Dir - Alberto Rodríguez
Overall: GOOD
A police procedural thriller boasting strong performances and a nuanced script, writer/director Alberto Rodríguez's Marshland, (La isla mínima), handles its disturbing subject manner respectfully. Coauthored by Rodríguez's frequent collaborator Rafael Cobos, the film is set in 1980, five years after the end of the Francoist Dictatorship whose ripple effects still linger in the small, backwater town in which things are set. The detective team played by Raúl Arévalo and Javier Gutiérrez are far from morally ideal characters, yet faced up against a series of murders, rapes, and tortures committed on teenage girls, the "good guy's" dubious past and police methods are put into a perspective that still paints a troubled playing field where there are no true winners, just those whose ends may justify less horrific means. Largely void of humor, the tone never becomes too overbearing thanks to the sincere presentation which boats nothing but a most naturalistic and grounded aesthetic that is impressively realized. Rodríguez also wisely shies away from any and all exploitative measures and keeps the most unwholesome aspects of his story off screen, making them more psychologically troubling in the process.
Dir - Leo Gabriadze
Overall: MEH
The gimmicky popcorn horror film Unfriended is better than one would expect from such usually forgettable, bottom-barrel garbage tailored to jump scare-craving teenagers, but it is still not without its flaws. Told exclusively through a MacBook screencast where several annoying high-schoolers video chat with each other on the one year anniversary of their friend's suicide which was brought on by a viral video of her being rather embarrassingly drunk to say the least, the story deals exclusively with bullying amongst peers and its psychologically ravaging effects. The young cast does a solid job of portraying their flawed, emotionally immature characters who scream, cry, overreact, and crack jokes at each other's expense in a typically exaggerated manner befitting Hollywood's version of what they think teenagers act like. All of this is forgivable and even borderline interesting from a narrative perspective, but the film drops the ball when it tries to go for shock-inducing violence. Every "kill" in the movie is unintentionally funny and the all-powerful supernatural elements at work become less creepy as everyone on screen does not run out into the streets looking for their parents or something, (anything), that knee-jerk logic would dictate. Nelson Greaves's script makes several attempts to explain such "dumb people in horror movies" malfunctions, but plausibility gets increasingly side-tracked to get to more loud drama and goofy death sequences. A solid B for effort and inventiveness, but that is about it.
Dir - Takashi Miike
Overall: GOOD
Following up the same year's wildly different Over Your Dead Body, Takashi Miike returns with yet another horror entry, adapting the first part of Muneyuki Kaneshiro and Akeji Fujimura's manga As the Gods Kill, (Kami-sama no Iu Tōri). Those venturing in without any information on the source material at their disposal may be a bit lost at the open-ended finale which clearly sets up a sequel that as of yet has not emerged, but there are enough inventively ridiculous set pieces here to delight the uninitiated. Set up as a series of children's games that are controlled by mysterious forces that are either aliens, deities, both, neither, or who knows what, (since no proper origin for such things is given), they all have a violent and demented, "survival of the fittest" slant. This theme of "God's chosen ones" is played throughout as the characters struggle to come to terms with, (or in one of their cases, fully embrace), the situation that they are forced in which results in more tragic casualties as it goes along. At the end of the day though, it is just fun to watch a bunch of high-schoolers try and outsmart a Daruma doll, a Maneki Neko cat, Kokeshi wooden dolls, a white polar bear on a surf board, and Matryoshka dolls from brutally murdering them by way of convoluted, occasionally unclear rules and methods.
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