7/8/15: If These Walls Could Talk

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abused children, abusive childhood, Agnes Bruckner, based on a short, Bridger Nielson, Caity Lotz, Casper Van Dien, cinema, Dakota Bright, dead mother, dysfunctional family, estranged siblings, family home, family secrets, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, ghosts, Haley Hudson, haunted house, haunted houses, horror, horror movies, Judas, Kathleen Rose Perkins, Mark Steger, mediums, Movies, mysteries, Nicholas McCarthy, Petra Wright, Ronen Landa, Sam Ball, serial killers, sisters, small town life, The Pact, twist ending, writer-director

Based on an earlier short of the same name, writer-director Nicholas McCarthy’s debut full-length, The Pact (2012), is an effective, if overly familiar, little haunted house chiller that manages to distinguish itself by dint of its austere atmosphere, focus on mystery and mood over gore and a twist ending that’s massively entertaining, if more than a little nonsensical. While nothing about the film is exactly revolutionary, the overall quality certainly bodes well for the rest of McCarthy’s burgeoning career.

After vowing to put as much distance between her abusive mother and herself as possible, Annie (Caity Lotz) finds herself returning to her childhood home under less than auspicious circumstances. Annie’s much-detested mother has just passed away and, under no small amount of duress, she’s come home for the funeral, mostly to appease her sister, Nichole (Agnes Bruckner), and see her adorable niece, Eva (Dakota Bright).

When she gets home, however, Annie discovers that Nichole, a former drug addict, has seemingly vanished into thin air, leaving Eva under the care of cousin Liz (Kathleen Rose Perkins). Annie assumes that her sister has relapsed but there’s just something about her old home that doesn’t sit quite right. When Liz vanishes under similar circumstances, Annie is convinced that something sinister is going on right under her nose.

As she investigates the history of her family and childhood home, Annie draws the attention of local sheriff Bill Creek (Casper Van Dien), a pensive, kind-hearted lawman who knew Nichole from her wild, druggie days. She also enlists the aid of Stevie (Hayley Hudson), a mysterious, blind, trailer-park medium who makes house calls along with her sketchy, paranoid brother, Giles (Sam Ball). Stevie detects a ghostly presence in the house, some kind of maligned specter who’s only seeking justice for its untimely end. She also detects something much crueler and more malignant, however, a festering, suffocating evil known only as “Judas.” Who (or what) is Judas? How, exactly, is Annie and her family connected to the tragedies at their old home? Will Annie be able to bring peace to the dead or will she find herself joining them?

Although there’s nothing about McCarthy’s debut that screams “instant classic,” it still ends up being a highly likable, well-made and effective film, albeit one with plenty of cheesy moments, overly familiar plot elements and more than a few outright holes. Caity Lotz is effective as Annie, bringing the right mixture of hard-edge, spunk and insecurity to the mix: she certainly doesn’t vault herself into the company of luminaries like Jaime Lee Curtis or Sigourney Weaver but she more than holds her own and gives us a (fairly) level-headed hero to hang our hats on.

The supporting cast ranges from dependable to slightly over-the-top, with Van Dien underplaying his role to the point of mumblecore, while Hudson and Ball have quite a bit of fun as the oddball, white trash mystics. Hudson, in particular, is suitably ethereal and brings a really odd, interesting quality to her performance as the blind psychic. For his part, Mark Steger brings a weird, lurching and almost insectile physicality to his performance as Judas, making him quite the memorable villain, even if he never utters a single line of dialogue. Just the sight of Steger hanging around in the background of various shots is enough to chill the blood and McCarthy gets good mileage out of it.

One of The Pact’s biggest strengths is its focus on the mystery aspect of the narrative, rather than a simple rehashing of moldy haunted house tropes. While McCarthy’s script certainly isn’t comparable to something like Silence of the Lambs, it definitely recalls Vincenzo Natali’s equally modest and effective Haunter (2013), another indie horror film that prided atmosphere over effects. There are still plenty of traditional haunted house scares, of course: people get pulled backwards by invisible forces, doors open and close on their own, lights turn on and off, sinister forms appear in the background while our heroes look in the opposite direction…basically “Ghosts 101.” For the most part, however, these end up being the film’s weakest moments (the invisible forces aspect, in particular, is so old that it sweats dust): when we’re following Annie on her quest for knowledge, the film is an altogether more interesting, tense and driven affair.

Another aspect of The Pact that separates it from its contemporaries is the big, Shyamalan-esque twist that pops up during the climax. While I would never dream of spoiling the surprise, the whole thing tends to make imperfect sense under closer inspection (it presupposes, for one thing, that a key character is either completely deaf or incredibly stupid, neither of which seems to be the case) but it ends the proceedings with a gonzo flourish that’s a lot of fun, if rather silly.

For the most part, I quite enjoyed The Pact, although it was certainly nothing I hadn’t seen before. When the film is silly, it can be quite silly: the scene where Annie draws a Ouija board into the floor and proceeds to contact a spirit is a real howler, as are most of the parts where Annie is shoved around by empty air. When the atmosphere, mood and languid pace all mesh, however, The Pact has plenty of genuinely chilling moments: the scene involving the ghostly photograph is fantastic, as is the one where Bill and Annie discover the hidden room. Any and all of Stevie’s scenes have a genuinely weird, otherworldly quality to them and the finale (minus the eye-rolling coda) is a real corker.

McCarthy would follow-up his debut with At the Devil’s Door (2014), which I’ve yet to see, along with an entry in the upcoming horror-anthology Holidays, which has been on my must-see list since it was announced. If McCarthy can continue to tweak his formula here, replacing some of the overly familiar material with stuff that’s a bit more singular and unique, he stands a good chance of blazing his own trail through the horror wasteland.

2/2/15 (Part One): Hiding in Plain Sight

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abused children, Academy Award Nominee, Best Feature Documentary nominee, biographical films, Charlie Siskel, child-care, cinema, co-directors, co-writers, documentaries, film reviews, films, Finding Vivian Maier, interviews, John Maloof, Movies, multiple directors, multiple writers, mysteries, nanny, Phil Donahue, photography, street photography, Vivian Maier, writer-director-cinematographer

At one point in Finding Vivian Maier (2014), filmmaker John Maloof makes one of the truest statements that anyone’s ever made: “You have to draw an understanding of the individual from the information you have.” In this day and age of over-sharing, this wouldn’t seem to be a huge issue…after all, you can basically find all the personal information you’d ever need just by spending a little time browsing someone’s social media presence. At a time when waiting for your 15 minutes is passe, it seems like folks are only too eager to shout their life stories from the nearest rooftop, in the desperate hope that the right person is listening and ready to turn the spotlight in their direction.

It wasn’t always like this, however: in previous eras, folks seemed to value their privacy more than they do now and it wasn’t uncommon for public figures, much less “commoners,” to be all but anonymous. For some people, even exceptionally talented artisans, there’s nothing glorious or desirable about the white-hot scrutiny of the masses. In some cases, individuals would rather leave behind a lifetime of unseen, unappreciated art than deal with people poking into every nook and cranny of their lives. There’s more to being a public artist than just talent and intent, after all: you have to actually put yourself out there and “live” among the people, as it were.

