When Sonita premiered last year at Amsterdam’s documentary film festival IDFA, it walked away with the audience award, a win that isn’t too surprising considering the film’s story. Director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami follows Sonita, an 18-year-old Afghan immigrant living with her sister and niece in Iran. Sonita is a restless creative, who aspires to become a rapper despite the personal, cultural, and political hurdles in her way. And perhaps the biggest hurdle comes from Sonita’s own family, who tell her she needs to come back home so they can force her into an arranged marriage. The reason for the marriage is purely financial: they’ll be selling her off to another family, and by doing so will have enough money to pay for the wedding of Sonita’s brother.

Sonita plays out as a conventional success story, and Maghami’s commitment to this structure eventually holds the film back from exploring issues beyond Sonita’s own story. It’s an issue that comes to a head around the midway point when Sonita is days away from being taken back to Afghanistan. After Sonita’s mother says she’ll postpone the wedding if they get some money, Maghami considers paying the family off herself, a breach of ethics that even her own crew tells her to avoid doing. Maghami’s transparency about her own involvement into the story, along with her selfish intentions (at one point she says that if Sonita goes to Afghanistan her movie will be over), adds a layer of complexity that winds up highlighting her film’s shortcomings.

By paying off Sonita’s family to let her stay in Iran, Maghami exposes her desire to mold the film in a way that fits the success story narrative. And while Maghami’s openness about becoming a direct player in her film is commendable, it’s not a topic she dwells on too much; the debate over her actions gets swept under the rug not long after it’s brought up, and the focus switches over to Sonita making a music video for her first proper single. It’s not the manipulation itself that’s bothersome (documentaries always manipulate in some form or another, and the expectation of objectivity is an archaic one), it’s that Maghami does it to help her film follow a smooth, accessible narrative arc.

Still, Maghami has found a compelling presence in Sonita, and her film has a feel-good quality that’s undeniable. But it’s hard to remove the feeling that, because of her motivations, Maghami is less of an observer and more of a puppet master.

The implicit trust that comes with viewing documentaries gets abused in Penny Lane’s NUTS!, a documentary about an interesting—and overlooked—story from Depression-era America. The subject in Lane’s film is Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, a doctor from Kansas who attempted to cure impotence by putting goat testicles into his patients. The method appeared to work, and Brinkley went on to be a success, turning his fortune into an empire when he invested it into building a radio station. As Brinkley’s success grew, the American Medical Association began targeting him because of his unorthodox medical practices, taking him to court and trying to ruin his businesses. Lane tells Brinkley’s story entirely through animated re-enactments, with a few talking head interviews along the way.

If the idea of goat testicle transplants curing impotence sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is; Brinkley was nothing more than an excellent con artist who took advantage of the placebo effect to paint himself as a medical genius. And Lane, taking inspiration from Brinkley, structures her film as a con job on viewers, treating Brinkley’s story as true until she pulls back the curtain in the final act. But Lane’s decision to deceive is misguided. In her attempt to point out how people are easy to let themselves be duped Lane only highlights the staleness of her message, along with the ethical murkiness of lying about such slight material. In reality, Lane’s deception is fueled by entertainment more than anything, as it gives her the ability to manufacture a twisty narrative while excusing her own behaviour by explaining herself at the end.

If NUTS! had a purpose for its narrative structure beyond trying to pull a fast one on viewers for kicks, it might have been less objectionable. Instead, Lane takes advantage of non-fiction for petty and selfish reasons, which makes Lane not too far removed from her own subject.

What begins as a search for a humourous news story turns into something far more insidious in David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s Tickled, a documentary that’s living proof of how truth is always stranger than fiction. Farrier, a reporter in New Zealand, comes upon a website offering young men money to get tied up and tickled in front of a camera (something the site calls “Competitive Endurance Tickling” in the hopes of making it sound more professional). When he tries getting in touch with the site’s owners about doing a story, he gets a nasty reply mocking his sexual orientation followed by legal threats. The unexpected response only interests Farrier more, who recruits his friend Reeve to help investigate by flying to America in the hopes of finding out who creates these tickling videos. What they find is the stuff of conspiracy thrillers, except it involves an empire of online tickling fetish videos (like I said: truth is stranger than fiction).

Tickled is the kind of documentary that relies almost entirely on the twists and turns of its story, meaning that it’s best to go in knowing as little as possible about what Farrier and Reeve discover as they dig deeper into the rabbit hole they stumbled upon. It’s as if both directors know just how incredible their story is, preferring a straightforward, investigative approach that’s paced like a mystery/thriller. And while this approach is entertaining enough, its adherence to a more conventional narrative format winds up sidestepping some of the important questions and ideas that come up during the course of the investigation. There might be plenty to say here about the power of the internet, how for some it can be used more as a weapon than a tool, but it’s drowned out by Farrier and Reeve’s desire to package their film as something more accessible and familiar. Tickled tells a great, sensational story, one that will have people buzzing the same way that Catfish did back in 2010, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that Farrier and Reeve could have done a lot more with their story than simply tell it as is.

What if men no longer served any purpose on Earth? That’s more or less the hook of the mockumentary No Men Beyond This Point, which presents an alternate universe where, in the 1950s, women suddenly gained the ability to reproduce asexually (it’s called parthenogenesis, as one of the talking heads explains). As the years went on, and the population of women kept increasing (since they’re reproducing asexually they only use the X chromosomes, meaning no more males being born), men eventually became of no use. No Men Beyond This Point starts in the present day, where the documentary crew follows 37-year-old Andrew Myers (Patrick Gilmore), now the youngest man in the world.

Writer/director/editor Mark Sawers uses a standard documentary approach to his absurd subject matter, employing talking head interviews, archival footage and black-and-white re-enactments, among plenty of other old tricks found in any average middlebrow doc made today. The familiar and banal approach works here because of its pairing with a fantasy/sci-fi concept, and the way Sawers focuses on some of the more nuanced changes that would come from the switch in dominant gender roles makes it easy to go along with his dystopian (or utopian, depending on how you look at it) vision.

Aside from playing out his big “What if?” scenario through social and political contexts, Sawers also focuses on Myers and his situation as the youngest man in the world. With the World Governing Council—a new body of government running the planet—sending men off to sanctuaries across the world to live out their remaining days, Myers manages to get a job as a servant for partners Terra (Tara Pratt) and Iris (Kristine Cofsky). Eventually, Andrew and Iris being showing an attraction for each other, and Sawers uses their flirtations to delve into the messier aspects of his universe.

It’s when No Men Beyond This Point starts exploring sex that the mockumentary begins to falter a bit. Especially giving a rather bland attempt at poking holes in the idea of how women would handle being in power. Earlier on, when Sawers highlights how the stubbornness of men in power ultimately led to their downfall, the idea works. But once women take charge and rule in a reactionary way towards men, essentially trying to speed up their extinction, Sawers portrays their rule as a conservative, sex-shaming authority, where women are not allowed to speak about their feelings of attraction whatsoever. It gives off an implication that women are inherently repressive when it comes to sexuality, a point that some people may take offense to. And with gender and sexuality turning into prominent issues recently, there’s something a little old hat about Sawers’ film operating within the same standards that are being constantly challenged today.

But still, anyone who tries to tackle gender is bound to get into a sticky situation of some sort, and for the most part No Men Beyond This Point is enjoyable despite its issues. It may be a little too deadpan for its own good, but even when the laughs aren’t there it’s fascinating to see just how much Sawers has thought out his idea of a world where women rule everything. I can’t say that No Men Beyond This Point lives up to the mockumentaries of the likes of Christopher Guest (and I’m sure some people will grow tired of Sawers’ premise pretty fast), but I can’t deny that I wasn’t entertained for the most part.

This review was originally published on September 14, 2015, as part of our coverage of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.

The sinister potential of New Age practices gets explored yet again in Karl Mueller’s Rebirth, a psychological thriller continuing the somewhat recent trend of films about cults like Faults, The Invitation, and Martha Marcy May Marlene. This time, rather than taking inspiration from the likes of the Manson family or Jonestown, Rebirth bases its eponymous enlightenment group off of the Church of Scientology, and anyone vaguely familiar with L. Ron Hubbard’s creepy “religion” will pick up on the influence within minutes. And while Mueller provides enough intrigue to keep viewers guessing, he has a hard time coming up with a proper conclusion for his small-scale mind games.

Kyle (Fran Kranz) is a typical upper-middle-class office drone, living in a big suburban home with his wife and daughter and spending his days working at a bank in the city. An opening montage establishes the happy monotony of Kyle’s life, which soon gets interrupted when his old college friend Zack (Adam Goldberg) shows up at his work. Zack asks Kyle to cancel all his weekend plans and participate with him in something called Rebirth, which he only describes as “an experience.” Kyle bristles at the boldness of his old friend’s proposal, but he decides to go for it after succumbing to his nostalgic feelings.

Things get weird in a short amount of time, as the hotel Kyle checks himself into for the weekend getaway turns out to be a ruse. A series of clues leads him to a bus filled with dozens of other men, all of whom have to hand over their cell phones and wear blindfolds for the entire ride while they’re taken to Rebirth’s real location. Upon arriving, Kyle and the other bus passengers get taken to a room where a man (Steve Agee) explains Rebirth’s anti-establishment philosophies, making it sound like some sort of college bro’s attempt at copying Chuck Palahniuk. From there, several strange events draw Kyle away from the main group and off into a sort of hellish funhouse, exploring a derelict building where each room offers a different, stranger facet of what Rebirth has to offer.

This section of the film turns out to be its strongest, even though its structure and influences are plain as day. Kyle bounces from room to room, and every door he opens functions as an excuse for Mueller to come up with a bizarre situation to throw his protagonist into. An early highlight involves Kyle stumbling into some kind of support group whose leader (Andrew J. West) torments people both physically and psychologically. It’s a gripping sequence, but it’s a borderline remake of the classroom scenes in Whiplash. Plenty of other influences pop up throughout Rebirth, including David Fincher’s The Game and Charlie Brooker’s TV series Black Mirror, but these comparisons aren’t complimentary; it just shows that Mueller is a competent copycat.

On the other hand, Mueller’s focus is squarely on creating an entertaining game of figuring out what’s real or part of Rebirth, and Kranz and the committed ensemble (including Harry Hamlin and Pat Healy, who take full advantage of their small roles) make the film’s transparent qualities easier to forgive. It’s in the final act, when the group starts exerting its influence on Kyle’s personal life, that the screenplay starts to break down. By breaking away from Rebirth’s controlled environment and into the real world, the plausibility of the whole scenario gets extremely thin, but not as thin as whatever message Mueller tries to tack on in the closing minutes. After an abrupt ending, the film switches over to one of Rebirth’s promotional videos while the credits roll. The video, a deliberate attempt to mimic Scientology’s promos (including the infamous Tom Cruise video), makes the whole film feel like the set-up for a corny punchline. A brief section of the video, where Rebirth promotes its branded product line, suggests a bit of a sly commentary on New Age ideas getting swallowed up by capitalist interests, but it’s drowned out by the parodic, wink-nudge nature of the clip.

Adapted from a short film that played at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2014, Sleeping Giant quickly turned into a Canadian indie success story when it was selected to play at the Cannes Film Festival in the Critics’ Week sidebar. Several months later, Sleeping Giant finally came back home to have its North American Premiere at TIFF in September 2015.

The film takes place over the summer in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where teenager Adam (Jackson Martin) spends his summer vacation with his family. At the start of his trip, he befriends Nate (Nick Serino) and Riley (Reece Moffett), two cousins from the area living with their grandmother. It’s immediately apparent that the friendship between the three boys only makes sense in the context of this vacation, with Adam coming from a sheltered, upper-middle-class life, and Nate and Riley coming from a lower class background. As the summer continues, tensions rise between Adam, Nate and Riley until they tragically boil over.

It’s been said many times already, but Cividino has made an impressive directorial debut with Sleeping Giant. As someone who has made similar trips up north as a kid, it was surprising to see how accurate Cividino portrays that unique feeling of spending your days away from home as an adolescent. In advance of Sleeping Giant’s North American premiere at TIFF, I had the chance to talk to Andrew Cividino about his film. Read on for the full interview below, where Cividino talks about his personal connection to the film’s location, learning how to work with young, nonprofessional actors, his feelings on finally bringing the film home and much more.

Sleeping Giant is currently out in limited release in Toronto, Ontario from D Films.

I never thought of the trip up to Northern Ontario as a rite of passage for kids in Ontario until I saw your film. I did it, my parents did it…I’m assuming this film had to come from a personal place for you.

I grew up spending my summers on the shore of Lake Superior in the exact locations that the film is set in. Every year at the end of the school year [my family] would go up the day school ended, and we could come back on Labour Day. It was like that well into high school, until I had to get a job. I made friends up there that occupied a kind of a special place because we grew up together but separate from our other lives. I think it was a chance every summer to go up and, as your identities form, have this separate group of friends that you’re spending this intense amount of time with. But you’re free from all the expectations of whatever hat you’re trying to wear in your high school in Southern Ontario.

To have that kind of an unsupervised playground hanging out with friends over the summer, you’re really just left to your own devices. You’re in the middle of nowhere. All of the sorts of risks that are associated with living in a more urban setting aren’t there. You just have to come for dinner basically, and that’s about it. You’re free to roam and explore, and that was kind of the genesis for me, wanting to capture what it was like to spend those years up in that place.

Your film feels more about capturing a specific sense of time and place than focusing on a narrative.

I think tone was something that was very important to me from the genesis of the project. There’s something that I saw mirrored that’s inherent to the landscape up there. It’s beautiful, but it’s also foreboding. If you know Lake Superior well, you know that you never feel fully at ease because it’s called Thunder Bay for a reason. There are always storms that could be rolling in, and it’s like the ocean in how the waves will whip up out of nowhere. There was this tension between it being like a romantic postcard view of nature and something much more, if not menacing, certainly indifferent to your existence. I thought was really well mirrored with what adolescent boys are like, the kind of tumult, the lack of empathy and that energy.

I feel like the editing is vital to the film because you’re combining intimate shots of nature, but you’re getting bigger macro shots as well. How did you find that specific rhythm going back and forth between the two types of shots?

I think it was in our philosophy from shooting it on the outset that we wanted to capture the grand scope and the intimate details, from sweeping aerial vistas to fighting insects on bark, and to do the same thing with our characters. It was important to step back far enough with our visuals to get a sense of space and location. It totally affects your understanding of what this story is, what it’s like for these characters to be here, and to get a sense of how isolated they are. There’s something under the surface. Like I mentioned before, [there’s] this idea of the romantic, European version of nature as this inviting thing, and there’s this other side of it which is more nature as a state of chaos. I really wanted to play that duality, both in terms of nature and how we shot it close and wide, and mirroring that with the two sides of the human story.

I’m assuming you had to have a lot of patience while making this in order to capture some of those shots up close, like the insects fighting on the bark.

I think, more than patience, it was about an openness to what’s around you. To recognize that you may be shooting a scene, but if you happen to see two bugs fighting on the tree, you have to run across the island and get your crew, and have them understand that it’s important enough to run with the camera on their back and to stop everything to shoot it. On the day [of shooting] it sounds totally insane, but you need people who can bind to that understanding and philosophy. For instance, we wanted to do a lot of stuff with crayfish. I used crayfish in the short film. We spent a day and a half trying to catch crayfish, but it was not a good year for them. We caught one in total. We couldn’t do it, and we had to re-envision the material. On the other hand, the bugs fighting on the tree was something that was just noticed, and we were able to stop and pay attention and actually capture it.

Did that openness apply to the rest of the production?

The narrative was nailed down, but what happens within scenes, and certainly where scenes happen, was something we had to be very much open to because the weather would repel us from the island. We were constantly having to adapt and reorganize our schedule, but the real openness was within scenes. To be open to allowing the actors to bring their own voices, and being open to explore possibilities while making sure that we don’t get off track of the number of narrative threads and character arcs that have to come together.

How did you approach working with these young, nonprofessional actors?

I was fortunate to do the short and develop a strong relationship with Nick Serino and Reese Moffett. There was a familiarity there, and I learned a lot about working with younger actors. I think the biggest thing of all was casting people who felt close enough to the characters. Not necessarily in terms of the details of their lives, but in terms of their personalities. [It’s] finding those people, and then being willing to change your own understanding of your character to allow them to bring their own element to it. You’re not going to get amazing craft performances out of young actors who usually don’t have any experience, but if you set things up properly, you may have put yourself in a situation where they feel comfortable to bring themselves to that role, to lose themselves in that scene or moment, and to draw on their own experiences if you can find those relatable things. It was about making sure it was a collaboration, and for them bringing their own perspective to it was important.

I wanted to ask specifically about Jackson Martin who plays Adam, because his role is so pivotal.

Jack was the most experienced of the three actors going in. We cast him in a traditional casting session out of Southern Ontario.

Did you deliberately choose a more experienced actor for the role of Adam?

I deliberately wanted a professional actor to play the role of Adam because I felt that the character was going to have to shoulder a lot more of the burden in that way, especially in the earlier drafts of the story. And I also wanted to cast someone who would be a fish out of water. For the other boys, it was essential that they were up there naturally and that was their environment. But I wanted to bring somebody up who felt like this was not their natural habitat.

I did want to talk about the homoerotic aspect between Adam and Riley. What made you decide to put that in the film?

I didn’t want to make a standard love triangle specifically, but I wanted to make something that kind of explored the complexities of sexuality coming online in a person. To me, Adam is not somebody who is necessarily going to land at gay or straight or who knows where on that spectrum. He’s somebody whose sexuality is just coming online, and who has a great deal of…pressure. Not intentional pressure, but expectations around heteronormative behaviour from everybody. There’s nobody in the film that’s homophobic, but the entire world assumes heterosexuality of him. That makes his admiration for Riley confused with [his] affection for Taylor, who’s his female friend as well. All of these things create this intense confusion for him as he’s trying to find his way.

2015 has been pretty exciting for Toronto-based filmmakers. There’s you, Kazik Radwanski (How Heavy This Hammer), and Adam Garnet Jones (Fire Song) to name a few playing at TIFF this year. It feels like a whole new generation of Canadian filmmakers is finally arriving.

I feel like it’s an incredibly exciting time to be making films in Toronto. I feel like I’m part of a community of people who are making really incredible and unique pieces. We share crews, we support each other’s work, we’re inspired by each other’s films, yet the voices are all quite distinct at the same time. I’m not sure exactly why it’s happening right now. I’ve been told by others, and I certainly feel it myself, that it’s something that hasn’t happened in a while. It’s this generation of filmmakers poking through at the exact same time and getting this kind of international recognition. I don’t know what the common threads are, other than the fact that it’s like “by any means necessary.” We go out and we find stories that compel us, and we’re not going to be constrained by financial resources. I’m really excited about where it will go.

You’ve made a film that feels very specific to an experience for people in Ontario, yet this is the first time your film will screen for audiences in Canada. You’ve screened the film at Cannes and Karlovy Vary already. Have you been surprised by the reaction from international audiences, and what do you expect from audiences at TIFF once they see it?

I was really surprised by the international response to the film. I always felt that the location for the film was incredibly beautiful but worried that was always just because of my personal bias towards it. I was really surprised to see how much the setting seemed to speak to people strongly when the film premiered internationally, and it how seemed exotic to them in a way. The colloquialisms, the way the boys speak in the film is so regional in a way that I wondered if that could have ever registered internationally, and I couldn’t believe it fully could. So I’m really curious to bring the film home. I hope that it rings true to people. I hope that it’s more than nostalgia too, I hope that the story connects. I’m curious and a little bit anxious to see how it goes over at home because, for us, this is the home crowd. I’m hopeful and a little bit scared. [Laughs]

A version of this interview was originally published on September 7th, 2015, as part of our coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival.

In a short amount of time, Mike Flanagan has become one of the most prolific directors working in horror today. After releasing his micro-budget debut feature Absentia in 2011, he followed it up with Oculus in 2013, which went on to get a wide theatrical release. Since then, Flanagan has been hard at work, and he now has not one, not two, but three films slated to come out this year: his passion project Before I Wake, the sequel to the 2014 genre hit Ouija, and Hush, a slick, low-budget horror film he made in secret. In fact, no one even knew of its existence until editing was completed.

The reason for Hush’s secrecy has to do with its approach, which some might consider radical for a horror film aimed towards mainstream audiences. The film takes place over one night at the secluded home of Maddie (Kate Siegel), a deaf-mute author working on her latest novel. Her house is a gorgeous cabin in the woods, but she soon finds herself trapped when a serial killer (John Gallagher Jr.) shows up at her door hoping to make her his next victim. Because Maddie can’t speak the majority of Hush has no dialogue, and the film plays out as a wordless game of cat and mouse between Maddie and her stalker.

With a slim runtime and minimal plot, Hush is a lean, effective, and fun little horror movie. Fans of home invasion films like The Strangers will find plenty to enjoy here, with Flanagan’s efficient direction and editing keeping the tension up thanks to the incredibly tight screenplay (written by both Flanagan and Siegel). In advance of its worldwide release on Netflix, I spoke to Mike Flanagan and Kate Siegel about why the film’s production was so secretive, the challenges of doing a film with little dialogue, and why we should all be excited for Ouija 2.

Hush comes out Friday, April 8th on Netflix.

This film appeared to have come out of nowhere. How did the ball get rolling on this production?

Mike: [Kate and I] had gone out to dinner and were talking about movies we really liked, and the kinds of movies that we wanted to make. We both talked about our mutual admiration for Wait Until Dark and high concept thrillers like that. For years, I’ve wanted to do a movie without dialogue, or mostly without dialogue because I thought it would be a really cool challenge. So we had pretty much figured out what we wanted to do with this at that meal, like before dessert showed up.

I then went to [producers] Jason Blum and Trevor Macy who I had worked with before and pitched them. I said I really want to do this but I think it could be really awesome or it could be a disaster and they kind of agreed. They were nervous about it, so we didn’t tell anybody about it because we didn’t know how it was going come out. If we did kind of announce the movie early, there was a fear that a studio would want to get involved, and they would show up and start messing with it. They’d be like, “Does she have to be deaf?” or “Can’t there be some dialogue throughout this middle section?”

Kate: Or “Can everyone be a teenager?”

Mike: You never know how many different ways this can go bad, so that was another reason why we didn’t want to tell anybody about it. So we wrote the movie in secret, and we shot it without telling anybody what we were doing. We shot it really fast, a three-week shoot, cut it really quickly back in LA, and then looked at the film and said: “I think this is working, now we can start telling people about it!”

This feels like a little bit of a departure compared to Absentia and Oculus. Those films dealt with characters pitted against supernatural forces, but this film is grounded in reality. What made you want to go down this route for your next film?

