Current Shortcomings of True Detective Season 2

Copyright: HBO

I was trying to figure out what feels less than right in the new True Detective season. Like practically everyone, I really loved the Season one. From the first moment, it had that synergy of place and characters that was just magnetic in a sweaty, sticky, wrong way, but didn’t leave me feeling uncomfortable for a long time (maybe this is its only shortfall from being a truly groundbreaking show like The Wire).

Of course, I had big expectations from Season Two, especially because Collin Farrell (ever since I saw Tigerland, I am certain that the man is a great but underappreciated actor). But, at the same time, I knew that replicating the formula from the first seasons would be impossible, so I was just hoping for something interesting. 

For the first couple of episodes, I wasn’t even sure that anything feels wrong or inadequate. After all, just a year later, I forgot what happened in the first season’s episodes (for example, what exactly takes place in episode 3 in the first season?), so I told myself that this is a normal buildup process of the Pizzolatto type.

But after the episode five, I think I finally managed to transform vague feelings into words. It turns out that Season Two of True Detective simply misses many key moments from Season One, but fails to add other elements that could replace them when it comes to the pure factor of engagement found in the show. On the other hand, its characters do not succeed in hooking the audience with one major hook but try throwing many smaller ones, which don’t connect that well. Here are some of the key points of the current Season Two lack of engagement:

Season One had the Yellow king, a ritualistic murder and creepy drawings which were all powerful but unclear symbols. Season Two has none of these and even the main murder mystery is easily forgettable.

Season One had that strong idea that something in the show might be supernatural. Rust Cohle had his visions, the Yellow King had its presence and these blended into an atmosphere of eerie, dark wonder. Season Two has highways and illegal immigrants looking sad.

Character relationships are deeply undeveloped because of lack of screen time and too many character threads. For example, why would Ray Velcoro and Paul Woodrugh care about each other? In the first 5 episodes, they had like 5 minutes of mutual conversations.

Season One used direct narration to foreshadow and intrigue, without giving anything away in any meaningful form. Granted, the same pattern was a one-time trick, but Season Two didn’t try to pull its own trick so far.

Finally, Season One didn’t have Vince Vaughn, which was, in retrospective, a huge plus. Let’s face it, the man is just saying his lines and there’s none of that “I’m changing my career here” fire. Imagine him smiling a lot more and he could walk right into the set of Wedding Crashers 2.

This all does not mean that True Detective Season Two cannot become something great. But the window of opportunity for that is becoming smaller and smaller, while at the same time, the narrative turn that might be coming has only to become bigger and bigger so that it could really impress us.

Coming Soon: The Stranger (2014)

Written and directed by Guillermo Amoedo and produced by Eli Roth, The Stranger tells a tale about a man who arrives into a small town looking for his wife. He soon finds the thing he is after, but this also unleashes carnage upon the same place.

The film seems really low-key, focused mainly on the actors and the rather ordinary-looking violence (which makes it all the more awful), but also pushes a supernatural premise in the mix. Recently, Roth showed that he is really keen on producing interesting mystery-horror films and The Stranger looks exactly like this.

Its official trailer weirdly reminds me of the No One Lives movie, but I'm not sure exactly why, or even if this should be a good or bad thing for the film.

The film starts its limited cinematic run today in the US and you can watch its trailer below.

Review and Ending Explanation: It Follows (2014)

Copyright: RADiUS-TWC

The beauty of this film is that it really makes you watch it. Unlike regular horrors, or even other films, in its case, watching is not just looking at what the characters are doing, but also what is happening around them. While many scare-based movies go for this, the director of It Follows, David Robert Mitchell took this notion one step further by making the audience into a type of lookout system for the main characters.

In the film, a young woman called Jay has sex with her new boyfriend. But, immediately after, she learns from him that he actually transmitted a curse (sort of) to her, the same one he got from someone else. It involves an invisible creature that walks towards its victim – it does not run, just walks, but can take the appearance of any other human being. If it reaches her, she is dead. After that, he flees and Jay is left with the curse and must find a way to get rid of it or do something about it.

Mitchell uses a weird soundtrack, similar to the film Cold in July, which is also strangely filled with 80’s sounds and synth-pop melodies in a terrifying way. In the film, Jay and other characters are often surrounded by people and some of them do walk towards them. Whenever this happens, the audience has to wonder if they really are stalked by the monster or is the same figure just an ordinary person. This stroke of genius is what makes If Follows a movie full of suspense and terror that comes from expecting something grisly to happen.

Of course, Mitchell is a young filmmaker and the movie is not perfect. Mainly, it rushes to demystify its creature to a certain point, its pacing is uneven and some elements are completely off as if they were taken from some other film of his (the boat scene, for example). But, its strongest suits make it a film that cannot be compared to many others currently out there, especially when it comes to those which try to advance the horror genre.

