8 stars

dir: Terence Davies

2022

It seems almost redundant saying that a film made by Terence Davies is a sad one, because…If you’ve seen any of his films, especially his more auto-biographical ones, you know. This one, however, is a biopic, of the life of the poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden, as the younger version) who fought in and then rejected the underlying premises of the so-called Great War, before he was institutionalised for his disobedience.

He writes to his superiors with exasperated disgust that his betters have been lying to the poor soldiers going off to die, and so they fight under false pretences. As such he rejects their authority in sending him off again, and objects, conscientiously or otherwise, to the war itself.

If he were a poorer man, they might have fucked him up royally for defying the right of Empire to do as it will. But as he is from a wealthy family, well…

Unlike the way those kinds of stories usually go, he was neither mistreated, lobotomised nor electro-shocked half to death. He merely had some chats with a sympathetic doctor (a very gentle and charming Ben Daniels, in a film filled with charming but not gentle people), and meets one of (I think) the loves of his life, being Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson).

The slight, pale Owen, who stutters and seems quite fearful, if we, the audience, know of him, it’s in the context of his famous poetry about just how horrible being in the trenches was. His poem Dulce et Decorum est must have been taught to every school kid throughout the Commonwealth, or at least the schoolboys, back in the 1980s. Or maybe I should narrow it down further to those of us who were taught out of Seven Centuries of Poetry in English…

After they spend a brief enough time together, Owen is deemed to be fit for service again, and is sent off for the purposes of irony to be killed a week before the end of the war.

Oh cruellest fate. If Sassoon didn’t have enough disgust for the war and the Empire beforehand, he has even more cause now.

His chats with the good doctor allow him, in that safe space, to confess to often experiencing the love for his fellow man that dare not speaketh its name, which the doctor himself mentions he has experienced himself. The question is made of how one is meant to live this life in an era where people without enough connections can still be destroyed for it.

Discretion seems to be the key. Also, being rich seems to help.

dir: Gasper Noé

2022

This is more like what I had in mind when I recently wrote about the small sub-genre of dramas dealing with old people facing old age, and the younger people trying to muddle through looking after them. Films that don’t shy away from how hard old age can be, and how hard it can be to look after such oldies properly.

However, this flick is directed by the same man who 20 years ago made Irreversible, a film so horrific in its content that I don’t even want to talk about it. Since then he’s made complex and almost experimental films that have in no way tried to do what his first two hideous films did (the other one being I Stand Alone, which, again, I don’t even want to talk about), but have been no less provocative.

Of one of those previous films, I will say that the message at the end was “Le Temps Detruit Tout”, or “time destroys everything”. Vortex starts with the dedication: “To all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts.”

One should know going in this isn’t going to be cheery stuff. The director himself nearly died in 2020 of a brain haemorrhage, and prior to that looked after his mum who had dementia. So maybe he’s got a feel for mortality, and for the complexities of looking after helpless old people.

The central old couple here are in their 80s, and start off seeming okay. They have a cluttered apartment in the 10th arondissement, in Paris, near, of all places, the Stalingrad train station, and we first watch them having an evening aperitif on the balcony.

“Life is a dream, isn’t it?” she says to him.
- “A dream within a dream.”

Most of the film is shot with at least two cameras, one focussing on Him (legendary Italian director Dario Argento), and one generally focussing on Her (Francoise Lebrun) simultaneously. So we often are watching what’s happening to either of them when they’re in the same apartment or apart. It’s giving us two slightly out of kilter perspectives on something that’s happening right in front of us.

Right from the start it’s obvious she has no idea what’s going on around her, where she is, what she’s meant to be doing, or even who her husband is, most of the time. He spends time trying to find her at the local shops, and clearly this has been happening more and more lately.

Back in her apartment, it is all unfamiliar to her. We watch most of a day proceed (not in real time – it’s a long film but it’s not 24 hours long), and for the majority of that day she has been baffled by everything around her, muttering in half formed sentences to herself. Irritated by photos in which she and other people are captured, but she recognises neither herself nor the other person, and turns them over.