Mike: I’m certainly not eager to repeat myself as a rule, and I thought this film was going to be a challenge for me on a number of levels. Even just removing dialogue takes away half of your storytelling tools, and I love the pressure of that. For me, it’s about character and suspense, and I think that can be achieved with or without supernatural elements. So there was nothing about it that felt like a departure for me, except for the dialogue angle. That felt like the biggest stretch to me, especially since my earlier movies were, like, 95% dialogue. Letting go of that crutch was really exciting, but also really scary. And I know it’s really tough for Kate too because that’s kind of half of your toolkit as an actor. She was going through the same thing I was.

Kate: At the first glance you think “Great! I don’t have to learn any lines,” but once you get in the intense circumstances, you realize that you can’t make any noise. And you can’t listen, which is what acting really is about. It took away these two things that are the majority of acting. It was very frustrating, but they say when you put a lot of restrictions on creativity often times it will grow to fit the space. You ever see those square watermelons that will grow in a box? It was a lot like that, where at first it was like “This is so uncomfortable!” but then when I watched the movie it ends up feeling like it really pushed my limits in a way that feels successful.

Did you always see yourself playing Maddie?

Kate: Yeah. In the writing stage, I was making jokes like “I don’t want to learn any lines. I hate hearing myself talk on camera,” and whatever insecure, accurate things were coming out of me at the moment. And so because it was such a private, secret project, part of it was, “If we keep this under a certain budget and under the radar then I can probably play Maddie.” One of the thoughts was that, if the studio got their hands on it, then the very first thing they would have done is replace me. I had the support of Mike, Jason, and Trevor in my performance, so they kind of protected me from the Hollywood machine who would have given this role to…

Mike: They would have quadrupled the budget and tried to bring in somebody with a certain amount of foreign sales value.

Kate: I’ll always be grateful for Jason and Trevor for supporting me in the face of people who asked them to do that.

Because there’s no dialogue, you also need to have much more physicality in front of the camera with your performance.

Kate: There were things I loved about it and things that were very frustrating. I learned a lot about acting in the course of this whole movie. With Maddie, who isolates herself and is isolated from the world, you would think that would cause her to be closed in. But there’s something about sign language that is so communicative with the body that kept her so open to the camera. I developed a real intimacy with the camera because it was the only thing I could really listen to and focus on. So where I think there was a certain amount of trepidation and fear in my earlier work about the camera who sees deep in your soul, that’s right in your face in your emotional world, through Hush I learned how to make the camera my best observer and my most trusting friend. That’s something I will take into future projects, knowing that the camera is there to support and trust as opposed to judge and watch.

This is such a lean movie, there’s no fat whatsoever. How important was it in the writing stage to structure things?

Mike: Very important, especially for a movie like this. Our initial outline had it beaten down almost by the minute, where we were like “We know we need the sliding glass door to open by minute 15.” It’s an 83-page script, it’s pretty much a page a minute of a very dense, very weird read. Kate said it reads like a novella more than a script.

Kate: Because you’re getting a lot of internal cues about how the characters are feeling, a lot of cues about what the house looks like, and what you’re seeing at any given moment, which generally speaking you don’t do in a script.

Mike: For this we had to choreograph it on the page. We had to have the layout of the house on the page, [because] we needed to know that house intimately while we were writing.

Kate: As my first feature script it was a boot camp. There’s no room for full dialogue scenes or a lot of exposition to eat up some time before the killer shows up. It was throwing me into the deep end and being like “these are the bones of how you make a narrative story,” and Mike was really generous with his knowledge.

Mike: There’s this thing that happens all the time with young writers where you overwrite dialogue. It’s because you want to get these story points out, but you want it to be conversational. And almost without fail, you can identify a young writer based on how much dialogue they put into the script, how circular the conversations are, and how long it takes to get to the relevant information. The more experienced a writer is, the less important it is to focus on the conversation and the more important it is to get the information out in the most efficient, artistic way possible. And with a script like this it couldn’t really be overwritten, so there was no opportunity for that. This was all about choreography and sound design, which was also scripted. There’s a ton of information about what we wanted the sound design to be in the script.

Kate: The other dialogue scene came in about draft two or three, where we really needed to step away from Maddie for a second.

Did earlier iterations of the script have no dialogue whatsoever?

Mike: There was something really attractive right away about doing a movie with no dialogue. I thought that would have been so fun.

Kate: And in black and white.

Mike: Yeah! We did talk about a black and white version of this.

Kate: We started so artsy.

Mike: It turned out that having no dialogue is not really feasible.

Kate: Or fun to watch. It’s interesting artistically but it’s not exciting.

Mike: There was certain information about who Maddie was and about her situation that, we realized early on, someone needed to say. It would take us five or six pages to get that information out using strictly visual cues, and we just needed someone to say it to set the table so we could pull the dialogue out and let the tension of the movie play out.

Kate: It’s also super cool because part of what Maddie’s deafness and muteness does is bring you into her perspective, and why it’s so specifically terrifying to have this happen to her. And so let’s say when [the other dialogue scene] shows up 60 minutes in, it’s such a weird feeling, and the reason it feels weird is because we haven’t heard anybody talk for about 40 minutes. I love that because it is weird, and when we cut back to Maddie you’re more familiar with what she’s missing out on.

Mike, you edit all of your films. Tell me about your editing process.

Mike: It’s pretty much the same on all of them. I get dailies on set and I’ve got Avid Media Composer on my laptop, so I will do rough cuts and assemblies on set at the monitor in between set ups. I tend to construct the coverage for a scene based on what I need for an edit. There’s really nothing else. I’ve heard my assistant editors describe my footage when it comes in as being like Ikea furniture, in that everything fits together in a specific way and there’s nothing left over. That can be really scary to me, and to a studio in particular because they look at it and say there’s no option to change this. It kind of is what it is, which is one of the only ways you can accomplish [shooting] a movie like Hush in 18 days. It has to be very specific and surgical.

I’m really lucky that they let me keep editing my stuff. It doesn’t happen for everybody, and it almost didn’t happen for me. They weren’t going to let me edit Oculus at first, and I had to actually show them what I wanted to do with it because the editor they hired wasn’t getting it. He was having that Ikea furniture panic where he was saying “I don’t see how this fits.” I had to sit down and actually edit and show them how it works, and they let me do it. But yeah, I think the writing process and everything I do on set are designed to serve me as an editor.

This is a crazy year for you, with three of your movies coming out in 2016. Tell me about Ouija 2, because I was surprised when I heard you were working on a franchise film.

Mike: Everybody was. I was. The thing with Ouija 2 was, it’s through Blumhouse, and I’ve worked with those guys a bunch now. So when they first brought it up to me, my gut reaction was “No way.” Then they said I can do whatever I want and I said, “Really?” I didn’t believe it, so I kind of tentatively moved forward with it, feeling like at any moment they would swoop in and stop me from doing what I wanted to do and then I could just gracefully step away from the movie. But it was irresistible, this idea that I could just do whatever.

So I got to do something really cool that I can’t talk about too much, although I know Blum and everyone’s so happy with the movie they’re going to be screening it for critics well before the release, which is really surprising. We got to do something really unique and unexpected. I think you can pretty much let go of the first movie. Mike Fimognari, who’s been kind of my regular DP, and I got to do things visually on this movie that we never thought we could get away with. So it’s actually a pretty cool and ambitious little movie that I think is hopefully going to really surprise people and defy the expectations that the first movie established.

In Neon Bull, writer/director Gabriel Mascaro takes viewers to a familiar yet strange world in northeastern Brazil. The film hones in on the Vaquejada rodeo, an event in the area where cowboys drag a bull to the ground by grabbing its tail. It’s a popular event throughout the region, and one Mascaro has a familiarity with. “I come from Recife, and at the school I studied at as a teenager there was a lot of influence about Vaquejada,” he explains, before talking about attending a Vaquejada party when he was 15 years old. “I never thought that, 15 years later, I would be making a movie about them.”

But Neon Bull doesn’t keep its focus on the rodeo events themselves, although the performance sequences provide some of the film’s best moments. Mascaro focuses on a small group of Vaquieros, people who work behind the scenes transporting bulls to each stop on the rodeo’s tour and making sure each event goes off without a hitch. The group’s makeshift leader is Iremar (Juliano Cazarré), the main Vaquiero who’s a pro at his job, and Mascaro observes Iremar and his coworkers as they deal with their daily existence both at work and within their surrounding environment.

Beyond his personal connection, Mascaro’s interest in making a film about the Vaquejada rodeo had to do with the link between the film’s subject matter and location. “When I started thinking about Vaquejadas as an environment to translate into a movie, I had the opportunity to meet a cattle rancher that also worked part-time in the textile industry,” Mascaro recalls, a piece of information he eventually used as the basis for Iremar’s character. The textile industry’s success in the region is one thing Mascaro cites as evidence of significant changes happening in his country. “Vaquejadas work as the scenery for a lot of the transformations that Brazil has been having for the last ten years, a lot of social and economic transformations.” And while the film is never explicit in laying out the political and economic changes going on in the background, it dominates what goes on in a film Mascaro describes as being about “a body in a transformational environment.”

That idea of transformation also applies to transforming preconceptions about gender norms. “The movie is very interested in the concept of a body,” Mascaro says. “It’s not fixed to a specific gender.” Neon Bull repeatedly finds ways to subvert the sorts of expectations one might make when watching a film about such an aggressive and masculine setting. Iremar is a strong, hulking presence when working as a Vaquiero but in his downtime, he pursues his dream of becoming a fashion designer, sewing clothes in a nearby textile factory. And partway through the film, Mascaro brings in a new character named Junior (Vinicius de Oliveira), whose slim body and long hair stand out when compared to the muscular rodeo workers around him.

Mascaro believes that, in order to break stereotypes involving masculinity and gender roles, the camera’s placement needs to be taken into account. “One of the central issues for me in regards to moviemaking is the relationship between the distance of the camera to the object being filmed. If the camera is too close, it might reinforce too much of a stereotype. If it’s far away, it might break the stereotype. You empower much more if you’re far away, with a full frame of the body. So I tried to translate this into a dance or choreography of the body into this transformational environment.”

The film does largely unfold through long, uninterrupted takes filmed with the camera at a distance, a choice that also gives Neon Bull a naturalistic, almost documentary-like appearance. Mascaro, who has a background in documentary filmmaking, and cinematographer Diego Garcia (who also worked as DoP on Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour) use their style to help normalize some of the film’s more surreal or provocative moments, whether they’re aesthetic (the neon-drenched rodeo sequences) or explicit (a graphic sex scene between Iremar and a pregnant woman). This is a deliberate choice on Mascaro’s part, explaining that “even surrealism is within the context of a spectacle, a show, and that’s how it becomes naturalism.”

The other big contributor to the film’s natural mood comes from the cast, an ensemble made up of professional and non-professional actors. “We worked with Fatima Toledo, who did actor preparation for City of God as well, to break barriers between formal actors and non-actors and bring them to a common level so there’s no tension.” A lack of tension seems important for a film shoot like this, given the lengthy and well-choreographed sequences throughout. Mascaro says there was “a lot of work involved,” especially with sequences like Iremar urinating in front of the camera, a shot that took eight hours to complete in order to achieve the correct camera movement, along with Cazarré being required to piss on cue. But the biggest challenge was a scene where Cazarré had to masturbate a horse, a situation that Mascaro laughs about today. “[Cazarré] said ‘No way, you’re pushing the limits, I’m not gonna do this unless you do it first.’ So I did.”

This interview was conducted in September 2015 during the Toronto International Film Festival. Special thanks to translator Daniel Galvao.

There’s something off with Darling, Mickey Keating’s latest horror movie (his second in 2015, after unveiling Pod at SXSW). Shooting in black-and-white on a presumably low budget (given its single location and glossy digital sheen), Keating’s film is a combination of familiar elements from psychological horror that never feels genuine in its execution save for the set-up: a young woman (Lauren Ashley Carter, referred to only as “Darling”) gets a new job as a caretaker for a large house in Manhattan, which the owner (Sean Young) claims is the oldest house in the city. But right before the homeowner leaves Darling to care for the house on her own, she also mentions two other pieces of information: the house has a reputation for being haunted, and the previous caretaker jumped from the roof to her death. Darling doesn’t seem to mind, seemingly unfazed by her new boss’ oversights.

With the owner out of the way, Darling turns into a largely one person show for Carter, who goes insane as she picks up on some strange things in the house: a room she can’t enter, a necklace with an upside-down cross, doors opening on their own, and other sorts of things that can only be attributed to unseen, sinister forces. Keating shows an awareness for traits commonly associated with austere, refined horror (rigorously composed shots, an emphasis on mood, and obfuscated character development, to name a few) but he has no idea how to properly implement them. Darling is woefully underdeveloped, with an ominous shot of some scars on her body serving as backstory, and the eventual reveal of Darling as a victim of sexual trauma is more offensive in its laziness than its insensitivity. Keating makes his protagonist nothing more than a victim succumbing to her traumatic past, and by doing so exposes his usage of sexual/physical abuse as a plot device, the sort of behaviour that should be left in the time period Darling tries to emulate.

The offensiveness of Keating’s story might not have been so transparent if everything else didn’t feel so half-baked. A five-chapter structure feels as superfluous as the different typefaces used to introduce each section, but the worst part has to be Keating’s insistence on stroboscopic effects and quick cuts throughout. What might have been an attempt to portray Darling’s fractured mental state turns into an obnoxious and annoying attempt to shock rather than scare, relying on bursts of static over Carter’s screaming face as a way to jolt viewers awake. Carter, looking like a grown-up Wednesday Addams, manages to come out of the film unscathed, doing a fine job acting unhinged while easily carrying the film along on her shoulders. But no matter how magnetic Carter’s presence is in front of the camera, it’s no escape from Keating’s asinine attempt at both a horror film and a character study.

This review was originally published on November 16, 2015 as part of our coverage of the Ithaca International Film Festival.

When looking at a festival like New Directors New Films, a question comes to mind: what should be expected from a first film? There are plenty of cases where a director’s first outing can produce a stunning masterwork, but it would be absurd to put those expectations on every single debut. It might be best to look at first features, especially within the context of a festival like ND/NF, through a bigger scale rather than scrutinizing each title on its own merits. Sometimes a first film can establish a new, distinctive, and underdeveloped voice, showing off filmmakers brimming with a potential that might not be fully realized just yet.

From what I’ve seen at ND/NF this year, Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits feels like an ideal film for this festival. It starts out with a shot of Toni (Royalty Hightower), an 11-year-old girl doing push-ups in a boxing gym. She goes to the gym with her older brother Jermaine (Da’Sean Minor) every day after school so he can look after her, and while her tomboyish looks suggest she enjoys being surrounded by so much masculinity, it soon becomes apparent that she would rather be doing something else. One day, she discovers an all-girls dance crew practicing nearby and immediately gets hooked, signing up despite having no experience with dancing.

Holmer sets her film up as the story of an alienated youth but relies on form and texture to establish Toni’s feelings of isolation. The visuals and sound design represent Toni’s heightened perspective on the world, and without using much dialogue, Holmer lets viewers pick up on her protagonists’ internal issues through the film’s rigid and well-defined style. Using static shots, shallow focus and off-kilter framing (along with a great score from Danny Bensi & Saunder Jurriaans), Holmer and cinematographer Paul Yee create a tone that reflects Toni’s detachment from both the world of the boxing gym and the dance crew (a personal favourite: the way Holmer frames a group of boys at the gym going to town on a pizza, making them look more like animals fighting over a meal).

And as beguiling as Holmer’s film might be, it isn’t always effective. The detached vibe sometimes makes Toni too vague and undefined to understand what she might be feeling within a specific scene, a feeling that can make The Fits seem like it’s missing something that can elevate it into something truly special. That almost comes when Holmer introduces a mysterious plague that starts causing girls in the dance group to suffer intense seizures, an affliction that Toni seems to be immune to (which only contributes further to her feelings of solitude). The tonal shift doesn’t do much to address the film’s more opaque qualities, but it does make some of Holmer’s themes—like the fear that comes with entering adolescence—more resonant.

Still, even if The Fits doesn’t coalesce into something more than the sum of its parts, its flashes of greatness (of which there are many) certify Holmer as one to watch. On a moment-by-moment basis, The Fits remains compelling, and at several points Holmer achieves a synergy that combines form and content into something truly singular. It’s the sort of film that frustrates in a good way, making you wish it lived up to the immense amount of promise brewing just underneath each frame. Whether or not Holmer’s next project lives up to that promise remains to be seen, but I know that I’ll be eager to see whatever she does next.

It’s only taken 35 years for Isabelle Huppert and Gerard Depardieu to reunite on screen, but anyone expecting fireworks between the two French acting titans will come away befuddled by Valley of Love. What begins as a two-hander dealing with the grief of two parents in Death Valley gradually transforms into something more surreal and mysterious, a sort of Lynchian turn that tends to happen with films utilizing desert locations. It’s a switch that fascinates more than it satisfies, turning the questions surrounding loss into literal (and increasingly bizarre) mysteries. Writer/director Guillaume Nicloux’s attempts to make his film into something more spiritual by the end don’t pay off too well, but Huppert and Depardieu’s strong performances help soften the blow.

The tragedy kicking the story into gear is the suicide of Michael, the only son of actors Isabelle (Huppert) and Gerard (Depardieu). The two of them have been divorced for years, and their relationship with Michael sounds strained; Isabelle last saw him over seven years ago, and Gerard, while having a stronger bond with Michael, admits he didn’t have much of a presence in his son’s life. At some point before or after Michael’s suicide (Nicloux keeps the distinction unclear, the first sign that something metaphysical might be going on), both parents receive a letter from him urging them to meet in Death Valley several months after his death. He lays out a series of locations across the desert for them to travel to, promising them that, if they follow his instructions, they will get to see him again.

Beyond the letters, Valley of Love leaves Michael undefined as a character, a choice that makes sense given the film unfolds through the perspective of his absent parents. The decision to follow their deceased son’s instructions is both a way to confront their loss together and an attempt at making up for their poor parenting. The majority of the film plays out through conversations between Isabelle and Gerard about their own lives, reflecting on the past and pondering about their uncertain future (Isabelle is in the process of divorcing her current husband, and Gerard’s health has been failing). This is where the presence of Huppert and Depardieu elevates Nicloux’s screenplay to something more meaningful. Huppert does an expectedly great job, weaving through different emotional states while keeping Isabelle grounded as a character, but the real surprise here is Depardieu. It’s a different role for Depardieu considering his output in recent years, and it’s a welcome change, giving him the opportunity to play a more nuanced role alongside Huppert.

But Nicloux has other ideas in mind than just letting his two leads’ chemistry carry the film. Eventually, the supernatural elements take a larger role in the story, like when Isabelle claims that Michael grabbed her ankle while she was alone in her hotel room. The film’s shift from drama to surreal mystery creates some striking moments (like Gerard having a strange encounter with a woman at his hotel), but it comes at the expense of reducing the story down to a conflict between faith and skepticism. That conflict weakens the film, making it go from an involving exploration of two characters processing the loss of their son to covering a broader (and, therefore, less interesting) topic. Aside from Huppert and Depardieu’s committed turns, the only thing stopping Valley of Love from collapsing in on itself is Nicloux’s earnest approach, making some of the more bald-faced moments—especially the closing scene—avoid becoming too mawkish or absurd. The difficulty in finding an overall purpose for Nicloux’s venture into the metaphysical makes Valley of Love feel like tagging along on a road trip that goes nowhere, but with company like Huppert and Depardieu, it’s hard to find much reason to complain.

The war in Afghanistan gets a supernatural twist with Clément Cogitore’s Neither Heaven Nor Earth, a military drama about soldiers confronting the unknown while stationed at the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s 2014 and the war is winding down, leaving Captain Antares (Jérémie Renier) and his men with little to do until they’re called back home. They’re stationed in a remote valley called Wakhan, where the villagers don’t like them and enemy soldiers hide in the surrounding desert. It all looks like business as usual for the soldiers, until one night when two men vanish without a trace. Antares launches a search, thinking they might have gotten lost or injured, but then another soldier disappears. And then another. And then the group of Taliban soldiers they’ve been fighting offer a ceasefire so they can look for their own men, who have also been disappearing one by one.

At a point where the plot should thicken, Cogitore decides to let things peter out instead, preferring to focus on Antares’ stubborn skepticism (when one soldier describes what’s happening as inexplicable, Antares says that they just haven’t found the explanation yet). Cogitore fails to convincingly portray Antares’ switch from skeptic to believer, and his refusal to provide any resolution about the mysterious disappearances becomes annoying as a result. If Cogitore doesn’t want to give any answers, then his questions should have enough substance to carry the film’s weight, which turns out not to be the case when watching Antares’ crisis play out in a dull, familiar fashion (at one point, Cogitore throws in a nod to Claire Denis’ Beau Travail that only serves as a reminder of better films already out there dealing with similar subject matter). And when hints of something more to the film pop up, like the vanishings acting as a symbol for the soldiers’ fears and anxieties, they get lost in Cogitore’s muddle. Despite its strong cast and impressive cinematography (courtesy of Sylvain Verdet, who makes good use out of the soldiers’ night-vision cameras), Neither Heaven Nor Earth only winds up squandering its great premise.

Neither Heaven Nor Earth screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

After its premiere at 2015’s SXSW Film Festival (where it won the Grand Jury and Audience awards), Trey Edward Shults’ Krisha received comparisons to the likes of John Cassavetes and Terrence Malick. Given that Shults has worked on several of Malick’s recent films—starting out as an intern on The Tree of Life—those comparisons feel obvious, even though they’re earned. The Cassavetes comparisons come from both Shults’ low-budget, indie origins and his close-knit cast (almost everyone in the film is a family member). These associations with such big names in American indie filmmaking have critics and audiences making their point clear: Krisha marks the arrival of a new, bold voice for indie films.

Then again, referring to Shults’ work as nothing but an amalgamation of potential influences only does a good job describing what Krisha is like, rather than what it actually is. There’s something here that sets Shults apart from every other up and coming American director getting their break at film festivals around the country, and it’s evident right from the beginning: a close-up of the title character (Krisha Fairchild, Shults’ real-life aunt) staring the camera down, with ominous strings surging on the soundtrack. That stark opening shot is followed by a complex long take, where Krisha walks around a suburban neighbourhood looking for a house, finds it after winding up at the wrong place, and then introduces herself to the guests inside. It’s soon revealed that the guests are Krisha’s own family, who she hasn’t seen in over a decade, and she’s arrived to celebrate Thanksgiving with them. Shults’ decision to film the sequence in one lengthy shot implies either a keen understanding of his own material—the high-wire act of pulling off such a sequence feeding into the awkward nature of the family reunion—or a showy stunt, the kind first-time directors like to make as a way to get noticed.

