Moana (2016)

The Disney formula of a girl experiencing the call to adventure is usually made more interesting by a twist on the basic premise. In Mulan, Fa Mulan has to pretend to be a boy. In Tangled, Rapunzel shares protagonist duties with Flynn; in Frozen, Anna and Elsa share protagonist duties, and one has to rescue the other after she isolates herself for being too dangerous (and almost becomes the film’s antagonist), while a character who seems like the love interest turns out to be the real antagonist, and the true love story is between two sisters. A similar villainous inversion features in Beauty and the Beast, where Beast is set up as an antagonist and becomes the love interest, flipping the story from one of resistance in imprisonment to finding understanding beyond superficial barriers.

Where other Disney princess films have tried to liven up the rigid formula with twists and variations, Moana slavishly follows it to a T, presumably hoping its colourful setting will compensate for its total lack of creativity. The film is predictable from beginning to end, far more so than even other Disney princess features – it doesn’t even attempt to vary the little things. Its largest departure from the predictable is an absence – unlike previous pets/mascots which usually had some kind of personality, Moana’s pet is a chicken who is so stupid it can’t even be trusted to eat food or stay away from the ocean, constantly trying to peck at and swallow stones or walking off cliffs. Its total lack of a brain is the joke. The laziness of this detail sums up the film in microcosm.

Moana herself is charming, in a prefabricated sort of way. She is introduced as capable and determined, having already become accomplished enough to be considered a chief of the tribe at 16. While more sensible films would leave some room for development or at least introduce a flaw, Moana is perfect from the start. She just doesn’t know how to sail, and she learns that over five minutes’ screen time. It’s a testament to Auli'i Cravalho’s performance as well as proof of how starved we are for capable, independent female protagonists that she remains likeable despite being utterly-middle-of-the-road: nice enough, brave enough, kind enough, smart enough. If you mapped her traits onto a polygon of numbered lines, like an RPG character, she’d be a perfect circle: totally capable and not at all interesting.

Although Dwayne Johnson can usually be counted on for outsize charisma, his egomaniac demi-god Maui is a mixed bag, owing to the inconsistent characterisation of a script which can’t decide whether he’s an amoral antihero who’ll use Moana as monster-bait to get back his magical fishhook, or a rogue with a heart of gold who’ll go along with her on her prospective suicide mission and even teach her to sail. Adding to the way he bounces between the two extremes is a perfunctory attempt at deepening his characterisation with the sombre revelation that he was abandoned by his parents – despite being the sort of devastating fact that would require years of therapy to work through, the depression Maui falls into is cured by a spirited pep talk from Moana.

This refusal to seriously deal with anything that might be remotely negative or involve conflict is typical of Moana, which is written to have as many triumphant shots of Moana sailing forward with joyous music playing is possible, and to minimise any sign that she might have flaws or weaknesses. Once Maui obligatorily storms off and leaves Moana hopeless, and she experiences her dark night of the soul and doubts her ability to be the Chosen One and save the world, her heroic resolve is found and reaffirmed within two minutes. At a pivotal early moment in the film, a beloved family member dies, and as her spirit moves through the sea to lift Moana’s boat, not a single moment is spared on tears or a recognition of the fact that Moana’s loved one is dead: we transition instantly to the same Polynesian choir harmonies and dramatic shots of Moana sailing to her uninteresting destiny. Consider how Frozen could spend multiple songs on the conflict between Anna and Elsa; consider that “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” is a whole song dedicated to their separation and loneliness. How much more emotionally earned and heartfelt is the triumphant climax for this time spent on establishing the sadness and the heartbreak? But Moana doesn’t want to do the work. The climax is presented as a meaningful moment, as if it's bring some theme to fruition about "remembering who you are" and love conquering hate and heartlessness, but the script never lays the groundwork to develop any of those themes, so it just comes off as weird and incongruous.

Lin Manuel-Miranda, evidently exhausted from Hamilton, produces an uninspiring soundtrack whose sole highlight is thankfully also the main theme, Moana’s “How Far I’ll Go” – the rest is unfunny riffs on demigod sidekick Maui’s egomania (“You’re Welcome”) that will make you nostalgic for “Gaston”, the ridiculous novelty character spotlight song “Shiny”, and admittedly-decent Polynesian vocal harmonies for the ancestral song, “We Know the Way”.

While the script may be lazy and uninspiring, and the music little better, half of Moana’s crew have clearly put in the work – the animators. Full of gorgeously detailed and beautifully-rendered undersea locations, storms, lava-monster battles, and verdant islands, Moana is a visual delight. Since acquiring Pixar, Disney can count on always impressing the viewer with the look of the film – an ideal marriage of the two companies can produce something heartfelt, with universal archetypes used in the service of a personal and moving story, like Frozen. When one half of the team slacks off, you wind up with the gorgeous-but-empty Moana.

Doctor Strange (2016)

Can you still call Doctor Strange the Marvel film with the highest potential for weirdness after they adapted Guardians of the Galaxy? The latter definitely seemed like more of a gamble when it was coming out, but the source material of GotG has always been relatively conventional compared to the cosmic psychedelia of the Doctor’s adventures. Taken at face value, Steve Ditko’s acid-trip visuals and the hokey mysticism of Strange’s spells and costume seem like a harder sell to the current generation of filmgoers. There’s no longer much tolerance for fantasy campiness; Thor was reinvented as an alien for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the more magical elements of The Dark World (elves, for god’s sake) were drowned in pseudoscientific babble to make them sound more acceptable. These days, magic in movies is presented with the veneer of science to make it go down easier; just look at Neil DeGrasse Tyson trying to pretend Interstellar’s space bookcase made scientific sense.

So, while all that comic book weirdness is crushed into a recognisable hero’s journey formula, you have to give Doctor Strange some credit for showing us levitating cloaks, mandala-type mystical shields, and wizards tearing open fiery portals in the air, even if the bulk of the magic shown looks like the city-rearrangement scene from Inception on crack. It might not be as wacky as a battle between magicians should be, but it’s spectacular viewing – Strange is easily the best-looking Marvel film, and the first to really push the envelope with special effects instead of just using them to make traditional superhero action look more real; the dizzying abstraction of its city-warping battles actually makes iMAX worth the money.

As front-loading the verdict with praise of its special effects might imply, there’s not much more to Doctor Strange than its looks. Stephen Strange is pricklier and more obviously arrogant than his narrative cousin, Tony Stark: they both had hubris, and in both cases, it was shattered by a wound which left them helpless. But while Tony is too charismatic to stay down for long or not make it a part of his big comeback story, Stephen is more fragile, more broken. Some of the best character work in a Marvel origin film comes from the genuinely upsetting scenes post-accident when Stephen frantically bankrupts himself trying to heal his now-useless surgeon’s hands, and becomes a bitter wreck, driving away his only friend – Rachel McAdams in (even for Marvel) an unusually slight love interest role. But all that drama, where Benedict Cumberbatch’s gift for picturesque brooding and sneering hatred is well-used, comes to an end once he goes on his mystical quest and finds the cure: magic.

