Showing posts with label Juno Temple. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Juno Temple. Show all posts

Monday, March 26, 2018

UNSANE in the Brain


Unsane, Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, is a breathlessly suspenseful psychological thriller built upon a great lead performance, and an experiment in technical limitations. It finds tightly wound tension as a woman (Claire Foy) is involuntarily committed to a mental institution and therefore quickly pushed to her wits end. The more she loudly and wildly proclaims her sanity, the less the staff is likely to believe her, especially when the cops see the paperwork she signed, and the insurance company signs off on underwriting her stay. Shot almost entirely on iPhones, the perspective is unfamiliar, set on tables and desks, at unusually close or low angles a full-sized camera on a conventional set couldn’t possibly find. There’s a sense of tactile energy to the framing, and a crackling sense of unease in how unfamiliar the look becomes. This isn’t manipulated like Sean Baker’s Tangerine (the other major iPhone-shot feature) to have a rough-hewn beauty approaching the digital expressiveness of Michael Mann or latter day Godard. Soderbergh allows for the phone’s camera to manifest natural jaggedness in pans, slight wobbling of focus at the edges, tight aspect ratio that leaves black the edges of a properly sized and matted theater screen. Every interaction seems ripe with danger. The whole frame is closing in on its main character, trapping her as reality seems to warp and distort in the bugs of the visual information’s capture. 

The trick of the movie is the deceptively simple filmmaking and crystal clear screenplay by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer letting suspicion cloud judgement. Maybe, the thought occurred to me early on, our protagonist really is in need of this treatment. She went to see a therapist about lingering uneasiness related to being the victim of a stalker (Joshua Leonard). She admits to occasional thoughts of self-harm. Then she’s asked back into the inner wards and locked in a seven day stay for her own good, cooped up with others (Jay Pharaoh, Juno Temple) who view her as one of them. Soon, she starts lashing out – striking an employee, berating her fellow patients – eventually appearing to hallucinate her stalker is one of the nurses at the facility. How easy it is to slip out of sanity, when stress is pushed to the limits. She feels trapped, held against her will, loudly protesting when no one believes her pleas. She is unsafe, she cries. No, say the doctors, she is simply unsane. Soderbergh takes her point of view at clinical face value, the great twist brewing in plain sight. He’s simply not trying to trick you, playing everything exactly straight, playing the audience’s doubts against his character. Foy does a Grade-A breakdown, expertly modulating her mood swings from exasperated frustration and wailing despair to violent disbelief or depressed resignation and back again as the week stretches on. As the film picks up in a pulpy fever pitch, it becomes a double-edged harm – from a health care system easily manipulated by corrupt individuals, and from the long-lasting effects of trauma. It’s as gripping an experiment as any Soderbergh has yet pulled off.

Sunday, September 20, 2015

Bad Fellas: BLACK MASS


Black Mass is a true crime gangster picture that doesn’t have a perspective or opinion on the events it recounts. It is content to grimly reenact backroom power plays and violent hits without caring too much about what it meant to the people involved, let alone using the proceedings as windows into their psyches. Set in Boston during the reign of crime kingpin James “Whitey” Bulger, a man who muscled out the Italian mob to become the city’s main source of organized crime, the screenplay makes clear the ties of neighborhood loyalty. This allowed Bulger to enter a mutually beneficial relationship with an FBI agent who once was a schoolyard chum, feeding information about his rivals while receiving a blind eye to his own criminal enterprises. This, along with a senator for a brother, allowed him to remain untouched for decades.

Director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) and screenwriters Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth (Get on Up) start in 1975 and work their way to 1995, following Bulger from humble nastiness to king of crime before it all unravels for him. Perhaps assuming the target audience has seen some gangster stories play out before, the film is not particularly interested in the how or what of its characters’ schemes, and is never clear about the nature of his income. Instead, it features tight close-ups and slow zooms highlighting small shifts in negotiations and power plays. The recurring moments are either intimately creepy – Bulger staring down another person with intimidating intensity until they give him what he wants – or violent, with killings telegraphed beyond the point of surprise arriving with nonetheless brutal force. What are we to make of these murders? Only that they’re senseless, I suppose.