It Follows is a film that took horror into new and interesting waters of suspense and audience immersion, along with its symbolic message of STD’s. Because of this, it is a small genre masterpiece.

It Follows Ending Explained

Spoiler Alert


This is how I understood the ending of the film (ignoring the notion of sexually transmitted diseases and watching the film just as a horror) – Jay gives the curse Paul after they have sex and Paul is later seen driving by some prostitutes. In the last scene, the figure that is seen following Jay and Paul. This figure is not the monster – it is just a regular person (most likely). Here’s why:

The idea is that Paul had sex with someone who has intercourses many times a day. This means that the same prostitute will spread the curse without even knowing she has it. If the next victim (the prostitute’s customer) is then killed, the curse goes back to her. But then, she once more has sex in less than 24 hours (most likely), giving it to someone else, whom the monster then needs to start following.

This way, Paul brought the curse to a “sex nexus” where it can linger on without anyone noticing that murders are taking place, especially because many of the prostitute’s victims are not locals, but only passing through and the curse is not activated the same second it is passed on. Because of that, the ending explanation can only be that the person behind Jay and Paul in the last scene has been just a passerby.

Because of Paul’s intercourse with the prostitute, both he and Jay are safe for the time being.

Crowdfunding Push: Spectrum

Mystery movies are probably one of the most engaging film genres. At the same time, they are also a genre that is notoriously hard to pull off without seeming goofy, predictable or plain bad. A new IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign is looking to develop a surreal mystery film that will from the get-go embrace its funnier side. This film is called Spectrum and its official page states:

Charlie wakes from a coma into a world seemingly run by the corporation ‘Spectrum’, who offer personality implants to those willing to pay. Not funny? Buy an implant. Want to stop caring? Buy an implant. Reassembling the pieces of his lost life, Charlie is faced with the tough decision of whether he wants to remember who he was or joining the new world, where he can pay to be anything he wants. Occasionally, he finds, the decision will even be made for him.

Michael Henry is the man behind this project and the artists that inspired this film include David Lynch, Paul Tomas Anderson, and Terry Gilliam. At the same time, the film was also influenced by darker things like the Rupert Murdoch and the global trend of corporations intruding into private lives. Watching the trailer, I also noticed bits that resemble the broad feel found in things like the UK TV show Utopia, Upstream Color and maybe even a few hints of the classic TV show The Prisoner. In total, Spectrum seems like an ambitious project that deserves a chance, especially because of its humor and a really modest asking budget. Its IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign just started, but you can check it out here and see how you can help.

If you're looking for exposure for your film-related project, contact me right here.

Coming Soon: Man From Reno

Directed by Dave Boyle, Man from Reno is a thriller about two separate stories set in California, connected by the notion of one particular Asian country – first one is an random road accident that includes a sheriff from a small town and a Japanese man, while the other follows a fiction writer from Japan who travels to San Francisco to escape the media pressure of her new book release.

From the trailer, it looks like Boyle created a minimalist thriller with a strong sense of a compact mystery. Currently, the film is hitting the festival circuit, but I’m guessing it will find a wider release date very soon.

Check out Man From Reno trailer below.

Film Review: Gone Girl

20th Century Fox

All narrative art is about suspense of disbelief. This notion works on almost every level, and no film can ignore this. People shoot revolvers without reloading every ten seconds, and drive while they have long conversations when they don’t look at the road (which surprisingly easy leads to crashes in real life). 

Suspension of disbelief means that we play along and accept that things don’t need to be too realistic, first and foremost basic stuff like the passage of time – in reality, a visit to the bathroom can take up to 10 or 15 minutes in which nothing happens (well, nothing too important, usually at least), while in a film during that same time, once in a lifetime love affairs begin and end.

That is why suspension of disbelief is fine with me. But Gone Girl moves is one gigantic a continuation of disbelief that stomps on reality until there is nothing left by a fine powder that gets swept away by the laborious David Fincher. This director is by no means a stranger to hits and misses. He ended the 90’s as one of the visionaries of this weird decade where movies didn’t get things like the Internet, but tried hard. Just two years after Fight Club, a film that might be one of the key works of cinematic works art in this period, Fincher made Panic Room, a complete disaster of low ambitions and emotional detachment.

Now, he sees like he was hell bent on connecting us to the characters in Gone Girl, but somewhere along the way, reason got left eating ice cream, confused and alone on a gas station, while Fincher’s van sped forward. In this van, Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike play a young married couple living in Missouri. One day, husband Affleck returns home and find wife Pike missing. He finds signs of struggle and calls the cops. Soon, a huge media spectacle begins and the audience is forced into reading characters and devising who is or isn’t a sociopath or a psychopath (hey, aren’t those two the same – no, they are not). Movies like Cold Comes the Night present psychopaths in a convincing manner, but this one definitely doesn't do the same.