What differentiates Shults from the pack has less to do with story (he’s far from the first person to tackle a disastrous holiday reunion) and more to do with his execution. Krisha’s decade-long absence from her family’s lives is due in large part to her addictions and penchant for self-destructive behaviour, and Shults lets the film’s form act as a gateway into his lead character’s anxious perspective. Using quick cuts, whirling camera movements, an abrasive score (courtesy of Brian McOmber), shifting aspect ratios, and plenty of other tricks, the film becomes a cacophony that reflects Krisha’s immense, self-imposed stress. Despite the invite from her sister Robyn (Robyn Fairchild, Shults’ mother), Krisha senses the anger and resentment brewing just underneath her relatives’ friendly demeanor. She expects every interaction with one of her family members to turn confrontational at any second.

But how can Krisha work as an entrance into its protagonist’s mind when there’s no proper context for it? The bulk of Krisha’s concerns come from the fear of her family calling out her poor behaviour over the years, yet Shults cares little about establishing his other characters’ relationships to her. Beyond a basic establishing of her past issues and the uncomfortable nature of the reunion, Shults doesn’t bother trying to convey a full understanding of what brought Krisha and her family to their current emotional states. That makes the inevitable sour turn of events, culminating in Krisha’s relapse, unearned; her downward spiral feels manufactured for maximum melodrama, and her relatives the pawns designed to carry the story to its emotionally charged destination.

So if we want to find a different filmmaker to compare Shults to, one that helps explain his sensibilities rather than the conditions of his production, we just have to look north. Much like Canadian director Xavier Dolan’s work—more specifically Mommy and Tom at the Farm—Shults shows an interest in emotional intensity for its own sake. They prefer to let the visceral qualities of shouting matches and familial angst compensate for the lack of any weight behind these intense feelings, all while wrapping it up in superfluous or ineffective formal quirks that amplify the content, instead of complementing or supporting it. Granted, Shults’ approach is an effective one, even if it’s transparent; Fairchild gives a great performance, and there’s something inherently involving about watching this family fall apart. But it only works up to a certain point. As Krisha keeps going, it’s obvious that its director only knows how to operate in loud, shrill tones, and what the film amounts to is a fireworks show: loud, short bursts of excitement that fade fast and get old quick. It doesn’t come as a surprise when the film ends during its most heated moment, cutting off mid-scream to a dedication before the credits start rolling. With Krisha, Shults shows that he knows how to get people’s attention—figuring out what to do with it is another story altogether.

In Cemetery of Splendour, Jenjira (Jenjira Pongpas Widner) volunteers at a hospital in Khon Kaen to take care of soldiers suffering from a strange sleeping sickness. She takes care of Itt (Banlop Lomnoi), and she soon befriends him, along with a psychic (Jarinpattra Rueangram) who communicates with the sleeping soldiers. During her volunteering, Jen learns through a surreal encounter that the hospital’s location used to be a cemetery for kings in ancient times, and the spirits of these kings have recruited the soldiers to fight their battles in their dreams. As time goes on, and Jenjira’s bond with Itt grows, she begins questioning her own interpretation of what’s real and imagined.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest film, his first feature-length effort since he won the Palme d’Or in 2010 with Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, is another sublime effort from one of the best filmmakers working today. Creating a space where dreams, reality, fantasy, politics, fiction, non-fiction and other seemingly disparate concepts intermingle with one another, the film is a serene, meditative experience where anything feels possible.

We spoke to Apichatpong Weerasethakul at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival about Cemetery of Splendour. Read the full interview below, and be sure to catch Cemetery of Splendour in theatres during its limited run.

Cemetery of Splendour is now playing in limited release in the US, and will open Friday, March 11th, in Toronto, Ontario.

This is your first feature-length film in five years. Talk about the evolution of this film after Uncle Boonmee.

I think I am pretty interested in the idea of dreams and sleeping, so [after Boonmee] I made installations and other work related to dreams as a way to escape reality, and they influenced this film. But [the film] developed pretty organically with my relationship with Jen. Also, the political situation in Thailand is getting worse and worse. I think the movie reflects that kind of confusion and sadness at the same time.

You went back to your hometown to make this film, and you’ve spoken about engaging with your memories. I’m curious as to how important memory is to you, and if you feel it’s necessary to dive back into them.

I question my memory because it’s very short term in contrast to Jen, who remembers everything, so we make a good combination. I think memory is pretty malleable, and for our generation memory is shaped a lot by cinema. So for me, it’s very interesting to try and mimic this in the movie, to ask questions about reality and if it really exists in our everyday life, because we look at things differently according to our experience. The movie is like that, along with how to give the audience a lot of space for interpretation and imagination to suggest and build their own images.

You’re pulling from very personal and subjective experiences to make this film. What is your process like when it comes to translating these experiences into something for audiences to watch?

I don’t know. Since the beginning, I’ve just made movies for myself and, hopefully, the audience could somehow relate to the rhythm of the narrative over the years. It kind of makes sense that people get used to certain logical or illogical things in my films because it’s like a friendship. You start to learn, so it’s a span of time and not only about a single movie.

Did the film change from how you originally developed it once you worked on set and in post-production?

It’s always changing, but the core is there. It’s pretty straightforward, especially for this film. We don’t have much improvisation. We did [improvise] in the pre-production rehearsal, it changed quite a bit for dialogue and movement, but overall it’s pretty clear from the beginning. And we shuffled quite a bit in the editing room, but I have to say that it is more than I expected. When I watched the finished film, I cried. I didn’t expect that to happen. I didn’t expect it to have such an emotional link to myself.

What brought that reaction out of you?

I think it was the feeling of powerlessness. When I watched the film through the eyes of Jenjira, her desire and her inability to grasp the difference between reality and fantasy.

Do you feel there are many people like Jenjira who find themselves lost between reality and fantasy?

I’m sure for us, Thai people at this time, we would feel there’s kind of an unstable future. I hope it can translate to any audience.

Your film is very political, but audiences outside of Thailand might not pick up on that aspect if they’re unaware of the situation in your country.  

I’m making the film I want to make that I feel comfortable looking at. It doesn’t feel like an overload of information like you’re reading a report or something, but as long as the audience can connect to it spiritually it can lead to curiosity and, I don’t know, googling [Laughs]. I think my job is only the beginning part.

A lot of things are converging in your film at the school: military, education, health, and even technology with the construction going on. What draws you to merging all these things together into one place?

It may be about how our brain works, all these spaces collapsing to form a new experience. I am just trying to make sense of my memory and the sadness of leaving Khon Kaen as well.

Do you feel sad when you go back to your hometown?

Of course.

Is it nostalgia? Do you wish your town was back to the way it was when you were younger?

No, but I’m a very nostalgic person. I look at everything from the perspective of my past experiences. I always ask or always see what has changed or what is left. It’s especially obvious in my hometown because it’s been changing very quickly.

You’ve been working with Jenjira for a while, and you’ve worked with Banlop before as well. Are you naturally inclined to want to work with Jen and other actors from your previous films whenever you start a new project?

Yes, it’s automatic. I like to [be updated] and continue following their trajectory in life. Now Jen got married to an American, and she got her leg operated on.

How is she now after the surgery to stretch her leg?

It’s strange because the process was that you have to stretch the leg with this huge weight until it’s the same length as the other leg, and then you operate to make it stable. She passed the stretch process and got operated on, but after the operation it moved back. It’s still better than before, but her leg is about four centimeters shorter now instead of ten.

How do you feel about the future of Thailand?

It surprised me that Thailand lasted this long, but I don’t see the future actually. I just feel that this military is raping the country in the name of national security that I think it’s kind of sad to everyone. But at the same we are just part of the world and the borders are disappearing. It’s a conflicted feeling. I feel hope for cinema, but at the same time, I feel hopeless for the country.

You’ve said you’re interested in working in South America next. Do you feel like you’re finished with making films in Thailand?

I feel that in Thailand it’s finished for feature films. I set a rule that I’d like to make a short film in Thailand once a month in exchange for being able to go out and make a feature. It’s a different contract with myself.

This weekend, the 2016 Berlin Film Festival came to a close with the festival’s international jury awarding eight films that played in the main competition. Berlin, which used to be looked at as a tier below Cannes and Venice, has slowly shed that perception over the years thanks to premiering titles like The Grand Budapest Hotel and 45 Years (the declining stature of Venice might also be a factor too, but that’s a story for another day). Jury president Meryl Streep announced the winners with her fellow jury members, which included Clive Owen, past Berlin winner Małgorzata Szumowska and Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher.

The winners (listed at the bottom of the page) also help tell us a few things about Berlin and the state of world cinema right now. Here are a few things we learned:

Berlin isn’t afraid to take risks

Lav Diaz has been making films for nearly two decades, but his uncompromising approach to filmmaking and duration has acted as a sort of barrier to competing at a major film festival (when he does screen, he’s usually pushed to sidebars or out of competition slots). So it came as a shock when the Berlinale announced his latest film, the 8-hour A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, would actually premiere in the main competition. Berlin is the first of the three major festivals to give Diaz a spot on the main stage, and that alone helps establish the festival as a sort of risky alternative to Cannes (which caused a minor stir last year when it refused to consider Miguel Gomes’ epic Arabian Nights for the main competition) and Venice. Berlin still has a way to go with establishing an identity for itself—some of their competition selections still seem random—but if it continues to make moves like this one, it might start carving a place out for itself on the festival circuit where even the boldest and most unconventional works can coexist in competition with more friendly and prestigious festival fare.

The Alfred Bauer prize needs to go

First off, I want to be clear: I don’t think the Alfred Bauer prize is a bad idea. The prize, which some might consider third place, is an award “for a feature film that opens new perspectives.” It sounds like a nice way to honour a bold or daring title in competition but, in reality, it’s just a way for the jury to look like they’re not excluding “difficult” cinema. This year, the winner didn’t come as a surprise at all: Lav Diaz’s A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery pretty much had this one locked up from the start. So while having Diaz in competition is great, the presence of the Alfred Bauer prize feels like Diaz’s film never had a fair shot at the Golden Bear to begin with. Unfortunately, even if the prize went away or changed its purpose of avoiding the exclusion of certain types of films, the association will probably still be there (much like how Best Director at Cannes has turned into “let’s give it to the most stylish and/or difficult one”), and until it’s gone the prize is going to look less like an award and more like an excuse.

Are you listening, Cannes?

Cannes shouldn’t have to worry about losing its status as the most prestigious film festival in the world (even if festival head Thierry Fremaux seems hellbent on turning Cannes into a laughing stock), but with every passing year, it looks more like a festival that needs to get with the times. And for a festival that loves to make egregious decisions, perhaps its most egregious one is the continued exclusion of documentaries from its main competition. The last time a documentary competed for the Palme was in 2004 when Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 walked away with the main prize, a decision that still irks some to this day. Perhaps that’s why Cannes hasn’t put a documentary in competition since, but Berlin doesn’t seem to have any biases when it comes to format. This year had two nonfiction films in the main competition, with Gianfranco Rosi’s immigration documentary Fire at Sea taking home the Golden Bear. Berlin isn’t the only major festival to show some love for documentaries either; Rosi’s previous film Sacro GRA won the Golden Lion at Venice, yet if either of them tried to compete in Cannes they would probably get denied. Perhaps Rosi’s two wins can be a sign to Fremaux and Cannes that, as documentaries continue to expand and evolve, the borders between fiction and nonfiction will continue looking arbitrary and archaic.

The unstoppable Mia Hansen-Løve

It’s only been less than a decade, but Mia Hansen-Løve has gradually climbed her way into the top tier of European directors working today, and with Things to Come she seems to have finally cemented her place. It wasn’t until 2009, with her second feature Father of my Children, that Hansen-Løve started making a name for herself (partially helped by her film earning a prize at Cannes), and with her next feature Goodbye First Love the fan base grew even more. 2014 turned out to be her biggest year, with her EDM tale Eden earning rave reviews and distribution deals around the world. Things to Come has Hansen-Løve going in an opposite direction from Eden (or, to put it properly, she’s just continuing to go in her own direction), this time crafting a story around a middle-aged philosophy professor (Isabelle Huppert) instead of a young DJ, and from the sounds of it the film is her strongest work to date. It received near-unanimous praise from critics (including high marks from Nik when he saw it), walked away with a Silver Bear for Best Director, and (perhaps most surprising) scored a slew of distribution deals, including a US deal with IFC Films. Not bad for a film with no major appeal beyond the presence of Huppert.

2016 Berlin Film Festival Winners

Golden Bear for Best Film – Fire at Sea, directed by Gianfranco Rosi

Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize – Death in Sarajevo, directed by Danis Tanović

Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize (for a feature film that opens new perspectives) – A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, directed by Lav Diaz

Silver Bear for Best Director – Mia Hansen-Løve for Things to Come

Silver Bear for Best Actress – Trine Dyrholm for The Commune, directed by Thomas Vinterberg

Silver Bear for Best Actor – Majd Mastoura for Hedi, directed by Mohamed Ben Attia

Silver Bear for Best Script – Tomasz Wasilewski for United States of Love, directed by Tomasz Wasilewski

Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution (in the categories camera, editing, music score, costume or set design – Mark Lee Ping-Bing for the camera in Crosscurrent, directed by Yang Chao

The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Film Comment Selects Series runs from February 17 – 24 in New York City. Two of our writers, C.J. Prince and Michael Nazarewycz, got to preview some of the films playing in the series. First up is C.J., who took a look at some of the new films playing in this year’s series.

C.J.: If you’re a die-hard cinephile, you should already know about New York City’s Film Society of Lincoln Center. With plenty of series and festivals every year like New Directors/New Films and the New York Film Festival, FSLC combines mainstream, classic and experimental cinema into one big, unending celebration of great filmmaking.

So when Film Comment, the official publication of the Lincoln Center, put together their 16^th edition of the Film Comment Selects series, we wanted to see what they had to offer. Gathering a mix of new works hot off the festival circuit and older, underseen titles, the series unites through themes of discovery and rediscovery.

Opening the series is Terence Davies’ Sunset Song, which had its World Premiere last year at the Toronto International Film Festival. A passion project for Davies, the film is an adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel about young Scottish farm girl Chris Guthrie (Agyness Deyn) as she tries to find independence and happiness in the early 1900s. For some reason Davies doesn’t get a lot of respect from the major fests (rumor has it that this film, along with the underrated The Deep Blue Sea, were flat out rejected by both Cannes and Venice), which seems baffling considering this is the same man behind The Long Day Closes and Distant Voices, Still Lives. Sunset Song doesn’t reach the same highs as those two films, keeping its focus on the source material’s sweeping narrative rather than providing the kinds of sublime moments Davies specializes in, but the film has a cumulative strength that’s undeniable. It’s less of a character study and more of a representation of how desires and ambitions can fall victim to forces beyond our control, whether it’s abusive family members (a subject Davies knows how to portray better than anyone else) or a war breaking out. It’s a reminder of how we can only define ourselves to a certain degree, and Davies expresses this message with just the right amount of humility and grace.

Even if one can’t go along with Davies’ style in Sunset Song, there’s still an earnestness with his approach that’s admirable. I can’t say the same for Benoit Jacquot’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, a piece of French prestige that sleepwalks through its adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s novel. This is the third time Mirbeau’s story has been translated to the screen, with Jean Renoir and Luis Bunuel making their own versions in the past, and despite having seen neither of those versions (something I’m not proud of), Jacquot’s adaptation still feels pointless. Léa Seydoux plays Celestine, a chambermaid who gets hired on at a house in the French countryside. She’s a smart, beautiful woman who knows it, spending most of her time bitterly lamenting both her job and social status. Seydoux continues to show why she’s become such a revered actress in a short time, and Clotilde Mollet gives a great performance as her cruel master, but the screenplay is a total mess. Flashbacks to Celestine’s previous jobs attempt to flesh out her character when it actually paints her as erratic, veering between sensitive caretaker (in a strange sequence with other up-and-coming French actor Vincent Lacoste) and resentful grump. These sorts of sudden, inexplicable shifts happen across the film, with the most baffling one being Celestine’s crush on her brooding, anti-Semitic co-worker (Vincent Lindon). With Jacquot making no effort to provide any sense of coherency, it’s hard to give a single shit about Diary of a Chambermaid’s narrative. The abrupt, unsatisfying conclusion feels more like everyone just gave up, preferring to go take a nap rather than try and make an actual ending.

From one French “It Girl” to another, Philippe Grandrieux’s Malgré la Nuit (the English title is Despite the Night, but I prefer the original) stars Ariane Labed, who co-starred with Seydoux in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster. Possibly the most extreme film in this year’s line-up, Grandrieux takes a look at extreme emotions through two people living in Paris: Lenz (Kristian Marr), returning from England to look for a woman named Madeleine, and Hélène (Labed), a nurse who strikes up an intense relationship with Lenz during his search. Beyond its disturbing subject matter (involving an underground club specializing in sex, torture and murder), Malgré la nuit gets under the skin through its strange formal choices, whether it’s shrouding scenes in darkness—most exchanges look like they’re happening in an underground cavern rather than a room—or shooting close-ups with artificial lights that turn faces into overexposed blobs of light. Grandrieux operates through cinema’s ability to portray subjectivity and emotions rather than its ability to tell a story, so while the narrative may be flimsy, it takes a backseat to the film’s ability to provide a visceral knockout to the senses.

Of course, this being FSLC, the series wouldn’t be complete without some titles that will leave viewers completely baffled. Take, for example, Marco Bellochio’s Blood of my Blood, which premiered at Venice and Toronto last year to a small yet vocal chorus of raves. It starts in the 17th century with Federico (Pier Giorgio Bellocchio) arriving at the convent his priest brother resided at before killing himself. His brother had an affair with the nun Sister Benedetta (Lidiya Liberman), and in order to ensure his brother gets a proper burial, he must help prove that Benedetta is influenced by Satan (since that would prove that the suicide was an involuntary act and not a sin). This is all well and good until Bellochio abruptly ends this story halfway through, flashing forward to the same convent in present day where an old man named Count Basta (Roberto Herlitzka) resides. And oh yeah, Count Basta might be a vampire. How do these two storylines link together? It’s a question I can’t really answer after one viewing, and I’m sure most people will find themselves in the same boat. It’s a bemusing experience, although not everyone will feel like it’s worth the effort to try and understand what exactly might be going on in Bellochio’s head.

But, at the very least, I can say something about Bellochio’s film. Trying to talk about Andrzej Żuławski’s Cosmos is something that eludes me, and I’ll be perfectly fine admitting that a large amount of it probably went over my head. Adapted from Witold Gombrowicz’s novel, the film is Żuławski’s first feature film in over 15 years, and from frame one it feels like he’s unleashing all the pent-up strangeness he’s been accumulating over the years. Law student Witold (Jonathan Genet) escapes to a guest house where he befriends fellow guest Fuchs (Johan Libereau) and falls for the owner’s daughter (Victoria Guerra). At the same time, Witold’s discovery of a block of wood and a dead sparrow, both strung up by wire near the property, inspires him and Fuchs to figure out who’s responsible. All I can say about Cosmos is that it’s just one weird experience that, no matter how maddening it may get, never slows down for a second. It’s just unfortunate that Żuławski’s quirks start paying off far too late into the picture, with a final act and ending(s) that inspire laughter just by its sheer audacity. Fans of Possession, Żuławski’s cult classic, should not expect anything similar here, even though both films could be classified as unforgettable whatsits.

There are plenty more intriguing titles from recent years playing the series that I wish I could have gotten to see, like the essay Notfilm, a look into the making of Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton’s avant-garde short Film (which screens with Notfilm). Also playing are Venice prize winner No One’s Child, Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s 2015 Cannes competition entry Our Little Sister, Aleksei German Jr.’s Under Electric Clouds, and the US premiere of 2012 Iranian film The Paternal House. But Film Comment has much more going on than a showcase of recent festival fare. Michael Nazarewycz took a peek at some of the archival titles playing this year, starting with Ray Davies’ Return to Waterloo.

Michael: The Kinks, formed in 1963 by brothers Ray and Dave Davies, were a British rock band that had critical success early (1964’s You Really Got Me) and late (1983’s Come Dancing) in their musical careers. On the heels of the success of Come Dancing, with its music video rich in bittersweet themes of melancholy and regret, Ray Davies clearly had more to get off his chest creatively and thematically. He did so, partially at the expense of an already strained relationship with his brother Dave, by focusing his artistic attention on directing a musical film. The result, along with an accompanying soundtrack of mostly new music written by Ray, was 1984’s Return to Waterloo.

In the film, veteran British character actor Kenneth Colley plays a man simply known as The Traveller. The Traveller is an otherwise unassuming businessman…until it’s revealed he might be a wanted serial rapist. He follows a blonde into the tube and, as he takes his train ride, his mind harkens to many different things, including thoughts of his recently-estranged daughter and his disenchanted wife, as well as his opinions of present-day youth and memories of a more promising career in his younger days.

Return to Waterloo marks the cinematic debut of writer/director Ray Davies and, with the exception of a few subsequent documentaries, it’s his only filmmaking effort. That’s a shame. Davies’ musical drama, while not perfect, is a wonderful blend of melancholy, music, and mystery, and it proves that the musician had greater artistic scope than just penning and recording hit records. His approach is bold; rather than create a linear narrative and tell a traditional story, Davies plays fast and loose with The Traveller’s timeline and his sense of reality. The character clearly exists in the now, but as he encounters people in his travels, those people trigger thoughts and images that slip in and out of reality, dancing a line between things that happened in the past and things he imagines are happening now. The creative approach, which ultimately relies on the viewer to do some heavier-than-usual lifting, works more often than it doesn’t, and at a lean and energetic 58 minutes, it’s a great time. Tthe film also marks the second onscreen appearance of a young Tim Roth, as well as an early entry in the career of legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins.

Film Comment has also chosen to screen a pair of Charles Bronson films at their Selects festival. Bronson, who began acting in the early 1950s, appeared in a collection of films that would go on to become classics, including John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape. In the 1970s, Bronson rocketed to superstardom, anchored by a star turn in Michael Winner’s vigilante classic Death Wish. Late in his career, Bronson was one of the biggest stars in the Cannon Films stable, appearing in a collection of ’80s action flicks for the notorious production company. But hidden among these famous films are two lesser-known entries from the action legend.

First is Tom Gries’ Breakout, from 1975. In the film, Robert Duvall plays Jay Wagner, a man wrongly imprisoned in Mexico for a murder he didn’t commit. The murder and incarceration were orchestrated by Wagner’s corrupt grandfather-in-law (played by John Huston). Wagner’s wife, played by frequent Bronson co-star and real-life spouse Jill Ireland, hires bush pilot Nick Colton (Bronson) to break her husband out of jail. Action ensues.

