SPRING (2014, directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead)
Evan's life has gone to hell in a handbasket made out of shit. His mother just passed away from cancer, leaving him with basically no family. At the bar where he works, a gang-banger wannabe tries to pick a fight with him, and when he laughs it off the punk grabs a bottle and turns to smash his best friend Brad over the head. Evan beats the holy fuck out of the guy (even knocking out his grill), which gets him fired, and then that night the guy drives by his house, shouting an ominous “I know where you live” out the passenger window as he cruises by while Evan and Brad get stoned on the lawn. When the police come by the next morning, Brad's advice to get the hell out of dodge seems very smart. In the cab to the airport, he buys a ticket to the first place suggested by the agent on the phone, Italy, because “white boys like Italy.” He falls in with a couple of Brits, and they drunkenly meander their way down to a small town near the bottom of the boot.
As they walk through the piazza, Evan sees Louise, and everything changes.
If you want to call SPRING a BEFORE SUNRISE-like romance, I won't argue with you. Evan and Louise certainly have a relationship, if an unconventional one. She tells him when they first meet that she doesn't date, but he's so smitten that he eventually ditches the Brits and gets a job at a nearby orchard just so he can stay in the village and continue pursuing her. But while they talk, and grow closer, the camerawork lets you know that something is off. Swooping aerial shots are taken from slightly odd angles, and tracking shots don't seem to be at quite the right speed. While the story itself starts out as a mundane boy-meets-girl thing, the rest of the film is screaming that it's anything but. And as he walks around the countryside, Evan keeps stumbling upon mutilated animal bodies that make it look like Lars von Trier just blew through town shooting an Antichrist sequel. None of the warning signs are enough for Evan though. Uprooted, alone, and thoroughly intoxicated by the fiercely smart, sarcastic and sexy Italian gal he's found, he's prepared to follow things through no matter where they lead him.
There's really nothing more I can say without spoiling the movie, and that would be a crime. Benson and Moorhead have constructed something unique here, something truly magical and touching and beautiful that feels equally like a grounded-in-reality drama and a Cocteau-like fairy tale, and giving too much away in advance might break that spell. The movie hinges on the performance of its two leads, and both the new EVIL DEAD's Lou Taylor Pucci as Evan and German TV star Nadia Hilker as Louise invest their characters with so much human vulnerability that you can't help but be swept up in their wake. Neither of them are finished products as people; they make mistakes, but it's the missteps that get you to root for them. In that sense, SPRING is as far from BEFORE SUNRISE's perfect charmers as you can get. Perhaps the dialogue lets the performers down just a touch in the third act, but that's a quibble, and in my opinion the lack of polish in Evan's final speech just makes it that much more realistic. Hollywood is infatuated with damaged Everymen at the moment (see: every Jake Gyllenhaal movie from the last five years) and Pucci proves here he can do damaged Everyman with the best of them. As for Hilker... wow. Just wow. Like Franka Potente before her she may not eventually find or even want sustained success on this side of the pond, but her work in SPRING lands her firmly on my list of young actresses whose next projects I will be seeking out every chance I get.
As for the ending... dammit, I'm misting up just thinking about it. When it comes to movies, the only thing that really makes me cry is perfection, those oh-too-rare moments when the filmmakers somehow achieve the impossible. The single greatest example, and the single scene that always turns me into a glorious blubbering mess, is the final shot of O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU? The kids exit the shot to the left singing Angel Band, with Everett's youngest lingering behind, and the blind seer rides past them on his pushcart singing in harmony, driving home that the destination is never as important as the journey, and then as she gets dragged off and he recedes towards the horizon, singing all the while, the whole thing fades to a bittersweet sepia... that whole sequence is so beautiful, so perfect, that it tears my heart out every time I watch it. The ending of SPRING doesn't quite achieve those heights, but it is damn close. I sat there thinking there's only one way this can end, only one way it has to end, that Benson and Moorhead wouldn't dare deny the payoff, and yet all those unsettling slightly wrong shots and scares and weirdness are still hovering in the air making me wonder, making me doubt, as Evan rambles desperately, searching for the right words...
And then the sunrise breaks over Vesuvius, and the movie does that thing that really only movies can do: make it seem, even if just for one perfect moment, like the world makes sense.
IT FOLLOWS (2014, directed by David Robert Mitchell)
One of my favorite words in the English language is 'inexorable'. It's the kind of word Vincent Price's vocal chords were created to wrap around, a word full of sinister intentions if not downright Lovecraftian malevolence. It sounds like bad news, and it usually is. (For the record, my absolute favorite word is 'grotesque', mainly because I find it fascinating that such an inherently beautiful word has come to mean 'ugly'.) IT FOLLOWS is a story of inexorable evil, built around a great concept and with a heavy thematic underpinning that is the hallmark of all truly great horror films.
All that probably helps explain why it's the movie at this year's fest that left me feeling the most disappointed.