Fincher was very good at making me like or dislikes a character, until I realized that this wasn’t there to help the film, this was the film. As the perspectives shift, so does the plot begin to unravel into more and more preposterous waters, where desperate improvisation leads to perfect, FBI-fooling crimes. Yes, the film is dynamic and fun, and it pulls the viewer in, but at one point, I felt like I wanted to go out, and the shallow plot couldn’t do a thing to keep me in.

I’m sure that every Gone Girl review will praise Rosamund Pike and her performance. I am also sure that we will see more of her in leading roles and at the same time, see more of her body in magazines and stuff like that. In fact, I suspect that Gone Girl movie will be remembered as her stepping stone (I hope that it does the same to Neil Patrick Harris, who was also very good), which is fine, but David Fincher should definitely ask himself is his talent really well suited for these kinds of endeavors.

Film Review: The Maze Runner (2014)

Copyright: 20th Century Fox

Wes Ball, who directed this movie, plays his first cards with a lot of style, and also some guts. He doesn’t go the way I expected him to, opening his film with some kind of an info dump. He stripped away almost everything, and opted for presenting a completely bare, almost raw experience.

A young man wakes up in a middle of a field called the Glade, surrounded by boys of different age. He lost all of his memories, but immediately recognizes that others are organized in Lord of the Flies kind of society, but only this one lives in relative harmony. 

The only problem is that they are surrounded by huge walls, and the only way out of this place is through the Maze, an incredible, constantly changing structure that is full of dangerous creatures.

With this minimal verbal setting, the film drives on, basing itself on experience, not knowledge. The audience gets to find out new things along with the main character Thomas, which feels very organic. This is how he gradually learns the power balance in the Glade, shared between a teenage version of hawks, doves and owls archetypes, which differ in their approach to social structure and governance. But at the same time, all strive for the exploration of the Maze and hope to find a way out.

Played by convincing young actors, primarily Dylan O'Brien as Thomas, but also Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Will Poulter, The Maze Runner movies keeps its traction for almost its entire duration. Because of this, it manages to come off as a serious film, clear of many young adult tropes that saturate films like those in the Hunger Game series.

While The Maze Runner 2014 is basically built on the same teenage angst-leaden material, it strips it down to a much emptier space, where it’s easier to be drawn into the story, and where there are also fewer deterrents like shabby romance subplots. Instead, Ball chose to focus on camaraderie and friendship, which is very refreshing. In this aspect Maze Runner is even more successful than Ender's Game, a film that was supposed to be mostly about a boy's dedication to his friends. The only substantial flaw in this adventure film is its corporate designed ending, which jams a generic Sci-Fi explanation (using, ironically, an info dump method) into an emotional and violent outburst, resulting in an overflow of sappy feelings which Ball so successfully avoided up to that point.

This marketing-research powered mud pie of an ending is additionally enhanced with an idiotic order for the audience to come back to the movie theaters because there is a second part coming our way. In it, a character pronounces a line straight from early James Bond villain textbook, which was designed (I guess) to intrigue the audience and keep it guessing, but fails to do everything except seem silly. This extremely sour cherry on the top of that mud pie really spoiled my solid experience of the film, even more because it was a completely unnecessary move.

Without that crippling last 10 minutes, Maze Runner could have made the best young adult adaptation of 2014.

Film Review and Ending Intepretation: Predestination

Copyright: Sony Pictures

My first association to Predestination was the movie Time Cop. Now, after I saw it, I feel like one of those people who, after hearing the word “Mars”, immediately things about the candy bar, not the planet. In the same fashion, Predestination has almost nothing to do with time cops running around the past busting crime before it happens.

Instead, it talks about personal growth and change in the setting that disposed of all the regular constraints of both time and matter. Michael and Peter Spierig, signed under the name of Spierig Brothers, made this film five years after their list project, Daybreakers, which didn’t impress me too much, mostly because of the bland characters it featured. Now, they are again experimenting with core science fiction ideas (Daybreakers was more about Sci-Fi than horror) but with a lot more success.

In their new story, based on a Robert A. Heinlein short piece, an agent working for a time traveling anti-crime organization hunts a man called the Fizzle bomber who continues to evade time alterations and manages to blow up more than 11,000 people in New York in 1975. The agent, known only as the Bartender, meets a man one night in a bar where he is working, and the man tells him he will tell him the most incredible tale in the world.