A large ensemble of reliable talents slurring through a variety of phony Boston accents keep things watchable and reasonably interesting on a moment by moment basis. Joel Edgerton is a slimy FBI agent too close to Bulger, protecting him from his law enforcement colleagues (Kevin Bacon, David Harbour, Adam Scott, Corey Stoll) and their suspicions they’re not getting appropriately valuable intel for all the damage caused. Jesse Plemons, Rory Cochrane, and W. Earl Brown are Whitey’s flunkies, who do a lot of the beating and killing, and drop in and out of the narrative. Benedict Cumberbatch is Bulger’s brother, affectionate but precious about keeping his office out of crime. And in this masculine environment of jockeying for power and speaking in deep whispers, a trio of female roles (for Dakota Johnson, Julianne Nicholson, and Juno Temple) exists to provide people who think this whole thing is dangerous but have no way of stopping it.

The proceedings are the sort of surface seriousness that coasts on the appearance of heavy subject matter without actually engaging with the thematic content that could exist under the surface. Cooper’s too interested in directing the logistics of the large ensemble, making sure everyone’s posing in the correct period detail and mushing their Rs into appropriate vaguely Bostonian sounds. The potentially fascinating story of corruption and crime is told through solid craft, Masanobu Takayanagi’s cinematography finely textured, David Rosenbaum’s editing steadily accumulating mild dread at the story’s most dramatic moments of threat. But there’s never a sense of what all the blood and backstabbing really means for the people involved beyond the simple facts of the case, and no foothold for either a formless “that’s life” truthiness or rigorous moralizing. It goes straight up the middle, ending up nowhere.

The mystery at the center remains the man himself, a presence and an instigator throughout the narrative who somehow remains stubbornly out of focus. How did he first rise to power? What made him the top Irish mobster? What did he think about what he did? We don’t know from this film. Here he seems to emerge fully formed from the shadows. Played by Johnny Depp at his least communicative and yet somehow as, if not more, affected than his Mortdecai or Mad Hatter, his countenance is entombed in artifice. Dead ice blue eyes pop against sickly pale skin, his face remolded out of makeup effects into something that’s always off-putting and unnatural. His Bulger is spooky, moving stiffly, holding his posture rigid, always frowning. He lurks in dark corners, most creepy when he stands hidden in an empty church nook, or when he interrupts a woman reading The Exorcist to calmly, threateningly run his hand along her face and neck.

Presenting the facts in a style synthesized and hollowed out from an amalgamation of every gangster picture that came before is one thing. But to plunk a performance like Depp’s in the middle of it – so artificial, so designed, so immediately signaling evil – is strange. It’s an interesting approach, more Karloff than DeNiro, more Michael Myers than Brando. He doesn’t seem like a real person. He looks like he should’ve been featured in Famous Monsters of Filmland fifty years ago. It makes impossible the notion we should take this seriously as a look into the face of real evil that men do. Besides, the movie’s too unfocused to even activate the Nosferatu qualities of Depp’s work. It’s a case of a project with a script, a director, and a lead performance working at cross purposes. It’s too shallow to be a weighty exploration of crime and punishment, too restrained to be pulpy fun, and too unwilling to follow an eccentric lead into a more overtly nightmarish direction. It’s competent enough to work scene by scene, but adds up to a missed opportunity all around.

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Bedeviled: HORNS


One morning, Ignatius wakes up to find a pair of devil horns growing right out of his forehead. Because this situation is based on the novel Horns by Joe Hill, who has inherited a flair for matter-of-fact macabre from his father Stephen King, we know that this isn’t a good sign. To make matters worse, Ig is currently the number one suspect in the murder of his girlfriend at the time of this new facial feature. Not a good time to start looking overtly devilish, but then again antlers are almost never a good look on a human person. Maybe Imogene of David Small’s picture book Imogene’s Antlers could pull it off, but even then only barely. It’s certainly not something most of us have to worry about.