What follows then is pretty typical. Strange proves a highly talented student after some minor struggles, is inducted into a secret society which protects the world, struggles with the choice of accepting his weighty responsibilities, is thrust into battle against the villain (who is a version of himself, in the most boring Marvel tradition, a hubristic magician), etc. The best thing to say about the second half of the film is that the fight scenes are far more interesting than usual and the expected action climax is neatly subverted. Aside from that, it’s largely just a grievous waste of Mads Mikkelsen and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One is briskly quirky in a way that works rather than being annoying, but her character could be far more intriguing than it is.

Ultimately, Doctor Strange is another competently-made Marvel product. It would be nice if they aimed higher, but it’s a well-made and passable film, which will delight a lot of niche fans even if it disappoints those looking for the more complex drama of something like Triumph and Torment. As a another Marvel installment, it’s promising: the visuals are superb and the finale is subversive and inventive, suggesting that good things are ahead.

Rogue One (2016)

Hopefully the final Star Wars film which is centred around the Death Star or its copies, Rogue One turns a tired premise into a solid sci-fi action film which improves in many ways on The Force Awakens, though it lacks the reboot's charm.

Set just days before the beginning of A New Hope, the film is the untold story of how the Rebel Alliance discovered the fatal flaw in the Death Star. What was an unexplained and convenient cliché in the original film is cleverly repurposed as the sacrifice of a rebel scientist, Galen Erso, who leaves behind his family and his ideals to work on the genocidal weapon, knowing only he will be committed enough to sabotage it and give the rebels a chance.

Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla film found a mixed reception for going easy on the monster fights and the spectacle and focusing too much on generic audience stand-ins without any unique personality or characterisation, like the protagonist played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson. But it had notable strengths, including wonderful visuals – dramatic contrasts of light and dark - and an awe-inspiring sense of scale. Godzilla never looked more terrifying and elemental than when Edwards used the huge disturbances caused by his passing (the aircraft carriers overturned by waves when he swam underneath them) to suggest unfathomable power.

Edwards brings those talents to Rogue One in spectacular fashion, staging the greatest space battle ever seen in a Star Wars film as well as the greatest land-battles. The traditional three-part finale is pulled off especially well, with the Alliance fighting the Empire in orbit above an imperial planet, while rebel troops re-enact the Normandy landings against Stormtroopers on the ground, and the protagonists infiltrate the imperial complex to find the Death Star plans. The battles are thrilling and unsparingly vicious, with a rawness to the violence that Star Wars previously lacked.

Unfortunately, Rogue One also shares some flaws with Edwards’ previous film, most notably its uninteresting characterisation. Felicity Jones is steely as Jyn Erso, but flips inconsistently from an anti-hero who’s out for herself and doesn’t care about the Rebellion’s ideals to a shining-eyed Joan of Arc who makes stilted speeches about hope and fighting on, seemingly without cause. Rather than an arc, she has two points of personal development with nothing connecting them. Diego Luna is convincingly rugged as Cassian Andor, a ruthless Rebel black ops captain, but he can’t sell the shift his character makes from cold-eyed assassin to sentimentalist because there’s no explanation for it in the script.

The cast is rounded out by bit-part ensemble roles for Donnie Yen (the stereotypical Asian monk with an enigmatic attitude and a Force fixation), Riz Ahmed (as a defected Imperial pilot who spends most of the movie too shellshocked to have a personality), and Forrest Whittaker as a extremist renegade rebel cyborg, used by the script to perfunctorily imply what happens if you go too far for revenge. Ben Mendelsohn plays the villain, Director Krennic, commanding officer of the Death Star, mostly notable for being the least threatening major Star Wars villain – a careerist bureaucrat with big dreams of being noticed by the Emperor. All of these actors could – and have – anchored better films on their own, playing complex and compelling characters. Here, they are each given a quirk or two in place of backstory or independent motivation (except for Mendelsohn, whose motivation is just boring), and sent their separate ways – their performances are appropriately lackluster. Compared to the blazing charisma of Oscar Isaac’s Poe Dameron, the crew of Rogue One is no more eye-catching than the drab earth tones that make up half the film’s colour palette.

The film’s plot can best be summed up as competent. There are no overt contrivances and events follow in a logical chain of cause and effect, straightforwardly moving from the Rebellion’s attempts to contact Galen Erso to the Empire cleaning house once the Death Star has been completed to Rogue One’s assault on the imperial base. If this sounds like grudging praise, it’s because the film never once surprises or shocks you: it just moves linearly towards the climax. Nevertheless, since the plot isn’t copied minute-by-minute from another film (as with The Force Awakens), its predictability is not as much of a blemish. The script has little to recommend it – aside from the wonderfully sarcastic K-2SO, a reprogrammed Imperial enforcer droid with no tact and a lot of repressed violence, there’s little amusement to be had, and the dialogue lacks the slightly overwritten, dramatic feel that made the original trilogy so quotable.

This is a deliberate choice. The tone of Rogue One is sombre and businesslike, aiming for a war movie more than the pulpy goodness of the original Star Wars films or episode VII. Although the blaring and distracting Michael Giacchino score does its best to replicate John Williams, the film just barely feels like Star Wars – which isn’t all bad. At its best, the emphasis on sacrifice and on the value of living and dying for an ideal makes it as profound as the single strongest moment in the entire series – Luke’s affirmation at the climax of Return of the Jedi (“I am a Jedi, like my father before me”). Rogue One is the rare blockbuster which isn’t afraid to kill off its characters instead of finding contrived ways to let them survive inescapable doom, which gives it weight and a well-earned meaningfulness. Although it has a weak first half and the characters are nothing to write home about, the climax fully redeems it: it’s arguably the strongest Star Wars film since The Empire Strikes Back.

Mustang (2015)

Five sisters in conservative, rural Turkey find the net of tradition closing around them in this eloquent and gorgeous debut feature from Deniz Gamze Ergüven. After they’re seen playing with boys at the beach, a nosy neighbour tells their family, inciting patriarchal fears about their marriageability and their sexual corruption. An early scene features them being taken to the doctor so he can confirm that their hymens are intact and they remain virgins – the matter-of-fact acceptance of this violation by all involved is chilling.

There is a loose age cluster of three older sisters – the liberated Sonay, the resigned and apathetic Selma, the impish and rebellious Ecce – and two younger sisters – Nur and Lale, who serves as the narrator and offers a perspective by turns childish and curiously cynical and penetrating. Regardless of the age gap, they’re united in a way which seems to transcend their individual identities – they blur together in dreamy montages featuring them packed into a single bedroom, enjoying a playful physical closeness, one soul in five bodies. The sisters are orphans, raised by their grandmother and living under the roof of a domineering, violent uncle, the patriarch Erol. They have been given free rein by their grandmother rather than routinely crushed into obedience, which makes them unused to the sudden strictures of barred windows, high walls, and the shapeless dresses – denounced by Lale as excrement-coloured– they’re made to wear to preserve their modesty.

For all that the social issues make the film sound preachy or political, Mustang’s ideological ambitions never interfere with its art. Its explorations of masculine possessiveness and insecurity are woven seamlessly into the narrative – when Selma’s wedding night doesn’t result in the blood-stained sheet which is prized by the husband’s family as (disturbingly medieval) proof of a virgin wife, her husband suspects he’s been duped and takes her to the hospital so the doctor can inspect her for the second time. A still, minimalist shot takes in Selma lying on the berth with a sort of impassive discomfort, as the doctor probes off-screen. Her hymen was present all along – her husband simply couldn’t penetrate it. It’s an elegant comment on how the girls have been objectified and dehumanised to assuage the pride of weak men.