Jay (Maika Monroe) is a pretty teenage girl living a pretty teenage life. She's just started dating a new guy, who's nice and cute but acts a little weird. One night they go all the way in the back seat of his car... and things go bugfuck crazy. After sex she gets chloroformed and tied to an office chair in the middle of an abandoned parking garage, Unable to run, Jay is forced by flashlight to see and hear the terrible news: her new guy has infected her with some kind of sexually transmitted haunting, and she will now be pursued, slowly but relentlessly, by a Thing that can look like just about anyone (in the parking garage, it takes the form of an older woman, haggard and naked). Only those infected can see it. It won't stop until it catches her, and if it catches her it will kill her. His only advice, before he literally dumps Jay in the street in front of her house still tied up, is to pass it on as quickly as she can, just like he did.
Goddamit, I wanted to love this movie. That set-up is genius, kind of the unholy bastard offspring of JU-ON and a T-1000 with a healthy dose of teen sex mixed in. Mitchell makes the wise choice to give the film a retro 80s aesthetic that matches up well with both the subject matter and the desolate Detroit hellscape where Jay lives. He also uses wide shots to fantastic effect, sucking the audience into the paranoia of Jay's predicament by forcing you to scan the horizon behind her looking for that one figure shambling towards her that you know is going to show up sooner or later. And while on the surface you'd think the film might be a metaphor for AIDS or bad breakups or something, some of the forms It takes, whether it's a battered woman in torn clothing peeing on Jay's kitchen floor and it walks towards her or her own absent father, make clear the message underlying the horror: IT FOLLOWS, ultimately, is about abuse, how it can cling to you and corrode your ability to trust, and how you can't simply run away from it no matter how far you go or how fast you get there.
Despite those strengths, the film lost me in two completely different ways. The score, a fusion of John Carpenter-by-way-of-DRIVE plinky synths and roaring walls of noise supplied by some guy named Disasterpeace, took me out of the film every time it reared its head. The plinky bits were repetitive and annoying, and the roaring bits were just noisy. It wasn't quite the train wreck Tortoise's score for LOVELY MOLLY was, but it came between me and the film far too often. On their own I probably could have gotten past the musical choices, though. For me, IT FOLLOWS' gravest sin is the fact that Jay doesn't really seem to have any kind of survival instinct at all. While we spend the movie playing Where's Scary Waldo, she sits on swings and stares up into the treetops. After being told (twice!) the rules of her haunting, and after being attacked inside her own home, she and her Scooby gang flee to a cottage owned by one of their families. There, she sits her butt down in a lawn chair on the beach and... relaxes. Any remotely sane person in her situation would be glancing over their shoulder every five seconds wondering where It was coming from next. Jay just chills until the Thing has a fistful of her hair. I can appreciate that characters in horror films don't always behave completely rationally, but when your lead character doesn't seem to care whether she lives or dies, it's hard for me to get too invested in her fate.
The climax, a big wonky set piece around a public pool that doesn't quite work as intended for anybody, feels like the kind of thing a bunch of kids would come up with, and the ending itself is suitably cryptic, so kudos to Mitchell for that. Certainly the word of mouth during the fest for IT FOLLOWS is big-time positive, and I seem to be in the minority in seeing the music or Jay's blase attitude towards impending doom as deal breakers. But much as I want to, I can't give my blessing to a film that does so much to keep me from embracing it.
KILL ME THREE TIMES (2014, directed by Kriv Stenders)
Um, err... yeah. Sigh.
An unscrupulous private dick (Simon Pegg, dressed all in black with a handlebar moustache Freddy Mercury would have been proud of) is hired by an abusive bar owner to spy on his wife, and get rid of her if it turns out she's unfaithful. Meanwhile, the husband's sister and her gambling addict dentist husband are plotting to kill her, swap dental records and use her body to pretend that the wife has died so they can collect the insurance money to pay off his debts. Meanwhile meanwhile, the wife and the guy she's having an affair with are planning to blow town, not knowing how many people want her dead.
Remember those atrocious PULP FICTION knock-offs that came out in the late 90s? TWO DAYS IN THE VALLEY WITH DESTINY'S RADIO AND A DUFFEL BAG FULL OF HEADS, and all that? Films where story lines involving unsavory characters intersected and got twisted up to no great effect or purpose? KILL ME THREE TIMES is the Australian version. It genuinely feels like some frustrated Hollywood producer in about 1999 received yet another script with overlapping plots about low-lifes where the chronology is jumbled around for no real reason, stuffed it in a bottle and threw it into the ocean, and it just washed up on the Australian shore a couple of years ago and somehow got financing. Pegg tries really, really hard to make something of his character, I'll give him that much, and Bryan Brown seems to know exactly what kind of film he's in when he shows up as the local corrupt cop. But there's only so much either one of them can do.
If you love those kinds of movies, movies chock full of improbable happenstance, improbabler (?) characters and eye roll-inducing dialogue, then by all means rush out and see this one if you get a chance. If, on the other hand, you have trouble wrapping your head around the fact that a plot twist can make no sense whatsoever and still be telegraphed from a mile off, then you might want to stay far, far away from KILL ME THREE TIMES.