The really cool thing about Predestination is the fact that it drives home the issue of personal possibilities that arise from one of the most basic time travel paradoxes, all the way into the very natural but still very weird waters. All gimmicks are developed so that they seem very minimal both in visual and narrative terms, so no one should expect Time Machine level of CGI grandeur. After seeing it, I had the feeling that the complete process remained logical and predictable, which makes this film is without a doubt a pioneer in time travel genre. This fact alone is a pretty bold thing to do in today’s movie market.

The only visible down side to this is the fact that Predestination movie might see predictable in general when it is perceived and experienced as a thriller. But, Spierig Brothers managed to harness that wind of predictability and instead of fighting it, use it to fill their sails. This made the film more similar to a mystery drama than a time travel action-adventure, and the main actress Sarah Snook should be commended for the way she delivered an extremely unique role.

In this Predestination review I wouldn’t stand against interpreting this film as an adventure, but I would have to call it a one that carries the viewer into the realm of personal self and the things what truly defines it.

Predestination Movie Ending Explained

Spoiler Alert

To understand Predestination and its ending, it is important to look at the passing of time in the film as a continuous development that never really begins or ends. Instead, it has a continuous cycle. At the end of this cycle, the character of the Bartender finally chases down the Fizzle bomber in the laundry mat. He realizes the he is in fact him from the future, and who somehow became certain that killing people would further diminish crime. The Fizzle bomber tries to stop the Bartender from killing him by saying that this already happened, and that the only way to break the cycle is to learn to love him. The Bartender decides not to heed his advice and kills him. He then returns home in his present year of 1975.

But, his time travel briefcase didn’t decommissioned properly, and it is implied that Robertson rigged it so that it didn’t because he needs the paradox to continue. The Bartender, alone and broken, gradually decides to start to use the briefcase because he misses the past versions of himself too much. This leads to him slowly slips into psychosis (which is a side effect of uncontrolled time travel). Because of this impact of time travel, he loses his mind and slowly becomes the Fizzle bomber (aided by his knowledge of chemistry and physics from his youth), completing the circle.

The entire cycle is continuously supported by Robertson as a means of assuring that the entire paradox continues to function.

Film Review and Interpretation: Before I Go to Sleep

Copyright: Clarius Entertainment

Tackling selective and not-so-selective amnesia is a favorite topic for both thriller and comedy filmmakers. Christopher Nolan made cinematic history with Memento and defined almost a decade worth of thrillers, doing for amnesia-stricken characters what Usual Suspect did for the Unreliable narrator back in the late 90’s. Before I Go to Sleep movie delves into the same murky waters of loss of memory, but unlike Memento, it reached a much shallower place.

Before I Go to Sleep was directed by Rowan Joffe in 2014, who wrote some good screenplays like 28 Weeks Later, but didn’t make many films from his latest position. This lack of experience is telling, and Joffe didin’t struggle with his star cast, where the triad of Nicole Kidman, Mark Strong but especially Colin Firth, all produced great roles. Joffe, in spite of this, made a very lukewarm film, which also managed to come off as very unassertive in several key moments.

The story of Before I Go to Sleep revolves around Christine, who wakes up every morning forgetting everything from her early 20’s. But, Christine is now over 40, and has a husband named Ben, who tries to help her to lead a somewhat normal life. But, one day, Christine gets a phone call from a neuropsychologist who claims that there is a camera hidden in her wardrobe, which contains more information. Christine, totally blank as always, begins to watch the videos of her, and the film takes off.

Its thriller narrative pulls many of the regular tropes when it comes to amnesia, and Kidman has enough talent to make all of them entertaining and relatively fresh. In its miniature runtime, the movie isn’t boring or undirected, but its substance is spread so thin that it is hard to care about anything else than the central mystery. Although there are many emotional outbursts, the film deal with such a miniscule film crew (3+1 actors make up 90% of it) that any connection is short and mostly based on recollection of the main character and its later impact (Ben telling Christine stuff, good and bad), not current action or events.

Because of this, Before I Go to Sleep comes off as a hastily recreated radio drama where the images leave a very pale impression on the viewers, while the story doesn’t do much better. In the end, I was left feeling that there is another mystery, left in the wake of the last reveal, only because the central reveal failed to make any impact on me.

Before I Go to Sleep Movie Explanation and Central Flaws

(Spoiler Alert)

Although the film's immediate story isn’t like this, the film is very linear in its core. Christine has a husband Ben and a small son named Adam. In the first years of 21st century, she enters an affair with Mike that ended with him assaulting her and leaving her for dead. She recovers, but with a recent memory cleaning amnesia. Her real husband, who is shown at the end as the guy with the scar, has tried to live with her for years after that.

