There will be blood, and the gnashing of teeth, so many teeth...
dir: Benjamin Brewer
2024
This is a surprisingly good action-y horror flick, and the main reason I say that with surprise is that Nicolas Cage is in it, and doesn’t really overact at all.
Which is… sometimes it feels like I criticise Nicolas Cage for overacting and for underacting and generally for acting, and it feels like I’m not fair to the guy at all.
Seriously, anyone could have played the role he plays here, that’s how unnecessary he is in the scheme of things. Nah, that’s unfair again.
This is a post-apocalyptic flick, in that something happened, civilisation fell apart, and a man (Cage) brought up his two sons on some isolated farm. The film starts with Cage’s character strapping on a back pack and hightailing it out of a wartorn city, struggling to get to two baby boys, who don’t seem that grateful to see him, after all he must have done to get back to them…
Fifteen years later, they live a strange existence on this farm which makes it look like they’re really afraid of vampires or something. Maybe werewolves. Regardless, it’s well into the movie before the threat is shown. We know they’re some kind of creature afraid of or pissed off by daylight, and they have serious claws.
Could be big angry guinea pigs? After Cage and his boys, at sundown, batten down the hatches and secure every window and door, something attacks one of the barricaded doors repeatedly. And it sounds pretty pissed off. Like it really, really likes eating humans.
The two sons could not be more different. One of them, Joseph (Jaeden Martell) is cerebral and curious. The other, Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) is a fuckwit. Even worse, he is a fuckwit in love. These aren’t the only three people left – there are some other people living on another farm down the road, somewhat. Hence, Thomas is constantly cutting it close trying to spend as much time as he can with Charlotte (Sadie Soverall) down at the Rose farm.
He is shown running back through a forest or a copse of trees, and there’s this crack in the earth that he keeps being shown jumping over, and unless you’ve never watched a flick in your life you know by the third time they show this, from the perspective of the camera being down in the earth below, you just know he’s going to end up down there.
And it will be because of stupid puppy love.
And because he’s not very bright. He and Joseph seem to loathe each other as only siblings can, but it feels even more elevated, perhaps to Cain and Abel levels of resentment. Cage’s character has done everything he can to teach them how to survive and how to fight the unseen menace, but that can only go so far when one of your kids actively does stuff so dumb that everyone is put at risk.
For all his intelligence, though, Joseph also takes stoopid risks too, though he does it For Science, or at least for a better understanding of that which attempts to prey upon them. He has, by dint of not having a heap of other distractions, like, no mobiles or internet or whatever, has learned a lot about the technology left to them, and ways of adapting it for their present needs.
Naturally, one evening when Thomas is mooning over Charlotte, he leaves it too late getting home AND manages to concuss himself and fall down a crack in the earth. Dear old dad has only one choice, brave the night with a knife and find his son.
This is actually, independent of the reveal of these absolute horrors, where the film really kicks into gear, which is kind of inevitable when you think about it: Paul (Cage’s character), desperate to save his son, injures himself horribly, and it becomes the responsibility of the boys to protect them all.
It’s the crux of the flick, and rightly so, and that’s why various reviewers refer to Cage having a literal supporting role in the flick – his character supported the boys, until he can support no more.
It’s your time to shine, boys, and shine they kinda do.
The creatures – holy shit are they nightmarish. Describing them is kind of difficult, because they are like horrifying monkey Swiss Army Knives. Their bodies are somewhat prehensile all over, their arms / claws can unfurl or stretch into unholy configurations, their heads are baffling and can snap their jaws so comically fast repeatedly that they’re like nothing else I’ve seen in any other flicks of similar genre trappings. We have no idea if they’re aliens or mutations, or demons or lab creations, and in the end it doesn’t matter because we just know that they really want to somehow eat humans, and even that they do bizarrely by ripping their torsos open and dropping some other organs onto the people they trap or kill.
The genuinely tensest moment of the flick is when it’s night, Joseph is on his own, and he’s fallen asleep in a chair. A hand of some description slides open a peephole cover from the outside, and then stretches, slowly, soundlessly towards Joseph, eventually to a claw which seems to stretch over closer towards Joseph’s face.
Genuinely terrifying. There are more horrors to behold down the track, but that sequence has stayed with me ever since. Whatever the creatures are, and however deadly they were before, they seem to be adapting as well, growing more vicious and clever, so many of the assumptions that underpin the brothers’ safety fly out the window.
When they are in dire straits, and visit the Rose farm where Thomas’s lady love lives, hoping for help, the people there, two of which are Charlotte’s parents, coldly say no dice; they’ll take Thomas, but Joseph and Paul can go fuck themselves. Years of post-apocalyptic scenarios have shown us that when it all goes down, people aren’t going to be reaching a hand out to help others up; they’ll be reaching in order to strangle people or push people’s heads underwater.
Thomas seemingly makes the right choice for him, but one that effectively condemns his brother and father to death, hot steaming hairy death. Went Joseph, perhaps unfairly, points out that Thomas is a thoughtless, selfish piece of shit, Thomas tries to rebut the argument by choking Joseph nearly to death.
Oh Thomas, the film goes out of its way to make it easy to hate you. But, thankfully, he’s not a complete piece of shit, because he has a plan.
It’s a stupid plan, because he’s so dumb, but it’s a plan all the same.
There is a confrontation towards the end, a climactic one for us, but we sense for those who survive, it’s just the beginning of a new set of problems to face on a daily basis until they figure out how to deal with this super-cockroach menace once and for all. It’s a bonkers fucked up final battle, and they end up doing what I usually consider the worst power move of all time, which is, not to spoil, a variation on nuking the fridge, but it works really well in the context of the film, and highlights Joseph’s technical skills (sort of, otherwise it’s just dumb luck, which is just as apt).
I thought this was really strong, and like many horror flicks that end up streaming on Shudder, it is the perfect length. Ninety fucking minutes, people. It’s the ideal length, and you know it. Anything longer than that, and you better have a massive justification for it, or I will be impatiently tapping my watch at you.
Cage brings his standard intensity to the role, but deploys it believably in service of playing a dad who cares about his sons a lot in a world that is even more hostile than contemporary middle America. He gets angry or nervous, and it’s expressed within normal human parameters, unlike what Cage usually does, which is even make scenes where he’s ordering something in a restaurant seem inherently unnatural. The boys, well, I have a clear favourite. It’s unfair to dislike an actor because he plays a character well as written for him, but as much as Maxwell Jenkins has such a smackable face for being such an irritating teenager, it’s Jaeden Martell who stands out. I may remember him from such films as It Chapter 1 and It Chapter 2, when he was playing the younger Bill, the one who loses his brother George to the evil clown down the drain.
He’s really good here, and walks away with the film, although Charlotte gives him a run for his money, especially with her last words of dialogue in the film, mocking him for him thinking he did anything special by blowing up the house.
Not a lot of laughs in the flick, but it’s also not unremittingly grim, even in the face of such an unholy menace. I didn’t love the shaky cam used predominately in the earlier parts of the film, but I guess I got used to it eventually. Whoever designed those creatures deserves a medal or a punch in the groin, I’m not sure which. Overall, a really solid Thursday night horror flick.
7 times the image of a burning wheel that will stay with me, and I’m not going to explain why out of 10
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