While those elements of society are given their just – and stomach-turning – representation, Mustang doesn’t dwell on misery. The girls are vibrantly alive, finding ways around paranoid familial monitoring, high walls, and forced marriages. Not all of them make it – but they rarely resign. A particularly beautiful sequence has them escape from the house to go to a football match in Istanbul. When they wind up appearing on TV as part of the crowd, their grandmother and their aunts must scramble to prevent their uncle and the other men from seeing, which leads to a deliciously comic solution. There’s an interesting distinction between the gentler, more discreet tactics used by the women and the simple violence of the uncle, Erol. Their scramble to save the girls is a rare moment of female solidarity across generations. But when the girls return from the match, it’s their grandmother who has the house walls raised and locked gates installed. She’s the one who knows that Erol is sexually abusive, but doesn’t go to the police. She’s the one who has them married off, happily or otherwise. Even the women are complicit in the oppression of their nieces and granddaughters.

While Mustang occasionally delves into montage, it's for the most part a naturalistic film (albeit with beautiful, saturated cinematography which gives it a hallucinatory shimmer), stringing together incidents of cause and effect, sibling banter, and vignettes of household routines. The life of the sisters is neither all misery nor the happy childhood it should be. Being trapped in their situation, they accept the presence of inequality and oppression without fully reconciling themselves to it. There’s no thesis-statement scene where they have a philosophical debate over the rights of women with their elders – luckily for Erol, who could have scarcely moved beyond the repellent platitudes which come from his educational TV programs (‘Women are too bold nowadays – where are the women who blush when men look at them?’) if challenged on the point. The film’s retort to this imprisonment is made ably by taking the perspective of the sisters and showing them both for the blossoming young women and the playful children they are. In its world, the former must be stifled – the latter robbed of innocence. Thankfully, though Mustang is unsparing in its depiction of the realities of life as a young girl in backwater Turkey, it has the heart to give the girls some freedom. 

The Nice Guys (2016)

Between the mismatched pair of investigators, the convoluted criminal conspiracy, the steadily-rising death toll, and the LA setting, it’s obvious that Shane Black is repeating himself with The Nice Guys, and his directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a hard act to follow. But with an upgraded central pair of Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling, and an even more quip-heavy script, Black pulls it off – and then some.

Holland March (Gosling) is a private investigator ripping off old ladies to make the rent on his ostentatious palm-fronted house. Jackson Healy (Crowe) is an enforcer who beats people up for a fee – bad people, usually, like a 70s version of pre-superpowers Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool. They collide when March goes looking for the wrong girl – Amelia – who hires Healy to break his arm and warn him off. After couple of semi-competent henchmen pressure Healy to give up Amelia’s location, he teams up with a very reluctant March to figure out what’s going on, and why everyone around Amelia keeps dying.  

While the plot lacks the elegance and the final emotional gut-punch of Kiss Kiss, the film more than makes up for that with sheer entertainment. Crowe and Gosling are an even more delightful comic pair than Downey and Kilmer, because while the latter two had a largely-stable dynamic of Downey being a bumbling idiot and Kilmer insulting him, Crowe and Gosling take turns to be the smart one. Gosling’s alcoholic private eye Holland March is likeable in spite of himself – underneath his cowardice and basic lack of morals, there’s a sort of scrappy underdog cleverness which resembles the famous fictional private eyes of old, and his honest terror at the chaos around him adds an audience-surrogate aspect to his charms. Crowe is largely relegated to playing the straight man as the bemused enforcer Jackson Healy, but March is so vibrant as a character that Healy doesn’t need to do more than stare in disbelief at his screw-ups to get a laugh.

The Nice Guys has a hilariously wacky plot featuring a porn film that’s secretly an environmental expose about car pollution, and auto manufacturers trying to suppress it, but it never quite comes together into a sensible, coherent whole. The villains are similarly unengaging – they either follow in the tradition of Iron Man 3’s amusingly self-aware henchmen or play stone-faced killing machines. The most enjoyment to be had out of them is either watching their incredulity when our heroes – for want of a better word – keep making fools of themselves.

Nevertheless, the opulent excesses of 70s porn mogul’s mansions and five star hotels being recreated in full, the joke-a-minute pace of the script, the unusual amount of slapstick and inventive physical comedy, and incredibly weird – but hilarious – divergences involving a giant fly and Richard Nixon, all signal that Shane Black had the time of his life directing this film. His enthusiasm is contagious. 

And while the film’s delights are mostly on the surface, Angourie Rice as March’s precocious 13-year-old daughter Holly is the film’s emotional center, in a superb performance. At one point, March asks her: “Give it to me straight. Am I a bad person?” and she agrees with zero hesitation. Their dynamic is almost one of equals, with Holly more a sort of long-suffering little sister than a daughter. At one point, fed up with March’s apathy and alcoholism, she explodes at him, and you can’t help but wince at her cuttingly honest anger and disappointment. If the film has any emotional arc, it’s about Holland learning to live up to his daughter’s expectations. That might be clichéd, but like everything else about The Nice Guys, all you have to do is put the right actors in and give them a good enough script - and it works great. It might the most entertaining film of the year so far.

A Bittersweet Life (2005)

A Korean gangster, Kim Sun-woo, is told to shadow his boss’s girlfriend to find out if she’s unfaithful. If she is, he must execute her and the man she’s with. When Sun-woo can’t go through with it, his life gets complicated.

Sun-woo is presented to us as the epitome of professionalism, a man equally comfortable while obsequiously pouring drinks for his boss and while beating up thugs from a rival organisation. Early long shots that follow him gliding through the gleaming, symmetrical decor of the hotel owned by his organisation underscore the impression of his infallibility. The camera moves from the visitor’s areas to ramshackle brick service corridors with leaking ceilings, which I took to mean little more than that the Korean mob’s respectable front hides a grubby interior. But it seems to replicate the experience of watching A Bittersweet Life, too.

The first twenty minutes of the film are typical to a fault, introducing Sun-woo, his boss, the task that’s set to him, with room for action scenes and the first blush of attraction between him and his boss’s mistress, Hee-soo. Present too is the definite implication of infidelity – he doesn’t yet have proof, but it’s almost certain that he’s eventually going to have to kill her. In this respect, the film’s conflict plays out fairly predictably. What’s odd is its tone.

The first sign that I wasn’t watching something by-the-numbers (if very well-made) came with the introduction of the loathsome Baek, the employer of the thugs Sun-woo casually dispatched. He’s not happy. He calls Sun-woo, who’s apathetic, telling him to come to the hotel and speak to him in person if he has a problem, then hanging up. What follows is an odd mixture of comedy and brutality, as Baek snatches the handle of the corded phone away when one of his henchmen tries to take it and redial. The cord detaches from the phone, rendering it useless. It’s a neat gag, and the henchman can’t help but giggle. The psychopathic Baek explodes, throws the phone at him, comes around the desk, and uses the phone to beat him till we hear the wet thump of flesh and bone rupturing. He can't use a phone with bloody hands, so another henchman flips open a phone and puts it to his ear without having dialed anyone. Baek is incensed to the point of giving up entirely, cursing at his incompetent staff before telling the man who to call.