This fails, while her child continues to grow, and she continues to recollect him as a baby. 4 years prior to the events of the film, he divorces her and puts her into a nursing home, deeming their life unmanageable. Mike then finds her, and pretends to be Ben, only so he could build up a new relationship with her.  Dr. Nasch bumps into Christine and offers to treat her, while no one anywhere notices that she is gone. The film begins shortly after Christinge begins her treatment with Dr. Nasch.

The events of the film are tightly arranged, but fail miserably on several points. Mike is shown to be murderously impulsive (the reason why he assaulted Christine in the first place), but also a genius when it comes to Photoshop, deception and forgery (how he got her out of her nursing home), deeply emotional, patient and a brilliant planner as well. Then, he visits Dr. Nasch to threaten him like a clumsy New Jersey mafia foot soldier, which made even less sense, and only added the possibility of him getting arrested.

Christine’s real husband and son are shown to be loving, carrying figures at the end of the film, but don’t notice mommy is gone for (I’m guessing) months on end. But, in spite of this, they are, all of a sudden, full of warmths and care for her. With this combination, Before I Go to Sleep produced a very unconvincing development that in the end came of as completely broken. While it didn’t make any rookie mistakes when it comes to sorting the amnesia part out, its characters are extremely flawed.

Film Review and Ending Intepretation: Coherence

Copyright: Oscilloscope Laboratories

Simple plots and heavy physics was the combination that created the incredible film Primer. Not so long ago, its director Shane Carruth created Upstream Color, but his new science fiction film took a more symbolic turn (although it’s still an awesome film).

Coherence is a film that could have been perfectly in line with his older Carruth’s film. Its tale is extremely simple, and takes place during one night at a dinner party where old fiends converge to relax and catch up. Above them, an unusual comet is passing by, and its effects alter reality itself, as the guests soon begin to realize.

James Ward Byrkit made this film as his directorial debut, and he created something deeply impacting. By using a single house and its exteriors, he made due with a very solid acting crew that is, unfortunately, very far from Hollywood stardom (Maury Sterling is the most famous one in the cast, along with the veteran Nicholas Brendon). Maybe thanks to this fact, everyone had a point to prove, and they definitely did it with this movie. Coherence uses the paradox of the multiverse and the now very known (but rarely understood) thought experiment called the Schrodinger's cat.

In the act of mixing universes which branch out with every possible choice, Byrkit filmed a very understandable collapse of regular cause and effect system. The idea of this film isn’t that impressive, but the easiness in which he depicted it definitely is (especially thought the ingenious use of simple props to mark important cues of the story).

Instead of making a mess, Byrkit decided to focus on the character of Emily (played really well in a sober and rational manner by Emily Baldoni) and her plight to make some sense from this dire, mind-bending situation (which are full of that special kind of existential horror).

At the end, the film nicely ties up all its ideas, underlining the most important one – the notions about humanity, summed up in a thought from Brendon’s character Kevin where he states that maybe there are those evil versions of themselves they fear lurking in the night.

Coherence Movie Ending Explained

(Spoiler alert)

Coherence has somewhat of a strange, abrupt ending, and here is my explanation and interpretation of it. Emily understands that her version of reality is already polluted with people from different multiverses, and when they become violent, she flees. She travels to different multiverses, many of which became equally bad, until she finally finds one that looks normal and stable.

She takes care of her other self (the original one in that universe) by violent means, hoping that she will disappear (in other words, be left behind in some other version of reality) once the comet passes and its effect end. She fails, and then has to do it all over again back in the house, were original Emily manages to crawl back.

Thinking that two versions of her will merge into one once it was all over (even if the other is dead) she hits on the head and presumes that she killed her. The next morning she wakes up thinking everything is all right. But then, in the last scene, her boyfriend gets a call from her, which should mean that the other Emily is still there and alive, and with the comet gone, two versions of Emily are now a permanent condition.

Enemy (2013) Review and Interpretation

Copyright: E1 Films

For me, Enemy has two major advantages for a movie that isn’t meant to be labeled. It is completely uninterested in helping the audience understand its story verbally, while it at the same time it presents a very clear emotional overtone. Denis Villeneuve made the very good Prisoners last year, and in his new creation, he once again uses the talented Jake Gyllenhaal. He plays Adam, a college professor who accidentally finds his identical double in the form of a small time actor by the name of Anthony. 

This film is based on a work by Jose Saramago, but isn’t one more of those stories about doppelgangers. Recently Jesse Eisenberg, an actor who is slowly becoming the new version of Jeff Goldblum in his post-Fly career, made a film called The Double which seems similar to Enemy. Villeneuve decided to focus on feelings, mainly those that seem to slowly suffocate the characters. As the film progresses, so does the feeling that something very dark will happen. The damped lights and the excellent photography use the Toronto landscape to underline this, putting the film in a universe of its own.

