Overall: MEH
An ultra moody period piece set relatively soon after the American Civil War, The Hatred is another modest genre movie from independent filmmaker John Adams. Clocking in at just under an hour and starring his daughter and occasional collaborator Zelda, Adams handles the writing and directing solo here and exceeds at one of them while failing miserably at the other. On the plus side, this is extraordinarily photographed with the rural, rugged, cold, outdoor landscape captured in a picturesque manner in every last shot. A handful of dreamlike moments are just as gorgeous, combining with the mostly naturalistic scenery to create an eerie, bleak atmosphere where supernatural revenge runs rampant. Sadly, Adam's dialog is absolutely atrocious though, with all of the lines, (particularly those monologued by Zelda's emotionless orphan), coming off as cliche-ridden, vapid nonsense that can only exists on the pages of pretentious, faux-poetic screenplays which completely do not resemble the way that human beings ever naturally talk. Such was most likely the point to enhance the abnormal narrative, but it comes off much more like the desperate scribblings of a social outcast Goth kid instead of the ethereal Western profoundness that it was likely intended to be.
Dir - Cristóbal León/Joaquín Cociña
Overall: GOOD
To date the only feature-length film from stop-motion animators Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, The Wolf House, (La casa lobo), is an unsettling part fairy tale/part faux-cautionary propaganda film. Shot over the course of five years and based in part on the infamous, fanatically religious, isolated German Colonia Dignidad cult in Chile which operated for decades, it tells the story of Maria; a young woman who flees the sect and ends up living for an undisclosed amount of time in a strange house with two pigs and the narration of a wolf to keep her company. From there, things follow a type of surreal non-logic where Maria's thoughts and imaginations come manifest by the house itself, morphing into a strange co-existence with her animal-turned-human children roommates. The animation style of León and Cociña is persistently fluid; not a single shot is stagnant as both the background and foreground are continually morphing into ever changing images and textures that run the gamut from merely grotesque to bizarro-world disturbing. Even if it had no narrative or sound design, the movie would still be a visual feast of strangeness and a technical triumph. As is though, it makes for a memorable and singular quasi-nightmare.
Dir - Tetsuya Nakashima
Overall: MEH
Japanese filmmaker Tetsuya Nakashima's first foray into supernatural horror It Comes, (Kuru), is a mostly bloated and messy adaptation of Ichi Sawamura's novel Bogiwan Ga, Kuru. Forgoing subtlety and spooky atmosphere for ADD-ridden editing, continuous music that is tonally all over the place, and a new protagonist shift every thirty minutes, it certainly feels its running time while playing out more like an over two hour movie trailer than a proper, immersive cinematic experience. The style is mostly what undoes it and though Nakashima utilized a similar one for his excellent, 2010 psychological thriller Confessions, it makes for a difficult to follow/difficult to take seriously experience here with a story concerning mystical powers and kid-hungry demons. Usually for an otherworldly story such as this to work, some semblance of rules need to be established let alone maintained, but everything here is bulldozed through with underwritten character and half-baked ideas that culminate in a cartoony CGI-fest finale that is about as frightening as Bob Hoskin's musical number in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Since we never get our footing even for a second, the stakes are only vaguely presented and this lack of patience makes the film a big, loud, and boring slog when it is actually presenting itself as just being big and loud.
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