As a film, Breakout isn’t very good. While it allows Bronson to be a little less serious than the brooding characters he’s better known for, the plot is an utter mess and the rescue attempts (there are several) are nothing more than a string of haplessly assembled action pieces that only serve to illustrate what a terrible rescuer Colton is (as is his sidekick of sorts, played by Randy Quaid). Still, the film is notable and worth checking out for a couple of things. It’s loosely based on the book The 10-Second Jailbreak, which itself is based on actual events. The film is part of the Bronson canon, and one not usually mentioned in the same breath as the others, so Bronson completists should rejoice. It has quite a cast, as well as quite the producing team in Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, the Oscar-winners behind the entire Rocky franchise (including 2015’s Creed). Most interestingly, though, Breakout is one of the titles bandied about when there are discussions about the “first summer blockbuster.” While Steven Spielberg’s Jaws is widely regarded to hold that distinction because of its wide release and its success, other films, including this one, had wide releases just as big.

The other Bronson film selected by Film Comment is an excellent choice, one that is part of the overlooked European portion of the actor’s career. Starting with Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West  and ending with his return to the US as the star of The Mechanic, Bronson made about a dozen films in Europe including the 1970 film Rider on the Rain, which won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. The French film is a sleek, slick Hitchcockian thriller, although the name of its femme fatale is more Bond than Hitch: Mélancolie Mau.

Played by Marlène Jobert, Mélancolie is a lonely woman in a loveless marriage living in a lifeless seaside town. One day, while her husband is somewhere else in the world in his role as an airline pilot (and philanderer), a creepy-looking man (Marc Mazza) with a red bag gets off a bus. The man makes incidental eye contact with Mélancolie. Later that day, when she is trying on clothes in a shop, the stranger leers at her through the outside window as she stands exposed in her underwear and stockings. That night, the stranger breaks into her home and rapes her. He doesn’t leave. Before he can repeat his act, there is a struggle that eventually affords Mélancolie the opportunity to shoot and kill him, but rather than report it to police, she dumps the body into the sea and keeps the incident a secret.

The next day at a wedding, Mélancolie meets American Harry Dobbs (Bronson), a man who not only knows what she did but knows a lot of the circumstances surrounding it. Still, despite his prodding, she refuses to confess to her actions, and what follows is a tingling game of cat-and-mouse that showcases Mélancolie’s resolve and Dobbs’s downright misogyny. Of course things devolve from there.

Director René Clément certainly gets his Hitchcock on for this film. While Mélancolie is not your typical Hitchcock blonde, the redhead is no less icy and no less mysterious. Of questionable character, too, is Dobbs, whose knowledge of the facts and pursuit of the truth suggest hero, but whose methods suggest anti-hero at best. A beautiful resort, sexual energy to spare, and a slowly unraveling mystery make Rider on the Rain a compelling and, at times, unsettling watch in ways reminiscent of Hitchcock, but perhaps with more dazzling visuals and brutal realism (the rape scene is harrowing). Jobert is truly the star of the picture, but Bronson is excellent, with his perpetual cat-who-ate-the-canary grin beneath his signature mustache. The two couldn’t be more different than each other, yet their onscreen chemistry is excellent.

In addition to these fun catalogue titles, Film Comment’s lineup boasts several other classics, including a trio of films from Andrzej Żuławski to accompany Cosmos. That trio consists of a pair of 1972 horror films, The Devil and The Third Part of the Night, and the 1988 sci-fi/fantasy On the Silver Globe. Closing night offers a Chantal Akerman tribute with the screening of her 1986 musical Golden Eighties.

Since its premiere at Cannes in May 2015, Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent has been stunning audiences all over the world with its tale of Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman who helps two different explorers over two periods of time as they hunt down a rare psychedelic plant. In order to provide an accurate portrait of the Amazon location and the early 20th century time period, Guerra and his crew ventured into the Colombian Amazon to work with the native tribes and bring their vision to life. And while the film has its fair share of stunning imagery—it was shot in black and white on 35mm film—Guerra doesn’t avoid confronting the horrors of colonization going on at the time, using his narrative to explore the devastating short-term and long-term effects of the West’s destruction of Amazonian cultures.

I talked with Ciro Guerra about Embrace of the Serpent last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, and since then the film has gone on to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Read on for the full interview below, where Guerra talks about his intensive research process and what filmmaking means to him.

Embrace of the Serpent opens in New York City on February 17th before expanding to Los Angeles, Toronto and more cities on February 19th.

Tell me about your research process for this film.

It was about 3 and a half years of research during which the script was developed. The starting point was the journals of the explorers. I found them fascinating when I read them. I thought it was a great story that had not been told. I was fascinated by these men who left everything behind, who left their families and their lives to go three, four, even 17 years in the case of Schultes, to an unknown place and just tell the world about it. I first traveled to the Amazon region after reading them, and what I found was completely different. The region is completely transformed. So [the film] is part of a desire to bring back this Amazon to the way it used to be, and it was a big effort. People don’t dress like that anymore, and most of the traditions and languages are lost or in the process of disappearing.

We contacted the communities and we asked them if they want to be a part of the film. They said, “Our condition is that, in order to give you permission to shoot here, we are part of the film.” That made us very happy because we were able to collaborate. And for them, it was like bringing back the stories of their grandfathers or their ancestors they have heard from before. We wanted to bring an image of that to life because history has no image of that moment.

Were you initially nervous about approaching the communities in the Amazon?

I think the people of the Amazon are really open and friendly and enthusiastic. They are very joyous people. They can see through you, so if you’re transparent and you’re not carrying any second intentions they can see that immediately. But they ask you the really important questions, which are “What’s the real reason you want to make this film? What’s the true reason?” And for me, it meant going back and looking in the mirror and asking myself, “What is the reason I want to make this film?” When I understood that I wanted to learn and share the knowledge, I felt comfortable saying this is the reason. If the reason had been that I want to work, I want to go to a festival, win awards or make money, I should have quit at that moment.

How did you initially come upon the two journals that you based the film on?

I had a lifelong dream of making a film in the Amazon. I had come from making my first two films, which were personal and about my life, my memories, my childhood, and my culture. For this film I wanted to go the opposite way, to take a journey into the unknown. The Amazon is half of Colombia and it’s completely unknown to Colombians. It’s a place that we have very little knowledge of. I have a friend who’s an anthropologist, who was an actor in my previous film, who said if I want to go into the Amazon I should start with the journals of the explorers. I related heavily to [the journals] because, to me, making a film is like that. It’s a journey into something where you never know what’s going to happen. It’s uncharted territory every time you make a film. I related strongly to that quest and hunger for knowledge.

Your previous film Wind Journeys was shot in 80 locations, and with Embrace of the Serpent, you’re going to the Amazon to make it. You’re doing much more than other people might normally do when making a movie. Is this something you feel like you need to do in order to make a film?

I think films should be an experience, both making them and watching them. When you sit in the theatre in the dark you want to be taken somewhere. You want to be changed, you want to live an experience. For me, with the process of making a film, I like to tackle it that way. I want a film to take me somewhere, to change my point of view, to confront my ideas in life and the world. Filmmaking is a really intense experience, and I think it should be. It shouldn’t be an office job. It shouldn’t be predictable or safe. It should be risky. When there’s that excitement on your part, from the people making the film, the audience feels that.

What made you decide to shoot on 35mm?

The look of the film was inspired by the photographs that the explorers took. [They’re] almost daguerreotype kind of pictures, but they have an organic quality, and in order to have this organic quality there’s no match for film. I have no problem with high definition video. I think it’s right for urban stories, modern stories, and artificial light, but when you want to get the real texture of nature, film is the way to go. It’s not possible to think of something else. But it also gives you some limitations.

There are strengths with film. The cameras are more [like] battle cameras. Some of them were made to shoot wars, so they are good for shooting in rough terrain. They do better with humidity and external conditions while video cameras are not so tough with these environments. But there was also something else. Since we had to shoot on film, we had limited stock, so we only had two takes for each shot. With video, you can do 17 takes for one shot, but here it’s two takes, and that makes every take precious. It focuses the actors, the crew, everyone. When we used to take photographs on film, every photograph was valuable. We had to choose and take care of it. Today with the digital age, you take thousands of photographs but they have no value. You never look at them again. You don’t frame them. In film you’re making a leap of faith, and that’s fascinating.

Was it a very stressful shoot then?

I thought it was going to be. We were prepared for the worst, and it was a very demanding and tough shoot, but it wasn’t stressful. The choice that we made to be very respectful to the environment, to the communities, to make as little impact as possible, meant that we felt that the jungle was playing to our side. We felt a connection with each other and the place that we were in, so it became a very profound and spiritual experience for all of us. I feel that, when you try to bring a foreign shoot into a place like this and try to obey all the rules of the place, you can turn the place against you. But, in this case, I felt that we had the protection of the place and the spiritual support of the community, so it turned into a very happy experience for all of us.

Tell me about the way you developed Karamakate.

The interesting thing to me was not to make [something] usually seen in this kind of movie, where you have the main point of view from the explorer. It was very clear to me that to make this story unique I had to switch the point of view. There was a character in the journals who had a very small appearance and I found him fascinating, so I started developing on him. But I had to switch something in my mind in order to write him and create him. That took about 2 years of writing and researching to really understand how this character sees the world. Not only that, I also had to make it understandable for an audience. It’s a role that’s so foreign that it’s easy to get lost, and I was really lost for a while.

But then we found the actors. They were really a part of developing the character. They brought their own experience and their own views, and they enrichen the characters through dialogue and action. But I think we were safe because it was a fiction, so we had some liberties.

Do you feel that what these explorers were doing was vital, or did it just contribute further to the colonization going on at the time?

I feel that what they did was vital because, if those encounters didn’t take place, these cultures would have been erased by capitalism and we would have never noticed them. These encounters in the jungle had a really big impact because this knowledge that was liberated for the first time really changed the world during the middle of the 20th century. All of the first ecological movements were influenced by these journals. The writers of the Beat Generation were influenced. For example, Burroughs went to Colombia to see if this was all true. It had a big influence on what became psychedelia and the hippie movement, and also the change of consciousness that brings us today to a world where environmental issues are a thing. A hundred years ago it would be impossible to discuss these matters of preserving other cultures and other languages, or being respectful to these people who, at that time, were seen as primitive, subhuman and souls that needed to be rescued. I think that the journals of the explorers really helped change that.

What made you bring in the concept of the Chullachaqui myth?

During the [research] process, I came upon the Machiguenga myth of the Peruvian amazon. It struck me because I was exploring the German culture at the time, and there was a direct resonance with the myth of the doppelganger. But then it struck even harder because it’s an ancient myth that speaks to contemporary men. We’re living in an age where people are communicating through virtual avatars. It was something timeless that was contemporary as well. It also gave me an idea of how I could find a way to express the feelings of a character who feels that their culture is disappearing and about to be lost. I decided that it was going to be the driving myth behind the film’s structure.

When did you come up with the idea to link these journals together and use Karamakate as the connective tissue?

I was looking at a way we could bring the viewer into a different world or view. In the journals of Theodor Koch-Grunberg, the German explorer that I was inspired by, he came following the footsteps of another German explorer named Schomburgk, who had been there 40 years before. Koch-Grunberg reached a community on the border of Colombia and Venezuela. They welcomed him and, for that generation, he was the first white man they had ever seen. He spent two months there, and all the time they talked about the myth of Surumbukú. After a while, he realized that Surumbukú was Schomburgk. The other explorer became an Amazonian myth, and now he was also Surumbukú. He was the same. So he understood that, for them, there was only one man going back in time every time. He was one soul traveling through different men who are coming in search of knowledge. I thought that was brilliant, and I was excited by that. This was a really great way of telling a story in which time is not a linear thing, but a multiplicity of things, which is the way they see time.

After making films about social recluses (Curling), ex-convicts (Vic + Flo Saw a Bear) and venturing into documentaries on animals (Bestiaire) and factory workers (Joy of Man’s Desiring), French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté sets his sights on the upper class in Boris Without Béatrice. Its story, about a successful businessman confronting his own privilege after a surreal encounter, will undoubtedly rub people the wrong way given its sympathetic view towards an unsympathetic protagonist, but fans of Côté’s precise, arresting style will find plenty to enjoy, even if it’s in strictly formal terms.

James Hyndman plays Boris Malinovsky, a middle-aged man as arrogant as he is successful. Early scenes establish Boris’ rich lifestyle and hubris, like when he gets furious at the cashier of a high-class clothing store for asking him too many questions or crashes a town hall to lambast the mayor for not prioritizing an unpaved road near his house. But Boris’ obnoxious sense of pride and short temper might be influenced by added stress at home; his wife Béatrice (Simone-Élise Girard), a minister for the Canadian government, has come down with a severe depression that’s left her mute and bedridden. Boris, unable to deal with his wife’s ailment, hires Klara (Isolda Dychauk) to take care of her while he continues an affair with co-worker Helga (Dounia Sichov). It’s a typical case of someone using their wealth to fill the holes in their life with something else, rather than putting the work in to try and gain back what’s lost.

For a character so stuck in his own self-inflated world, it will take a lot to shake Boris from his foundation. Enter Denis Lavant as an unknown stranger, who leaves a message in Boris’ mailbox urging him to meet late at night in a nearby quarry. Their meeting, which feels like Côté’s version of the Cowboy scene in Mulholland Drive, has Lavant (who electrifies the film just by showing up in a kurta) explaining to Boris that he’s the cause for Béatrice’s condition, and in order to cure her, he needs to change his life. The encounter throws Boris into a crisis that makes him re-evaluate his life while diving further into his selfish comforts when he starts an affair with Klara.

While Boris Without Béatrice may be Côté’s first time dealing with affluent characters, he’s far from the first filmmaker to explore the problems people can afford to have, and the thematic familiarity can make certain stretches feel a bit stale. But one of Côté’s strengths has always been his ability to build an enclosed yet well-realized universe within each of his films, so it comes as no surprise that his style fits nicely when operating within the bubble of someone’s privileged existence.

Teaming up with cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné, Côté extends the functional qualities of the narrative to the film’s visuals. Just as every action in the film leads to a direct reaction involving some other aspect of the story— Béatrice’s health improves or worsens depending on how Boris acts—Côté uses environments to make a direct commentary on each character’s current state, whether it’s obscuring Béatrice behind reflective surfaces or using the vertical lines throughout Boris’ sleek estate to make him appear separated from others within the same scene. Côté’s efficiency when it comes to establishing information through visuals is most effective when using flashbacks to show Boris reflecting on happier times with his wife. Shooting these (brief) moments in warm tones on what looks like 8mm film, the organic and textured look of the footage establishes that, despite his bad behavior, Boris’ love for Béatrice is real.

For any shortcomings Boris Without Béatrice might have storywise, Côté’s direction and his ensemble pick up the slack. It may lack the same unpredictability that made Vic + Flo Saw a Bear so strong, but Côté has firmly established himself as one of Canada’s strongest and most consistent directors working today.

A good film doesn’t always have to make sense. In some cases, a film’s perceived impenetrability might act as an invitation to theorize and discuss what’s going on; in other cases, a film can hit certain emotional notes or elicit reactions through its own filmmaking to create a rich experience. None of those scenarios apply to Daniil Zinchenko’s Elixir, which tries for a combination of sci-fi, fairy tale, religious parable, and political commentary, and winds up with a painful, mutated mishmash Seth Brundle would be proud of.

Taking place in a large, forested area, Elixir sets up a storyline it barely follows: a scientist (Oleg Rudenko) working on an elixir that can resurrect the dead assigns his assistant (Sergey Frolov) to collect the ingredients necessary to complete his mixture. Those ingredients are DNA from two cosmonauts, two guerillas, and “Him,” which might refer to a carpenter (Aleksandr Gorelov) getting hunted down by a businessman (Dmitriy Zhuravlev) because of his ability to turn water into oil.

A large amount takes place at a swamp within the film’s vast, rural setting, which turns out to go well with the slow, trudging experience of watching Elixir. Zinchenko’s blunt, obvious symbolism, and references to contemporary Russia aren’t hard to grasp, but understanding how all the pieces fit together is another story altogether. Adding to the frustration is Zinchenko’s decision to frame most of his film in long shots so he can deliberately obscure what’s going on in a scene, a choice that doesn’t seem to have a purpose other than providing more confusion (at one point he even blocks a scene so the main action gets covered by a bush in the middle of the frame). If there was a feeling of cohesion with any of this, or at least a sense that Zinchenko wasn’t just combining a bunch of underdeveloped ideas, Elixir might have provided some fun with its eccentricities. Instead, it’s just a pile of mush made up of boring quirks and unsubtle metaphors, adding up to pure, wasteful nonsense.

Dreams and reality collide, or rather blandly coexist, in Petr Oukropec’s In Your Dreams!, a coming-of-age tale that combines a teenage girl’s burgeoning emotions with parkour, the form of acrobatic urban exploration that became a passing fad in the early 2000s. Beginning at an off-season ski resort high up in a range of mountains, 16-year-old Laura (Barbora Štikarová) practices back flips while her father (Ivan Martinka) gets ready for the two of them to go out climbing. A tense climbing sequence establishes Laura as a teen whose craving for independence can make her reckless, as she climbs too fast and winds up slipping (lucky for her, the safety harness she complained about moments earlier saves her from falling to her death). This opening, while brief, makes a big impression thanks to director of photography’s Tomáš Sysel gorgeous visuals, using the film’s Cinemascope ratio to capture the jaw-dropping vistas provided by the high-altitude location.

The promise of a film filled with such eye-watering imagery soon dissipates as the movie has a literal and figurative comedown, with Laura abruptly cutting her trip short so she can go back to be with her mother (Klára Melišková) in Prague. Laura’s interests lie more with climbing buildings than mountains, and upon arriving back at her mother’s apartment she goes out with her friend Kaja (Veronika Pouchová) to audition for a spot on a parkour team. Kaja realizes that Laura’s desire to join the all-boys group might have more to do with her crush on Luky (Toman Rychtera), the cocky leader of the team, and after trying out Laura catches his attention, along with the group’s videographer Alex (Jáchym Novotný).

The emotional rush of potentially getting the boy of her dreams starts overwhelming Laura to the point where, when she’s taking the elevator down from her apartment, she falls into a dream world where she finds herself on a beach with Luka by her side. Oukropec’s structuring of his film between Laura’s dreams and the real world feels strange at first, especially when there’s no apparent reason for why she goes into fainting spells whenever she steps into an elevator (after the first incident, a doctor examines Laura but concludes it’s just the boundless mystery of female hormones). And it’s not that Oukropec needs to provide a logical, reality-based reason for his trips into the surreal; he just needs to make the transitions convincing within the realm of his own film, and on that front he comes up short. Compared to the opening minutes, Laura’s dreams look bland in comparison, filtered through drab greys and taking place in the same dull location that implies her own lack of imagination more than anything. It’s a problem that makes Oukropec’s intention of In Your Dreams! as a character-based piece fall flat, with every glimpse into Laura’s head too uninteresting to make anything register.

And once Laura’s dreams and reality begin influencing each other, it’s apparent that the film really has nowhere to go aside from watching its protagonist get over her crush through dreaming. Other aspects of Laura’s life, like a potential romance with Alex or the increasing presence of her mother’s new boyfriend in the apartment, get discarded altogether in the final act, leaving them unresolved or flat-out ignored. There’s also a brief episode where Laura questions whether or not her dreams are more than fantasy, since Luky vanishes after she dreams of him getting locked away, but Oukropec barely commits to Laura’s distressed state. At one point she starts imagining a dog from her dreams following her around in real life, and the development is treated so inconsequentially it just feels like a strange quirk rather than a sign of her further disconnect from reality. Even worse is the way Oukropec decides to wrap things up, letting the contrived climax play out entirely in Laura’s dream world that results in a near-incomprehensible plot resolution. The lazy execution of the film’s more imaginative side keeps Oukropec’s film tethered to its own uninteresting and poorly developed reality, with only Štikarová’s strong performance forming some sort of ground to stand on among the half-baked ideas. Aside from its visuals and some neat parkour stunt work, In Your Dreams! has about as much staying power as the majority of our own dreams.

The Best Foreign Language Film category, whether it’s at the Oscars or any other awards show, always poses a strange question: how can you whittle the entire non-English speaking world down to five titles? When you compare this to the eight English-language nominees for Best Picture, it seems like an unfair balance. Now, granted, the Best Picture category isn’t limited to just English-language productions, but you’d be crazy to suggest that foreign productions have the same shot at getting a Best Picture nod as something like The Revenant or Brooklyn (past foreign language nominees like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Amour are exceptions to the norm).

Even stranger is the method of selecting the nominees, which requires countries to submit only one film for consideration in the category. That means France, a country that consistently puts out some of the best cinema in the world every year, can only pick one film to represent their country in the category. But even then, the selected film needs to have a theatrical release within a specific time frame in their home country in order to truly qualify for the category. Those rules can get frustrating for some foreign language films, and the idea of contorting a release in one’s own home country just for the possibility of one award nomination thousands of miles away isn’t exactly an appealing one: in 2013, the French distributor of Blue is the Warmest Colour refused to change their release strategy, meaning one of the most buzzed about films of that year didn’t even qualify for the only category it had a shot of getting nominated in.

The point of all of this is that, like everything else at the Oscars, politics abound, and these nominees need to be taken with a big grain of salt. These five films are hardly representative of the best world cinema has to offer, but they’re far from being the worst either. This year, the Foreign Language category provided one big, welcome surprise: the nomination of Theeb, director Naji Abu Nowar’s film about a young member of a Bedouin tribe who gets caught up in the war taking place far from his community. I saw Theeb back at its New Directors/New Films screening and came away pleasantly surprised at its assuredness, especially coming from a first-time director. The fact that Theeb got a theatrical release in the US was great news on its own; its Oscar nomination should hopefully turn more people on to a great film that deserves to be seen (Theeb is currently out in limited theatrical release from Film Movement).

From the surprising to the not-so-surprising, it shouldn’t come as a shock that Hungary’s Son of Saul received a nomination in this category. It premiered at Cannes in 2015, where it scored the Grand Prix along with a nice distribution deal from Sony Pictures Classics. That, combined with the fact that it’s a Holocaust film, solidified Son of Saul’s appearance here, since at least one foreign language nominee must deal with the Holocaust in some way, shape or form. Critics and audiences have been over the moon for Son of Saul since its Cannes debut, but I came away disappointed after seeing it. Director Laszlo Nemes and cinematographer Matyas Erdely show off their formal skills with the film’s precise construction, using shallow focus and long takes to “immerse” viewers into the horrors of surviving Auschwitz, but it only calls attention to the film’s own technical achievements. And combining a form that’s all about showing itself off with one of mankind’s greatest tragedies makes for a pairing that’s ugly for all the wrong reasons. It’s disappointing to see that, in a year with so many strong films both nominated and eligible for the category, the award will wind up going to Son of Saul, whose bland, digestible form of “difficult” cinema makes its win more about people congratulating their own broadened cinematic horizons than celebrating the best nominee (Son of Saul is currently out in limited theatrical release from Sony Pictures Classics).