Here, a charge of morbid curiosity regarding this development is ignited by two factors. One, Ig is being demonized by the press and becomes an embodiment of their stereotyping, an idea more fulfilling when explored in Gone Girl, but there’s room for both. Two, Ig is played by Daniel Radcliffe, sweet, pure, innocent, heroic Harry Potter himself. The film certainly wants us thinking about that, making some use of his screen persona to stack the deck. We’re supposed to be on his side right away, because surely Harry Potter wouldn’t murder his girlfriend. His history, and earnest performance, provides a modicum of transgression to scenes where he gets drunk, swears, smokes, has sex. He’s bad in quotation marks, a figure who’s literally no angel, the most literal Biblical allusion in a film full of them, including an Eve’s Diner, complete with a neon apple out front.

What’s odd about the freshly sprouting horns is how little others seem to notice, shrugging them off and going about their business. What’s especially strange is how small Ig’s reaction is. He goes to the doctor, and when that doesn’t help he just wanders around. They’re just another burden to bear. But he soon discovers the horns cause even worse reactions. They have the power to get people spilling their deepest, darkest secrets, allowing him to discover that the world is a perverse and ugly place held barely in check by a sense of propriety that fast erodes when he’s around. He goes to his parents (Kathleen Quinlan and James Remar) who instantly confess they think he killed the girl. “And she was my favorite thing about you,” his dad says. That hurts. He decides to use this thorny truth power to track down the real murderer and clear his name.

This is a fine concept, and Keith Bunin’s script allows the movie to glancingly incorporate a variety of tones and styles, creating a genre mélange that ends up a comic body horror thriller neo-noir supernatural murder mystery. But it thinks it’s weirder than it is. The revelations of his fellow man – one wants to binge eat, another wants to be a flasher, yet another’s a secret arsonist – seem rather pat, all things considered. And the gee-ain’t-mankind-the-real-monsters plotting gets lost in the execution that runs on a paranormal mystery the characters largely shrug at and a dead-girl mystery rotely developed and simply solved with limp twists and iffy effects. Plot threads involving Ig’s lawyer (Max Minghella), brother (Joe Anderson), a bartender (Kelli Garner), a waitress (Heather Graham), and his girlfriend’s father (David Morse), all stumble towards the conclusion with him to little effect.

Director Alexandre Aja has made a career out of going all in on bungled execution in horror movies like the ruinously twisted High Tension or the traumatic gleeful bloodbath Piranha 3D. With Horns he enthusiastically embraces every cracked corner of the concept, taking it far further than it should go, but not as far as it could. With lush colors and handsome photography, and a few unfortunately overplayed choices in needle drops, it goes from sudden outbursts of dark comedy and gore to surprisingly sweet (sometimes) childhood flashbacks that melt into borderline sexy young adult romance. These flashbacks, which give Juno Temple slightly more to the role of girlfriend beyond mere corpse, take us out of the main narrative, but it’s so ambling and rambling in the telling anyway that it only cuts off theoretical momentum. Give Horns credit for trying something new, even if it ends up only fitfully working.

Friday, May 30, 2014

Like a Villain: MALEFICENT


Maleficent, the sorceress who gives Sleeping Beauty her cursed slumber, is one of Walt Disney Animation’s greatest accomplishments. Frightening and elegant, she has a tall, statuesque presence, high model features, towering horns growing from her head, and flowing dark robes swooshing around her. She glows green with dark magic, and by the end uses her powers to conjure the form of a dragon to fight off the Princess’s chances for True Love’s Kiss. She’s an iconic image. Thus the challenge for Maleficent, a live-action retelling of the story from the sorceress’s point of view. How to fill the role with a mere flesh and blood actor? How to recapture the power of those drawn images, so striking and so fearsome? Luckily, the filmmakers were able to meet the challenge and cast Angelina Jolie, whose high cheekbones, piercing eyes, and elegant silhouette make her an imposing presence when draped in the makeup and wardrobe to match the character’s iconic look. Here her eyes are fierce, her face is sculpted and angular. She’s a perfect fit.

