Drama

dir: Philippa Lowthorpe

2025

When they talk about books that couldn’t or shouldn’t be made into movies, they’re talking about books like the one this movie is based on. I acknowledge the irony of my writing that in a review of said film, just like I acknowledge the lands of the First Nations people upon which I unleash my dribble from.

Sovereignty was never ceded. Anyway, I am lucky enough, blessed enough to have read the book, and I remember being deeply moved and affected by it, seeing as I read it at a time when I was also grieving for a beloved parent that I had lost at the time. The writing was precise, exquisite, evocative, and transporting.

It was also about a person at a very difficult, very fraught period in her life, rendered into a successful art form, but still predominately about the most muddled, harrowing, isolating, claustrophobic, mentally unstable time of her life. And you can get away with that, so to speak, in a novel, because one has the perspective, the elocution and erudition of this author, in order to capture all of that, with a distance afforded by time.

Short of having reams and reams of voiceover, which this flick never uses, we do not have access to the author’s thoughts, or, since the lead actor is playing the author here, the character’s thoughts other than what she does, what she says, or what expressions we see on her face.

I just don’t see how audiences who haven’t read the novel would be able to get as much from this flick. The story’s scope, rendered visually, is so narrow, in a lot of ways, so limiting.

Without the eloquent prose of the book, you have a story about a woman who loses her father, whom she loved dearly, who cannot either handle her grief or acknowledge her grief, who lets everything else (job, friends, family, paying bills, hygiene) fall by the wayside as she fixates on a goshawk she calls Mabel.

Watching the film, you’d be like “How random!” Though there are an array of movies, even just recently where someone, usually a fairly famous actor, acts with a mostly CGI bird. It’s almost like a rite of middle-age passage. There was…Naomi Watts and some magpie? Steve Coogan and some penguin? Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and some parrot?

You kinda get that it’s not about the bird itself, but then it’s also all about the bird? I mean the beautiful, majestic goshawk does look incredible, close up and in flight, with those piercing eyes, and those monstrous talons and a beak that can pierce through flesh and bone with ease?

dir: Eva Victor

2025

Eva Victor wrote the screenplay, directs the film, and stars as the main character. I’m guessing they have some random connection to the story…

I shouldn’t be glib. This is a pretty serious story, dealt, dare I say it, with a light and humorous touch, and it’s not just about the terrible thing it’s about. It’s also about friendship, and how those relationships (just as important if not more so than ‘romantic’ ones) change over time, and need to change regardless of all the reasons we don’t want them to.

And it’s mostly about our odd main character, Agnes (Eva Victor). As the story opens she’s greeting her dearest friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) who is in town just to visit her. This is several years after they both did grad studies at this particular, small liberal arts college (I’m guessing somewhere in New England), one that Lydie has moved away from, and that Agnes is still entrenched in.

Amidst their catching up, and the kinds of goofy carry-ons that only long time intense friends have, there is concern on Lydie’s part, and continuous, unconvincing reassurance on Agnes’ part, that she’s okay, she’s not trapped, she’s not suicidal, it’s okay. They dance around The Bad Thing that must have happened to her, but not for too long, because it’s important to let us know what the Bad Thing was that happened to Agnes, that now colours many aspects of her life, so that it doesn’t become a distraction that they keep being mysterious about it.

The film is separated into chapters based on particular years that don’t follow chronologically, but the film does start and end in the same year, the Year of the Baby. It then jumps back to the Year with the Bad Thing, and the years that followed, and then it’s back to where the flick gets its title from, being Agnes apologising to an actual baby.

I feel like… maybe the chapter titles are a not-so-subtle allusion to David Foster Wallace, since Agnes is a lecturer in Modern American Literature, and though I doubt she has Infinite Jest on her syllabus, at least none of the chapters was titled The Year of the Chewable Ambien Tab or the like. Could be a bit of a reach, on my part. But it wouldn’t be out of line with the environment, seeing as it’s people who voluntarily immerse themselves in the cozy, smothering world of academia, with its attendant pitfalls and pretentious prats.