It this space, characters seem like they have jobs and relationships, but in reality they are just waiting for something and it will probably be unpleasant. In these dark hallways and dimmed rooms were the drawn curtains block the sunlight, Adam looks for a resolution, but only finds pieces of himself that terrify him, although without a clear reason. Gyllenhaal has now enough experience to present a character like Adam mostly thought sighs and barely noticeable changes in facial expressions.

As the story moves forward, it grows one additional line that follows Anthony, and this may cause problems for some viewers. The openness employed by Villeneuve is refreshingly uninterested in the wants and needs of the audience concerning the clarity of the plot and the ideas it tries to converse. Instead, he made a pulsating work of art that touches on a very deep rooted anxiety which is linked to a person’s need from an intimate relationship. But, this is just my interpretation of Enemy, and I will present my explanation. In any case, this is a brilliant film.

Interpretation of the Enemy ending scene

(Obviously, Defcon 1 Spoiler Alert)

This is how I understood the movie Enemy. The following is my interpretation of the film and its cryptic ending scene, so I will try to explain the way I understood the entire plot leading to it.

Adam is a guy who struggles with a steady relationship. His girlfriend isn’t living with him, and he isn’t very bothered when she leaves abruptly in one moment. He can’t commit. On the other hand, Anthony did commit, but is unfaithful, which is shown when his wife Helen asks him “if he is seeing her again”. More than that, Anthony is into darker stuff, and he is the person shown at the very beginning, watching the underground show. Later on, he practices acting hurt when he wants to have sex with Adam’s girlfriend Mary, and has no real feelings about his wife, which is also shown when he demands blueberries for himself.



Anthony focuses on Mary’s feet in high heels while he stalks her in the bus, which further connects his troubling desires with the underground club, where “models perform” on glass mirrors. When Anthony and Mary die, Adam has the opportunity to resolve his fear of commitment, already having a woman that genuinely wants to be with him, although she knows he isn’t Anthony (how was at school question), but a better person, which Adam demonstrates by repeatedly asking her if she wants anything before going to bed.

After that, she confronts his anxiety with understanding, and they presumably have sex, which I understood as a kind of an improvised wedding. Now, Adam and Helen are together. But, Adam finds the key for the underground club, which he knows nothing about, because he never visited it. But, he remembers the conversation he had with the building’s guard, who did spend time in the club with Anthony. He makes the connection, and instead of getting rid of the last pieces of Anthony, he saves it, most likely to explore it later on.

At the same moment, Helen turns into a tarantula, the object of his fears, because one again (symbolically) he won’t be able to stay faithful, and will seek excitement elsewhere. Through this process, he will gradually become Anthony once again, and even maybe enjoy seeing tarantulas being crushed like his predecessor did. The commitment is the spider, a terrifying thing, but also something that Adam/Anthony need and want.

Film Review: Mystery Road

Copyright: Well Go USA Entertainment

Mystery Road is a beautifully shot minimalistic thriller, set in an unusual social context. Its main character is a police detective in a small town located somewhere in the Australian outback. Detective, called Jay Swan, is of aboriginal descent, just like a big part of the town’s population. One day, a trucker discovers a body of a local girl underneath a highway, and Jay is given the case. The murder investigation sends him into the dark underbelly of the community, where alcohol, drugs and lack of opportunity decimate the underprivileged.

The film develops very slowly, presenting the town one image at a time, with Jay (played by Aaron Pedersen) as the guide. He comes from the same group of people, but is now feared, ignored or openly loathed because of his decision to become a “copper”. At the same time, he is also personally invested in the community and his ex-wife and daughter still live there.

There is a lot of social commentary in this film on the state of the Aboriginal minority in contemporary Australian culture. Mystery Road doesn’t explore why or how did the situation become so deplorable for some, focusing instead on the presentation of the current state, especially in the younger parts of the population. In this unnamed town, desert isn’t just a part of the landscape; it is the landscape, periodically interrupted by lonely roads or cardboard and plywood houses. Inside of them, families fall apart and euthanized by substance abuse. The film doesn’t blame anyone for this state, but instead implies that things need to change before the desert, inside and outside, eats up everything.

The most important character in the film, apart from Jay is Johnno, another police officer on the force. He is played by the great Hugo Weaving and represents the polar opposite of the protagonist. While Jay is indigenous, transparent and determined to shoot straight, Johnno is of European ancestry, murky, and his motives aren’t clear, except for the part that he isn’t shooting straight even by a long shot. Gradually, the gravity of the case begins to pull them closer, and the danger of an imminent collision starts to grow on the audience. Yet, the film managed to stay true to its name and stays a mystery till the end.