But making Maleficent the center of this story is not without its problems. In the 1959 film, as in the fairy tale upon which it was based, she’s pure evil, bestowing an awful curse on an infant for her parent’s crime of failing to invite the witch to a party. Maleficent is a force of destruction and looms large over the plot as pure threat, casting a dark shadow over innocent first love, worried parents, and sweet dotty fairies in a colorful Disney kingdom. Maleficent is out to make some changes, moving the title character into the position of protagonist. This isn’t Sleeping Beauty of old. It opens with a narrator (Janet McTeer) telling us about two lands that sit side by side. One is a kingdom ruled by man. The other is a magical forest ruled by no one, the better for fairies, living trees, sprites, and other fanciful creatures to frolic freely. In this forest a young Maleficent lives, carefree until the day a man (Sharlto Copley) appears, tells her he loves her, and then steals her wings.

The man presents the wings to the dying king in order to be named his successor. Now the new king, he has a daughter. She is cursed on the day of her christening by the vengeful, violated Maleficent who lashes out at the man who hurt her by attacking his child. Hidden away in the forest by three largely incompetent fairies (Imelda Staunton, Lesley Manville, and Juno Temple, great actresses doing bad comic relief), the baby grows up to be Aurora (Elle Fanning). Something - lingering guilt, perhaps, over hurting a child for the crimes of her father – makes Maleficent hang around, offering unseen assistance to Aurora as she grows, becoming something like a fairy godmother to her. And so, regretting her curse, Maleficent and her raven sidekick (Sam Riley) try to undo it before it is too late. Meanwhile, the evil king is plotting to invade the enchanted forest and slay the sorceress once and for all.

Flipping the script on a classic villain, Linda Woolverton (of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland) has written a screenplay that’s a bit of a mess, but at least finds thorny thematic issues with which to wrestle. Now it is not a fairy tale about unexplained evil and the pat True Love that will conquer all. Instead, it’s a movie about the marginalization of women, in which the king sees both Maleficent and Aurora as pawns in his life story instead of people with thoughts, feelings, and ambitions of their own. Just as surely as Maleficent is wounded for the sake of his promotion, his daughter is cast aside for his peace of mind. In the end, Maleficent made huge mistakes, but it’s the king who is the real bad guy.

That’s all interesting, but if only the film had the patience to stop and wrestle with the ideas. Instead, it’s content to only suggest deeper thoughts as it hustles its way through exposition and character beats with a sense of obligation instead of enchantment. Even the appearance of Prince Phillip (Brenton Thwaites) is a huge non-event, which is at once a hilarious example of the movie’s welcome shifting of gender roles and an example of its half-hearted plotting. I love how it takes a story about a young woman whose fate is decided by her father and her love and makes it a story about misunderstood and victimized women and their complicated relationship with each other, but the movie is simply too frustratingly thin to support these deeper concerns.

While Sleeping Beauty is less emotionally complex, it has a stronger and more direct sense of storytelling. Maleficent has a vague understanding of what a story looks like, but often plays like a series of haphazardly connected scenes. Characters have changes of heart and evolutions of thinking for no other reason than because the movie needs them to do so. Consequently, there is not a lot of momentum here and the film grows mushy and aimless in the center as it spends its time telling us what we need to know instead of allowing it to unfold. The result is a small cast standing against flat, over-lit CGI backgrounds reciting dialogue that sounds like someone left all the subtext on the surface of the rough draft and never did a rewrite to bury it.