Maloof’s Finding Vivian Maier, one of the nominees for this year’s Best Feature Documentary Oscar, tackles this subject head-on as it purports to examine the life and work of the formerly mysterious titular subject, a life-long nanny who also happened to be one of the very best street photographers around. Maloof came into contact with Maier’s work when he happened to buy a chest full of her negatives at an auction house. After examining the negatives, Maloof made a rather exciting discovery: not only was there a tremendous amount of material to pore through (upwards of hundreds of thousands of negatives) but the photographs were, for lack of a better descriptor, absolutely stunning. Perfectly composed, exquisitely lit and with a definite eye towards the “darker” side of life, Maier’s photos were real works of art. This, of course, led Maloof to the next, most logical question: just who, exactly, was Vivian Maier?

The answer to that question, such as it is, makes up the bulk of this extremely engaging documentary. As Maloof delves into Maier’s life, he discovers that she spent her life as a nanny for various families: various interviews with the people who employed her, as well as their grown children, help paint an intriguing, contradictory portrait of the secretive woman. She spoke with a French accent, yet was born in New York City. Some of her charges say that she approached all of her subjects, while others say that she shot everyone on the sly, leading to more than a few heated exchanges with her unwitting “subjects.” Vivian is described as being beloved by the children, yet each of them mentions a number of incidents that would paint her, at the very least, as casually abusive and abrasive. She took hundreds of thousands of photos, yet developed only a small handful. In every way, as Maloof (and us) will discover, Vivian Maier is an enigma, a mystery to be examined, figured out and “solved.” As he mentions, we must form our opinion based on the information about Vivian that we’re given and, as we see, there aren’t a lot of concrete facts floating around out there.

Despite a slightly rough start, Finding Vivian Maier gets gradually better, as it goes along, and ends up being quite the quiet little powerhouse by its final moments. One aspect that briefly kept me out of the movie (aside from its sometimes overly kinetic style) is actually John Maloof, the writer-director (along with Charlie Siskel, who we never see). At first, I found him to be uncomfortably aggressive and way too driven: there are times when he has more the feel of a bull in a china shop than a thoughtful commentator. As the film goes on and Maloof gets deeper into the mystery of Vivian, however, his passion for the subject begins to overtake his personality and I found my earlier reservations falling by the wayside. Call it a case of taxiing to get up to take-off speed but the film (and Maloof) find their groove at roughly the same time.

At the end of the day, however, a documentary lives or dies by its subject and Vivian Maier is a suitably fascinating one. While I’m fairly certain that progressive mental illness was responsible for many of her quirks, particularly late in life, there’s no denying that she was a helluva person and a genuine artist. The photos, themselves, are nothing short of amazing and are easily comparable to photographic greats like Annie Leibovitz or Ansel Adams: her portrait shots have a way of delving below the subject’s surface and revealing the myriad little tics that make us all such individuals, something that’s readily apparent in Leibovitz’s photography. It’s also fascinating to discover how intelligent and politically minded she was: the video footage of her interviewing various people about Nixon’s impeachment is a real revelation, as is the bit where she traces a crime from the scene all the way back to the victim’s home. In many ways, Maier was way ahead of the curve, a “citizen journalist” before the phrase even existed.

Many folks will probably have issues with Maier, the person, especially once the film begins to dig into the abusive incidents that the grown children describe. The film never picks a side, however, since everything is filled with such contradictions: we’re constantly hearing two versions of Vivian, sometimes from the same person, which only helps to drive home the notion of her as a living enigma, a reclusive, mysterious figure who lived life on her own terms. Was she misunderstood? A monster? Insane? A tortured artist? Ahead of her time? From what we’re shown/told, she may have been all of these things or none of them. The only thing we know for sure is that she managed to take hundreds of thousands of amazing photographs over the course of her lifetime.

As a lifelong writer who has the equivalent of Maier’s hundreds of thousands of negatives sitting around in the form of half-finished manuscripts, boxes of short stories and poetry, there’s definitely something about Maloof’s film that personally spoke to me. There’s a point in the film where someone remarks that Vivian did all of the hard work involving her art but none of the hard work that goes into being an actual “artist”: she didn’t try to put herself out in the world, to any great extent, which is what any successful artist needs to do. I found something terribly sad about the notion that Maier died without ever knowing the impact her art would have: who knows what difference that might have made in her life? For all of its sterling qualities as a documentary, perhaps the greatest thing that can come from Finding Vivian Maier is that it might convince similar artists to take a leap of faith: if you never try anything, you never succeed. For those of us who toil in obscurity (whether desired or not), Maloof’s film is nothing short of thought-provoking. By “finding” Vivian Maier, Maloof and Siskel might just have helped us all find ourselves.

8/31/14 (Part Two): 15 Going on 90

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abused children, Alexis Kavyrchine, Anais Demoustier, Celine, cinema, drama, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, foreign films, foster kids, French films, Funny Games, homeless children, l'Enfance du Mal, Lolita, Ludmila Mikael, mother-daughter relationships, Movies, Olivier Coussemacq, Pascal Greggory, Sweet Evil, Sylvain Dieuaide, writer-director

When we first see Celine (Anais Demoustier), the wise-beyond-her-years teenager who forms the chaotic focal point of writer/director Olivier Coussemacq’s Sweet Evil (2010), she’s literally looking in from the outside: specifically, we see her framed in such a way that she appears to be physically separating the couple of Henri (Pascal Greggory) and Nathalie Van Eyck (Ludmila Mikael) as they dine at their kitchen table, unaware of their hidden observer. It’s a smart, canny bit of cinematography and one that will be repeated to good effect throughout the dark, thorny narrative. Indeed, throughout the course of the film, Celine will handily succeed in ripping the troubled couple to shreds, using them as pawns in a game of her own devising, although this is anything by a one-player: Henri and Nathalie, in the end, have just as much a hand in their inevitable destruction as Celine does. In a world of gray, with no heavily defined sense of morality, we see that everyone is capable of evil: whether a supposedly innocent young girl or a theoretically incorruptible judge, humanity is always but a hairbreadth away from its own absolute destruction.

Without a doubt, Celine is quite the complicated character. When not shaking down perverted older men with the aid of her male accomplish, Romain (Sylvain Dieuaide), she wiles away her time in the garden house of the well-to-do but aloof Van Eycks. The jig is up, in a way, when Henri happens to catch Celine on the property one night: she tells him that she’s a 16-year-old foster child who’s run away from her foster home, although this conflicts with her earlier admission to a wannabe john that she’s actually 14. With a little reverse-psychology and a whole lot of manipulation, Celine wheedles her way into the judge’s good graces, although she seems to have a bit of an agenda that extends beyond finding a roof, four walls and a hearty meal. Indeed, Celine tips her hand fairly early when she “innocently” proclaims that being a judge must be nice, since people respect the law, but wonders how many innocent people have been unfairly locked away. What if, she reasons to Henri, life has really left them no choice? There’s always a choice, Henri snorts back. As we’ll come to see, this is absolutely true, although clarification may be necessary: there may always be choices but they aren’t always good ones.

As Celine insinuates herself into the Van Eyck household, she stirs a hornets’ nest of repressed desire, barely concealed anger, resentment and misplaced parental instincts. She plays the couple against each other by appealing to each partner’s basest needs: Henri desires her, sexually, while Nathalie seeks to mother her as substitute for her own inability to have children (in a telling bit of character development, the childless Nathalie is obsessed with dolls, although Celine complains that they all look like “old dead children” to her).