If you went to uni, and especially if you lived on campus, the vibes of these kinds of college set stories (though this is not to be confused with the “college novel” genre, like Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or Bret Easton Ellis’ early novels before he tried to hide his proximity from the closet by making everything about murder from American Psycho onwards) are familiar. Universities are absurd places. Plus, if you were there for any length of time, you either experienced sexual assault, had friends who survived it (or didn’t), or, in the least likely category if you’re ever reading one of my reviews, you committed it. Statistically speaking, three likely options, many horrible outcomes.

dir: Chloe Zhao

2025

What a mixed bag.

I was excited to see this, or at least the critical acclaim was off the charts and awards seemed to be pouring from the heavens, and now that I’ve seen it, part of me thinks critics have been trained like Pavlovian dogs to start slavering at the sound of Academy Awards chatter, or almost anything to do with Shakespeare.

Jessie Buckley is a great actor, or at least has been some times in other movies. I don’t think this is a great performance, here, at all. It’s so actorly, so contrived in certain spaces, so distracting in its efforts, it quite often took me out of the story and made me wonder why the actor in question made the decisions she made, and why the director and everyone else went along with it.

Paul Mescal is possibly an okay actor who I’ve enjoyed watching in other things. I did not enjoy or appreciate many if not most of his scenes here. They’re so mannered and contrived and distracting in the effort involved. It quite often took me out of the story and made me wonder what bad choices the actor was making, and left me wondering why the director and everyone else went along with it.

Emily Watson has been a great actor for decades, and does masterful work here, as a somewhat disapproving but ultimately supportive mother-in-law to the main family. And what a family it is.

A woman, Agnes, (Jessie Buckley) awakes from a nap in the hollow of a log open to the elements, to the sky. It just happens to be beneath a large tree, next to a deep hole in the ground. She wakes, and calls her hawk from the branch it rests on, and it alights on her glove and eats the scraps of meat she has ready for it.

Nature. It’s great, isn’t it? We get the sense she is a deeply witchy woman, of the forest, of the Earth itself.

As she returns to a rural property, a bored tutor (Paul Mescal) to some young lads learning Latin spies her out the window, and approaches her. This is not an Elizabethan meet-cute: it’s an awkward intro to two characters who are almost always awkward with each other except during a sex scene that will only happen ages from now. There is much space in between.

They eventually become a couple, over the objections of both families, but since she’s pregnant, eh, whatcha gonna do? The father is currently a glover’s son, subject to abuse, but he somehow has a plan to write something, maybe a sonnet or two, maybe a play. Is there money in that?

dir: Jafar Panahi

2025

It’s not that strange that there would be people who might think that there are no accidents, no coincidences, that all is planned or fated or meant to be. We like to think that we are free agents, with free will and self-determination, even though there’s no shortage of scientists / neurologists telling us, depressingly, that consciousness may be an illusion.

I think this flick is using the title ironically (uh derr fred, someone might say, if this was forty years ago, or 28 Years Later, for that matter). Running over a stray dog may have been accidental, but everything that transpires from then on is dripping with intentionality.

This flick, as you would expect from the Iranian master of cinema, Jafar Panahi, does a sly bait and switch in its opening minutes: we observe a husband and wife driving down a road on the outskirts of what we assume is Tehran. Panahi hasn’t been able to make a movie in Iran for decades because of the stupid authoritarian regime without being jailed, so it’s probably not filmed in Iran, but what do I know?

The accidental running over of a stray dog results in the family car needing repairs, which results in the car ending up at a mechanic’s garage.

The mechanic loses his mind when he hears the customer walking about: the guy that was driving has a prosthetic leg, and the mechanic, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), fears he knows the sound of that prosthetic leg all too well. Vahid is convinced that this guy was his torturer when he was kidnapped off the street, kept without reason or legal charge, and tormented by a guy they called Eghbal, or “Peg-Leg” (Ebraham Azizi).

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that ‘Peg-Leg’ is probably an ableist slur, but, contextually, I will point out that the people who use it in the film are people who were horribly tortured by the jerk who did it on behalf of one of the worst regimes in human history. I mean, in reality, the fuckers have slaughtered something close to 20,000 protesters in the last fortnight, leaving out all the other awful stuff they’ve been doing to their own people for years.

The second point I’d make is that they, his victims, don’t know his real name.

Third point is, and the flick hinges on this, Vahid and the other people who he knows who were tortured, have never seen the chap. They don’t know what he looks like.