At least it fits the general phoniness of everything around them. There is never a sense this fantasy world is real. It just doesn’t look good. Director Robert Stromberg is a visual effects artist making his directorial debut. The picture is filled with competently visualized spectacle, with tree-creatures and strange little fantasy animals wandering around. When Maleficent flies about it’s with a convincing woosh and the dragon in the climax is as big, scaly, and fiery as you’d expect. But the action is repetitive and dull. The environments are stiff and dead. It never feels like a coherent vision of a place or time. It’s just disconnected digital frippery. If it was chintzier, you could almost accuse it of feeling like it was shot in a corner of the Disney backlot. Instead, it just looks like endlessly green-screened busyness. This is the movie’s biggest downfall. On a visual level, it simply isn’t as convincing, as inky dark and richly imagined as its lead performance.

Jolie stands in the center of the movie as iconic a screen creation as ever there was. The scene in which the screen darkens as shadows cast by scary green fire flicker over her face as she bellows sinister magic into a crib is genuinely spooky. And yet, Jolie sells her character’s hurt and regret, her elegance and her frozen mask of emotions that slowly melts for the child she has doomed. She’s a sympathetic, complicated creature, capable of glowering harm and glimmering compassion. It’s a great, full-blooded performance in a movie that’s simply not up to the task of working on her level. She’s so good I wished there was enough to the scenes to allow her to really sink her teeth in and chew. She’s big. It’s the picture that’s small.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Fun for All or All for Fun? THE THREE MUSKETEERS


Alexandre Dumas’s classic novel The Three Musketeers has been adapted for the movies many times. After all, the familiar story is a rich source of swordplay and intrigue. Musketeers Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, with the help of young would-be musketeer d’Artagnan, try to protect the French monarchy from the dastardly coup being planned by the evil Cardinal Richelieu. It’s a great story, though it’s rarely made into good movies. I think it’s safe to say, though, that the story has never before been told in the way director Paul W.S. Anderson and screenwriters Alex Litvak and Andrew Davies have in this newest adaptation. They’ve turned it into a poor-man’s Pirates of the Caribbean, a swashbuckling 3D superhero movie with a thick layer of steampunk nonsense and genre tomfoolery ladled on top. (It’s greatest accomplishment is sure to be the exceptionally confused book reports that kids in the audience may be writing in the future.) Did I mention I kind of enjoyed it?

This is a film that starts off with a note of such high ridiculousness that it’s pleasing to find that it never climbs down. It all starts in Venice, where the Three Musketeers are introduced with splashy comic-book style freeze frames that spell out their names in thick ink, as if the screen has briefly turned to parchment. Athos (Matthew Macfadyen) bubbles up from underwater and attacks some guards with a multi-pronged crossbow. A cloaked Aramis (Luke Evans) dives off a bridge to smash into a gondola. A chained Porthos (Ray Stevenson) rips the shackles off the wall and beats back his captors. Meeting up, it’s clear that they are in the middle of heist. They, along with the sultry Milady (Milla Jovovich), are stealing secret plans to a warship hidden deep within Da Vinci’s vault that is accessible through a retractable staircase, the base of which is covered in Resident Evil by way of Indiana Jones booby traps. It’s this kind of wild invention and freewheeling genre stealing that will characterize the movie to come. We haven’t even really started yet. This is mere prologue.

The heist goes wrong care of an unexpected double cross, so the Musketeers are wallowing in their less than heroic status, nearly destitute on the streets of Paris, when sweet-faced, smooth-faced d’Artagnan (nicely earnest Logan Lerman) rides into town hoping to become a Musketeer like his father once was. Through some tortured scenes of sometimes-painful dialogue, the three become four as they begin to realize the extent to which France needs their help. The movie is top-heavy with thudding scenes of scheming and needling that move the characters with some degree of narrative bobbling into position for the forthcoming action sequences. Cardinal Richelieu (Christoph Waltz, always welcome) and Milady plan to break apart the French monarchy by creating distrust between the adolescent king (Freddie Fox) and his equally young bride (Juno Temple). Waltz, looking for all the world like a teacher disappointed in his students, regards the childish royalty with barely concealed disgust. He’s not much happier with the British envoy he’s planning to use as an unknowing patsy for his plan to work. That would be the Duke of Buckingham, played hammily and wonderfully against type by Orlando Bloom.