That dual sense of comedy and brutality pervades A Bittersweet Life. Scenes which would be tiresome if played straight, with Sun-woo as an invincible action hero killing his way through the mob, become arresting, tense, and amusing as they're played to maximise the bumbling of all involved. Sun-woo’s veneer of urbane unflappability is shattered when his boss finds out he didn’t kill the unfaithful girlfriend, and he’s brutalised and brought low in surprisingly pathetic ways. From then on he’s less the dangerous gangster we saw early on then a sort of scrappy, miserable underdog, like a hard-boiled PI on the downslope of one of his stories, taking beating after beating while trying to reach the truth. The film has the familiar skeleton of a revenge narrative – our hero trying to get even with the boss who betrayed him – but engagingly subversive execution which keeps it from ever getting boring.

A Bittersweet Life begins and ends with two pieces of sappy Zen wisdom. A disciple sees a tree moving in the wind and asks his master what moves. “Neither the wind nor the branches move, it is your heart and mind”, his master says. Later, the same disciple awakens from a dream, sobbing, and says he cries even though it was a good dream, because he knew it was too good to ever come true. I’m not sure those extracts are appropriate – the film’s subversively comic approach and its casual brutality seems to work against their melodramatic, faux-profound nature, even as the occasionally-overwrought weeping violins of the soundtrack and Lee Byung-hun’s moving performance as Sun-woo justify their inclusion. The film seems torn between Fargo-esque black comedy and an urge to romanticise its subject matter. But even if it’s not perfectly-realised, it’s certainly worth a look.

Anthony Jeselnik: Thoughts and Prayers (2015)

When you come to an Anthony Jeselnik show, you know what you’re going to get. He’s become famous as a shock comedian who’ll joke about everything from dead babies to national tragedies. That can be a problem. It's hard to surprise people into laughing if they're prepared for everything. He gets pigeonholed as someone with a shock-value gimmick, and if that was true, he'd have flamed out a long time ago. But there’s a lot more to his technique than getting laughs out of saying what you’re not “allowed” to say.

Here’s an example. He opens Thoughts and Prayers with this joke, after the usual region-specific spiel (here, it’s in San Francisco) about how he loves being in wherever-he-is.

“Got to walk around a little bit today. Saw a baby.”

Pause. The audience is laughing in anticipation. This is one layer – for someone else, seeing a baby might just be nice. But they’re anticipating the sick twist.

“Saw a baby locked inside the back of a hot car. So it’s been a great day. Love that.”

Pause. They’re cheering. This is what they expected: I saw a baby – the baby was dying, I enjoyed that. Is that the whole joke? But then:

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a monster. I tried to help the baby. Tried to throw a rock through the window.”

Pause. More laughter. This is the escalation of the original joke: I tried to help it, by probably killing it with a rock. He’s piling on. Is this the whole joke?

Wait:

“Window was down.”

They erupt. He set it up, hit the punchline – perfect delivery – then doubled down on the punchline, then added yet another twist. Epilogue:

“Ruined that baby’s whole weekend. It was worth it.”

That’s Jeselnik’s solution to an audience who thinks they know where you’re going. It’s not as simple as just extending the jokes. It’s about making the expected become unexpected, through framing. It’s about misdirection. Anthony Jeselnik is probably better at misdirection than any other comedian right now. That joke isn’t even in the top 10 jokes from that special. It’s just a warm-up, so I felt comfortable spoiling it because it demonstrates his technique. Regardless of your attitude to his material, you have to appreciate his craftsmanship. He keeps pulling the rug out from under the audience, in almost every joke, and it magnifies the impact.

There’s an inherent self-reflexivity to Jeselnik’s act that other comedians with more normal material don’t have, or need. Throughout Thoughts and Prayers, he comments on how the crowd is reacting to each joke. Right after the baby-in-the-car joke, he throws out another offensive one. Great delivery, great misdirection – everyone erupts. I won’t spoil it. Point is, after it, comes an aside:

“See, that joke, that joke is a test. To see if you guys are cool or not. That thing about the baby in the car, that’s just me clearing my throat. If you laugh at that joke, whole show goes great.”

Getting the audience into that cosy space of mutual acceptance is gratifying for them, but Jeselnik’s act has sharp edges and a constant need for surprise and a slight discomfort. So this isn’t a ceasefire. If most comedy acts are the performer and the audience laughing together, Jeselnik’s is the performer vs. the audience. He makes them laugh even when they’d rather not. People laugh while covering their eyes in amused shame, while shaking their heads in half-hearted negation. Which is why the next joke is immediately prefaced with: “This next joke is a test to see how cool you are”. And so it continues, Jeselnik letting them get comfortable before shocking them again. It’s a masterful, rhythmic manipulation of the audience.

Regardless of his technique, jokes which are getting laughs from violating established morality only work for as long as you’re still in a mental space where you’re clinging to that morality. So after about 15 minutes of the act, just when you’re getting used to it, the jokes change – less dead babies and rape, more subversion, more off-the-wall misdirection. From relatively short one-liners to stories. And then back again. The set concludes with 18 minutes of Jeselnik getting real, talking about his experiences as a ‘controversial’ comedian and how Comedy Central tried to control his show. That’s probably the best part – it’s just as funny as the rest, but the ironic distance he keeps from the audience has shrunk. He’s almost confiding. And what he has to say is honest and occasionally even profound. Plus, he ends on maybe the single best joke in the whole special, an act of misdirection which required a solid 5-6 minutes of setting-up. How real was he being? Who cares? 

Anthony Jeselnik: Thoughts and Prayers is on Netflix. 

Thoughts on the Preacher pilot

AMC’s Preacher pilot has an impossible task. It’s trying to adapt one of the most profane, sexually transgressive, and violent comics of all time as a TV show. Putting it on basic cable raises the bar for what you’re allowed to show, but clearly nowhere near enough. Preacher (the comic) was more defined by its willingness to go there than almost any work of fiction I’ve ever seen – which isn’t to say it was nothing but shock value, just that the constant swearing, twisted sexuality, near-total hostility to religion, and graphic violence gave it an essential flavour. It was anarchic and hilarious, but it was also self-aware, dramatically compelling, and essentially idealistic in the way of a traditional Western. Plus, it had Odin Quincannon molesting a giant doll made of meat.

Watching the pilot gives you an idea of the precise restrictions under which the show’s operating. There’s plenty of gore, delivered with an early Peter Jackson splatter-film enthusiasm, as if it’s trying to compensate for something. A man bursts into a shower of blood and meat in the first five minutes. Jesse Custer breaks another man’s arm and bone peeks out. Cassidy (the immortal vampire) jumps out of a plane and lands with a splat that disgorges his intestines. It’s trying, in a way which makes the communal reluctance to swear amusing.