That brings me to Mustang, Deniz Gamze Erguven’s film which France submitted this year over Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan, a film most assumed would have been selected given its Palme d’Or win last year. It’s a choice only people who haven’t seen Mustang might find surprising, since those who have seen Mustang know it’s a legitimately great film through and through. Following five orphaned sisters living in a tiny Turkish village, the film portrays the girls’ struggles to fight back against old cultural, religious and patriarchal standards as they’re married off one-by-one in arranged ceremonies. The film may get a little too contrived as it goes along, but it’s impossible to deny that Erguven has crafted one powerful story of a fight for independence and freedom from the old, archaic ways of the past. Mustang has a small but fervent following since its US release in late 2015, and because of that, it might be the only film with a shot at taking the trophy away from Son of Saul (Mustang is currently out in limited theatrical release from Cohen Media Group).

For a nominee like Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent, it should just be happy that it got nominated in the first place, as it’s probably too “out there” for people to consider choosing as the winner. Taking place between two periods of time, Guerra shows a shaman living deep in the Amazon as he helps two different scientists try to find a rare plant within the jungle. Embrace has its fair share of gorgeous cinematography, but like last year’s winner Ida it’s hard to find much to enjoy beyond its aesthetics. Unlike Son of Saul, Guerra’s form feels sincere in its attempts to pay respect to the location and cultures he profiles, but other than its pointed look at the devastating effects of colonialism the film comes across as Herzog-lite (Embrace of the Serpent will come out in limited theatrical release on Friday, February 17^th from Oscilloscope Pictures).

Finally, Tobias Lindholm’s A War is a fine follow-up to A Hijacking, which suffered an unfortunate case of timing when it came out around the same time as Paul Greengrass’ Captain Phillips. Taking place in Afghanistan, Lindholm focuses on a Danish army commander who winds up getting accused of a war crime after making a rash decision during a firefight. Denmark is no stranger to impressive yet overly manipulated drama—see previous Oscar nominee The Hunt, which Lindholm co-wrote—and A War is more of the same, showcasing a complex and nuanced situation with the efficiency of a procedural. Fans of this form of storytelling will find plenty to like here, while those who bristle at the staidness should stay far away. Lindholm continues to show he’s an excellent dramatist, and no matter what A War’s chances of winning might be, it’s difficult to argue against its presence in this category.

The news of yet another horror anthology coming out doesn’t inspire the same amount of excitement as it used to several years ago. The arrival of V/H/S, a fun blend of the anthology gimmick with found footage (the horror subgenre du jour), rejuvenated an interest in multiple directors collaborating on different, loosely connected short films. But now, after two V/H/S sequels, two ABCs of Death films, and with more “anthrillogies” on the way, the format is starting to get a bit tired again. That feeling must have been on the minds of the team behind Southbound, who also made V/H/S. They’ve gone in a different direction from their previous film, creating a more collaborative effort that intertwines Southbound’s five stories on both a narrative and thematic level. While the film can’t escape some of the inevitable issues that always plague these episodic movies, its consistency makes it the best horror anthology to come out since Trick ‘r Treat.

Things start with The Way Out directed by Radio Silence, who handle both the opening and closing stories. As an opening, the short really serves little purpose other than reeling viewers in with a deliberately hidden story that will be revealed in the concluding chapter (cleverly titled The Way In). Two men (Chad Villela & Matt Bettinelli-Olpin) are covered in blood and fleeing after escaping from someone (or something) that has them freaked out. After driving for a while, they notice a large, floating, skeletal demon following them, and despite their best efforts to escape they find themselves stuck in a sort of closed loop (also serving as a hint towards the film’s overall narrative structure). The purposefully vague plot makes this segment easy to forget, but it does a fine job establishing the major elements that run through the rest of the stories: the long stretch of highway in the Californian desert, and themes of regret, guilt and retribution.

Next up is Siren, Roxanne Benjamin’s directorial debut (she worked as a producer on V/H/S). Sadie (Fabianne Therese), Kim (Nathalie Love) and Ava (Hannah Marks) are a touring band whose van breaks down on the highway, and after getting offered a ride by a polite couple to stay at their house for the night Sadie begins noticing something seriously wrong with their hosts. Benjamin’s segment kicks off the strongest stretch of Southbound, with a fun little horror story that has a few devilish twists, along with a grim yet funny ending that segues into the film’s high point. David Bruckner’s Accident opens with Lucas (Mather Zickel) calling 911 to help someone injured in a car accident he caused. Bruckner hits a sort of twisted groove that none of the other films come close to reaching, and does a far better job at creating a sense of mystery that generates intrigue instead of frustration. And Brucker’s hook to the story is simple but effective: Lucas does the right thing, only to discover that he’s within a realm where morals don’t exist. It’s a brilliant short, with a low-key ending that provides the film’s best transition.

Unfortunately, the next story, Patrick Horvath’s Jailbreak, starts a slight downward trajectory due to its half-assed attempts to build out a mythology around the film’s location. Danny (David Yow) comes to one of the small towns along the highway in search of his missing sister, and it amounts to a lot of elements getting introduced without explanation as a way to imply some elaborate, complex supernatural society or system within this stretch of the desert. Horvath’s specificity only breaks the compelling illusion of something sinister in Bruckner’s previous short, suddenly showing there are weird back alleys and tattoo parlours all around. And the final short plays out as a riff on The Strangers before trying to explain what exactly was going on earlier in The Way Out.

But the less successful shorts in Southbound’s latter half don’t tank the film because of the overall thematic and visual through line. It’s hard to make desert locations look bad, and the film’s four directors of photography do a great job enhancing the isolated and dangerous qualities of the barren landscapes these characters can’t find their way out of. Southbound can act like an argument for why anthologies can benefit from a more collaborative effort, because even when one filmmaker might handle a theme or idea in a way that falters, the echoes of the stronger segments still ring through. It’s a big benefit in Southbound’s case, and helps make an increasingly stale format feel refreshing again.

A version of this review was originally published on September 18th, 2015, as part of our coverage of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.

Back in 2012, the anthology horror subgenre got a nice shot in the arm thanks to the arrival of V/H/S, a collection of found footage shorts that spawned two sequels and a renewed interest in short-form horror. Now, four years later, the same people behind V/H/S return with Southbound, a new anthology that takes a far more ambitious approach. Comprised of five short stories, Southbound shares both a location and narrative, taking place on a desert highway where poor souls meet terrible fates through interlocking tales. The cohesiveness of Southbound turns out to be the glue that keeps it together, exchanging the hit and miss quality of most anthologies with a narrative and thematic consistency. Much like V/H/S, Southbound is an entertaining collection of shorts that helps expand the storytelling possibilities of the anthology format.

The best stretch of Southbound happens early on with its second and third shorts Siren and The Accident. Directed by Roxanne Benjamin (her directorial debut, although she was a producer on the V/H/S series), Siren follows a small band whose van breaks down on the way to their next gig, but when a seemingly nice couple drives by offering to help, one band member suspects these good Samaritans might be hiding something. Benjamin’s short is a lot of sinister fun, and it’s a great lead-in to David Bruckner’s The Accident. Bruckner’s film is by far the highlight of Southbound, a small-scale piece that follows one man (Mather Zickel) trying to do the right thing after causing a tragic accident. The less said about the twists and turns throughout Southbound the better, since a large part of what makes Siren and The Accident so entertaining is trying to figure out where they’ll end up.

After Southbound’s World Premiere at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, I talked with Roxanne Benjamin and David Bruckner about their contributions to Southbound along with the film’s tight-knit collaborative process.

Southbound comes out in theaters on Friday, February 5th before a VOD release on Tuesday, February 9th.

What do you think anthologies bring to horror that a more conventional narrative doesn’t?

David: I think you can kind of do anything in 25 minutes. You have the ability to go nuts or take risks that you wouldn’t normally take when you have to support three acts. You also get to kind of experiment with a lot of different ideas, like maybe you have a creative impulse to do something and you don’t know if it’ll hold the audience’s attention for an entire movie. The short form campfire tale has a place. When you get into cautionary formats or these kinds of morality tales, you don’t need a lot more time to explore that idea.

Roxanne: Multiple viewpoints, too. You’re getting to work with a lot of people in a short amount of time, and making something together in a more collaborative environment. I think it’s really nice.

Before you decided to make another anthology, did you always intend to go in and change the format from your previous films?

Roxanne: Absolutely. I think with the V/H/S movies we wanted to challenge everyone with the idea of making found footage interesting. With this one, [it’s] “How do we reinvigorate that idea and try to take it to a next level?”

David: And on that note, what would we want to see? If we were going to see a bunch of shorts strung together as an anthology, maybe that wouldn’t be as fulfilling as something that winds together and has a purpose, a certain order or intuitive sensibility for why these things should come together. We were sort of searching for that.

Roxanne: And how to live in one world and make the stories within that world, rather than dropping the audience into a new world every 20 minutes.

David: I was always talking about the idea of a night at the movies where you hear several different voices on a similar topic or idea, so you’re kind of hitting it on different sides. That always seemed like a good night at the movies.

It’s surprising to me that, with so many anthology films coming out after V/H/S, none of these other recent anthologies have tried what you guys do here.

Roxanne: It just happened organically. I can’t speak to the other ones that are out there, but it was something we had done before, so we didn’t want to do the same thing.

David: I think we were interested in finding some sort of connective force to put these things together. I think we also just spent a lot more time on the front end than V/H/S. We were out location scouting together, we landed on the idea that there should be a location, something that ties these things together geographically. That led to a lot of afternoon and evening drives out into the California desert exploring our options. We had a very small budget, and had to figure out what to do to make these things come to life, and just being out on those desert highways together [makes] ideas come about.

Roxanne: And there are easter eggs all over the movie a lot of people don’t know that are tying them together. Little crossovers that…

David: Some of them are excruciatingly subtle.

Roxanne: Yeah. [Laughs]

David: I don’t know if anyone will ever discover them.

Roxanne: But we know they’re there!

So what made you decide on using the desert as your location?

David: It’s awesome.

Roxanne: It’s vast, it’s empty, it’s an ethereal plane of existence. You feel like you’re not quite in reality. Both day and night out in the desert, there’s just so much nothing, and so much opportunity for horror to emerge out of that nothing.

David: I’m from Atlanta, I’m a forest creature. So for me to have that much of a spectrum in my point of view was a little unnerving. [To Roxanne] You actually taught me a lot about the desert because you knew all these locations. You were in some ways my ambassador to California. It was a fun exploration.

How different was the collaborative process on Southbound compared to V/H/S?

Roxanne: Writer’s room.

You all got in one room together and hashed it out?

Roxanne: All the time. For the V/H/S films, our filmmakers were kind of their own entities, and then we brought them together in post. On V/H/S/2 we connected everybody a little bit more by starting earlier, swapping cuts and that kind of thing. On this one it was very much through design, starting with Radio Silence kind of developing the world, [then] everyone getting together and finding their stories within that world and how they’re connected. It’s more like a TV model.

Did you come up with the themes first and find ways to explore that, or did you come up with the ideas and then realize how they tied together?

Roxanne: It’s kind of chicken-egg.

David: It is kind of hard to say. Early on we settled into different things. We knew Radio Silence were going to handle the bookends. I fell into the middle. Patrick’s piece made sense later on because he had a protagonist who knew more about what was going on, and that was a really satisfying turn at that point in the movie. We were conscious of avoiding certain pitfalls like having five act ones in a row. Every time you start a new movie, the momentum dies down a little bit, so we were trying to contradict all of that. You can swing back and forth between having an individual take on something and seeing the bigger picture, and wanting to do something in service of that.

How did you each come up with the ideas for your films?

Roxanne: For Siren, I was working with my co-writer Susan Burke, who’s awesome. I’ve known her for a long time and we have similar sensibilities of this eerie surrealism where comedy meets horror and what those lines are. We were talking about how we both have friends in traveling bands and that kind of era of your life where you’re irresponsible, and you think everything’s an adventure until it’s not. That’s kind of what sparked the idea.

David: For some reason, I really wanted to do a piece with one guy on the phone for most of it. I got attached to that early on. I wanted to focus on a single performance, to have a guy walk into a creepy place and have to act quickly. It really was that vague, and I didn’t know where to go with it from there. There were several iterations of it, and then through the process of talking about where to go, we found a way to make these pieces fit in an event that would hold them together in a unique way.

I really enjoyed seeing Mather Zickel in The Accident since I’m used to seeing him in comedies like Newsreaders.

David: Mather came in to read and blew me away in the room. We had a lot of great reads, and the night after we did those reads Roxanne and I hopped in a car to scout a potential location. I just took all the reads, particularly of the 911 calls, and we listened in the car to actual 911 calls off of YouTube, and then I would just play the auditions. And Mather’s just got us. We believed it, and he took it to a really fascinating place. The piece required a lot of very fast internal transitions, the character has like 5 plates spinning at once. And just from a technical perspective, I don’t know if it’s his comedy background or where he came from, Mather could just move through all of those things in such a fantastic way that could keep the pace of the movie up.

How did you handle approaching the mythological aspect of the film? It feels like you wanted to make sure you didn’t give away too much.

Roxanne: You never want to beat people over the head with that because it takes away that sense of discovery. The fun part for me in early screenings was seeing people arguing over what they thought the mythology was, or when they realized what the mythology was. That’s the most fun part.

David: I think part of it too is that it’s just a fun way to string together these kinds of tales. When we landed on the idea of some kind of hellish haunted highway or however you want to describe it, you kind of come across what you need to come across. So to some degree, the mythology owes itself to each individual character and what their story is. We kind of collected elements together, but I think we never wanted to lose sight of that. We never wanted to be so explicit that we were world building something that could be understood outside the confines of this movie.

I’ve always wondered if filmmakers get competitive with each other when making their own segments in an anthology film.

Roxanne: I don’t think it’s competitive so much as wanting to bring your A-game, because you got a team you can’t let down on top of wanting to make your best thing.

David: I think you get in the mindset of just celebrating something that’s awesome no matter what it is. Wherever it happens, you’re excited to be a part of that. And it’s also being a fan of the people you’re working with and getting to see what they’re doing unfold. Sometimes there’s a thing someone is fighting for in the script that you maybe don’t recognize or don’t understand, and when you see it unfold on set or in the cut you’re constantly going “Oh, that’s what you were doing there.” The medium is so simple, a script is not a finished product, it’s a blueprint for an idea, and it’s not until those elements come across that you really understand what somebody meant. So half the time we’re just listening to each other. Even now, when we screen the film we’ll come out of the film often and go, “I finally heard that moment, I finally heard what you were talking about.”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that, given the word “diversity” dominating recent conversations around the film industry, a festival like Sundance can act an alternative to the homogeneity of the mainstream. By its very nature, independent filmmaking provides more diverse, unique and personal stories, and it’s only upon seeing these kinds of films that one can get a true sense of the importance of opening up to new perspectives. Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night, screening in Sundance’s Official U.S. Dramatic Competition, is a perfect example, a coming-of-age tale that’s refreshing just for the fact that it shines a light on an area of society that’s rarely put on film.

Taking place in Koreatown in Los Angeles, Spa Night follows David (Joe Seo), the son of Korean immigrants Soyoung (Haerry Kim) and Jin (Youn Ho Cho). David’s parents own a restaurant, and he’s been happy to forego attending college in order to help his family’s business. But once the restaurant shuts down, things change significantly for David and his family: Soyoung starts working as a waitress at a restaurant owned by one of her friends at church, Jin turns to drinking in order to cope with his inability to find work, and David starts becoming aware of his attraction towards men. Pushed by his parents to retake his SATs so he can go to college, David decides to find a job instead, working at a Korean spa that doubles as a site for discreet gay hook-ups. The spa serves as a heightened middle ground for David, providing an opportunity to explore his sexual identity while not straying too far from his own cultural comfort zone.

The film’s specificity, combined with Ahn’s sensitivity towards his own characters, go a long way to establishing Spa Night’s unique placement among US cinema, but those factors don’t change how inert the movie feels on an emotional level. David represses his homosexuality due to his religious upbringing and parents’ conservatism (when he asks how they’d feel about him dating a white woman, they stare at him with stunned, disapproving silence), which Ahn reflects through his rigid and detached form, making it hard to invest in David’s internal struggles. Beyond his attraction to men, it’s hard to pin down what exactly David might be feeling about his situation, shutting off any possibility of engaging with David’s story on a character level.

The same can’t be said for David’s parents, whose attempts to recover from losing their business help fill in the film’s emotional gaps. Haerry Kim and Youn Ho Cho both give great performances as David’s parents, but it’s Kim as Soyoung who steals the film from her co-stars. As her character transitions into the family breadwinner after the restaurant’s closure, Kim makes every aspect of Soyoung’s painful adjustment felt. The success of this subplot only makes Ahn’s issues with making David’s storyline resonate all the more frustrating.

Inspired by true events (or so the opening title card claims), The Tail Job is a comedy that’s high on energy but low on laughs, getting by on its committed cast and a Hollywood-friendly narrative. After a violent and pointless opening, the film cuts to Nicholas (Blair Dwyer) taking a cab driven by Trevor (Craig Anderson) to spy on a woman with his camera. When Trevor asks Nicholas what he’s doing, he says the woman is his fiancée Mona, and he’s trying to find evidence that she’s having an affair. Several days earlier, Nicholas looked at Mona’s phone and saw her exchanging flirty messages with a man named Sio Bohan, and Nicholas wants to catch them together. Trevor takes sympathy on Nicholas, deciding to help him tail Mona for the night in order to find out who the mysterious Sio Bohan really is.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Nicholas misread the name of Mona’s girlfriend Siobhan as Sio Bohan; in fact, it only takes someone smarter than Nicholas or Trevor to make that discovery. It’s a cute misunderstanding that makes for a funny anecdote, but as the foundation for a feature-length film it runs out of steam almost immediately. Either way, the mistake causes Trevor and Nicholas to follow a bunch of false leads and red herrings until they get the attention of a dangerous gangster who actually happens to be named Sio Bohan, who sends out his goons to take care of them for some reason or another.

The Tail Job’s plot is deliberately silly, with co-directors/co-writers Bryan Moses and Daniel Millar using the standard formula for a Hollywood mystery/thriller and throwing in whatever absurdity they can. That approach can work, except the Siobhan/Sio Bohan mix-up is pretty much the height of what kind of comedy the film offers. Jokes constantly fall flat or go for the lowest common denominator, whether it’s a hacker insisting that only “full penetration” counts as cheating or a prostitute whose only purpose is to point out that she has a lot of sex. None of it works, and the poor treatment of the (very few) female characters only makes the comedy look worse.

But as problematic as The Tail Job’s script might be, it does inspire a few laughs when it skewers the kinds of familiar story beats and lines of dialogue we’re used to. Moses and Millar have a good understanding of how the genre they’re operating within works, along with a lot of ingenuity and technical skills that make good use of their small budget. That, combined with Dwyer and Anderson’s strong performances, gives The Tail Job a momentum that helps move things along, a quality that goes a long way when dealing with a comedy that just isn’t funny.

What would happen to humanity if everyone lost their ability to retain memories? That’s one of the questions Claire Carré explores with her debut feature Embers, which drops viewers into a world 10 years after a disease infects everyone with short-term and long-term memory loss. Carré splits her film up into five narrative strands, each one examining how an aspect intrinsic to our existence changes within her own dystopian vision; a couple (Jason Ritter & Iva Gocheva) wake up every day trying to remember how they know each other; a former intellectual (Tucker Smallwood) tries different ways to learn again so he can find a cure; a boy (Silvan Friedman) with no parents wanders around trying to survive on his own; a young man (Karl Glusman, credited as Chaos) filled with rage attacks everyone he encounters; and the young girl Miranda (Greta Fernandez) lives in an underground bunker with her father (Roberto Cots), safe from the disease but cut off from the world.

On the surface, Carré’s film looks like standard post-apocalyptic fare, but its tone is anything but. Shooting in Indiana, New York and Poland, Embers casts its urban decay in a bland, grey hue that should bring to mind Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, except Carré doesn’t provide her film with the same bleakness and nihilism. With no one connected to their past, the strong emotions connected to memories don’t exist anymore, leaving characters to constantly live in the moment in a somewhat peaceful state. The only exception to this is Chaos, whose violent acts take on a new meaning given they’re instinctual and without consequence. The somewhat tranquil mood amidst a dying world makes for a fascinating juxtaposition, allowing Carré the ability to weave in emotional and philosophical questions about identity and the human condition.

With a short runtime and several disconnected storylines, Embers only disappoints with its inability to coalesce on a thematic level (most segments just end abruptly). The only exception is Miranda’s storyline, as her near-decade of isolation makes her consider leaving the bunker to go live in the real world. Her father begs her not to go, telling her that once she’s infected she’ll lose everything that makes her who she is. For Miranda, it’s a complicated situation that directly addresses Carré’s question at the heart of the film, over whether or not memory is the source of our own individuality.

The saying goes that time heals all wounds, but in A Good Wife time also uncovers new ones. For middle-aged housewife Milena (writer/director Mirjana Karanovic, making her first feature), life is going well. Her eldest daughter is a successful artist, her two younger children are doing great in school, and her husband Vlada (Boris Isakovic) makes sure she lives a comfy life. When Milena cleans around the house one day, she discovers a VHS tape containing footage of her husband committing war crimes during his days as a soldier. A disturbed Milena puts the tape back, telling no one of what she saw, but word starts getting around that the authorities might have already started investigating Vlada, and the threat of his arrest throws Milena’s happy life into turmoil. At the same time, a check-up at the doctor’s leads to the discovery of a large lump in one of her breasts, and despite Milena’s attempts to avoid getting it checked further, it’s clear that her life is about to go through some major changes.

Karanovic, an accomplished Serbian actress who’s been working for over three decades, shows she has plenty of talent behind the camera as well, directing in a subdued manner that places characters and themes at the forefront. The same can’t necessarily be said about her screenplay, which leans on some heavy-handed metaphors and familiar ideas that can’t help but feel stale. Karanovic makes the link between Milena’s tumor and her willful ignorance of the past impossible to miss, and even with the unique angle of the Yugoslav Wars, watching Milena’s growing awareness of her own domestication as more of a self-imposed prison sentence isn’t especially exciting. But the screenplay’s staleness only ends up being a slight bother, as Karanovic’s direction and captivating performance keep things from falling into tedium. A Good Wife has its flaws, but as a directorial debut, it shows enough promise to hope that it won’t be the only time Karanovic takes a seat in the director’s chair.

