Thriller/Suspense

dir: Steven Soderbergh

2024

America’s most reliably competent director is back with another reliably competent movie / genre exercise. It’s too much of an experiment to just consider it as a straight haunted house / ghost story flick, but it’s one that aims to tell its story somewhat uniquely, rather than just deliver thrills and/or chills.

Soderbergh has long been his own cinematographer, under the fake name of Peter Andrews this time, which means he’s the one holding the camera during these long, choreographed takes. The slight difference here, is that the ‘camera’ is the ‘presence’ of the title, a presence that observes what’s happening (which is why we get to see it), but is also occasionally sensed by some of the characters.

Nothing indicates why the presence, or ghost, is where it is. It roams through the empty house and settles back into a closet, before doing it all again as a realtor shows a family through the house. The teenage girl of the family is the only one who feels that there’s something wrong, some ‘thing’ floating around observing her, being the camera/ghost. It’s weird.

It’s weird on a number of levels. It’s weird in the sense that she sense’s there’s a supernatural presence there. It’s weird because she’s directing her attention towards the camera, something that never happens in 99 per cent of movies, whereby the unspoken rule is “never look at the camera, and never make eye contact with Tom Cruise”. It’s weird on a third level because it’s almost (at least for me) like she’s detecting that we, as in the audience, are watching her. Like she knows we’re there, and she’s uncomfortable about it, which kinda makes me feel voyeuristic and uncomfortable about it, too.

dir: Christopher Landon

2025

There’s something a bit brave about making a flick dependent on some fad app that is already forgotten by the time audiences get to watch the flick. If there is an app that insists, that allows random fuckheads to force you to download it in order to receive messages which disappear after you look at them, I don’t know about it, but I am aware that people can “drop” messages or photos to each other using a panoply of apps, but it’s already wronger than wrong.

And I don’t care. This story is entirely dependent on these apps to maintain tension or a sense of being surveilled at all times, but it’s bullshit, and it doesn’t matter in the end. The point of the premise is that it’s a thriller premise, and a woman at one location, being a fancy restaurant, is being watched constantly by someone in the restaurant, who forces her to do things because, back at home, her son and sister are being menaced by some jerk with a gun, which she can also see via her phone.

Depending on who you believe, almost everyone in America is either being menaced with a gun in their homes or is doing the menacing themselves at any given moment. The strength or failure of such a premise is entirely dependent on whether we think it’s believable for someone to be trapped in such a way, and to go along with what her antagonists want, until she finds a heroic solution to all her problems. If you buy it, then this flick becomes an exciting thrill ride as a young widow chooses to either go along with or reject the dictates of what the unknown psycho pestering her through her phone is forcing her to do.

I can’t think of many flicks like this, but I’m sure there are a bunch of them. There are plenty of flicks where someone forces the protagonist to do whatever under threat of something worse happening, but I can’t think of too many where someone is restricted to one location and observed from every possible angle which the protagonist can’t figure out for most of the plot.

dir: Zoë Kravitz

2024

It’s not enough that her parents are Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz who are, if nothing else, two of the most supernaturally attractive people on the planet. It’s not enough that her parents are incredibly talented and successful as well in their respective fields. It’s not enough that Ms Kravitz is immensely talented and successful herself, and that she’s been great in most of the performances I’ve ever seen her give, in films as different as The Batman and, a film I actually liked, being Kimi or that remake series of High Fidelity.

Now she wants to successfully direct movies as well. Goddamn talented nepo babies: a leg up and a foot through the door, and so much more.

Also, as if to emphasise what a nepo baby experience this all is, a child of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman is in this, but no, it’s not Maya – it’s their son Levon, who plays a complete nothing of a character. He is there just to remind us what the untalented nepo babies are up to.

Plus, Ms Kravitz also hires her fiancé, who’s clearly hurting for work, being Channing Tatum, to play one of the main roles here: that of a tech billionaire who’s always vaping.

If only that was the worst of his crimes. This is one of those movies where someone accidentally or unintentionally gets trapped in a place where they might get hunted or murdered or worse. You know, like those films where rich people hunt poor people for their selfish amusement.

The twist in the tail here is that the rich tech bros led by Slater King, which is a name so terrible it could only be the name of a vile tech bro who rubs shoulders with the likes of Elmo Husk or Peter Thiel, have it all figured out. He and his other monsters are monstrous predators, but they are comfortable ones.

The thing is, right from the start, we know something odd is going on, and that’s a good place to start from.

dir: William Oldroyd

2023

This film… Does it actually exist? Did I imagine it all?

I bet you’ve probably never heard of this movie’s existence. I’m not saying this from the perspective of like a music vinyl snob sneering at someone in a record shop “you’ve probably never even heard of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, have you?” I mean it more from the perspective that this flick was made in the covid years, was released December last year and then the world acted like nothing had happened.

You know, like sometimes when you’re on public transport, and someone does something absolutely psychotic, but everyone looks away and tries to pretend that nothing happened, because they don’t want to draw the attention or the ire of the lunatic that did the thing?

I imagine that Eileen made negative dollars at the box office, if it was even ever released. I would not even know of the film’s existence if I hadn’t heard of a review from some other film reviewer who feels compelled to review absolutely everything that is ever released.

I understood absolutely nothing about this flick until the very, very end. As in when the credits started, and then I saw that this was based on a novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, and then it all fell into place.

I have not read the novel this was based on, which was Moshfegh’s first published novel, but I have read My Year of Rest and Relaxation, so I have some idea of where she was coming from with this screenplay, which she wrote as well (along with her husband Luke Goebel).

But I didn’t twig on to this while watching the flick. If you know of Ottessa Moshfegh’s work, or you skim articles about contemporary literature, you would know of her name cropping up whenever there’s a discussion about “unlikeable” or “unpleasant” female main characters in novels, as in the heavily gendered idea that male characters can be absolute arseholes, and that’s fine, if not desirable, but if there’s a female main character who exhibits the same kind of behaviour or possesses similar character traits or motivations, then it’s unpleasant and icky. Ew, gross. Women have bodies? Ew.