So the stage is set for some exciting action, and it arrives more or less on schedule. Anderson, shooting in 3D, creates some great crazy visuals that play with depth and space. As the film slips farther and farther away from Dumas, it arrives at an uneven, but terrific, sense of boyish adventure with an anything goes genre freedom. A woman in full period costume rappels down the side of Versailles and then wriggles in slow motion through a corridor filled with invisible trip-wires. Sailing ships with dirigible-like enhancements float across the sky. Flamethrowers and rapid-fire cannons shoot flames and bombs. And still, amidst this pile-up of unexpected imagery that plays like a head-on collision between Terry Gilliam and Hayao Miyazaki, we get simple, fun swordplay and gunfire that thrills as well. Like that other disreputable scholckmeister Michael Bay, 3D has sharpened and clarified Paul W.S. Anderson’s style. It was hard to glimpse in ridiculously terrible movies like Mortal Kombat and Alien vs. Predator, but with Three Musketeers there is a likable self-conscious feeling of playfulness. When Richelieu is confronted with an accusation, he responds, “Am I supposed to laugh maniacally and divulge my plans?” When a flying ship comes crashing down onto a steeple, the architectural flourish appears to slice up out of the screen. Moments like these feel irreverent, gimmicky and completely natural.

Does the whole movie work on this level? No. So much of the film is straining to reach a sense of light fun that remains just out of reach. Dialogue is clunky and strange. Scenes seem to pass with little consequence before suddenly becoming only stifling importance. By the end, it’s clear that the plot is burdened by its own possible future. Characters and events are left dangling just enough for a sequel, which has the unfortunate effect of leaving all the best villains on the sidelines during the climax, while the heroes do battle with some lesser evils. And it’s all so very strange, a movie at once completely derivative and utterly idiosyncratic. It’s both an exasperating and an enjoyable big budget oddity. It’s a movie that will play best to an open-minded audience prepared with patience, indulgence, and low expectations.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Catching Up on 2011: Twists and Turns Edition


In Gregg Araki’s Kaboom, Thomas Dekker stars as a college student who harbors a crush on his dumb surfer roommate (Chris Zylka).  He - Dekker, not the roommate - is a troubled guy, trying to figure out who he is and find his place in the world. Chowing down in the cafeteria, he confides in his best friend (Haley Bennett). They chat about the usual college topics: relationships and classes. Their rapport has a lived-in chemistry. They have fun being with each other and, consequently, they’re fun to watch. Around this little R-rated collegiate comedy spins an increasingly paranoid frenzy of plot that includes missing persons, a jealous lesbian witch (Roxane Mesquida), people in animal masks, a flirty party girl (Juno Temple), a doomsday cult, a pot-fueled prophet (James Duval), and the End of the World. It’s a fevered concoction, like a messy, madly uneven collaboration between David Lynch, Richard Kelly, and Diablo Cody. It’s also distinctly Araki, harkening back to the mix of tactile sensual imagery and commitment to heightened cartoonish grotesquery that he was deploying early in his career in wild, scattershot efforts like 1995’s The Doom Generation. He’s dialed back the intensity in the interim and, though it shares the DNA, Kaboom benefits from Araki’s more mature, experienced eye. The film’s no less of a mess, but it feels significantly more considered in its choices, a kind of careful craziness, a kind of tidy disorder to be found. It’s a sexy, vibrant jumble of weirdness and hilarity that is uneven but entertaining right up until its rushed climax that sucks the fun out of it all. To a certain extent, this feels like a deeply strange, very funny, sometimes creepy, often brilliant TV show with one or two seasons shoved into 80 minutes. With a complicated narrative structure of interwoven and overlapping hallucinations, amorous fantasies, drug trips, and bad dreams that culminates (spoiler!) in a literal apocalyptic explosion, the film keeps Dekker at the center, grounding it all. On a plot level it may be crazy and unsatisfying, but the metaphor rings true. To searching college kids floating around in hormonal ennui, the stakes of self-discovery can seem downright cataclysmic in proportions. 