In my mind, Mystery Road is in the same group as the brilliant Animal Kingdom. Director Ivan Sen applies a recognizable and unique thriller sensibility in Mystery Road and by doing that he creates a small neo-noir gem. I would like to think that this film is another example of a bigger trend of making fantastic, unorthodox works of cinematic art in Australia

Film Review: The Sound of My Voice

Copyright: Fox Searchlight Pictures

Somewhere in Los Angeles lives a woman who claims that she came from the future. Around her, a small cult-like group starts to grow, composed of people who actually believe her. More importantly, they believe in her.

For me, one of the key features of any good independent film is a successful acclimatization to the budget that is available. A lot of films have great ambitions, but the money that is at their disposal simply cannot transfer those ambitions in the right way to the big screen. Therefore, any indie filmmaker must be flexible, just like Zal Batmanglij in this case, especially if they’re interested in a genre like (or near) science fiction.

Sound of My Voice perfectly performs in the budget department. The beginning of the film shows a man and a woman in ordinary houses, who bathe and clean themselves, put on a pair of white robes, and then some unknown man puts plastic handcuffs and blindfolds on them. Blind and restrained, they are ushered into a van, which should lead them to an ordinary house. There, in the basement, the woman awaits them, and the movie kicks into gear in this everyday surroundings.

As a psychological thriller, the film works flawlessly. The mentioned man and a woman are Peter and Lorna, a couple who wants to enter this strange world and become a part of it. But actually, they intend to film an uncovered documentary about this woman and her followers.

Soon, they meet Maggie, the woman in question, and start to get involved in different psychological exercises and work with her other attendants. As the plot unfolds, the motivations of the main characters get more confusing, and Maggie’s knowledge of the human condition begins to erode their original intentions.

Most of the film was shot in empty rooms, with no windows and no natural light. This is a great stage for actress Brit Marling who plays Maggie. Here, surrounded by followers in white robes, she presents an impressive range - a woman who at one point seems sublime, gentle, forgiving and even holy in the other looks like an ordinary person eager to make jokes. A few minutes later, she is transformed into a hostile psychoanalyst who attacks other people's personal pasts, but never reveals much about the difficult future that supposedly awaits the humanity.

However, Maggie does everything with understanding and acceptance, which is a trait shared by many real spiritual and religious leaders. Marling captured this conflicted personality exceptionally. At the same time, very wisely, the film refuses to talk about cults and sects in general, and instead chooses to speak more about loneliness and sadness that makes people gravitate towards these kinds of gatherings

As the story develops, so do Lorne and Peter, while Maggie remains a distant figure. For those viewers who seek a compact mystery resolution in this film, the ending may seem disappointing. That doesn’t diminish its very heartfelt exploration of an unpleasant topic (cult leaders and its members in their infancy).

Sound of My Voice shows that an intriguing story, a handful of talented actors and a well-lit basement are enough for a very good film.

Review: Haunter

Copyright: IFC Midnight

I love dream sequences. In some way, dreams were the original proto-movies, and we as a species probably started making films in our head long before even paintings existed. Haunter uses the dream space as the main setting for the plot and the action starts from the beginning.

A young teenager named Lisa lives with her parents and a small brother in a big family house. She wears a dark Siouxsie and the Banshees t-shirt and looks gloomy. The rest of her family, however, looks perfectly content in their everyday, mundane activities. It soon revealed that Lisa is the only one who understands that they are living the same day over and over.

In the opening sequence, Haunter makes the viewer jump right into Lisa’s terrifying world. Her surroundings are menacing but don’t pose a direct or imminent danger. Her parents seem distant and somehow detached, but don’t act crazy or deranged. She doesn’t see any alternative and soon starts to investigate how and why are they stuck in this weird limbo.

Abigail Breslin is really solid on all fronts as Lisa. Her character never becomes irrational, but also doesn’t fully embrace her warped condition. Breslin is equally present and engaging both as a detective and a sacred girl. This isn’t odd – her house, as well as her family members, can turn to pure horror without warning.

Vincenzo Natali directed the movie almost flawlessly, using the most from the temporal and spatial dislocation phenomena that Lisa experiences. He also did a great job with the special effects and the way he merged them with the sets. This is probably the result of his rich work experience. Since the early nineties he was often employed in the film industry as a worker in the art department. It’s obvious that his knowledge in this field added a lot to the visual style that he employed in this film. Like many horrors that don’t go for gore and violence, a distinct visual feel is really important.

The only major problem for me in this film is the resolution and the last sequence. Simply put, I found it too similar to The Lovely Bones. To be hones, many details in the story point toward this film (or the book), but the ending just drove this point further. Because of the clear similarities, I feel like Haunter had to make a bigger effort to distinguish itself from this much more famous movie about dead girls.