It turns out that Celine has a plan, however, a rather diabolical scheme that involves Henri, her incarcerated mother and the increasingly unstable Romain, a young man whose favorite hobby involves stabbing innocent dogs. As Celine moves everything towards her end game, Henri’s weakness may spell the couple’s doom, while Nathalie’s ferocious desire to be a mother may mark her evolution into something other than Henri’s “faithful spouse.”

Tone-wise, Coussemacq’s film certainly recalls the work of misanthropic German filmmaker Michael Haneke, in particular his most famous film, Funny Games (1997). There’s an austere severity and frigidity to the film that nearly constant, a solemn tone that seems to be heightened by the almost playful musical score. The world of Sweet Evil is a cold one, all arctic whites, blues and chilly winter sunlight: in certain ways, the film’s look serves as a compliment to Tomas Vinterberg’s equally chilly The Hunt (2012). As previously mentioned, Alexis Kavyrchine’s cinematography is consistently exceptional, serving up not only beautifully staged images but also expanding on the film’s themes by way of the imagery: Kavyrchine has a particular way of shooting the trio of Henri, Nathalie and Celine that always manages to place one person between the other two, a perfect visual representation of the characters’ inner conflicts.

Coussemacq’s script, like Kavyrchine’s cinematography, is exceptionally smart: one of my favorite sustained bits was the notion that all of Celine’s lies end up being halfway between reality and fiction. It’s an idea that’s made explicit regarding her age (she introduces herself to the first john as being 14, tells Henri that she’s 16 but is actually 15) but is revealed in other, more subtle ways throughout the narrative. Coussemacq also has a particular way with dialogue, giving Demoustier plenty of choice lines to chew on. The development of Nathalie’s character was also quite impressive, particular given that the disparate elements of her personality could easily have across as “movie-shorthand” but feel much more organic than that. Her work with women’s rights parallels nicely with Celine’s more dastardly machinations and allows for a nice sense of evolution in the third act. Craft-wise, Sweet Evil is top-notch filmmaking.

While the cast is generally good, Demoustier is pretty impressive as the less-than-innocent waif: she has a way with subtle facial expressions and vocal inflections that manages to reveal hidden dimensions within her character. Most impressively, the 27-year-old actress is pretty convincing as a 15-year-old, no mean feat in itself (just ask any of the middle-aged “teenagers” that frolicked through most ’80s slasher flicks). Demoustier manages to walk a fine line between playing Celine as a hard-edged loner, a dutiful daughter and a confused teenager: one of the better aspects of Sweet Evil is the way in which Celine’s ultimate character is left up for the audience’s interpretation. Viewed from various angles, it’s possible to see Celine as a cold-blooded criminal, the shattered product of abuse, a victim of the welfare system and a wiser-than-her-years “emotional con-artist.”

Ultimately, Sweet Evil is an atmospheric, well-acted and appropriately thorny (if occasionally confusing) film, the kind of movie, like The Hunt, that gives one plenty of food for thought once the final credits have rolled. If the film offers no easy answers, particularly regarding the character of Henri (it becomes exceedingly difficult to fully sympathize with Henri once one sits through the scene where he tries to sneak a peek at Celine’s sleeping body), it also offers plenty of interesting characters, a quick pace and a climax that handily splits the difference between tragic and ironic. I’m still not really sure how I feel about Celine, although I must admit to being completely swept up by her self-assurance: when she believes in herself that much, it’s kind of hard not to feel the same way, regardless of her ultimate goal.

5/31/14 (Part Two): The Children Suffer

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abused children, Aharon Keshales, Ami Weinberg, bad cops, Big Bad Wolves, black comedies, child killing, cinema, co-directors, co-writers, cops, cops behaving badly, Doval'e Glickman, Dror, fairy tales, film reviews, films, gallows' humor, Gidi, irony, Israeli films, Kalevet, Lior Ashkenazi, Menashe Noy, Micki, missing child, Movies, Nati Kluger, Navot Papushado, Prisoners, Rabies, revenge, Rotem Keinan, torture, Tzahi Grad, vengeance, writer-director

While we’d all like to think that we’re above primal emotions like hate and fear, the reality is actually a lot less black-and-white. The human animal may try to distance itself from its more feral, four-legged “cousins,” casting its eyes (and aspirations) to the cosmos, suppressing more earthy, “unpleasant” instincts. It may do this to its heart’s content but one overwhelming fact cannot be denied: the wild, untamed brutality of the animal kingdom always lurks just below the serene, civilized facade of humanity. At any given moment, we all walk the razor’s edge, careful not to give ourselves over too completely to the darkness.

This delicate balancing act becomes a lifelong task, then, just one other facet of life to navigate. We’re always perfectly balanced, the necessary combination of light and dark to survive in a dangerous world…until we aren’t. When we allow powerful, devastating primal urges like hate, fear and vengeance to take the controls, we tempt the fates, throw off the natural order of things. Too little of the “animal instinct” and we’re gingerbread figures, empty haircuts that mean as much to the natural order as plankton do to whales. Too much of the “old ways,” however, and we become something much different from human…much more dangerous. When the hearts of men and women become overstuffed with hate and vengeance, when we cast aside all other notions of humanity in service of stoking the indignant fire in our guts, we become wolves, ourselves. As we see in Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado’s extraordinary, incendiary new film, Big Bad Wolves (2013), even the desire for justice can become something ugly in the blast furnace of hate, leading us to do all of the right things for all of the most terribly wrong reasons.

Our protagonist, Micki (Lior Ashkenazi), is a charismatic Israeli police detective with a huge problem: there’s a psychopath kidnapping, raping, torturing and killing young girls. Micki’s a good guy, at heart, but he’s also one of those movie cops who operates best outside the polite constraints of the law. Along with his by-the-book partner, Rami (Menashe Noy), and a couple of eager young cops nicknamed “Beavis and Butthead,” Micki takes the chief suspect in the case, Dror (Rotem Keinan), to an abandoned factory for a little good old-fashioned “questioning questioning.” Dror, a religious studies teacher, is a particularly pathetic figure, resembling nothing so much as one of those shaggy dogs that gets wet and ends up looking like a drowned rat. During the course of the “interrogation,” Micki and the perpetually giggling moron brothers put quite the smack-down on Dror (including actually smacking him repeatedly with a phone book), all in the hope of getting him to cop to the heinous crimes. When the factory ends up being less than abandoned, footage of the entire incident is uploaded to YouTube: Micki becomes an instant celebrity and is rewarded with being busted down to traffic cop, while Dror is summarily released into a community that has pretty much already convicted him. Not the best situation for a school teacher, it turns out, and Dror is quickly asked to take a little “vacation” by the principal (Ami Weinberg): he’s welcome to come back once everyone’s “got over it,” presumably sometime between “the distant future” and “never.”