A sturdy ensemble anchors The Lincoln Lawyer, a fairly standard legal thriller, the kind with twists that are only surprising to someone who has never experienced a legal thriller of any kind, not even an episode of Law & Order or a thick, forgettable airport novel. The script from John Romano, from a novel by Michael Connelly, gives Matthew McConaughey a rare suitable role that finds a way to channel his default sleaziness into an actual character. He’s an L.A. defense attorney working out of his car when he’s hired by a rich guy (Ryan Phillippe) who needs to beat an assault charge. The problem is that McConaughey begins to have good reason to think that his client really did brutally beat a prostitute and feels sick about defending him. He thinks his way through the criminal justice system, trying to alternately outwit and work with prosecutors (Marisa Tomei and Josh Lucas), cops (John Leguizamo and Bryan Cranston), an investigator (William H. Macy), and an inmate (Michael Peña). It’s all a slick bore. Now, this might sound like nitpicking, but the thing that most bugged me about this mediocre entertainment were the wobbly little zooms that director Brad Furman would drop into scenes for no apparent reason. A standard dialogue scene would be humming right along and then, zoom, we zip a little closer to the person talking. Sometimes, the zoom would take us back a few inches, just to mix things up. While I’ll admit that it’s definitely a minor stylistic tick and certainly not one that pervades every scene, it’s also indicative of a larger failing of Furman’s. This is a film that feels as if it’s breathlessly trying to become a better movie, but just can’t make it. Every little tick in the style just struck me as an empty gesture, a failed attempt to make the uninteresting interesting.

Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue, handsome and clean-cut in a way that invites easy empathy) is a young man who leaves the family business, a mortuary run by his father (Rutger Hauer), to attend seminary school. Flash forward to just before he is scheduled to become a priest. He’s lost his faith. He’s not sure he believes in God anymore, even (or is that especially?) when he witnesses a freak accident and kneels over a dying woman, reluctantly giving her the last rites. The head of his program (Toby Jones) asks him to reconsider his decision to abandon the church and gets him to agree to a trip to Rome where he will enroll in a class for exorcism training from the esteemed Father Xavier (Ciarán Hinds). Once there, he finds he still has his doubts. Aren’t the possessed simply mentally ill? He’s taken under the wing of a grave master exorcist (crinkled, latter-day Anthony Hopkins) and finds much to test his doubt. This is Mikael Håfström’s The Rite, which screenwriter Michael Petroni claims, in line with a dubious horror tradition, to be suggested by a true story. It coasts a bit too far on its easy pop-psychological pseudo-religious conflict, but has such a tremendously oppressive sense of somber, suffocating Catholic dread that I couldn’t help but be jangled about. The actors are fantastic all, matching the film’s earnestness and solemnity. It’s an essentially standard paranormal creeper, in many ways just shiny trash, but the deathly unsmiling tone of the film, matched with the high production value, especially the sleek cinematography from Ben Davis who photographs Vatican City in gorgeous, ominous ways, creates a tone of overwhelming skin-crawling danger. I fell into the film’s mood, matching its earnest approach with an unexpectedly earnest response. There’s a creeping sense of an invisible, evil spiritual threat that set my teeth grinding and my feet bouncing. It worked on me. Handsomely mounted and scarily serious, the film’s an effective freak-out.