Less amusing and more irritating is the show’s sanitisation of Preacher’s full-throated contempt for religion. A running joke about people vandalising a church sign is all that remains. It’s been replaced with a dime-a-dozen story of a man who can’t hear God speak to him anymore and is losing his faith (Jesse Custer) deciding to renew his commitment to his calling. If you’ve read the source material, where Jesse was forced to become a preacher after over a decade of physical and psychological abuse, and it was never framed as anything other than a damaging choice, the show’s take on this storyline can’t be anything but a perversion. I can see why they’ve chosen to go this route – they’re likely afraid of alienating religious demographics or garnering bad press by faithfully adapting a story where a disillusioned preacher is trying to hunt down God to make him pay for the misery of his creation.

Setting aside its divergences from the comic, the show’s pilot has a bigger problem – it isn’t particularly good. There are a lot of imaginative stylistic flourishes (my favourite being a match cut from Cassidy jumping out of a plane to ketchup splatting on a plate) , but it’s long on style, short on content. Jesse is morose and depressed in an inert, dramatically uninteresting way. He was involved in some kind of criminal enterprise with Tulip, and she’s trying to bring him back for the age-old One Last Job. He’s become a preacher because he made a promise to his dad, just before his dad was shot. He mostly sits around, drinks, and once beats up an abusive husband. The town of Annville is fodder for achingly contemporary jokes about replacing politically incorrect sports mascots and the slippery slopes of Southern prejudice. It’s depressingly by-the-numbers.

Getting away from Jesse, the show’s versions of Cassidy and Tulip offer more entertainment, if not more originality. Cassidy being ambushed by a crusader cult suggests there’s going to be a larger mythology built around his vampirism than there was in the comic, which is a smart move. Tulip is so hyper-competent while MacGyver-ing an impromptu rocket launcher out of cans, moonshine, and fertiliser – recruiting a boy and a girl to help her and doling out nuggets of feminist wisdom – that it becomes funny. But at least she’s doing something, until she comes to Annville and is reduced to waiting around for Jesse to wise up and join her, while trying to persuade him with such original non-tautologies as ‘We did what we did. We are who we are, and that’s it, you know?’ The unengaging, morose faux-drama of their reunion is so far away from its precursor in the comic – which had an electric charge of resentment and latent desire – that it’s almost painful to watch. 

The occasional flashes of humour and creativity, and the competent action sequences mean that it’ll likely be well-received – I can see it already is – and it’s mildly entertaining. Still, when you’re adapting one of the most uproariously entertaining comics of all time, that’s a depressingly mediocre outcome. It's nowhere as awful either on its own, or for how it bastardises the source material, as NBC's Constantine or Fox's Lucifer (the ultimate example of a great Vertigo comic being turned into generic network fodder), and in that respect it represents an improvement on the trend. But my advice is, read the comic instead. 

Green Room (2015)

When people wind up in violent situations, they don’t react with the steely competence of most Hollywood action movie protagonists. They freak out, they mess up, and they pay for it. Which isn’t to say that they can’t make the right choice – but sometimes you can make the smart plays and still wind up dead. That’s how it is in Green Room. A hardcore punk band playing a skinhead venue stumbles onto a murder scene, and the people who run the club can’t afford witnesses. Trapped and barricaded in the green room, the pressure-cooker situation gets worse and worse.

Jeremy Saulnier’s last film, Blue Ruin, subverted revenge-pulp movies by making the avenger a soft-spoken drifter unused to violence. His incompetence, combined with Saulnier’s immaculate sense of timing, lent every scene razor-edge suspense as he blundered through murder attempts – his own, and those made by others on him. Early on, the protagonist got a shave and got cleaned up – the inscrutable, wild-man drifter beard went, revealing Macon Blair’s mild features – and from then on we processed his actions not as the work of a crazed outsider, but as deliberate and premeditated violence being carried out by someone who looked like your accountant. A telling line from his sister reflected this shift: ‘I'd forgive you if you were crazy, but you're not. You're weak.’ It was his choice to enter the downward spiral of vengeance.

There is no such deeper goal in Green Room; its pleasures are entirely on the surface, but they are many. Visceral, horrifying gore mocks the clean, aestheticized wounds of typical action movies. The villains aren’t blustering or crazy, despite their Neo-Nazi leanings. They have their interests, and they go about protecting them with a chilling, deliberate efficiency – Patrick Stewart is underused, but excellent as the owner of the club and leader of the skinheads, marshalling his troops to flush out the band with all the resources at their disposal. There’s a surprising amount of procedural detail – ‘soldiers’ wear red laces, they run a dog-fighting ring so the dogs can be used as weapons here, police reports of a stabbing can be fobbed off by finding two willing skinheads and having one stab the other and go off with the police for it.

The painstaking details make the situation tangible and immediate. The green room has been built so that there’s nothing but solid brick past the ceiling and the four walls. How do they break out? How do they overpower the lumbering doorman who’s holding a gun on them? Following the changing calculus of the situation, weighing up their options for survival, and trying to figure out what they (and the skinheads) will do next is as much part of Green Room’s fun as the almost-unbearable suspense and gruesome violence, as well as the black comedy which arises from blunders and mishaps as each side does their best to kill the other.

The eventual shift from siege movie to slasher movie spoiled my enjoyment a little, bringing some of the old clichés into a movie which was enormously refreshing for its realism and internal coherence, but it’s still a superb genre piece – nasty, intense fun.

Son of Saul (2015)

How do you make an honest film about the Holocaust? You need to communicate the scale of the tragedy, depict the dehumanising machinery which carried it out, balance the banality and enormity of its evil, and – if you’re making a drama, not a documentary – do it all in one story. Your protagonist needs to stay alive. The victims of the Holocaust who stayed alive were the sonderkommando – conscripts who participated unwillingly, in the process of herding Jewish prisoners into the gas chambers and getting rid of all evidence of their existence, from their discarded clothes to their corpses to the bloodstains, so the next batch could be killed in the same way. They bore witness to all of it and lived – for a time.

Son of Saul follows two days in the life of Saul, a sonderkommando who discovers a boy in the gas chamber who isn’t quite dead. The boy is taken away and quietly strangled by a Nazi doctor. For the entirety of the long shot that begins the film, Saul has been in shallow focus, the background intentionally blurred, and the camera has doggedly followed him so we can absorb the zombie-like blankness of his creased, ash-covered face. His detachment is a necessity. But when the boy is strangled, he looks back and it slips. It was his son.

Saul tries to find a way to give him a decent burial. The film is largely consumed with his effort to secure his son’s body (the doctors want it for an autopsy), find a rabbi who can say the Kaddish, and find a burial place. It’s poignant and futile. Even those around him – Abraham, the sonderkommando rabbi – tell him to let it go, inured to brutal death and unceremonious cremation, but Saul will not be moved. All along, Abraham and others are organising a rebellion, which quietly goes on in the blurred background of the long shots of Saul moving feverishly through Auschwitz.

The film is pitched precisely in order to show the truth without exploiting or offering false redemption. Saul’s son is already dead. It’s understood what he wants to do will change nothing. Even in his newfound agitation, he retains the glassy blankness of shellshock, rather than beating his breast or sobbing. He never stops moving, and so the horrors of the camp become visible around him – the edges of the frame reveal corpses stacked like firewood, pools of blood being methodically mopped up to maintain the illusion that the gas chamber is a shower room. The camera does not move through the wall to watching people dying, although it could have mined horror from the sight – it sticks with Saul, who stands by the iron doors as the frenzied banging of the people inside gradually slows and stops. We all know what happened. The suggestion is as effective as depiction, and it offers some dignity. There is no manipulative orchestral soundtrack, only the diegetic sounds of a concentration camp.