In the empty landscapes of rural Washington, a meeting is about to go down between two people: Abe (Conner Marx), a young journalist trying to make a name for himself, and Debra (Carol Roscoe), who works for the US government. Their meeting is the result of a series of back and forth communications, with Debra wanting to release sensitive information involving national security. From the moment they meet in person, the word “trust” gets thrown around more than once. For Abe, it’s making sure Debra’s a legitimate source while trying to stop her from being spooked so easily; for Debra, it’s a matter of not getting caught handing out classified information. They may be surrounded by vast flatlands, but their location exposes them just as much as it exposes anyone who might be watching them. Over the next hour and a half (shown almost entirely in real-time), Abe and Debra will try to trust each other in order to get what they want. On the other hand, viewers can place their full trust in writer/director Nathan Williams’ hands. If There’s a Hell Below is the kind of back to basics take on a conspiracy thriller that feels refreshing and riveting at the same time, with a confidence behind the camera that establishes a new name brimming with potential. Here’s a film where the word “Hitchcockian” is not just apt; it’s earned.

For its slim runtime, Williams goes against expectations by making as much empty space as possible. When it comes to story, it’s not about the specifics of why Abe and Debra get together. Her specific role in the government is never expanded on beyond a meaningless job title, and the information she has for Abe doesn’t get explained or broken down (all she has is a list of names on a flash drive). Williams’ deliberate avoidance of specifics helps make the situation easier to get pulled into, as it gives him the ability to hone in on the dramatic core: two people entering a possibly life or death situation, with no way of knowing they’re safe until they’re unsafe. Williams’ set-up doesn’t provide any evidence of Abe or Debra being who they say they are, and no knowledge of whether or not they’re being watched. They meet in the open countryside with no one else around them, but they act like they’re in an enclosed space with eyes all around them.

Initially, Abe and Debra’s characterizations come across as a little too familiar, with Abe’s ignorant cockiness making him look less like an opportunistic journalist and more like a victim in the first act of a slasher movie. But like everything else in Williams’ film, it’s a deliberate move. Abe turns out to be a small-time reporter desperately looking for a big break, and his behaviour comes from not realizing the stakes of the situation. Early on, when Debra gets scared once she sees a parked SUV in the distance, Abe decides to drive right up to the vehicle to show her she has nothing to worry about. It’s an annoying sequence until Williams throws in a nice punchline, one that’s predictable but pulled off with such aplomb it’s hard not to crack a smile.

The assured direction extends out to the film’s look, an aspect that’s vital to why If There’s a Hell Below works so effectively. Taking full advantage of the spacious locations, Williams and cinematographer Christopher Messina create one painterly image after another, at times evoking Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World but with a more sinister edge. It’s an impressive control over mood and atmosphere that heightens the intensity, especially in the latter half when the film closes on a terrific, wordless epilogue, a mini-narrative that drops just enough information for viewers to piece everything together. It’s that kind of cool, confident filmmaking that makes If There’s a Hell Below a highly entertaining shock to the system, a thriller that shows how a skillful hand can make all the difference between a good film and a great one.

In 2014, Robert Greene premiered his documentary Actress, about his neighbour and former TV star who, after leaving the entertainment industry to become a stay-at-home mom, tries to get back into acting again. On paper, Actress looked like a story of someone pursuing their passion again and facing the greater obstacles that come with time, but Greene had bigger ideas in mind than a simple portrait of his neighbour’s rebooting of her career. The film explored the conflict between performance and nonfiction, and as Actress’ authenticity came into question, so did the preconceived notion of documentary filmmaking as inherently objective or truthful. Compared to the glut of modern documentaries constructed as passive, information-based experiences, Actress was a difficult—and memorable—piece of “non-fiction.”

In some ways, Kate Plays Christine extends the ideas and themes of Actress, albeit through a more ambitious and provocative lens, traversing through darker subject matter in its quest to confront the thorny issues of ethics and responsibility most documentarians would prefer to ignore. The object of Greene’s fascination is Christine Chubbuck, a news reporter in Sarasota, Florida who hosted the local talk show Suncoast Digest. On a Monday morning in 1974 during a live broadcast, Chubbuck made a statement about her station providing “blood and guts” television before shooting herself in the head with a revolver. Not many people outside of a few Sarasotans caught Chubbuck’s suicide, and any tapes of the incident have long been destroyed, but news of her death made national news, even inspiring screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky to write the script for Network.

Now, with the four-decade anniversary of Chubbuck’s death approaching, Greene enlisted actress Kate Lyn Sheil (Sun Don’t Shine, Green) to play Christine in a film about her death. This gives Kate Plays Christine a set-up that operates like a strange, closed loop; the film documents Sheil preparing for her role, but the film within the film doesn’t actually exist. The only purpose of the Christine Chubbuck “biopic” is for Greene to document Sheil’s preparation, an indirect statement by Greene on how pointless he finds the endeavor of trying to fictionalize this sort of material.

That’s only the start of Greene’s deliberate clashes with what one might expect from a documentary of a tragic figure like Chubbuck, removing any clarity or explanation on what might have driven her to perform such a dramatic act. It’s a radical approach because of Greene’s refusal to provide any sense of solid ground, putting viewers right beside him and Sheil as they try to navigate the situation he’s put themselves in. The film exists within an uncertain present tense, avoiding direct messages or an editing style that suggests some sort of hindsight. It’s that lack of guidance, the feeling of actively engaging ideas and themes on the same level as the filmmakers rather than being dictated to, that can make Kate Plays Christine as exciting as it is frustrating.

Naturally, all of this uncertainty wreaks havoc on Sheil’s ability to prepare and perform for her role. Her goal is to give a performance that’s respectful and accurate in its portrayal of Chubbuck, but Greene stacks the deck against her. Aside from Sheil being unable to find any footage of Chubbuck to study, the film she’s acting in is done in a cheap, melodramatic style with no real connection outside of re-enacting known information about Chubbuck weeks before her death. Greene provides a perfect symbol for Sheil’s frustration when he tries shooting a scene of Christine going for a swim in the ocean, with Sheil’s wig falling off the entire time. It’s one thing for Sheil to look the part, but she will never embody or become Chubbuck.

The ambiguous space Kate Plays Christine occupies, while making it impossible not to have the film rattle around in the brain long after it ends, brings up a nagging question over whether or not Greene’s process shields him from criticism. There are moments where the film can feel aimless or messy, but it’s difficult to criticize an inherently flawed design. Greene himself has said that he wanted Kate Plays Christine to be a film that “almost falls apart as you watch,” and it’s hard not to feel that way during the (seemingly) scattershot final act.

Eventually, the film works towards a conclusion: the filming of Chubbuck’s suicide, which Sheil begins feeling hesitant about as she weighs the moral implications of tackling the role she’s signed on for. It’s in these final minutes, where Sheil begins acting out Chubbuck’s final news broadcast, that Greene acknowledges the corner he’s backed himself into. At this point, taking a moralistic route with filming the death would be hypocritical, but showing it would indulge in the same “blood and guts” entertainment Chubbuck called out before shooting herself. Amazingly, Greene gets himself out of this corner by playing out both scenarios in purposely unsatisfying ways. It’s an ending that will please no one—although the idea of wanting to walk away “pleased” by someone tragically taking their own life sounds a bit strange. Greene’s direction and Sheil’s performance help tackle the complexity of documenting Chubbuck’s life, along with interrogating the accepted methods documentaries use to explore these sorts of tragic profiles. Perhaps it’s best to take a page from Greene’s book and approach the conflicting elements with the kind of acute awareness he uses with his films: creating these kinds of clashes and juxtapositions shouldn’t make for easy viewing, and the fact that Kate Plays Christine remains so difficult to shake off should speak for itself.

First-time writer/director Paul Taylor wants you to know that Driftwood is, in his words, “a reaction to contemporary cinema.” Citing excessive exposition and the old adage of style over substance, Taylor intends to make a film that breaks things down to cinema’s purest form as a visual medium. What that translates to is, in a literal sense, nothing: Driftwood doesn’t have a single word of dialogue in it, strictly relying on actions to communicate themes and plot. It’s a bold move for Taylor or any new director, but it’s hard not to feel a little hesitant about the move given its origins. Could Taylor’s eschewing of dialogue be an opportunity to provide a breath of fresh air from more standard indie fare, or is it merely a reactionary gimmick whose purpose is to stand out for the sake of it? Driftwood luckily doesn’t fall into the latter category, with Taylor sincerely trying to break from the norm to explore different ways of keeping viewers engaged, even if his methods might have their own shortcomings.

Opening with the arresting image of a Woman (Joslyn Jensen) possibly suffering from some sort of amnesia wandering out of a beach, Driftwood cuts to a Man (Paul C. Kelly) taking the Woman back to his house. There’s no relation between them from the looks of it—he more or less found her on the beach and decided to take her home—and the Woman is so far gone she doesn’t even know how to go to the bathroom. Is she suffering from amnesia, or is this something supernatural or stranger? That’s left up to interpretation, but when the camera lingers on a shot of the Man touching his new “friend” a little too affectionately, there’s no need to guess his intentions with her.

Without dialogue, Driftwood’s narrative keeps things basic. What the film boils down to is the Woman trying to escape from the Man, as her growing independence is met with harsher treatment by her captor. An unwarranted trip outside prompts the Man to lock the Woman in her bedroom when he’s at work, and her successive acts of rebellion lead to stricter living conditions. The Man’s motives for his behaviour get an explanation from Taylor early on, a bit of development that highlights the benefits of Taylor’s approach. With all the emphasis on visuals and sound, there’s more room for Taylor’s themes to take centre stage.

Aside from the more ambiguous questions surrounding the set-up, Driftwood’s straightforward storyline also means there’s just a lot more room altogether, and that space starts getting felt as the plot becomes repetitive. Later in the film, the arrival of a Young Man (Michael Fentin) threatens to shake things up, except it plays out more or less as expected, eventually falling back into the routine established earlier. That’s not to say Driftwood is a stale film by any means, though. It’s an inherently active viewing experience, with Taylor’s cinematography and the two lead performances keeping things both dynamic and engaging. But with more attention paid to what’s on screen, the patterns and repetitions inevitably become more noticeable as well.

So while there’s plenty of room to chew on Driftwood’s ideas of loneliness, grief and trying to rebuild the past, the comparably lacking story means more attention winds up being paid on filling in the background information, theorizing on the origins of the Woman and how she wound up rising out of the beach like a newborn. Those mystery elements make Driftwood a fun curiosity and Taylor’s refusal to give context is more than welcome, but it can only take the film so far. Nonetheless, Taylor can easily rest his film on its own ambitions. Driftwood showcases the good and bad of making a dialogue-free film, but it also shows the kind of riskiness that more indies should attempt.

Following in the footsteps of Alex Ross Perry’s comedies and 2014 SXSW winner Fort Tilden (whose co-lead Clare McNulty shows up here in a small role), Robert Putka’s MAD deals almost exclusively with watching selfish, heinous people behave in selfish, heinous ways, with Putka setting his sights on a dysfunctional family and their bipolar mother. Mel (Maryann Plunkett) suffers a breakdown after her husband leaves her, winding up in the hospital when she’s found uncontrollably sobbing by her neighbours. Mel’s daughters Connie (Jennifer Lafleur), a successful corporate worker with a husband and two kids, and Casey (Eilis Cahill), unemployed and trying to figure out her life, convince her to commit herself to a psych ward in order to rehabilitate herself, a choice fueled more by selfishness than a sincere desire to help their mom.

Of course, being a family with its fair share of relationship issues, every interaction ends up devolving into a brutal war of words between mother and daughter(s). Putka, who also wrote the screenplay, knows how to write some great passive-aggressive barbs (when a dejected Mel tells Connie that her daughters hate her, Connie calmly responds with “Casey doesn’t hate you”), and his game cast do a great job making their arguments crackle until the acid-tongued screenplay gets the better of everyone. For the most part, Putka’s tonal balance between sweet and bitter works (largely because of Plunkett’s performance), but the constant repetition of Connie or other characters lashing out at one another takes its toll, eventually making scenes feel like Putka trying to constantly one-up his own insults. That makes MAD work against itself when it tries to humanize its three leads, resulting in a rocky ending when the film goes for an emotionally satisfying payoff. Fans of extremely caustic humour should get their fill with MAD, and while Putka’s attempt to find a middle ground between the sincere and cynical doesn’t entirely work (a hard task for anyone to accomplish, let alone a first feature), he shows enough wit to make MAD’s ambitions worthwhile.

When discussing Romanian cinema, or more specifically the “New Wave” of minimalist, arthouse-friendly titles from this century (a wave that really isn’t that new anymore, given it’s over a decade old now), the word “slow” inevitably comes up in some form or another. With an emphasis on realism and letting scenes unfold through long, (usually) static takes, the apparent mundanity of what’s on screen ends up giving way to something thought-provoking and thematically rich. Whether it’s taking place in the country’s tumultuous past or its present day, the relatable and banal actions of characters provide a platform to explore personal, political and social ideas that delve well beyond the surface. These films are only “slow” in that their pacing isn’t what’s usually expected; “deliberate” would be a more accurate, and less reductive, description.

So it comes as no surprise that Radu Muntean’s One Floor Below is a very deliberately paced film, to the point where it might fly over some people’s heads. It starts with an innocuous act of eavesdropping: Business owner Patrascu (Teodor Corban) comes back home after taking his dog for a walk when he overhears an intense argument in the apartment below his. He listens in as Laura (Maria Popistasu) argues with Vali (Iulian Postelnicu), another tenant in the apartment. There’s a sound of a struggle and a scream from Laura before everything goes silent, and before Patrascu knows it Vali opens the door, catching him listening in. It’s an awkward moment for Patrascu, one he tries to forget about later that day until he sees police cars outside his building when he comes home from work.

Laura was found dead in her apartment with the police suspecting foul play, and while some directors might create a mystery over whether or not Vali did it, Muntean has different plans. The big question revolves around Patrascu instead, as he doesn’t divulge what he heard to police when they question him about Laura’s death. Without any hint of character motivation, Patrascu is more or less a blank slate for viewers to pin their assumptions and theories on. The only thing that’s obvious is his avoidance of anything related to Laura’s murder, shutting down the topic whenever his wife or son bring it up. But the hassle of trying to stay a silent witness gets worse for Patrascu once Vali starts involving himself in his life more and more, befriending family members and eventually asking Patrascu to help him out with a business matter.

It’s an enticing set-up, except Muntean seems intent on making his film a sort of inert thriller, focusing his time on things like Patrascu’s job as a bureaucratic navigator of sorts, helping people get their car registrations with little to no hassle. That’s what One Floor Below might look like at first blush, but it would be a mistake to interpret Muntean’s vast room for interpretation and reflection as nothing more than empty space. It’s a film that unfolds through gaps, to the point where its editing is so elliptical it’s easy to question basic facts: it’s never explicitly stated that Laura was murdered, and even then Muntean doesn’t make it clear that Vali killed her. Muntean’s omissions are blanks for viewers to fill in as they see fit, not holes in the story.

With so many films happy to withhold facts or delve into ambiguities, it’s easy to apply that same mode of interpretation on Muntean’s narrative, but with One Floor Below it might be a case of digging a little too deep. When Patrascu bumps into Laura’s sister in the apartment, trying to open her dead sibling’s overstuffed mailbox, it’s followed by Patrascu lambasting a friend for calling Laura a slut. Does Patrascu feel guilty about his silence after seeing Laura’s distraught sister, or is he just annoyed at the topic not going away? The real ambiguities of One Floor Below lie in its characters, not its story, which serves as a set-up for Muntean’s exploration of the reactions and fallout from Laura’s death. Patrascu, as a man who runs his own complicated business, finds himself inserted into a situation he has no grasp on, and in his attempts to maintain control he only finds it slipping out of his hands at a faster rate.

Teodor Corban’s performance is a low-key powerhouse in many ways, finding a perfect balance between a specificity that gives him an intimidating presence and an ability to hold back from revealing too much about what’s going on inside his head. Muntean pulls off a similar balancing act himself in his film’s construction, filming most of his scenes in lengthy, unbroken takes emphasizing the underlying tension between Patrascu and Vali. These scenes, especially when Vali starts showing up in Patrascu’s apartment to lend a hand, linger on the lulls in conversations, watching Patrascu try to get a handle on how to navigate himself out of a mess he inadvertently made himself a part of. Muntean has enough confidence in his premise and direction to simply present the situation, let viewers pick apart what’s raging underneath the surface and make their own conclusions about character motivations and psychology rather than what’s fact or fiction. And by creating the opportunity to navigate the murkier landscape of character rather than narrative, Muntean provides a more active and rewarding experience than One Floor Below’s conventional-sounding story implies.

It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a decade since the New French Extremity—a group of French genre films united by, to put it simply, a lot of disgusting gore—exploded with titles like Frontier(s), Inside, and Sheitan coming out over a short time span. In 2008, the movement reached its peak with Martyrs, Pascal Laugier’s controversial take on martyrdom that had people fleeing for the exits. Martyrs has gained a strong following since it came out, partly because of how it transcends the expectations of an exploitation film. It’s a film that shows women being systematically tortured, but labeling it as “torture porn” would be wrong. Laugier examined the meaning of being a martyr, along with the connection between immense suffering and transcendence through pain. Martyrs stuck out not just because of its gore; it was a philosophical horror film, one with significant ambitions that combined intellectual themes and the kind of horrifying content associated with the lowest common denominator. Even the film’s harshest critics couldn’t deny that Laugier, despite his methods, was trying to say something.

So what happens when US filmmakers take Laugier’s work and adapt it for English-speaking audiences? After several false starts, this new Martyrs has finally come to fruition via the help of directors Kevin and Michael Goetz, The Revenant screenwriter Mark L. Smith, and horror “it” producer Jason Blum. Blumhouse, the production company responsible for the Paranormal Activity and Insidious franchises, is known for its successful approach to making horror films: make a film for a low budget, then have major studios pick up and release them. It’s a successful model because it takes advantage of horror’s self-generating interest (genre films don’t need big stars to attract moviegoers) while providing big profits given the low production cost. That is, in a nutshell, the model behind multiple horror success stories over the past several years, including films like The Purge and Sinister.

Blumhouse has tweaked and perfected a micro-budget machine, and as much as the company can tout its increased creative control or ability to produce outside of the studio system, it’s still a machine. Laugier handled writing and directing duties on the original Martyrs, and it’s obvious that it’s a film with his individual stamp on it. With the remake, the Goetz brothers and Smith transplant Laugier’s work to a format more focused on quick returns and basic thrills, a change that’s like shoving a square peg into a round hole. The set-up is more or less identical to Laugier’s film: Lucie (Troian Bellisario) claims she was kidnapped and tortured by a group of people as a child before escaping, although police found no evidence backing up her story. Fifteen years after escaping, Lucie finally tracks down her kidnappers—a seemingly ordinary couple with two teenage children—and ruthlessly slaughters them in their own home. She calls on Anna (Bailey Noble), her best friend growing up at the orphanage, to help her remove the bodies, although Anna starts doubting Lucie’s sanity given she just gunned down a family without remorse (fair warning: those unfamiliar with either version of Martyrs should stop reading here unless they want to be spoiled).

Since this is a horror movie, Lucie’s claims turn out to be true. The people she killed did, in fact, torture her as a child, and Anna soon discovers they were part of a cult dedicated to creating martyrs in an attempt to understand what lies in the afterlife. Smith’s screenplay, in what some might point to as a true example of what “Americanizing” something means, dumbs things down to make the religious themes impossible to miss, whether it’s having the cult’s leader (Kate Burton) spell everything out or using the image of a woman burning at the stake. At the very least, Smith does try to change things up from Laugier’s original screenplay in the latter half, honing in on Anna and Lucie’s friendship instead of the barbaric plot they’ve become a part of. But that focus only muddles the thematic content that made up the backbone of Laugier’s film, and Smith makes no efforts to adjust the rest of the source material to his changes.

What Martyrs amounts to is a cheap mess, an attempt to adapt a work more focused on ideas into something designed to provide thrills and action, and the clash between the two modes is an ugly one. The Goetz brothers, try as they might to claim they’re doing their own spin on the original, settle into what feels like a shot for shot remake; the punishing final act of Laugier’s film, designed to make its climactic moment of transcendence all the more powerful, gets replaced by a vengeance-fueled firefight instead; the violence gets toned down significantly, a choice that could have worked had it not reeked of the producers trying to ensure they’d get an R rating; and the ending tries to maintain the original’s ambiguity while tying up Anna and Lucie’s storyline in a way that betrays the film’s own themes. Martyrs is nothing more than a complete waste of time, a remake whose own irrelevance dominates every frame. Rather than try to respect the original content beyond its gory surface, Martyrs prefers to trace over its more violent moments, cherry picking what it needs to make something more inclined to entertain than provoke. Unlike Laugier’s unforgettable film, it’s best to forget this version of Martyrs ever happened.

Radu Muntean’s One Floor Below centres around Patrascu (Teodor Corban), a man who’s made a business out of navigating his way through government bureaucracy for citizens. When coming back to his apartment one day, he hears his downstairs neighbour Laura arguing with Vali (Iulian Postelnicu) in her apartment. Later that day, he learns that Laura has been found murdered in her apartment, but when the police come to question him, Patrascu doesn’t tell them about what he heard. It seems like an issue Patrascu just wants to go away altogether, but soon Vali starts befriending his wife and son, and Patrascu finds himself stuck in a volatile situation he can’t get out of.

Muntean’s film is a murder mystery that’s less about the murder itself and more about the reactions to it, letting viewers try to figure out what’s going on in each character’s head rather than concerning themselves over the specifics of the crime. It makes for a much more fascinating and rewarding film than its conventional plot would suggest, avoiding narrative concerns to explore character instead. Back at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, I sat down with director Radu Muntean to talk about the film.

One Floor Below opens Friday, January 22nd in Toronto, Ontario at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

Where did the idea for One Floor Below come from?

I remembered this idea I had maybe 15 years ago or more. I read an article in a newspaper about someone who witnessed a murder. He was listening to a fight in neighbour’s apartment, he didn’t do anything, and then he heard there was a crime there. I was thinking about this, like if he did something at that moment [of the fight], maybe he could have stopped the killing or interrupted the fight. It was inside my head for some time, and then I met a guy who was actually the model for Patrascu. He has the same job as him, and I thought it might be interesting to mix a very in control character like Patrascu with this difficult situation you can’t easily control.

Your last film Tuesday After Christmas also deals with a character losing control, except in that film it’s because of an affair. What attracts you to throwing characters into these kinds of situations?

I’m attracted to putting myself, the character, and the viewer in an uncomfortable situation. What would you do when you’re in a position where Patrascu is? It’s not an easy task because you know he’s not a vicious guy. It’s something personal, somehow none of your business, although society wants you to react very promptly and share all the information that you have. But it’s not so easy. If you’re referring to my previous film, it would have been easier to have a very ugly wife, an aggressive and boring wife or whatever, but she’s as beautiful as the mistress and you have to choose. It’s very subjective.