Despite being summarily chewed out by his superior, Tsvika (Dvir Benedek), Micki is still positive that Dror is guilty and intends on continuing to push him until he cracks. With a knowing look, Tsvika tells him that he can do whatever he likes, since he’s no longer working the case…as long as he doesn’t get caught, of course. But Micki does end up getting caught, right at the key moment when he has spirited Dror away to an isolated forest locale and made the terrified man dig his own grave. Far from an agent of law enforcement, however, Dror’s “guardian angel” ends up being a devil in disguise: Gidi (Tzahi Grad), the vengeful father of one of the dead girls. Like Micki, he’s also convinced that Dror is guilty but his ultimate intention is a bit different from Micki’s: he intends to torture Dror until he reveals the location of his daughter’s missing head. By inflicting all of the torture onto Dror that he suspects the schoolteacher of inflicting on the girls, Gidi hopes to achieve a kind of perverted justice. If Dror talks, he gets a merciful bullet to the brain. If he doesn’t, he’ll get the hammers…and the pliers…and the blowtorch.

As the three men interact within the isolated, soundproofed house that Gidi has set-up expressly for this occasion, allegiances are formed and torn asunder. Micki alternates between being Gidi’s captive and his accomplish, depending on how far down the rabbit-hole he’s willing to go. Dror tries to appeal to Micki’s basic humanity, as well as their shared connection as fathers: both Dror and Micki have young daughters and difficult relationships with their respective wives. Complications arise when Gidi’s pushy father, Yoram (Doval’e Glickman), drops by to bring him some soup. Upon seeing the situation, Yoram gently chides Gidi but offers to help: he’s ex-military, after all, and knows a thing or two about getting men to talk. As the situation for Dror (and Micki) becomes more dire, new revelations threaten to spin the entire mess off the rails. When men become angry, desperate and frightened, they become dangerous: they become big, bad wolves.

One of the first things that becomes clear in Big, Bad Wolves is that there’s a strong, consistent dose of gallows’ humor that runs throughout the entire film. In fact, right up until the gut-punch final image (which manages to be as terrifyingly bleak as the final scene in Darabont’s The Mist (2007)), the film is actually quite funny. Bleak, violent, savage and hopeless? Absolutely. The dark subject matter is leavened considerably, however, by a script that manages to be not only subtly clever but also broadly comedic, when called for. One of the best scenes in the film is the one where Tsvika calls Micki into his office. It’s “Bring Your Son to Work Day” and Tsvika has brought his son with him: in a classic scene that works on a number of levels, Tsvika and his son engage in some tandem ball-busting that’s pretty damn funny. “This is the yellow card conversation,” Tsvika tells his son, at one point. “Like in soccer, dad?” “Just like in soccer, son,” Tsvika says proudly, mussing his son’s hair while staring Micki down with a glare that would melt Medusa.

Keshales and Papushado (whose debut film, Kalevet (2010), bears the distinction of being Israel’s first-ever horror film) use this scene of humor is some truly surprising, disarming ways, none more so than the scenes where Gidi tortures Dror. There’s never anything funny about torture but the filmmakers manage to wring a surprising amount of genuine laughs out of these scenes. As Gidi sets about on his path of vengeance, he’s constantly interrupted by reminders of the “polite” world. As Gidi is about to begin breaking Dror’s fingers, one by one, his cellphone rings: it’s Gidi’s mom and he’d better take the call, lest she go “crazy.” Gidi and Micki flip a coin to see who gets the first go at Dror, only to have the coin dramatically roll away. Micki tries to stall the inevitable mayhem by telling Gidi that they should drug Dror first, if they really wanted to do everything to him that he did to the kids: Gidi matter-of-factly tells him that Dror also violated the girls sexually but they’ve both decided to pass on that punishment…there are always compromises.

In many ways, Big, Bad Wolves plays as a sardonic counterpart to the much more po-faced Prisoners (2013). While the Jake Gyllenahaal-starring Oscar nominee had a portentous, serious tone that practically demanded it be taken seriously, its Israeli “cousin” is much more loose and easy-going. For one thing, Ashkenazi is a ridiculously charismatic lead, sort of a Middle Eastern take on George Clooney: he does more acting with his eyes and the corner of his mouth than most actors do with the entire script. In a particularly knockout moment, Micki stares incredulously as Dror stops to help an old woman cross a busy street. The look of surprise and disbelief is obvious, but there’s an undercurrent of amusement and, dare I say, approval, that comes through just as loud and clear. Micki is a complex, engaging character with a truly heartbreaking arc and one of the most interesting cinematic creations in some time.

The real revelation of the film, however, is the towering, absolutely astounding performance of Tzahi Grad as Gidi. By the time we’re introduced to him, Gidi is already “past” the actual murder of his daughter and is moving on to the closure that he wants: there’s very little outward “sadness” to the character and no moping or chest-beating whatsoever. Gidi is a practical, cold and successful man who has been dealt a terrible blow and now must make it all “right,” just as he’s always done. As additional details about Gidi’s character creep in, we begin to see a more fully formed vision of the man, making his actions that much more difficult to fully condone (or condemn, if we’re being honest). There is nothing stereotypical about Gidi or his actions. Frequently, I would find myself genuinely shocked by something he does (the film does not wallow in gore and violence but what there is tends to be extremely sudden, extremely brutal and rather unforgettable) but I never lost my connection to him as a character. While the writing in Big, Bad Wolves is pretty flawless, a lot of the credit for this must go to Grad: it’s not easy to make a potentially monstrous character “human,” but Gidi manages to be not only massively human but completely relateable and likable, as well. He feels like a real person, not a film construct.

Big, Bad Wolves ends up being filled with the kind of subtle details and moments that practically demand repeat viewings. A throwaway line of dialogue becomes an important bit of foreshadowing…a “random” encounter with a mysterious, nomadic horseman (Kais Nashif) becomes an opportunity for an incisive point about Arab/Israeli relations. The whole film is full of fairy-tale imagery, from the opening title sequence to the trail of “breadcrumbs” that lead to the dead girls to the title of the film, itself. Far from being an all-too obvious bit of symbolism, the fairy-tale aspect is completely organic, seamlessly interwoven into the film and providing a rich depth missing from the straight-laced, nuts-and-bolts construction that was Prisoners.

Despite being an exceptionally difficult film to watch, at times, Big, Bad Wolves is the furthest thing possible from “torture porn” like Hostel (2005) and Seven Days (2010). Unlike more shallow genre exercises, the torture and violence in Big, Bad Wolves is not intended to be fodder for gorehounds: there is real pain and suffering to be found here, not just from the battered, bloody man receiving the violence but from the emotionally scarred men distributing it. Similar to Winner’s original Death Wish (1974), Keshales and Papushado’s film goes to great lengths to explore the actual concept of vengeance: inflicting pain on someone will never bring back a loved one. In a way, it’s just another death: the death of the soul and the death of essential humanity.

Ultimately, Big, Bad Wolves is a fierce, ferocious and utterly alive film. It practically bursts from the screen, thanks to a combination of exceptionally skilled filmmaking (the script and cinematography, alone, are two of the very best of 2013) and raw, vital acting. If Keshales and Papushado marked themselves as filmmakers to watch with their debut, they’ve cemented their reputations with its follow-up. Undoubtedly, there will be some who can’t stomach the audacious mixture of soul-crushing violence and humor that the film offers and that’s quite alright: the real world, the terribly unfair, brutal and beautiful orb that we stand on, is the same mixture of violence and comedy and many can’t deal with that, either. As the most cutting, intuitive writers have always known, however, comedy and tragedy always go hand-in-hand…it’s quite impossible to live without experiencing more than your fair share of both. It may seem wrong to laugh as it all comes collapsing to the ground but it’s also necessary. After all, without a sense of humor, aren’t we really all just wolves?