The film is an unrelenting experience, owing to its subject matter, its spare presentation of long tracking shots focused on Saul’s hollowed face, the chaotic melees of prisoners unloading and firefights, and owing to the purpose which pushes it forward. Abraham, who needs Saul to do his part in the sonderkommando rebellion, tells him to stop – the boy wasn’t even his son. It might be the case, but what drives Saul has become about more than family ties – he is trying to do a kindness which is all the more meaningful because it’s futile, amidst endless death and desecration. The boy’s death should be recognised. It should affect someone. It should matter.

The narrow scope of Son of Saul suggests the enormity of the holocaust in the same way that the claustrophobic framing lets the atrocity seep in at the edges, sparing us the full sight without letting us ignore it. In the routine of Saul’s day – scrubbing away blood, digging mass graves, throwing crematorium ash into the river – we see the massive organisational effort behind the Nazi attempt to not only kill the Jewish people, but to erase them as if they had never existed. Against all that, Saul seems heartbreakingly quixotic, an impression at odds with the studied blankness of his demeanour. He is all the more poignant because he doesn’t seem capable of caring, and yet he does, to the exclusion of everything, including survival.  

The sonderkommando were not allowed to die. They had to facilitate the deaths of their kin instead. All they could do was bear witness. Son of Saul bears witness. It’s not only gripping, but deeply meaningful, expressing a unified purposed in its story, performances, and filmmaking – a stunning achievement from first-time director László Nemes. Not a film you’ll want to see, but perhaps one you should.

X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)

I’ve always thought the X-Men are the most inherently compelling of the major comic book properties. They can be a metaphor for any persecuted minority - meaning you can automatically invest in a resonant narrative - and in Xavier and Magneto, they have the rare rivalry where both the hero and the villain are right. You can’t dismiss Magneto out of hand given what humans do to mutants, any more than you could pretend Malcolm X didn’t have a point. At their best – Days of Future Past – the film adaptations present their perspectives as equally valid and give their conflict a moral, philosophical, and emotional dimension. The plot arises from the problem of how humans and mutants can coexist.

In Apocalypse, Xavier and Magneto speak maybe three times, and the plot arises from an ancient mutant coming back to life because CIA agent Moira McTaggert is careless with a carpet (no, really) and trying to take over the world. It might seem unfair to leave out that En Sabah Nur is a kind of mutant messiah who wants his ‘children’ to inherit the earth, and so the movie’s about –as much as it is about anything – humans vs. mutants again, but this is really lip service.

Apocalypse is full of the increasingly groan-inducing superhero staples. Destruction of cities and familiar landmarks? Cairo and the Sydney Opera house, check. Posing as a team? Apocalypse’s four horsemen, check. Vague, faux-profound dialogue which skims over issues without really addressing them? Check, multiple times, and there’s an especially robotic, stilted script in this one – check out Jean Grey’s line about being afraid she’ll hurt someone with her powers. Sophie Turner gets some thankless dreck to deliver in this film, because she’s the one with the psychic visions of Apocalypse – it probably took more than a few takes for her to say the line about his “dark power” with a straight face. Then again, she has to come out with lines almost as bad in season 5 of Game of Thrones, so she’s probably used to it.

This film felt tired and obligatory whenever either Magneto or Quicksilver weren’t on-screen. Michael Fassbender is by some distance the best thing about these movies. There’s no line he can’t deliver with conviction, and he sells the hell out of Erik’s rage, grief, and sorrow when his new family are killed – the strongest scene in the movie – he’s a magnetic screen presence. Trying to wring the last bit of pathos out of his background as a holocaust survivor, the film takes him to Auschwitz, which he tears down, in the only scene featuring Apocalypse powering-up someone which doesn’t come off as slightly funny. Quicksilver’s entrance raised questions regarding timing and knowledge, and it felt like a very convenient way to ensure almost nobody died in a giant explosion, but the way his powers are represented is so inherently cool that he’s still a plus, even though (spoiler) by the end of the film, he still hasn’t told Magneto they’re related.

While Quicksilver’s set-up doesn’t pay off, the film is good at ensuring a lot of other things do, ranging from the foreshadowing of Jean Grey’s unrestrained power to the connection between Xavier and Apocalypse and Storm’s teenage idolisation of Mystique. But rather than making the film feel tight and well-written, these feel like franchise obligations. Jean’s power, for example, is setting up the Phoenix storyline for a future instalment. The fact that Storm was apparently comfortable with genocide of humans until she saw her hero, Mystique, fighting Apocalypse – even though Mystique became a hero by saving the life of humans – is baffling. Wolverine’s cameo, which (spoiler?) was nothing more interesting than him going on a mindless rampage in a Weapon X facility, felt like a ploy to placate fanboys.

The tiredness suffusing the film continued through the poorly-choreographed and boring action climax. Unlike the Russo Brothers, action isn’t Singer’s strong suit, and while DoFP made the wise choice to restrict out-and-out superhero fights in favour of striking visuals like Magneto casually mowing down sentinels and using a stadium to tactically isolate the White House, Apocalypse doesn’t know its limits. The stale brawling – often shot with an irritatingly shaky camera – and exchanges of fluorescent energy beams are tedious and unexciting. The visualisation of Apocalypse’s power - reducing earth and stone to huge washes of sand - and Magneto’s newly-amped power resulting in grainy metal particles boiling around him are a little impressive the first time, but soon make their action scenes look overly busy and distracting, while also being ugly, like a prequel Star Wars battle. And Apocalypse never stoops looking slightly goofy.

Apocalypse has just enough bright spots – almost any time Michael Fassbender is on-screen, Quicksilver, James McAvoy – to be a mildly entertaining experience, or at least to prevent the cons from outweighing the pros, but it’s little better than mediocre. A fact it seems to acknowledge when Jean and co. walk out of a showing of Return of the Jedi (1983 references abound) and she says the third movie’s always the worst. 

Our Little Sister (2015)

Three sisters – Sachi, Yoshino, and Chika – live in their ancestral house in Japan. Their father left with another woman, and their mother left soon after, leaving them to fend for themselves – all adults now, they still live together, orphans in a girl’s dorm. They get on with life and don’t talk about the things that brought them to where they are. One day, news arrives – their father has passed away, and he left a fourth daughter behind; Suzu, their half-sister.

In Suzu, the eldest sister Sachi sees herself – someone forced to grow up much too quickly, in Suzu’s case so she could take after her ailing father in place of her negligent stepmother, as Sachi raised her little sisters. Perhaps the sisters should feel bitterly towards Suzu, whose mother stole their father – Suzu certainly expects resentment – but they don’t. They see in her see a kindred spirit, and ask her to come live with them. The lonely, deprived Suzu becomes the new baby sister – almost a daughter – and blossoms under their care and affection.