Do you have sympathy for Patrascu?

I need to try and understand him. I’m not judging him at all. This is not the case. The case is to talk about the notions like conscience and morality. To question [them] in a very direct and sincere way.

It’s a murder mystery, but the mystery is about psychology and motivations.

The viewer has all the information that Patrascu has regarding the murder. We wanted Patrascu to have the 1% of doubt that he could hang on to, that this wasn’t the real killer. Towards the end of the film, he realises Vali is the real killer, but he also realises that he misjudged his actions until that moment.

These underlying aspects are left open to the viewer, but do you know the answers yourself when developing the film?

Yeah, of course. For me, it’s the only way. You have to talk to the actors, you have to make them understand their characters in order to make them organic with their characters. Otherwise, it’s just something glued on their own personalities, and you can see that. I think I was very precise in that I knew where I wanted to get with the film. At the same time, what you interpret as open is the viewer’s way to get to that point, which might be different from viewer to viewer.

I did find it very straightforward in terms of what happens, but it’s still a complex film.

Yes, these are the facts, but it’s not so easy to judge them! [Laughs]

Do you feel like what Patrascu has done, or didn’t do, is more of an isolated incident, or do you find this is representative of something larger or more societal?

It’s not a comment on society. Of course, a lot of people will think this, and I don’t mind it. They always link the films coming from Romania to social situations, political situations, the Communist era, the heritage of that, I don’t know. I didn’t want that because I’m Romanian, I live in that society and maybe I’m one of these guys. I don’t know, but I didn’t want to comment on it. And I think it can apply to a guy from Canada, from Korea…I think that, although you know what society wants from you, it’s not easy to apply it all the time. For me, Patrascu is thinking the police want him to give information, but if this guy killed this lady that he loved, most likely by accident, what can society do? What justice can be made in this kind of situation? It’s very tricky for me. To be honest, you have to question these things because otherwise they are just abstract. They’re just stamps saying you have to be this or you have to be that.

I felt like Patrascu working in this intense, bureaucratic job meant that he knew how much of a hassle it would be to him if he did provide the information and became a key witness.

Yeah, it’s very possible. It’s thinking about his own comfort and family, too. A lot of people in Cannes asked me about what’s Romanian in it, what’s the social commentary. I was thinking about this, and maybe they’re right. Some of the particularities of Patrascu as the male head of the family are in a lot of Romanians. Their ego is quite big. Maybe because of the Communist heritage, the head of the family is not allowed to have weaknesses. And I think this is the main reason he is not telling his wife. Forget about the police. He was listening maybe a little too much near the door, and he didn’t do anything. He doesn’t want to recognize this in front of his wife because he’s supposed to be the head of the family. Maybe that’s the thing. I don’t know if it’s only Romanian.

Tell me about the casting process for Teodor and Iulian.

I first chose Iulian because I knew him, I used to work with him before. I’m doing a lot of advertising in between films so I worked with him. I immediately thought of Iulian and I cast him after we did some tests. For Teodor, I was not so sure because I was initially thinking of a younger character, 40-something instead of 50-something, but he’s very transparent. You can feel what’s inside him even if he’s barely moving. He’s an intelligent actor, he can be very organic with the character and I needed this. He can be empathetic even with a very minimalistic way of acting, and even if you know very few things about the actor you somehow feel his inside.

Does your precision with the film’s form also apply to the actors, or are you more open to what they might want to bring to the performance?

Of course, I have the idea, but it’s not cartoons. They bring their own personality to the film. I want them to understand what I want from the character and I’m open to ideas, but at the same time I’m not changing a lot in the rehearsals. It’s a kind of process in layers, you put layer after layer until the final layer on the shooting. I discuss a lot with them but there’s almost no room for improvisation [during] shooting.

How much preparation went into pulling off the fight scene at the film’s climax?

It was the most difficult thing that we shot. We knew it had to be in one shot because we did the whole film like that, it has to be as real as you can [make], and you have to obtain this without a degree of danger. They could actually hit themselves very hard. We initially had a fight coordinator, but we fired him after two rehearsals because he had very clear idea of how they could pretend they’re fighting. We had a little bit of choreography of how things will take place. We rehearsed with 20% of the power involved in the fighting but having in mind that during shooting we have to use almost 100%, so things can change very easily. The first time we shot it, Iulian was hit in the head by Teo’s foot somehow, so I had to change the way I wanted to shoot a little bit. We did reshoot [the scene] and it was OK, but at the end of the shooting day, I was not completely happy. I wanted even more. It’s the peak of the film, it’s like the Sergio Leone showdown in my way, so it should be very convincing.

Did the rest of the shoot go smoothly given your rehearsal process?

Smoothly or not, when you have a 5-minute or 6-minute shot with 4 characters there’s no such thing as a perfect take. You have to make small compromises. Sometimes it’s for the best, and sometimes it surprises you with really nice things. It’s a very alive process. Sometimes take number 2, sometimes take 20, sometimes take 11, it’s a peak. You feel like you cannot get a better take than this. And if something is not working, the focus, the movement, one of the actors, it’s really bad because you cannot get better. You can obtain only less from that scene. So it’s very alive and, for me, it’s very stressful. Even if it’s not difficult in a logistic way, it was not a difficult shoot, this tension I accumulate on this shooting is really intense for me and the actors.

Do you feel like that tension during shooting might actually help the material?

Who knows? No, I don’t think so. There are situations where you don’t want the characters to be tense.

Your last four films including this one have been written by you and the same two co-writers (Alexandru Baciu and Razvan Radulescu).

I really enjoy working with them. We’re really good friends and I cannot see any reason of changing the team because we’re having a really good time working together. We discover a lot of things about ourselves, and it’s a really interesting and intense experience.

I’ve spent the last several weeks of December doing what almost everyone who writes about film does at the end of the year: compiling, ranking and showing off lists. The only thing is that, for almost every list I put together, everything on it needed to have a public release in 2015. That means every film needed distribution of some sort, disqualifying anything that might not be accessible or lucky enough to score some sort of availability outside of film festivals.

That’s why, like for 2014, I’ve decided to compile another list of great films that don’t have a US distributor. For some of these films, it might not be surprising to see that buyers aren’t clamoring for them (a perception that has nothing to do with the film’s quality); other titles are more surprising in that they still don’t have distribution, given their accessibility and/or accolades. Either way, all of the films on this list deserve the chance of being seen beyond the festival circuit, and hopefully with enough interest or demand that might happen for a good number of these titles. Last year, over half of the films profiled on our 2014 undistributed feature wound up getting distributed; here’s hoping that amount winds up being higher for these 15 films.

Best Undistributed Films of 2015

The Academy of Muses

José Luis Guerín (sort of) returns to narrative filmmaking eight years after his masterpiece In the City of Sylvia, creating an entrancing and dense work done on a micro budget. Starting out as a documentary, Guerín films lectures held by Italian Philology professor Raffaele Pinto (playing himself) about poetry and the role of the female muse as inspiration for male artists. The opening act can feel like a tidal wave of concepts and ideas, but Guerín eventually settles down once he brings in a narrative involving Pinto using several of his students as muses. Shooting on cheap DV with no cinematographer, Guerín pulls off images just as evocative as the ones in Sylvia, once again using reflective surfaces to portray emotions and sensations that could never be summed up properly with words. It’s a film that crackles with energy from beginning to end, and yet another example of great small-scale filmmaking.

Update: Grasshopper Film has acquired US distribution rights for The Academy of Muses.

The Ardennes

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Robin Pront’s directorial debut surprised me back when I saw it at TIFF, as its familiar story of a love triangle between two criminal brothers (one reformed, one just out of jail) and the woman between them sounded all too familiar. But The Ardennes is both sophisticated in its approach and more thematically rich than one would expect, focusing on its characters trying to move on from their past sins by working their way above the poverty line. That gives The Ardennes a powerful and tragic edge, acknowledging how much social, political and systematic factors can muddle the distinctions between good and evil. Combined with great performances from its three leads (especially Veerle Baetens, who works wonders with what could have been a thankless role) and a gut punch of an ending, it’s surprising that The Ardennes is still awaiting US distribution.

Update: Film Movement has acquired US distribution rights for The Ardennes.

The Brand New Testament

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In Jaco Van Dormael’s The Brand New Testament, God (Benoît Poelvoorde) is a mean old drunk who spends his days creating disasters, diversions and annoyances on his computer to toy with humanity. He locks his wife (Yolande Moreau) and 10-year-old daughter Ea (Pili Groyne) in his apartment, worried that if they get out they’ll end up like his son. But Ea rebels against him, leaking out everyone’s date of death before escaping to Brussels in the hopes of recruiting six new apostles. It’s a strange film to say the least, with a premise viewers will have to accept as is if they want to enjoy it. Luckily, Van Dormael is intensely committed to seeing his vision through, and the film is bursting with so many weird ideas it’s easy to get won over by its energetic style. It’s a light, humourous attempt by Van Dormael to confront some of the bigger questions involving existence, and probably the cutest act of blasphemy you’ll ever see.

Update: Music Box Films has acquired US distribution rights for The Brand New Testament.

Despite the Night

After being rejected by the major festivals, Philippe Grandrieux’s Despite the Night (Malgré la nuit) finally unveiled itself at Montreal’s Festival du nouveau cinéma in the fall of 2015, marking another disappointing treatment of one of the most interesting and consistent filmmakers working today. Grandrieux is a director more interested in the dark and insidious, finding unsettling ways to push the boundaries of cinema into new territory, and Despite the Night is more of the same. Lenz (Kristian Marr) returns to Paris searching for a woman from his past, and in the process he enters an intense, destructive relationship with Hélène (Ariane Labed), a disturbed nurse still grieving the loss of her son. Grandrieux has made what might be his most accessible film to date, although that’s not saying much considering narrative has never been of too much interest in his works (it’s best to just surrender to Grandrieux’s intense aesthetics). Few filmmakers are willing to venture into the darkness; Grandrieux dives in headfirst, leaving it up to viewers if they want to dive in alongside him.

El Movimiento

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“1835. Argentina. Anarchy. Plague.” That title card sets the stage for Benjamin Naishtat’s El Movimiento, which quickly establishes its chaotic world by opening with a man getting his head blown off by a cannon at point blank range. From there, the film settles into following Señor (a fantastic Pablo Cedrón) and his two lackeys as they travel the desert, convincing people to join what Señor calls “The Movement” in hopes of unifying the country. Naishtat never bothers delving into what Señor’s movement exactly is (and Señor’s talks are nothing more than vague statements delivered with intensity), a choice that puts the focus more on the quest for power and dominance than ideology. People familiar with Argentina’s history and politics will certainly get more out of El Movimiento, but those unfamiliar should find plenty to enjoy whether it’s the gorgeous black and white cinematography, Pedro Irusta’s aggressive score, or Naishtat’s ability to create such an engrossing sense of time and place over a brief 65-minute runtime.

Happy Hour

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With the distinction between cinema and television getting blurrier by the day, and binge watching becoming more common, along comes Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 317-minute Happy Hour to show the unique pleasures cinema can bring when duration isn’t a restriction. The film follows four women in their 30s, close friends who discover one of them has been trying to divorce her husband for over a year. The woman’s decision to leave her husband, followed by her vanishing from the film altogether, throws the other three women’s lives into turmoil over their own relationships. Hamaguchi lets his film breathe considerably, dedicating large chunks of time to sequences like an art event all four women participate in, a hangout at a bar or a getaway to a resort, and by doing so takes full advantage of his runtime to provide a level of depth rarely seen in film or television. All four women transform considerably by the time Happy Hour’s credits start to roll, and Hamaguchi gives his characters enough time and care to make their changes deeply felt and all the more resonant.

How Heavy This Hammer

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My heritage may make me biased, but 2015 was a good year for Canadian cinema (case in point: at least 3 films on this list are from the Great White North). And while a good amount of Canadian films blew me away last year, it was Kazik Radwanski’s How Heavy This Hammer that left me feeling excited for what the future might bring. Erwin (Erwin van Cotthem), a family man who spends most of his time playing computer games, makes a drastic shift in his life when he suddenly decides to leave his wife, yet finds himself in the same rut as before. Radwanski shoots almost entirely with handheld cameras and in extreme close-up, giving the film have a claustrophobic mood that emphasizes its protagonist’s feelings of being trapped that’s extremely effective. But Radwanski’s greatest skill here is his ability to get inside Erwin’s head without being judgmental, leaving viewers to make up their mind how to feel about him. Seeing something this formally interesting and empathetic come out of Canada only makes me hopeful that this is only the beginning of something much bigger for Canadian cinema.

Invention

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First off: kudos to Soda Pictures, who acquired both Canadian and UK rights to Mark Lewis’ Invention, a film that I never thought would get distribution of any kind considering it’s almost entirely silent. Other than a small piano number opening the film and a Fuck Buttons song used in the conclusion, Invention plays out with no sound whatsoever as Lewis’ camera swoops through three locations: Toronto, Sao Paolo and The Louvre in Paris. The film’s complex shots—using cranes, pans, zooms, tilts and just about every other possible type of camera movement—constantly redefines each space with every passing second, putting an emphasis on how cinema can influence our own perception. Taken on their own, Lewis’ shots are incredible works (the film is actually an anthology of a dozen films by Lewis), but Invention’s real power comes from the way it elegantly reminds viewers of how powerful of a tool cinema can be.

The Missing Girl

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A US indie about one of life’s “late bloomers” isn’t exactly unheard of (Sundance has made an industry of these kinds of films), but A.D. Calvo’s The Missing Girl is a shining example of how much good execution can make even the most familiar material feel fresh again. The film starts out as a mystery: comic book store owner Mort (Robert Longstreet) hires a new employee (Alexia Rasmussen), only for her to disappear shortly after someone connected to an old missing persons case moves back into town. Calvo, with the help of an incredible performance by Longstreet, sets things up to look like Mort taking on the role of amateur detective before deliberately abandoning all feelings of mystery in the film’s second half. It’s a surprising move that pays off well, letting the film’s terrific sense of character take over while making Mort’s character arc much more impacting. With no distribution deal announced as of this time, I hope that someone will come along to help make this hidden gem no longer stay hidden.

One Floor Below

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Radu Muntean’s follow-up to Tuesday After Christmas finds the Romanian director—one of the members of Romania’s “new wave” of cinema—dealing with material similar to Ruben Ostlund’s films (or, for a more specific comparison, Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown). Patrascu (Teodor Corban) overhears an argument between a man and woman in the apartment below his, eavesdropping until the man in the argument catches him listening in. Hours later, the woman from the argument is found murdered but Patrascu doesn’t tell the police about what he heard, and soon the man who caught him starts taking an interest in Patrascu. Muntean’s interests lie strictly with Patrascu and not the circumstances surrounding the murder, preferring to delve into how Patrascu, a successful businessman used to exercising control over everything in his life, deals with getting thrown into a situation where he no longer has the upper hand. It’s a slow boiler that’s hard not to get caught up in, with Muntean’s long, elaborately choreographed takes—a high-wire act in itself—feeding into Patrascu’s attempts to navigate the sticky situation he’s put himself in.

The Other Side

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After completing his Texas Trilogy, Roberto Minervini moves into darker and more political territory with The Other Side. It continues Minervini’s unique blend of documentary and fiction developed in his earlier films, except this time he’s moved from Texas to rural Louisiana, looking at two groups located on the furthest edges of society. The film’s first half dedicates itself to Mark and Lisa, a couple trapped by their drug addictions, before switching over to a militia group preparing itself for what they think is an impending war with the government. It’s impossible to tell between what’s real or staged, and Minervini’s camera remains unflinching in its observation of some of the uglier aspects of both lifestyles. Yet The Other Side always shows a care and understanding towards its subjects/characters, with Minervini exploring the context behind their intense dislike of their government rather than pitying or dismissing them based on their situation. It’s a perspective that, in a time when political divisions get stronger and more abrasive with each passing day, feels more necessary than ever.

Update: Film Movement has acquired North American distribution rights for The Other Side.

Our Loved Ones

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When talking about Anne Émond’s Our Loved Ones, the word ambition springs to mind immediately. For her second feature, Émond creates a multigenerational family story dealing with grief, loss, fatherhood, depression and mental illness among many other big themes, nailing almost all of them with a grace and honesty even some well-established filmmakers might envy. Opening with the suicide of a family’s patriarch, the film hones in on eldest son David (Maxim Gaudette) over the years as he gets married and has two children. It’s only later on in the film that Émond’s elliptical and deceptively undramatic approach pays off, as David begins suffering from the same feelings of melancholy that led to his father’s death. Émond’s portrayal of depression is remarkable in its precision, and when the narrative transitions from David to his daughter Laurence in the film’s final act, Our Loved Ones feels like a true epic done on a human scale. Our Loved Ones’ subject matter will be a tough sell to most audiences, but it’s a powerful experience viewers should have the chance to see for themselves.

Paulina

Winner of the top prize at Cannes’ Critics’ Week in 2015, Santiago Mitre’s Paulina is only further proof of how Argentina has a knack for producing some seriously good directors. Paulina (Dolores Fonzi), a lawyer with a promising career, throws it all away when she decides to finally pursue her passion, moving away to teach high school students in one of the poorer parts of the country. Not too long after starting her job, a group of men (some of whom include her own students) beat and rape her as she travels home one night after visiting a friend. It’s a grim set-up that turns into something more frustrating and complicated as Paulina decides to keep teaching, baffling and infuriating everyone around her. Revealing any more of the story’s twists and turns would be a disservice to what Mitre has crafted, turning Paulina from a captivating drama into a fascinating look at what happens when personal interests clash with ideological ones. Forzi, along with Oscar Martinez (playing her father), both give great performances that help steer the film away from feeling too provocative or contrived.

Tag

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Only one of six (!) films Sion Sono made in 2015, Tag should prove to be a delight for fans of the director’s gonzo works like Why Don’t You Play in Hell? or Tokyo Tribe. Anyone familiar with Tag already (it won several awards at Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival) should know about its opening sequence already, a kind of deranged remake of The Happening that’s more surprising and entertaining than anything M. Night Shyamalan has done in more than a decade. After that, Sono just keeps the strangeness coming at full force, as the film’s lead transforms into three different women while avoiding death at every turn, whether it’s from gun-toting teachers, malevolent gusts of wind or pig men. Sono, a master when it comes to pacing, never slows things down for a second, and his ability to throw out as many insane ideas he can think of means it’s impossible to guess what will happen from one second to the next. Hopefully, Tag will be the first feature of Sono’s six from last year to score US distribution, and help further expose Western audiences to one of the most prolific and singular directors in the world right now.

Uncertain

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Uncertain fell off people’s radars after winning an award at Tribeca in 2015, a shame considering it was one of the best documentaries of last year. The title comes from the town directors Ewan McNicol and Anna Sandilands profile, a small city with a population of 94 sitting on the border between Louisiana and Texas. The film profiles three men ranging from 21 to 74, all of whom have their own present hardships or tumultuous pasts primarily dealing with addiction. At the same time, the film periodically looks at a crisis happening in the town when an invasive weed spreads throughout the local lake, wreaking havoc on the ecosystem and threatening to end people’s ability to fish for food and income. McNicol and Sandilands tie together both the aquatic weed’s stranglehold on the town with the vices and conditions of its three subjects, creating a metaphor so perfectly intertwined with the film’s themes it gives Uncertain’s final moments—a brief glimmer of hope amid a grim reality—an emotional resonance that lasts long after the credits roll.

For Henry Gamble (Cole Doman), his 17^th birthday is a big turning point. He’s first seen lying in bed the night before his birthday with best friend Gabe (Joe Keery), talking about sex before the two of them mutually masturbate over Gabe’s fantasy involving a female classmate. It’s plain to see from Henry’s behaviour that he has a crush on Gabe, but before Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party becomes a story of a secret crush, writer/director Stephen Cone shows Henry praying before he goes to sleep, establishing both the film’s prevailing theme of religion and an ambition to deal with ideas that go well beyond the intimacy of the opening scene.

Indeed, Henry isn’t the only person dealing with internal conflicts at his party, although his own situation is complicated given his father Bob (the undervalued and always reliable Pat Healy) is a pastor. As the guests arrive one by one, Cone establishes his ensemble cast while gradually revealing information about the various dramas lurking underneath the surface. Henry’s mom Kat (Elizabeth Laidlaw) can barely hide that her marriage is going through hard times; sister Autumn (Nina Ganet) is visiting from college and trying to get over a breakup; the death of a prevalent member of the congregation hangs over the proceedings; and Henry tries to avoid his gay classmate Logan (Daniel Kyri), who has a crush on Henry and doesn’t hide it around him.

That’s only a small chunk of the many subplots swirling around Henry’s home, and as the day goes on many of the various crises going on between friends and family come to a head. Taking place over one day at the house, Cone’s skillful balancing of the large cast and multiple narrative strands is so impressive it’s easy to forget that it’s all an elaborate juggling act. Part of that has to do with the ensemble, a combination of amateurs and professionals that work together naturally (it’s worth singling out Healy and Laidlaw as Henry’s parents, who are so good it feels like there could be a film just about them), but it’s largely due to the thematic tissue connecting everyone’s stories. Almost everyone faces a similar dilemma involving their faith, finding themselves face to face with a desire that goes against what they’ve been taught. And as much as their community promotes a friendliness and openness with each other, the fact that their feelings and/or actions would be categorized as sinful means their issues stay buried.

Cone’s ability to extend his story beyond Henry’s own struggle with his queer identity is what helps give Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party an empathetic quality that’s rarely seen in US indies. Whether it’s Kat trying to fight against her feelings of leaving her marriage or someone wanting to break away from their overbearing mother, Cone approaches each character in a way that distinguishes them and respects their own inner conflicts. Granted, this isn’t the case for every character, and when Cone’s characterizations turn broad—like one woman who spends her time at the party ranting about pornography, or a minor character whose story takes a grisly turn at the climax—there’s a brief clash with the naturalistic mood. But the fact that there are no heroes or villains in a film dealing with homosexuality and Christianity is a rare and welcome sight, one that highlights the complexity of everyone’s situations without casting judgment on whatever they believe in public or private. It’s a film that’s not without its issues, but it displays a sensitivity that more films (indie and otherwise) should try to emulate.

David O. Russell continues establishing himself as a top name in mainstream prestige fare with Joy, albeit in a different direction compared to his last three features. The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle showed off Russell’s strengths when it came to working with ensembles, whereas Joy prefers to keep its focus on one character. That means a more streamlined narrative compared to, say, American Hustle, although Russell’s own formula since his career’s resurgence is still here, even if it doesn’t cast as wide of a net. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Joy is a rather simple and entertaining film, a biopic of sorts that works best when seen as a strange, unique and slightly true success story.