Review: Trance

Copyright: Fox Searchlight Pictures

For the last two decades, Danny Boyle delivered interesting, intriguing and most importantly, untypical movies that are firmly and clearly set in one or another movie genre. This time around he delivered a compact psychological thriller that is, underneath the surface, a potent drama.

Trance has only one movie device: hypnosis. After a botched robbery of a Rembrandt painting, Elizabeth, a hypnotherapist gets an opportunity form a small criminal gang to use her skill to unlock memories in their inside man; his name is Simon, and he somehow, after getting hit in the head, managed to hide this incredibly valuable piece of art. Because of the concussion, his memory is gone, but Frank, the organizer of the robbery, believes Elizabeth can change that. Acting as an unwilling team, they have the task to find the missing painting.

I love the way Boyle demonstrates his ability to unseeingly focus a convoluted story. He doesn't use plot twists, but instead guides the story from one narration node to another. In the duration of the movie, he visits the same nodes, changing the perspective and shedding more light with every pass. By doing this, Boyle unveils more and more of the story, allowing it to evolve alongside his characters. In some aspect, the character development reminded me of Steven Soderbergh's The Limey, because both movies take their time with revelations, while simultaneously putting the main protagonist in a whirlwind of actions and decisions.

Another important aspect of the film is the idea that memories play multiple roles, from protective mechanism, hidden treasure maps and transgressions that were buried into the subconsciousness, to a much greater base that determines Simon's sense of identity. Here, Boyle also elegantly steers clear of too much science and the need to overexplain anything.

His cast was an important ally in this process. Vincent Cassel impressively plays a criminal leader that wasn't given too much onscreen time, but still depicts his character just right, avoiding every cliché trait. James McAvoy, who I'm not terribly fond of also does a decent job, especially last third of the film (although in the finish sequence he tries a bit too hard), but Rosario Dawson is the main attraction as Elizabeth. In the role, Dawson displayed a huge variety, sometimes playing the dominant figure, and then other times effortlessly fading in the background. Also, her character is the mechanism that allows the film to morph into an impacting personal drama, and shed its thriller skin.

I see that Trance is often compared with Inception, but for me, the similarities are only superficial - both movies dabble in the worlds of subconsciousness, but for me, Danny Boyle's film presents a less spectacular, but a deeper, personal story.

Review: Now You See Me

Copyright: Summit Entertainment/Lionsgate

In this movie, Woody Harrelson’s character is a sly swindler that likes to wear small hats, while Jesse Eisenberg plays a anxious looking, smart and fast talking brilliant young man. Yes, you saw this before, and these people are here again, playing the same roles they played in many other films because the people who wrote Now You See Me were too lazy or uninterested in making anything that would in any way set apart this magicians-do-a-heist story from the run-of-the-mill Hollywood offering.

In this reverse Ocean’s Eleven, the public and the police force from both sides of the Atlantic are amazed and/or pissed off when a group of misfit stage performers (magicians, illusionist, hypnotist and so on) called The Four Horsemen actually steals a large sum of money from a French bank while performing a trick in Las Vegas. FBI agent Dylan Rhodes isn’t prepared to let this one slide, and becomes obsessed with the group. His only real aid is Thaddeus Bradley, a former illusionist that developed a TV show with the purpose of debunking magic tricks.

The beginning of the movie is a traditional gathering of the crew, where we see each of the Horsemen slowly being drawn into a mysterious situation that will grant them the ability to perform one or more amazing tricks (that include robbing real money). The second act is the trick itself, and then the movie becomes the regular Catch Me If You Canchase narrative where the confident Horsemen evade the increasingly frustrated FBI task force.

As the movie creeps towards the end, it became clear that the mystery’s revelation of who did it won’t give any real payoff, like it usually doesn’t when the audience fails to connect to the human part of the story.

Here, the regular problem is seen once more: the characters weren’t allowed to evolve, and begin and end as stage props, played by actors on rewind mode, giving performances from other jobs in their careers.

The only steady development as a character is made by agent Rhodes, played by Mark Ruffalo. Unfortunately, this process is completely negated by the ending twist that reminded me of the imaginary script from the movie Adaptation, and the part when Donald explains his ludicrous plot (especially the chase part) to his bewildered brother.

Having in mind that Louis Leterrier, the director of Now You See Me, worked mostly in action movies where we don’t care for the characters, it’s clear that he tried to extend the same approach in this picture. Although here we also see some impressive imagery, the onscreen magic is painfully similar to the one this movie generates off-screen – both are fake and at the end, expectedly dull.