Our Little Sister has no plot to speak of beyond the galvanising event of their father’s death. While events occur – a family friend gets cancer, Sachi’s married lover asks her to come to America with him, the sisters’ mother comes for a memorial event – they occur as part of everyday life, not in service of a larger goal. The film is consummate slice-of-life, following the sisters about their days – Sachi is a nurse, Yoshino is a bank teller, and Chika works at a sports shop – and building a cast of tertiary characters from those they know and meet, like Chika’s mountaineer maybe-boyfriend –who wants to go back to Everest even though he lost six of his toes – or the café owner who has always been a little in love with the woman who runs the girls’ favourite seafood restaurant.

The film spans a year in the lives of the sisters, with shots of the changing seasons beautifully framing the vignettes of their everyday existence. There is an easy, comfortable rhythm to the film. Its understated vignettes hone in on the minutiae of life, like the simple pleasures of whitebait fishing and the beautiful sequence of Suzu cycling in summer under a tunnel of cherry-blossom trees.

This gentle patience contrasts an underlying tension – one created by the sisters’ abandoned, quasi-orphaned state, and Suzu being the child of the woman who broke up their family. It’s been there from the beginning but it lies, almost forgotten, until Sachi, Yoshino, and Chika’s mother comes to stir it up again. Till then, true to people’s wilful avoidance of what is unpleasant, Suzu and her sisters have rarely talked about their situation, the dialogue gently tiptoeing around acknowledgement even as they live in a house filled with memories of a broken family.

The director Hirokazu Koreeda uses silences, compositions and immaculate framing to full effect in communicating how the sisters are trying to keep their family together while the internal stresses threaten to push them apart – not just those of their past, but of their present, with three adult women living together, each itching for personal independence but reluctant to leave their family behind. Suzu’s homecoming gives them someone to care for and raise, uniting them.

Our Little Sister is a work of simple, eloquent beauty, both in subject, treatment, and visual flourish. It explores sisterhood, growing up, and moving on, with naturalism and sensitivity, conjuring a rich world and even expressing a sort of humanistic philosophy  - graceful acceptance of what you can’t change with a relish in the texture and joys of life. It may not aspire to grandness in scope, but it’s a great film nonetheless.   

The Witch (2015)

An exiled pioneer family travel from their New England plantation to uninhabited land near a foreboding wood to start their life anew. ‘We will conquer this wilderness – it will not consume us’, the father says. It consumes them.

The Witch is at least half a family drama. Thomasin, the oldest daughter, is put-upon with having to take care of her mischievous twin brother and sister; the stoic oldest son Caleb struggles with adolescent attraction towards Thomasin. The mother, Katherine, is broken early on by the loss of her baby Samuel – stolen by the witch – and she inevitably blames Thomasin, who was minding him. The father, William, stands in the middle of it all, trying to keep his family together as tragedy and lies pull them apart. Watching them turn on each other is sickening and sad – it’s an unusual and effective kind of horror.           

Conflicts which might otherwise lead merely to shouting matches acquire high stakes because of the presence of both the witch and God. Devout Christians, the family are constantly seen in prayer and concepts of grace, God’s mercy, the punishment visited on the prideful, and the Devil are completely real to them – after Samuel is taken, Caleb asks his father if Samuel is in hell because he was unbaptized. A day’s ride from the plantation, the loss of a horse can make the difference between life and death for the family, particularly once their crops begin failing. Poised so close to death, every conflict acquires extreme gravity.  The ambiguity of the witch’s influence and the Puritan emphasis on personal responsibility combine to make everyone suspect of evil – have they earned their suffering? Why is God punishing them? All the while, the wood encroaches on their farm, nature’s terrifying aspect comes to reclaim their attempts at a civilised existence.

The Witch is a masterpiece in building tension and dread. When their crops fail, the family goes into the wood for food, into the witch’s territory, giving her ways to influence them further and escalate the situation. Little domestic dramas revolving around William’s foolhardiness in taking Caleb hunting or Katherine’s missing silver cup inflate in significance as lies break trusts and invite God’s supposed wrath. The spiralling is punctuated by moments of indelible horror – Thomasin plays peekaboo with Samuel and opens her eyes to an empty cradle, a milking goat gives blood,  a raven pecking at a breast –as reality is distorted by the corrupting influence of the devil.

To make the 400 years-old setting credible and immediate, Robert Eggers painstakingly reconstructs the world of puritan New England, from accent and speech – dialogue in The Witch has the antiquated gloss of Jacobean drama - to costume and set design. Its characters may be credulous, but they engage with their faith responsively – Katherine’s speech about how she fears she’s become as Job’s wife, her heart hardened by the loss of her children, is deeply affecting, as is William’s self-recriminating breakdown. Eggers’ immaculate framing and his eye for what to leave unseen are a perfect match for The Witch’s slow-burn approach to horror. It’s a spectacular debut – functioning simultaneously as a family drama, a vividly-realised historical film, and an exercise in suffocating dread.

Captain America: Civil War (2016)

Marvel’s 2006 Civil War crossover was politicised – liberty vs. security, secret identities vs. transparency – with tie-ins featuring reporters and the general populace of the Marvel universe experiencing the effects of the conflict in Civil War: Frontline. With 70 years of published material about superheroes living among us, it had a rich context to draw from. The Marvel Cinematic Universe introduced Iron Man, the first ‘enhanced’ human, only 8 years ago, in its fictional timeline. There’s not enough context for Civil War, as it was.

So in Captain America: Civil War, the politics take a backseat to what has always been the strength of Marvel movies – the characters. After an operation in Lagos goes wrong, the UN demand that the Avengers accept their oversight, and Captain America and Iron Man’s friendship slowly unravels as they take opposite sides. ‘If I see a situation pointed south, I can’t ignore it. Sometimes I wish I could,’ muses Cap – ‘No, you don’t’, Tony counters knowingly, in one of the many significant character moments of the film.

Their conflict might have stayed ideological if not for Bucky, who gets framed for the bombing of the UN. Cap naturally tries to save Bucky, which puts him between the world and public enemy number one. Bucky is systematically used to drive a wedge between Cap and Tony, and personal loyalties and beliefs break the Avengers into two camps as the conflict escalates. The death of Wakandan relief workers during the operation in Lagos introduces a superb Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther, who combines royal dignity with implacable rage in his hunt for Bucky, the main suspect in the bombing death of his father.

Each fight, each inevitable political reaction and counter-reaction, drives the plot forward in an engrossing rhythm, as small character-exploring asides foreshadow later shifts in loyalties. Despite juggling a huge cast and including four or five major action set-pieces, the film never feels bloated at 2 hours and 27 minutes. Every scene has a purpose and every character has their spotlight, though Spider-Man’s is gratuitous. The studied craftsmanship in the screenplay and direction enables an extraordinarily difficult balancing act to come off without a hitch.

Thanks to dialing back on the shaky-cam approach which was the sole drawback of Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s excellent fight scenes, the Russo Brothers have made an action-movie masterpiece in Civil War. The choreography is intense, acrobatic, and inventive – one of the pleasures of the lacklustre Man of Steel was seeing the physics-defying aspect of superheroes captured for the first time, and Civil War offers the same sense of revelation in jaw-dropping chase scenes through Berlin and the climactic airport showdown. Black Panther is a highlight, his unrelenting savagery even briefly cowing Bucky and Cap. The film offers constant, brutal fulfilment.