 

5/31/14 (Part One): Suffer the Children

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abused children, Adrian Garcia Bogliano, Alan Martinez, auteur theory, Barbara Perrin Rivemar, child abuse, cinema, Cold Sweat, David Arturo Cabezud, demons, doppelgängers, Ernesto Herrera, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, foreign films, Francisco Barreiro, Giancarlo Ruiz, Here Comes the Devil, horror, horror films, killer children, Laura Caro, Mexican films, Michele Garcia, Movies, mysterious cave, Penumbra, possession, sexuality, Tijuana, writer-director

It should go without saying that one of the prime directives of parenthood is to protect your children, at all costs. I say “should,” of course, since the world rarely works in ideal ways. In truth, the winding path of adolescence can be just as hazardous and filled with hidden malice as the most dangerous military expedition. The “bad guys” don’t always look drastically different from the “good guys” and, frequently, can be two halves of the same person. Caught between a menagerie of predators, on one hand, and a cultural imperative to “grow up fast,” modern kids truly are stuck between two unpleasant extremes. Children should never have to navigate this labyrinth alone but, increasingly, it seems like they do. Even with the best of intentions, it may be difficult for parents to completely shield their children from all the evil that the world has to offer. When parents behave in less than ideal, selfish ways, however, it makes it all that much easier for the “bad guys” to creep out of the darkness. Spanish auteur Adrian Garcia Bogliano’s newest film, Here Comes the Devil (2013), quite ably explores the intersection between “parental sacrifice” and “selfish desire,” finding a shadow world where innocence is fleeting and evil can wear many different faces.

After a dynamic opening that introduces us to the diabolic forces at work, Here Comes the Devil settles down with our main protagonists: husband-and-wife Felix (Fracisco Barreiro) and Sol (Laura Caro) and their two young kids, Adolfo (Alan Martinez) and Sara (Michele Garcia). The family is on a vacation in Tijuana, a relaxing little day-trip that involves kicking back on sand dunes and exploring the nearby hills and their honeycombs of interconnecting caves. When young Sara gets her first period (a situation that causes Adolfo no small amount of distress: “Sara is bleeding! And I didn’t even touch her!”), Sol takes her to a public restroom to get cleaned up, assuring her that this is the furthest thing from a big deal: this happens to every woman and is nothing to be afraid of. Afterwards, Adolfo and Sara decide to go explore a hill that they noticed earlier, which gives Felix and Sol the opportunity for a little “alone time.” When a little fooling around turns into a hot and heavy session, however, the parents lose all track of time…and their own kids.

When Sara and Adolfo don’t return, Sol and Felix get righteously freaked out and frantically try to find them: Felix goes out to search the darkening landscape while Sol hangs around the nearby gas station, just in case they should return. As Sol waits, despondent, the gas station attendant (Enrique Saint-Martin) informs her that the local hills are cursed: no one goes up there because “creatures” live there who consider humans “nothing more than shells.” This kind of revelation doesn’t usually set worried parents’ minds to ease and, sure enough, Sol is beside herself: she blames the whole thing on her husband, who never wants to spend time with the family and had to be practically forced to take them on this excursion. If he was a better father, perhaps they would have gone to a better, “safer” place: if she was a better mother, she would have been watching her kids, instead of getting off. It’s a vicious back-and-forth that bleeds into the next morning, when the search is supposed to begin properly.

As they prepare to head out, however, Felix and Sol have a bit of a surprise: Sgt. Flores (Giancarlo Ruiz) is waiting for them, with Sara and Adolfo in tow. The kids look frightened but none the worse for wear. According to them, they got lost in a cave and couldn’t find their way out. Regardless of the reason, the family is happily reunited and go on to live happily ever after. Only, of course, they don’t. Cracks and fissures begin to appear in the kids’ story and their personalities seem different: Sol is certain that something is going on when Sara’s bloody panties from that day are nowhere to be found. Even stranger, Sara’s period appears to be over. Concerned, Sol takes her daughter to the doctor and gets the terrible diagnosis: while the doctor can’t be certain, there does appear to be signs of sexual trauma.

As Felix and Sol face the horrible implications, they launch their own “investigation” into the incident and come up with a possible suspect: Lucio (David Arturo Cabezud), a local weirdo who lives in a little trailer and has a predilection for stealing underwear. In a quest to “avenge” their children, Felix and Sol make a terrible decision, a decision that begins to rob them of their basic humanity. Even worse, however, is the nagging suspicion that they may have been wrong. As Sara and Adolfo begin to act odder and odder, culminating in a truly perverse, jaw-dropping incident with their unfortunate babysitter, Marcia (Barbara Perrin Rivemar), Felix and Sol are forced to confront the unthinkable: the innocent-looking kids who came back to them might not be so innocent, after all.

Writer-director Bogliano has become quite the go-to guy for Latin American horror films as of late, being responsible for three of the finest in recent memory: 36 Pasos (2006), Cold Sweat (2010) and Penumbra (2011), as well as one of the most effective, unsettling stories in the ABCs of Death (2012) anthology with “B is for Bigfoot.” Bogliano’s films tend to be hyper-sexual, gritty and very kinetic, flirting with a truly bracing combination of supernatural mythology, real-world horror and gallows humor. While Here Comes the Devil is nowhere near as purposefully “funny” as Penumbra (which often felt like a subtle satire of similar Satanic-themed films), there is plenty of humor to be found here, albeit mixed with elements that drain the laughs out like air from a leaking balloon. Bogliano is a masterful writer, capable of dropping hints, when necessary, but just as content to let his audience blunder their way through to the resolution. Unlike many modern horror filmmakers, Bogliano doesn’t hold hands: if the audience isn’t paying attention, he fully expects them to tap out and there’s nothing wrong with that. Truth be told, I wish more filmmakers dealt with the kind of intelligent, high-concept genre fare that Bogliano routinely does: Bogliano will have his English-language debut with Late Phases later this year, so let’s hope that he doesn’t “dumb down” his style for less discerning American audiences.

The things that work in the film work exceptionally well: the performances are all authentic, the cinematography (by frequent Bogliano collaborator Ernesto Herrera) is usually beautiful and the sound design is pretty great. Unlike many films that feature bickering parents (particularly horror films), the emotions and actions behind Felix and Sol seem to be more authentic than plot-driven. In addition, Here Comes the Devil is absolutely sodden with Gothic atmosphere, which works wonders in establishing a truly claustrophobic environment for the characters to get lost in. The film isn’t gore-drenched, by any definition of the term, but what’s there is unpleasant, in-your-face and pretty hard to forget: one Grand Guignol scene seemed to work on a “tiered” system which had me reacting, in ever escalating disgust, to each new development. By the time we get an up-close and personal meeting with someone’s trachea, the scene had pretty much cemented its place in the Hall of Fame. The effects work seems to be practical, for the most part, and is exceptionally realistic.