Oh irony of ironies: in her previous career she happened to be a psychiatrist, who would examine and diagnose people going through exactly the kind of dementia that she’s living with now, but, because of the dementia, she doesn’t really get that she has dementia, but she knows that something is profoundly wrong.

(Pahanhautoja)

dir: Hanna Bergholm

2022

What a Freudian field day for the whole freaking family.

I can’t remember the last time I watched a Finnish film, but I can tell you two things: it was probably by Aki Kaurismaki, the only other Finnish director I can think of, and it was nothing like this. Certainly not as colourful.

This is flat out a horror flick, there’s no getting around it, and it’s a fairly brutal one. Don’t let gentle images of girls and eggs lull you into a false sense of security. It is pretty funny in parts, but I wouldn’t call this a dark comedy or anything like that. It’s way too bright, for one thing.

There is a Mother (Sophia Keikillä), who is an Instagram-influencer monster, a Father (Jani Volanen), a daughter Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) and a son Matias (Oiva Ollila). The son is a boring carbon copy of the father, and the mother does everything in her power to make the daughter into her clone. Everything they do, every way their house looks, has to be Instagram-worthy.

When Tinja competes in gymnastics, there’s none of that “just go out there and have fun” bullshit, or “good job” this or “you tried your best” that. There’s only “win or I will disfigure you” type tough love without the love part.

This can have an effect on a young woman’s development. When a bird flies into the house during one of these White Woman Instagram moments, and punctures Mother’s fantasy, Tinja tries to gently catch the bird, but Mother is all “I’m here for the neck snappings, nothing else”.

This unleashes forces the Mother, the Father, the whole neighbourhood simply cannot understand, but at least it will help Tinja achieve some measure of self-realisation.

Struggling as she is to live up to her Mother’s strict requirements, Tinja gets the opportunity to look after a new life in the form of an egg, from the mortally wounded bird. She protects the egg. She cradles the egg. She puts into it all her rage, shame, anger, jealousy, even as she’s doing her best to nurture it and see it grow.

What hatches is a sight, a sight to behold. I don’t think there’s any CGI involved, it looks like practical, physical effects work. It’s impressive, and kinda sickening, too.

Tinja calls this inhuman bird / child hybrid Alli, after a lullaby, and the ways of feeding it are pretty gross. Alli does need regurgitated food, like all baby birds. But she also likes to feed on blood and emotions. She especially seems to like killing neighbourhood pets and anyone else that pisses Tinja off.

dir: Thomas M. Wright

2022

This is not an easy review to write. It wasn’t an easy film to watch.

I have found with all the death and insanity of the last bunch of years that I really don’t have a lot of love for true crime stuff based on things that have actually happened. Same goes for war films. I find them very hard to watch at the moment.

Horror movies with underground monsters or kill crazy maniacs are fine, but “real” or true stuff is just too painful. This film, The Stranger, is very painful to watch.

It should be. I don’t know if it should have been made. I haven’t sorted through, in my head, the moral and ethical arguments about making a movie depicting the lengths the police went to in order to convict a man for the murder of a child. I don’t know if I should even mention the boy’s name, since the family not only had nothing to do with this production but actively spoke out against it.

Who owns the story? The parents? The boy, which ultimately means the parents? The cops? Does Australian society own the story? And by own I don’t mean who has the right to make “art” and profit from the story. I mean, whose story is it?

I don’t think anyone is comfortable saying that, despite being the main character here, and the subject of that most generic of titles, the man who killed that boy wouldn’t be considered to be the one who owns this story.

And yet it’s all about him, and not the boy.

He is depicted as he is depicted, and instead of being depicted as a monster, he is depicted as a revenant, as something or someone who’s barely there. He is a scarecrow, gaunt, with a scraggly beard. He is almost faded, and only tentatively interacts with the world around him. Other than smoking I have no idea what he even did before he was caught up in this incredible undercover operation.

This is not a deep character study. You will find nor see no reasons to sympathise with him.