Superhero films, especially Marvel’s, have settled into a cosy niche. There is a constant sense of their narrative limitations, of the risks which they’re not willing to take, because it’s become a reliable brand. Coming towards the climax of Civil War, I was appreciative, but I qualified my praise, thinking I knew what was coming. But then it did something I didn’t know Marvel films could still do – it surprised me with the best kind of climactic revelation, the kind that shocks you even as you realise it was telegraphed all along. In the last half-hour, the film elevates itself from a professionally accomplished action thriller to an emotionally resonant and deeply affecting superhero film, one that means something. That’s when Civil War joins X-Men: Days of Future Past and The Dark Knight as one of the greatest superhero films of all time. 

High-Rise (2015)

A hallucinatory, blackly-comic satire about social breakdown in a class-stratified block of apartments with its own swimming pool and supermarket, High-Rise is a profoundly immersive visual experience, but lacks textual depth.

Our navigator through the society of the high-rise is Robert Laing, a physiologist (differentiated from a doctor – in the event of a medical emergency, he says he’d just call for an ambulance) who has recently lost his sister and craves a fresh start, leading him to move into the "blank slate" of the high-rise. Tom Hiddleston plays Laing as simultaneously vulnerable and opaque. He goes through the motions of what is considered an acceptable lifestyle for a young middle-class professional with disquieting artificiality – in the film’s own words, he "thrives like an advanced species in the neutral atmosphere". As the situation in the high-rise becomes more and more extreme, Laing begins to undergo a nervous breakdown, bringing forth some of the film’s best visual jokes as he tries to do rowing exercises without a rowing machine by strapping himself to some dumb-bells and pulling on thin air. Hiddleston is perfect in the role, conveying superficial geniality with the vague promise of menace and simmering resentment

In the class context of the film, Laing is situated in between the (for the film's purposes) proletariat at the bottom of the tower and the debauched elites at the top, most absurd of whom is the architect, Royal (Jeremy Irons), who builds for his wife a full-sized garden on the 40^th floor so she can ride her horse, walk around with a shepherd’s crook and "reassert herself on the rung". While a film simulating class conflict from a left-wing perspective might seem to side with the lower classes against the bourgeoisie, High-Rise seems almost equally contemptuous of everyone involved. Its critique is omnidirectional. The main figure among those at the bottom of the high-rise is Wilder (Luke Evans), a documentary filmmaker who is effusive, violent, full of class animosity, and an eventual rapist, stirring up anger in the high-rise so he can film it for his next project. He casually explores infidelity at parties while his long-suffering pregnant wife looks on, and he beats a man mercilessly as two people at the same party debate intervening and conclude it might only make things worse and it’s best to leave it be.

Parties take up perhaps as much as a third of the film, meandering and hallucinatory montages of smoking, drinking. snorting, and debauchery. On the upper floors, the parties occur in Georgian fancy-dress, and Laing is mocked as a dilettante for coming in a suit; on the lower floors they occur in whatever anyone’s wearing at the time, but although there is no pretension to skewer, the working classes do not come off much better, with Wilder’s pregnant wife Helen chain-smoking and drinking heavily as she tells Laing her baby’s overdue. High-Rise is chock-full of caricatured characters – an actress who compulsively asks people if they want her autograph, James Purefoy as a sociopathic and predatory fop, the aforementioned Royal and his absurd wife, and Laing himself. They are almost all unsympathetic, and even tender interactions are ironised as they happen – Laing and Helen lie in bed together in easy intimacy, and she tells him “you really are the best amenity in the building”; Laing talks to single mother Charlotte’s son Toby, who innocently asks him why he doesn’t have a wife, to which he snaps “Why don’t you have a father?”

Without characters or moments which escape unironised and represent genuine human emotion, satires threaten to become untethered and nihilistic. Network had William Holden’s Max Schumacher as the decent man wrapped up in the machinations of an evil system; Alexander Payne’s Election had the emotional gut-punch when Matthew Broderick’s Mr McAllister comes home to find his wife sobbing, his infidelity revealed. The human perspective is lacking in High-Rise, which makes it impossible to emotionally invest.

Failing that, intellectual investment would remain a strength if High-Rise had a coherent satirical statement to make. The title, the central structure, and the omnidirectional mockery of all concerned suggests it is taking aim at a system – the system of capitalism represented by the high-rise. This system is unrestrained by any oversight: it's noted that no police come to the scene when a man commits suicide, and when they do come later, Royal waves them away; it is restrictive – hermetically sealed, containing all amenities considered necessary. Most importantly, it attempts to divide and conquer by first using snobbery, elitism, and envy to divide its population and then redirecting the energies of their conflict towards primal urges of sex (the film is packed with sex scenes) and acquisitive violence (Laing beats a man till his eye pops out to keep a jar of paint).

But the film doesn’t go far enough in developing its thesis – the high-rise’s problems are generally universal (flickering power, bad lifts), and put down to it ‘settling’ rather than constituting a specific campaign to deny resources and intentionally inflict a poor standard of living on the lower floors. There are few procedural details of the tower’s features which could enhance and complicate the metaphor and the critique. A great many lines skewer the absurd detachment and triviality of the rich – Laing is rescued from a murder attempt by Royal’s henchmen when Royal protests that Laing owes him a game of squash – but these are obvious marks and obvious targets. Without humanising, you can only mock a caricature, and it is simple to do so, with diminishing returns.

The film is a visual masterpiece of Brutalist production design, vivid cinematography, and fascinating compositions which emphasise the linear structures of the high-rise and the glossy, reflective surfaces of life in it, to communicate its sterility and superficiality. It shifts from being predominantly bright and vivid in a neon-lit fashion to darker, red-and-brown tones, and the direction moves from smooth, gliding takes to shaky handheld movements as the high-rise breaks down and the structures fall with it. The final movement of the society is announced with the birth of Helen’s child, as the worst of the men are gradually killed: Royal falls to a gunshot from Wilder, and Wilder is then stabbed to death by six women in a re-enactment of the Ides of March, shown to us through a child’s kaleidoscope – the infinite reflections recalling Laing in Royal’s mirror-walled private elevator, which infinitely reflected his blank and confused face. Wilder seems to represent the primal, destructive masculinity that must be purged from the sophisticated high-rise (and from the sophisticated Laing) before society can be rebuilt by the women who are left alive.

But if the message is that the high-rise is a fundamentally male creation – phallic, obviously – and the torch must pass to women in order to redeem it, then the film has hamstrung its ideological point by depicting the key women in the new power structure – Royal’s wife and the narcissistic actress, both named Ann – as absurd and laughable. Nor does the new world, with Laing killing Royal’s dog and eating his roasted leg as he talks about himself in a third-person monologue (“for all its inconveniences, Laing was satisfied with life in the high-rise, ready to move forward and explore life”) appear to be anything but a post-apocalyptic disaster.

High-Rise is fitfully incisive, and if not ideologically coherent or complex, it’s still a reliable source of pitch-black humour, anchored by excellent actors throughout (though perhaps slightly wasted on a gallery of caricatures whose satirical interactions begin to seem increasingly schematic), realised beautifully by superlative production design, and directed with skill and vision