While Here Comes the Devil is an exceptionally well-made, powerful film, it’s certainly not without its faults. Despite being just shy of an hour and forty minutes long, the film still manages to seem at least 10 minutes too long. I can chalk this up to some repetition (necessary to explain plot points but rather cumbersome, all the same) but there are plenty of instances when scenes (and shots) seem to be held for just a little longer than necessary. This was also a bit of an issue in Penumbra, although the film’s (relatively) complex plot made this “stretching out” more welcome than intrusive. The biggest issue with the film (and one of my personal pet peeves, in general) is the rather obnoxious use of zooms to set-up foreshadowing. One of Bogliano’s favorite tricks in the film is to execute a sudden zoom (usually to eyes or items) as a manner of saying “Hey, pay attention to this!” We get zooms on wristwatches (to show that they’ve stopped), zooms on hand-holding (to highlight relationships), zooms into the landscape (to show us something), close-up zooms (to show us small details)…Here Comes the Devil is so zoom-happy that one could fashion a pretty vicious drinking game out of it: take a drink every time there’s a zoom and be ready to die by the half-way point.

I tend to hate the “revealing zoom” because it’s such an obvious filmmaking trick but there’s a bigger reason to dislike its overuse in Here Comes the Devil: the frequent zooms completely change the tone of the films, making it see-saw between somber atmosphere and giddy “action beats.” Used in moderation, I could get behind the technique (although I still find it highly unnecessary) but Bogliano (or Herrera, take your pick) absolutely beat it into the ground, rendering it meaningless. It may seem like an awfully silly quibble but keep this in mind: the obnoxious zooming turned this from an “excellent” film, in my book, to a “very good” one, which is testament to exactly how intrusive it is.

Nonetheless, the high points in Here Comes the Devil are very nearly enough to wash away the low ones. When the film is firing on all cylinders, it’s a lean, mean, angry, berserk little piece of insanity: there are no happy endings here whatsoever, nor are there any pulled punches. While the ultimate resolution may be a touch vague, there’s nothing open-ended about it: the only thing up for debate is just what, exactly, the family is dealing with. Bogliano has staked himself out a nice piece of land in the current horror real estate explosion, placing one foot firmly in the horrors of the “real world,” while the other tromps ground on the “supernatural” side of town. If he can make the transition to English-language films as surely as Del Toro did, our favorite over-extended director might just get a run for his money. Now, if we could only get these guys in the same room together…

 

5/28/14: Your Life, Minus the Bad Parts

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abused children, Brendan Fletcher, child abuse, childhood trauma, cinema, cutter, Dead Poets Society, film reviews, films, Final Cut, Genevieve Buechner, Jim Caviezel, memories, Michael St. John Smith, Mimi Kuzyk, Mira Sorvino, Movies, near future, Omar Naim, Robin Williams, sci-fi, science-fiction, Stephanie Romanov, Tak Fujimoto, tech-thriller, The Final Cut, thriller, Vincent Gale, Where the Buffalo Roam, writer-director

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could edit our own lives, go back through the “footage” of our years and remove all of the embarrassing, sad, shameful and hateful moments? In a perfect world, perhaps, we’d be able to remember just what we wanted: every golden sunset, ever moment of empowerment, every true moment of happiness, would stand in greater relief without all of the “other stuff” to clog it up. We would be able to remember our first kiss forever, while completely forgetting every racist, sexist, despicable or stupid thing we ever did. It sounds pretty great, on the outside, but it’s also pretty foolish. Indeed, it’s often the bad stuff, the moments that we’re most ashamed of, that help us to grow the most, to form our worldviews and personalities. It’s impossible to know love without knowing hate: good doesn’t exist without the presence of evil. We know all of this, of course, but we’re also humans and humans, by default, are pretty foolish creatures. We’re always looking for the perfect, idealized version of ourselves, sometimes to the deficit (or destruction) of those around us. It’s just what we do, really.

Omar Naim’s Final Cut (2004) examines not only this particularly human phenomena but also the tendency to whitewash (or tar, depending on the situation) someone after they’ve died. Dead people have a difficult time defending themselves, after all, so it’s no difficult thing to proclaim someone as either “hero” or “goat” after they’re unable to do anything about it. While it’s always disheartening to see how quickly people will rush to dig up dirt on a newly dead celebrity, it’s no less worrisome to see how willing some folks are to deify undeserving people. After all, if the memories of a person’s bad deeds can be erased from the public conscience, doesn’t that, in some twisted way, absolve them of their actions? It’s an intriguing idea and one that the film examines, at some length, with rather varying degrees of success.

Alan (Robin Williams) is a “cutter” in the near-future, a craftsman charged with editing the lifelong memories of recently deceased people into attractive, bite-sized pieces that are perfectly suitable for hi-tech memorial services/funerals called Rememories. Alan is one of the best cutters in the business, which means that he’s particularly adept at cutting out all of the nasty little bits that would tend to be upsetting in a public setting: for every life accomplishment, Alan cuts out a memory of savagely beating one’s spouse…for every moment of infidelity, child abuse and hatred that Alan removes, he leaves in the moments of charity, love and joy. Essentially, Alan gives families the “gift” that they think they want: an idealized, pain-free memory of their deceased love ones. It’s similar to history books that skip over the ugly parts, in favor of a more homogeneous, white-washed version of events: if we don’t see them, they couldn’t have happened.

While he may be good at his job, Alan doesn’t seem like a particularly happy person. For one thing, he’s constantly tortured by half-lucid, childhood memories of his friend, Louis, dying: from what he can remember, Alan was explicitly responsible for Louis’ death but he just can’t remember enough about the incident to know one way or the other. As such, he walks around bearing the burden of crushing guilt for an incident that may not have even happened…at least the way he remembers it. Talk about a key to a happy life!

Alan’s life is further complicated when his “boss,” Thelma (Mimi Kuzyk) presents him with a new assignment: edit a suitable Rememory for Charles Bannister (Michael St. John Smith), the recently deceased executive who was intrinsically tied to the implant technology that allows people’s memories to be recorded. Charles was an important person, perhaps one of the most important in the “new world,” but he was also a monster, as Alan discovers when he comes across the terrible footage of Bannister molesting his young daughter, Isabel (Genevieve Buechner). Isabel’s mother, Jennifer Bannister (Stephanie Romanov) seems to be well-aware of the abuse, since he’s careful to keep Alan away from Isabel: she doesn’t want her “muddying” the waters, as it were. Bannister was a very important person and they need to ensure that the public remembers him as a technological innovator rather than the monster who routinely raped his own daughter.

To further complicate matters, there’s a heavily anti-implant faction in society, a group that fights for a return to the days when memories were personal and couldn’t be manipulated by corporations. One of Alan’s former cutting peers, Fletcher (Jim Caviezel), is deeply embedded with the protesters and wants Alan to break the tenets of his profession and get him Bannister’s uncut footage: if the general public can see the truth, Bannister won’t be deified and his horrible actions will be dragged into the light of day. Alan protests, as dedicated to his job as anyone who truly believes in their work but cracks are forming in his smooth veneer. When Alan finds out a secret about himself, a secret which automatically sets him at odds with his own profession and fellow cutters, he must decided whether to do the right thing or to follow the oath he took, regardless of how unjust it may be.

The Final Cut, first and foremost, is a very serious, somber film: just a few minutes in, it reminded me explicitly of Gattaca (1997), another ultra-serious, portentous science-fiction film. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a serious film, mind you, but The Final Cut ends up slingshoting past serious into a cinematic realm usually reserved for stuffy historical dramas or “big, important” pictures. Unfortunately, the film never becomes quite “big enough” to make these affectations seem anything more than pretentious. It’s kind of like getting Brian Eno to score a Roger Corman boobs-and-aliens-in-space epic: adding gravitas to a pulpy storyline doesn’t make the subject inherently weighty. Likewise, The Final Cut seems focused on big, intellectual issues yet the resolution still hinges on the kind of maudlin, sentimental “feelings” that the film (mostly) avoids for its running time.

The ending, on its own, ends up being a pretty massive problem, since it purports to morph the film into a completely different beast with the movie’s final 10 minutes: never the best place to “flip the script,” as it were, unless you’re going for a “twist ending.” The finale to The Final Cut is no twist: rather, it’s a non-ending that sort of shrugs its shoulders, leaving the audience to pull together any deeper meaning. Worse yet, the ending posits the highly insulting notion that everyone in the film knows what Alan wants more than he does. It’s the equivalent of spending twenty minutes trying to convince the ice cream man that you really do want vanilla and not strawberry before he hands you a double-scoop of strawberry, anyway.

Craftwise, The Final Cut has the exact same look/feel that I tend to associate with most “Dystopia-lite” films, although the presence of veteran cinematographer Tak Fujimoto definitely lends the proceedings some weight. Fujimoto, known for Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) and Silence of the Lambs (1992), among many, many, many others, doesn’t bring a ton of individuality to the film but there’s plenty of nice shots here, including some truly impressive overheads. Again, the whole thing tends to remind me rather overtly of Gattaca, but that could just be a by-product of the whole “independent, intelligent sci-fi” subgenre. The score, as a rule, is always ponderous and somber, as if we need constant reminding that this is a “serious” film with “big issues.” A lighter (or, at least, more subtle) approach might have been more effective but it is what it is.

Robin Williams, as befits his late-career “serious” roles, is completely subdued, almost to the point of blending into the background. It’s definitely not my favorite of his low-key performances but I’ll be honest: I’ll take a hundred “mediocre” performances like this to one of his obnoxiously manic “funny guy” personas. I’ve never been a fan of Williams when he gets truly wound-up and rewatching some of his more “classic” roles, such as Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) and Dead Poets Society (1989) showed me that he’s been guilty of this for some time. While Williams’ performance in The Final Cut is nowhere near as relevatory as his turns in One Hour Photo (2002), Insomnia (2002) or World’s Greatest Dad (2009), it’s still a nicely low-key performance that maintains a consistent pitch throughout the film. I’m not sure that Alan has much of an arc, to be honest, but it’s nice to get through a Williams’ film without getting “mugged” to death.

Aside from Williams, the rest of the cast ranges from capable to fairly anonymous. Mira Sorvino has a rather thankless role as Alan’s on-again/off-again girlfriend, Delila, and Caviezel ends up being less than convincing as Fletcher, the former philistine who’s had his eyes opened to the evils of modern technology. To be fair, I’m rarely, if ever, blown away by Caviezel, who seems to underact to the point of non-acting. That being said, Fletcher is a rather confounding character and I’m not sure that anyone could have made him distinctive.

While The Final Cut isn’t a bad film (although it has a very bad ending), it’s also not a particularly interesting film. Any of the plot’s intriguing concepts (how would you act if you knew that everything you did would be recorded for the rest of your life?) become mundane by sheer repetition (a fact not helped by the tedious aural flashbacks that remind us of things we may have missed) and the whole thing is too glum and joyless to be much fun. While it’s interesting to think of our lives as one big editing project (like with film editing, Alan separates the footage into various categories, although his categories have names like “Masturbation,” “Personal Hygiene,” “Youth,” and “School”), I can’t really see the concept having much interest to anyone who’s not well-versed with the Final Cut editing program. Ultimately, The Final Cut ends up being so similar to other films that you might begin to wonder if someone hasn’t removed your memory of seeing it before. You probably haven’t but you’re sure gonna think you have.

5/21/14: One Day, It Will Please Us to Remember Even This

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abuse, abused children, Alex Calloway, Best of 2013, Brie Larson, child abuse, cinema, completely unforgettable, depression, Destin Daniel Cretton, dysfunctional family, film reviews, films, Frantz Turner, friends, group homes, independent films, indie dramas, John Gallagher Jr., Kaitlyn Dever, Keith Stanfield, Kevin Hernandez, Movies, non-traditional families, Rami Malek, residential treatment facility, Short Term 12, snubbed at the Oscars, Stephanie Beatriz, unplanned pregnancies, writer-director, youth in trouble

Child abuse, whether physical, mental or emotional, is an insidious evil, a cancer that takes root in an individual and manifests itself for generations to come. There can be no greater horror for a defenseless young person than to be preyed upon and victimized by the very people that are supposed to protect them, those parents and guardians who function as wolves among the flock. When one’s trust and faith has been shattered in such a terrible, fundamental way, is it ever possible to fully trust another human being, much less an adult in a position of authority? What of those abused individuals who dedicate their lives to helping others in similar situations? When you have been so terribly fractured and marginalized yourself, what happens when someone else needs to rely on you? What if, in the end, you only have enough strength for one person: do you save yourself, as you’ve always done, or do you give everything to the other, losing yourself completely in the process?

Writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton’s Short Term 12 (based on his earlier short film) is an open wound, a raw nerve love-letter to those people who devote their lives to helping troubled youth, even when the victories seem slight and the struggles nearly impossible. It’s an amazing film, the kind of movie that builds in subtle ways until you’re almost flattened by the raw emotion on display. It’s a familiar story, this examination of screwed-kids trying to make sense of themselves and the terrifying world around them, but it’s a necessary story, the kind that we should keep watching until we finally get it. Most importantly, Short Term 12 is an honest, powerful film filled with the kind of scorched-earth performances that will resonate long after the final credits have rolled: it’s a gut-punch, in the best possible way, and completely unforgettable.

We begin with a bit of a regular occurrence in this particular group home: an escape attempt by the ridiculously energetic Sammy (Alex Calloway). As Sammy runs gleefully for the hills, he’s chased down by two of the counselors, Grace (Brie Larson) and Mason (John Gallagher Jr.). We then meet the other counselors, a wet-behind-the-ears newbie named Nate (Rami Malek) and Jessica (Stephanie Beatriz). These four, along with the head of the facility, Jack (Frantz Turner), are all that stands between their various charges and a very big, bad world.

We also meet the kids, with special attention paid to the withdrawn, surly Marcus (Keith Stanfield) and sarcastic trouble-maker Luis (Kevin Hernandez). Marcus, an aspiring rapper, has been physically abused for so long that he’s become completely nihilistic: when asked if he wants a party for his upcoming 18th birthday, he replies that he just wants to get his head shaved. Marcus has seen the bad side of life for so long that it’s all he knows: he trudges through his days with the weariness of someone four times his age. The scene where he demos his new song for Mason, spitting out spare, harsh lines while Mason keeps time with skeletal beats on a bongo-drum, is a show stopper. The scene is so painful, so blazingly honest, that it’s almost impossible to watch: it’s like a child asking for spelling advise on a suicide note.

Into this situation falls Jayden (Kaitlyn Dever), the troubled daughter of one of Jack’s best friends. Jack describes his friend as a good, attentive father but Grace has her doubts: after all, if he’s so great, why’s Jayden coming to stay with them? As promised, Jayden is surly, unpleasant, unfriendly and confrontational: she doesn’t do “short-term” relationships and she won’t be here long enough to matter, so who cares? Jayden is also a cutter, with the scars to prove it, and instigates a minor shit-storm when she becomes upset and locks herself in her room. For all intents and purposes, Jayden is already unreachable, a young lady so damaged by whatever has happened to her that she views herself as a lost cause: in other words, she reminds Grace of herself.

You see, Grace, like Mason (and possible Jessica and Nate, although we’re never told), is the product of a fractured childhood. In Grace’s case, it was an abusive father who’s spent the past 10 years in prison for terrible crimes against her. She’s buried herself in the good she does with the children but she’s a tortured, unhappy person, given to long periods of simply sitting in the shower, letting the steaming water beat on her head. She’s also pregnant with Mason’s baby: he’s delighted, seeing a chance to start the family that he never had. Grace, on the other hand, is a bit more conflicted. She still has a tendency in punch Mason in the face when they get intimate, after all, and there’s always the nagging notion that she, herself, is “damaged goods.” When she can’t “fix” herself, what right does she have to bring a child into the world?

As things with Marcus and Luis come to a head at the facility, Grace finds herself more and more attached to Jayden. She seems to feel that making a difference in this one instance, to this one person, will make a difference to everyone…to herself. Grace’s actions put her relationship with Mason in danger, as well as her job with the facility. One of the first rules, after all, is that you never chase the kids once they’ve left the property: once they’re off the grounds, they’re no longer the responsibility of the group or the individual counselors. Grace, of course, knows that’s a load of bullshit: when you honestly care, you’ll chase them right to hell and back. And so, Grace descends into Hell to bring back Jayden…and see if she can’t save herself, while she’s at it.

In all honesty, there’s very little (if anything) bad that I have to say about Short Term 12: it’s a miraculous film, the kind of movie that requires that you sit and process what you’ve seen after the credits roll. It’s a powerful film, sometimes surprisingly so: I wasn’t ready for the way that some scenes moved me, perhaps due to my own experiences, and there are certain scenes that are painfully cathartic. As a child, I grew up a short distance from a troubled youth group home, a truly nightmarish facility where the children were physically abused for years. The place was eventually shut down (perhaps because a town can only sit on a dirty secret for so long, no matter what the secret) but the damage would have been done long before that. I was close friends with many of the kids who lived at the home and I “recognized” them in the movie: shy, introverted youth, prone to explosive violence but just as likely to be impossibly sweet. I saw their scars, during gym class, and they looked a lot like the scars on the kids in Short Term 12. This movie felt utterly and completely real and honest to me, a few degrees removed from a documentary, in some instances.

The subject matter, alone, would make Short Term 12 a powerful film but that wouldn’t necessarily make it an amazing film. Any film about child abuse walks a perilous line: on the one hand, an overly-sentimental film can come across as mawkish, manipulative and contrived, even if the intentions are good; on the other hand, a film that traffics in overly fantastic ideas of retribution or revenge (something like Princess (2006) or Dark Touch (2013) comes to mind) tends to marginalize the very real suffering that abused children endure. Revenge-oriented child abuse films always strike me as being close cousins to rape-revenge films: the terrible reality of something like child abuse or rape is reframed as a plot device.

Short Term 12 is not a sentimental film, although it does have a tremendous amount of compassion for its characters. This is a film where the characters, particularly Grace and Marcus, are allowed to “act out,” to express their anger and pain in ways that they feel is appropriate, whether anyone else does or not. Short Term 12, in many ways, is about being able to own your pain, to make it about survival versus victimization. By the time the film has come around to its conclusion, no one is “fixed,” even if they are happier. Indeed, the phenomenal final scene tells us nothing if not that life will continue to be like this, full of pain and sorrow and rage and small pockets of joy, until the day we all cease drawing breath. There is no such thing as a “happy ending,” because the story is still being written until the day you die: there is only “one day at a time.”

At the center of the film, towering above all else from a great height, is the staggering performance of Brie Larson. I’ll be honest: I never really paid attention to her before, even though I vaguely recall her from The United States of Tara…I didn’t even remember that she was in Don Jon (2013) and I just saw that a few weeks ago. Her performance in Short Term 12, however, is nothing short of relevatory and is one of the finest performances I saw this year. If Kaitlyn Dever is less impressive as Jayden, it’s probably because much of her time is given over to being the stereotypically moody “goth” teen: her character development is more subtle and spread across a wider space. We spend the entire film with Larson, however, and we can see her growing even within the first five minutes of the film. I really can’t laud her performance enough: she’s subtle, conflicted, funny, sad, selfish, selfless and, above all, highly human. Grace is easily the focal point of the film and Larson is such an effortless talent that it was a pleasure to make the journey with her, even when the emotion became searingly honest and painful.

While there’s not a bad actor in the bunch (John Gallagher Jr’s Mason has to be one of my favorite characters in quite some time and his “pants shitting” story is a minor classic), special mention must be made of both Keith Stanfield, as Marcus, and Rami Malek, as Nate. Stanfield is an impossibly magnetic presence as the seriously messed-up Marcus, taking a role that could have played as “stereotypical tough guy softens up” and making it completely organic. He brings an offhanded sense of menace to some of his lines (and actions) that serve as a subtle but omnipresent reminder: these may be kids but they’re capable of some pretty adult things. Malek, by contrast, gets the rather thankless role of the clueless newbie and makes it something both endearing and suitably exasperated. If Mason and Grace represent the people who are “all-in” when helping troubled youth, then Nate is the person who probably represents how most people act/are: eager to do good but clumsy, nervous and laden with their own issues/expectations. Nate is a supremely nice guy but he’s ridiculously self-absorbed: in one key scene, as Jessica and Nate comfort Luis after Marcus hits him, Jessica asks if “he’s alright.” Nate immediately responds that he’s fine but shaken, blah blah blah until Jessica cuts him off with the cold reply that she was talking to Luis. Nate means well but he’s too tied up in the formal process, as many of us are, to actually make a connection with the kids. Grace and Mason follow the rules of the group home to the letter…until they don’t. With Nate, you get the idea that he would never bend the rules, regardless of the situation.

Ultimately, Short Term 12 is not only an exquisitely crafted, masterfully acted, intelligent and powerful film, but it’s also an important film…if I may say so, it’s a completely necessary film, especially in our day and age. There’s nothing “feel-good” about Short Term 12, although the ending will probably make your heart soar. There are no easy answers here, either: sometimes, love is all you need…sometimes, it’s just not enough. Sometimes, broken people can make themselves whole…or at least whole enough to function. Sometimes, they can’t. In the real world, there are no easy answers and previous few “happily ever afters”: there’s a reason those were called fairy tales, after all.

If you’ve ever known someone (or been someone) who’s gone through this, I would wager that Short Term 12 will completely knock you on your ass. In an era when filmmaking seems more enslaved to escapism than ever, it’s sometimes helpful to remember that there are other colors in the cinematic crayon box. There are times when Short Term 12 will make you feel very bad. There are times when it will put a smile on even the sourest face. There will be times when you curse humanity and times when you realize that, for better or worse, we’re all that we’ve got.

At the end of the day, it breaks my heart to think about how many real-life Marcuses and Jaydens there are out there. It gives me hope to realize, however, that the world is full of Graces, too.