In a clear case of not fixing what isn’t broken, Russell works with Jennifer Lawrence yet again in her biggest role for him to date. Inspired by the true story of Joy Mangano, inventor of the Miracle Mop and other successful household items, the film starts with Joy (Lawrence) bearing the burden of her needy family. Joy’s mother Terry (Virginia Madsen) stays in bed all day watching soap operas, and her ex-husband Tony (Edgar Ramirez) lives in the basement. Joy’s grandmother Mimi (Diane Ladd) takes care of Joy and Tony’s two children while she works whatever jobs she can to pay the bills, including helping out the business run by her father Rudy (Robert De Niro) and half-sister Peggy (Elisabeth Rohm). On top of all this, Joy can’t shake her own disappointment in not pursuing her dreams of inventing.

It’s only when Rudy starts dating the wealthy Trudy (Isabella Rossellini) that Joy seizes on the opportunity to see her idea of the Miracle Mop through. It’s in this early section of the film that Russell leans on the familial elements that made The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook so successful. Joy’s family oscillates between being a support and a weight for her, with their individual idiosyncrasies either providing a funny narrative detour or an obstacle to Joy achieving her goals. Russell sometimes likes to start a new scene with only Joy before bringing in her family to overpower the proceedings (at one point Russell frames a meeting between Joy and Trudy as a one-on-one before revealing her friends and family surrounding them in the same room). Russell never goes so far as to paint Joy’s immediate family as villains in the story, understanding the complexities of blood relations. For instance: when Joy complains about needing a good sleep, her family’s response is to feed her a bottle of children’s cough syrup while she lays down on the stairs. They’re not malicious people so much as their best intentions do more harm than good.

The specificity of Joy’s family and experiences goes a long way to helping Russell establish that Joy should not be taken as some sort of symbol for the American dream in action. At first blush, Mangano’s tale does come across as an ideal example of working hard to make one’s own success, but in this film’s reality (Russell embellishes a lot of facts, and not enough is publicly known about Mangano to know just how accurate some of the film’s events are) it’s too bizarre and specific to be taken that way. It’s only when Joy winds up at QVC that a station executive (Bradley Cooper, acting like Russell called him in as a favour to take advantage of his and Lawrence’s on-screen chemistry) starts hammering home the virtues of America as a land of opportunity. The fact that these themes get delivered around artificial sets within giant, empty spaces is probably not a coincidence.

If anything, Russell’s film is more of a celebration of individual resolve. Joy faces constant rejection over her ideas, but she never doubts her own instincts about her mop having the potential to be successful. Russell’s script vindicates Joy through a simple and clever move: the narrative always advances because of a decision Joy makes on her own. Her decision to use Trudy as an investor gets the mop made, her decision to go on TV to sell the Miracle Mop herself gets people to buy it in record numbers, and in the film’s anticlimactic final act—an attempt at a climactic confrontation that fizzles out as quickly as it’s introduced—Joy’s acting entirely on her own. Still, watching Lawrence (who turns in another great performance, although her youth gets the best of her in a clunky flash forward) seize control of her dreams from the hands of those trying to pilfer off of them is fun to watch, and Russell’s unwavering commitment to highlighting her self-earned achievements make it all the more effective.

The title Christmas, Again says it all, really. In Charles Poekel’s directorial debut, Christmas is less of a joyous holiday and more of a hurdle to jump over. At least that’s what it’s like for Noel (Kentucker Audley), a Christmas tree salesman in New York City working the night shift. Poekel isn’t cheery or sentimental in his approach, but he also doesn’t make his film an exercise in misery. With a low-key, melancholy tone throughout, Christmas, Again pleasantly goes against expectations, winding up as a minor, well-observed character study.

Poekel, who also wrote and produced, actually spent several years working the same dead-end job as Noel, living in a trailer during the Christmas season in the middle of New York. Poekel’s own experiences add an autobiographical element to the film, giving it a specificity that picks up the narrative slack. Most of Christmas, Again unfolds with very little plot, opting to follow Noel around as he sells trees, goes swimming at the YMCA and makes tree deliveries across the city. Little is known about Noel aside from a few key details: he lives upstate, coming into the city every Christmas to work, and he’s still getting over a recent break-up (his ex-girlfriend would work with him every year, making this Christmas an especially lonely one). To make matters worse, a young couple works the day shift, their presence a constant reminder to Noel of what he used to have.

The monotony of Noel’s job takes a turn for him when he finds Lydia (Hannah Gross) passed out on a bench near his work. After letting her sleep in his trailer, she vanishes the next morning, only to return again days later. Noel and Lydia strike up a sort of casual friendship, one more out of necessity than by choice. Both of them have similar issues, and their isolation only draws them closer together. Poekel ends up taking their relationship in an unexpected direction by the end, one that’s surprisingly satisfying considering its lack of a clear resolution.

And while Poekel’s naturalistic, semi-adapted experiences help him get away with making such a plotless film (some scenes feel like they must have been lifted directly from Poekel’s life), it’s Kentucker Audley’s performance that keeps everything in place. Audley gives the kind of performance bound to get unfairly ignored. Noel barely says a word unless he has to, so Audley must express everything through mannerisms and expressions. Audley perfectly balances the distanced, solitary traits of Noel with the sense of a deep inner turmoil lurking right underneath the surface. It’s the kind of performance that never calls attention to itself, yet remains a captivating force throughout.

By the end of Christmas, Again’s brief runtime, Poekel’s preference of little to no narrative momentum begins to wear things down, but not enough to cause any serious damage. For the most part, the listless tone helps establish the film as a refreshing take on the Christmas movie. It doesn’t like to think big or provide a neat character arc, preferring to act as a brief snapshot into one person’s wistful existence during the holidays. It may not be the most exciting thing to watch, but it provides something unique, relatable and ultimately worthwhile.

This review was originally published as part of our coverage for the 2015 New Directors/New Films festival.

A documentary that unfurls itself in unexpected directions, David Shapiro’s Missing People starts out as a portrait of two different artists before turning into a mystery and, eventually, a meditation on grief and loss. Shapiro follows Martina Bratan, the eccentric director of an art gallery in New York, who has suffered from insomnia ever since her 14-year-old brother was murdered in the ‘70s. One of her obsessions is collecting the work of Roy Ferdinand, an artist from New Orleans whose paintings inspire Bratan to try and have them donated to a major museum. Travelling from New York to New Orleans, Bratan meets the late Ferdinand’s sisters (he died in 2004) and the meeting inspires her to go back and confront her brother’s grisly death. Hiring a private investigator, Bratan tries to find some closure over her brother, whose case is still unsolved.

Bratan is a captivating figure, and the structure of Shapiro’s film is intriguing in the way it branches out to include Ferdinand’s life before going back inwards to focus on Bratan. But Missing People feels somewhat light in its approach, with Shapiro leaning heavily on his documentary’s narrative rather than delving more into Bratan or the ideas and themes that arise from the subject matter. The involvement of Ferdinand, his work and family also feel a little slight at times, their purpose and involvement feeling like little more than a catalyst for Bratan’s own story. Missing People may disappoint in how little it delves beyond its compelling surface, but Shapiro’s film is still admirable in how much it pulls from Bratan’s experiences.

Starting on November 14 and running until November 28, the 2015 edition of The European Union Film Festival (EUFF) will screen 28 films over two weeks at The Royal in Toronto, Ontario. Founded in 2004, the festival’s purpose is simple and distinct: every year it screens one movie from each country in the European Union. It’s an intriguing format that feels like a democratic form of discovery, giving people the chance to watch some great films that might not get much exposure outside of their home country. And the best part about the festival is that every screening is free to attend.

This year, the EUFF boasts two North American Premieres, along with 9 Canadian Premieres and 13 Toronto Premieres. Opening the festival is Alias Loner, the debut feature of Latvian writer/director Normunds Pucis. Based on a true story, the film follows a priest in the 1940s who helped men in his town avoid conscription into the Red Army. Playing the next day is Liza The Fox Fairy, an award-winning Hungarian film about a woman’s bad luck (and we mean really bad) with dating that looks reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s dark comedies.

Other films we’re looking forward to include; Sworn Virgin, an Italian feature starring Alba Rohrwacher (Hungry Hearts, The Wonders) that premiered earlier this year at Berlin and Tribeca; Greek thriller The Enemy Within; Simshar, a film based on true events from Malta; and the films Dark Horse, Body, and The Grump, which all had well-received premieres at TIFF in 2014 and 2015.

To find out more information about all 28 films playing this year, along with the chance to purchase reserved tickets (while every screening is free, you have the option of reserving a seat for $10), go to the festival’s official website at http://eutorontofilmfest.ca/.

Once a director gets classified as a provocateur, it’s a label that can be hard to shake off. Rick Alverson earned that title three years ago with The Comedy, his extremely uncomfortable (and funny) takedown of ironic detachment. In that film, Tim Heidecker played someone who thrived on being repulsive and confrontational, and it was easy to treat his character as a symbol for a specific, rotting part of today’s culture. Entertainment, Alverson’s follow-up, is another piece of provocation that will naturally get compared and contrasted with The Comedy; Heidecker returns to co-write the screenplay (and show up in a cameo), and Alverson continues showing off his knack for creating interactions that can have people crawling in agony towards the exits. But Entertainment provokes in a more insidious manner than The Comedy. If Alverson’s previous film focused on attacking character, stretching a protagonist’s “likability” to the breaking point and beyond (think of Heidecker’s character as less of an anti-hero and more of an asshole), then his latest work sets its sights on dismantling structure and narrative. That makes Entertainment feel more specific and less like a commentary or something symbolic, so it can be harder to glean what Alverson’s real intent might be with his increasingly surreal story. The results are murkier, for better and worse.

So it makes sense to cast someone like Gregg Turkington in the central role, a person whose career involves blurring the lines between reality and fiction. Turkington is known best as Neil Hamburger, a comedian who specializes in antihumour, taking familiar aspects of stand-up comedy and performance and aggressively going against expectations. But in recent years he’s also played “Gregg Turkington,” a version of himself that co-hosts the web series On Cinema, along with being involved in its spinoff Decker. In Entertainment, Turkington plays “The Comedian,” a stand-up travelling across the Mojave Desert with his act (an exact version of Turkington’s Neil Hamburger character). A young clown (Tye Sheridan) appears from time to time as an opener with his own baffling act, but The Comedian travels alone, making pit stops in between his performances to indifferent crowds. Alverson expectedly basks in every millisecond of painful silence that comes after Turkington/Hamburger barks out another one of his offensive jokes. Enjoying these scenes, and enjoying Entertainment as a whole, is largely a make or break affair; either you like Turkington’s brand of comedy or you don’t.

The majority of Entertainment plays out as a portrait of one man’s loneliness, with Turkington usually framed in a way that makes him look swallowed up by the desert landscapes (Lorenzo Hagerman’s cinematography is one of, if not the best parts of the film). His interactions with people are usually brief, except for a sequence where he visits a cousin (John C. Reilly) who’s too business-minded to comprehend what The Comedian’s purpose really is. A series of voicemails The Comedian makes to his daughter (who’s never seen or heard) throughout also provides a little bit of characterization, even if it feels like it’s there to make the character look like more of a desperate sad sack. It’s only until a meeting with a chromotherapist (Lotte Verbeek), followed by a brutal encounter with a drunk heckler (Amy Seimetz) that Alverson starts letting go of his formal grip on the film, providing one surreal encounter after another that escorts The Comedian from the purgatory of his desert tour to some sort of deranged, Lynchian hell. Levels of discomfort get ratcheted up considerably as The Comedian’s disdain of others, along with accepting his own pitiful existence, reach a fever pitch when he makes it to the final stop on his trip. Entertainment ends with the image of The Comedian laughing hysterically, which is both the character’s most expressive moment in the film and the point where Alverson lets go of the film’s connection to any form of reality. The Comedian’s eventual acceptance of his own existence as a punchline doesn’t land as strongly as it should, a result of Alverson’s tendency to create compelling scenes that stand on their own yet link together in an aimless fashion, but there’s something powerful in Entertainment’s ability to push down into the darkest depths without any hesitation. Alverson, whose singular style makes him one of US indie’s most important voices right now, confirms what The Comedy established three years ago: he’s a filmmaker brimming with potential, but for the time being someone to watch rather than behold.

With the amount of middlebrow, “journalistic” documentaries putting information first that come out of the woodwork every year to score some trophies, it’s easy to laud a documentary for being nothing more than an alternative. Praising a documentary can sometimes amount to doing a hypothetical comparison with a “bad” version of the same thing, pointing out what it doesn’t do rather than what it actually does; no talking heads, no overbearing score, no reliance on animations, no bad re-enactments, and other usual suspects when watching nonfiction. But this can be a lazy and reductive way to evaluate a film, undermining its actual achievements. A film like Laurent Bécue-Renard’s Of Men and War can easily make people fall into this trap, given its apolitical approach to a political topic. Using a vérité style that naturally brings Frederick Wiseman’s films to mind, Bécue-Renard’s film is initially surprising in how it places emotions—along with the act of confronting emotions—at the forefront. And by doing so, Bécue-Renard creates a powerful glimpse at the struggles of dealing with PTSD.

Bécue-Renard spent over six years filming Of Men and War, starting off by gaining access to The Pathway Home, a therapy centre in California that helps soldiers suffering from PTSD. This included filming the home’s intense group therapy sessions, where veterans (mostly from Iraq and/or Afghanistan) graphically describe their horrors from war that still haunt them. These sequences dominate the film with how harrowing and disturbing descriptions of death and destruction. The stories they tell tend to have a cinematic quality in the way they describe them, but it’s the graphic, realistic details that stick with them. One soldier talks about noticing a young man as a potential threat and taking him out, then sheds tears as he remembers part of the man’s brain falling on his boot as the body was getting put into a body bag. He remembers the body’s eye—the only one remaining—staring at him. While he fights through his tears, it’s apparent that he’s also holding back pure anger at the same time.

What’s interesting about these sequences, and why their impact is so strong, is the way Bécue-Renard films his subjects to highlight the despair of their situation. The soldiers sit around a table with the group therapist moderating the session, but Bécue-Renard sits behind the therapist. The therapist’s face is rarely shown, with the camera honing in on close-ups of the soldiers instead. The composition of the therapy scenes only heightens the isolation of these men, emphasizing their feelings of suffering in solitude. When Bécue-Renard cuts away to a reaction shot it’s only to the other soldiers in the room, the only other people in the room who can have empathy or an understanding of what everyone else is going through. Bécue-Renard’s direction shows off how impossible it is for viewers to be able to fully comprehend these soldiers’ pain while observing them with a distance that feels both justified and respectful.

Beyond the therapy sessions, scenes of the soldiers back home trying to live their daily lives add moments of levity and anxiety, depending on how well they’re handling a social or familial situation (when one soldier and his wife try to be friendly with another couple at a bar, it’s crushing to see how hard he’s trying to just act sociable). Bécue-Renard only focuses on the soldiers who have wives and/or children when he takes his camera away from The Pathway Home, a choice that feels deliberate in showcasing how high the stakes are for some of the subjects. Placed next to the therapy sessions, the scenes of what can sometimes look like basic family life take on a new context, framing every action or interaction as a constant struggle. Yet Of Men and War, while unflinching in its observation of the hardships that come with trying to deal with and potentially move on from intense trauma, provides a hopeful (and realistic) outlook. It shows the power and necessity of openness and communication with the healing process, and how the simple act of trying to better oneself is sometimes all it takes to make it happen.

In the arid landscape of derivative and unoriginal horror movies, the sight of something different can act like discovering a wellspring. Saying that S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk is a wholly original film would be disingenuous. Zahler hasn’t created something new so much as re-arranged what’s already there into a beguiling and (eventually) nasty combination. First and foremost a western, Bone Tomahawk teases its gradual turn to the sadistic and bloody with its opening sequence before settling into its own unique groove. If anything, Zahler has immediately established himself as one to watch in genre filmmaking right now by creating something no one else is doing right now.

The aforementioned opening finds murderers/thieves Purvis (David Arquette) and Buddy (Sid Haig) stumbling on (and desecrating) the burial ground of a group of cave-dwelling cannibals. Cut to 11 days later, where Purvis takes shelter in the small town of Bright Hope, only to get arrested by Sheriff Hunt (Kurt Russell) and his deputy Chicory (Richard Jenkins). But Purvis isn’t aware that the cave dwellers have been tracking him, and overnight they kidnap Purvis, Deputy Nick (Evan Jonigkeit) and town doctor Samantha (Lili Simmons). Hunt and Chicory decide to head out on a rescue mission to bring back Nick and Samantha, bringing two more townsmen with them: Samantha’s husband Arthur (Patrick Wilson), recovering from a broken leg, and Brooder (Matthew Fox), a handsome gunslinger who claims to have killed more Indians than anyone else in town.

Not that the villains in Bone Tomahawk are Indians, as Zahler is quick to point out through a Native American character who refers to them as “troglodytes.” It might be easy to label the film as a revisionist western given its realism and subversion of genre clichés but, for the most part, it feels like Zahler is just creating his own strange universe within the Wild West. This extends to Zahler’s screenplay, which revels in stylized dialogue that will have fans of Deadwood feeling nostalgic (in this film, “Can you be quiet?” becomes “Is it possible for you to close that aperture?”). Zahler, a novelist making his directorial debut here, has a great sense of humour too, giving his cast plenty of opportunities to revel in his script’s seemingly endless turns of phrase.

It also helps that Zahler has assembled a seriously impressive cast for his first feature. The presence of a familiar face like Kurt Russell as Sheriff Hunt elevates the character significantly, along with the inclusion of character actors in every other major role. Matthew Fox plays directly against type as the ruthlessly pragmatic and vain Brooder, but he sells the role perfectly, looking like he’s thriving on the chance to show off a side of himself that hasn’t really been given the opportunity to shine before. At first, Patrick Wilson looks typecast as yet another portrait of wounded masculinity (this time in a more literal sense), but his casting feels like a subversion of Wilson’s previous roles once he completes his character’s arc. It’s the best role Wilson has had in years, but if an MVP had to be selected out of the cast it would have to be Richard Jenkins. He’s almost unrecognizable as the bearded, oafish Chicory, providing both the comedic relief for the film along with its beating heart once more details emerge about his past. It’s bound to go down as one of the year’s most underrated performances.

But the most surprising thing about Bone Tomahawk isn’t its screenplay or its merging of two genres that usually stay separate; it’s the film’s breathing room that helps the film stand on its own. The 132-minute runtime is a rare sight these days for a low-budget (under $2 million to be precise, an astonishing figure given how good the movie looks) genre movie, but Zahler’s writing skills and his cast make it hard to find a single dull moment. Each scene, no matter how much it might feel like a total non-sequitur or detour from the main narrative, always keeps the focus on character. And, admittedly, this makes the final act’s sudden shift into the grotesque all the more impactful. The less said about Bone Tomahawk’s horror elements the better (it’s best to watch it unfold without knowing anything), but its drastic turn into a bloody gorefest certainly leaves an impression with one of the most brutal death scenes ever put in a film. And Zahler shows his skills as a filmmaker by having this tonal shift work, using the strength of his characters to carry along the change in circumstances. Zahler’s curious approach might not work all the time, and the meshing of two disparate genres doesn’t always come together nicely, but it makes for a fascinating and (mostly) entertaining experience.

In a dystopian Tokyo, 23 “tribes” (read: gangs) rule different sections of the city. These tribes range from the GiraGira Girls, a group of women including a whip-cracking dominatrix, to the Musashino Saru, a gang all about promoting peace and love. But it’s the Bukuro Wu-Ronz running everything, and their leader Big Buppa (Takeuchi Riki) is not to be messed with. Mera, one of Bukuro Wu-Ronz’s top members, starts a feud with Musashino Saru heads Tera (Ryuta Sato) and Kai (Young Dais), and the battle soon spins out of control, involving every other tribe in an epic battle to become the most powerful in the city. And did I mention it’s a hip-hop musical? Welcome to the insane world of Sion Sono and Tokyo Tribe.

But that’s not all! There’s also the presence of Sunmi (Nana Seino), a mysterious girl dragged into the gang conflict with some serious fighting skills. In fact, a lot of the cast can fight really well. This also happens to be a highly kinetic action film, with numerous fight scenes placed in between the rap songs sung by the massive cast. Sometani Shota provides help for viewers as the film’s MC, walking around scenes rapping exposition about different tribes and their feuds with other gangs. Just don’t bother actually trying to understand what the hell is going on, though. Tokyo Tribe is so dense and convoluted there are already 50 other things occurring the minute after a scene ends.

The density and hyperactivity of Sono’s style prove his film’s biggest strength and weakness. Sono, working with what looks like his biggest budget to date, packs as much as he possibly can into each frame. His shots are more ambitious, letting things play out in long, elaborate single takes, the camera moving all over the place. The set design is on a whole other level compared to Sono’s previous films as well, with so many elaborately designed locations for each tribe. And Sono never takes a moment to breathe, whipping back and forth between places, stuffing each one with as many extras and activity as possible, all while putting the camera right in the middle of it. It’s exhilarating, but at the same time incredibly exhausting

Trying to watch Tokyo Tribe for its story, nothing more than a standard gangster epic with a message about community, won’t maximize the amount of shock and joy Sono throws around on-screen. It’s the quirks and little moments that work best. Like Big Buppa’s son having a room where people act as his furniture. Or a massive karate fighter wishing someone a happy birthday as they punch them 50 feet in the air (one of the fighter’s only lines: “Take me! To! A sauna!”). Or an army tank driving around Tokyo blowing shit up. Tokyo Tribe is full of these kinds of insane, world-building moments, most of them hilariously original and bonkers beyond belief.

And even though Sono’s restlessness can get tiring at times, it doesn’t take away from the utter brilliance of Tokyo Tribe. No one injects more insanity and ideas into their films on a moment-by-moment basis the way Sono does. It was hard to imagine how Sono could outdo his previous film Why Don’t You Play in Hell?, but with Tokyo Tribe he’s outdone himself completely, and by successfully taking on musicals he feels unstoppable. With a propulsive, catchy score, Tokyo Tribe doesn’t have to try to be energetic. It breathes vivaciousness. Tokyo Tribe will leave viewers dazed, assaulted, and mortified, but by the end they’ll be begging for more.

A version of this review was originally published as part of our coverage of the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.

Winner of last year’s Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders might come as a bit of a surprise to some viewers. While Cannes has a reputation of profiling the big, brash and bold of arthouse’s finest—last year’s top prize went to a 3+ hour Chekov-inspired drama, after all—The Wonders goes in the opposite direction of its competitors. It’s a quiet, enchanting coming-of-age tale about a unique family in the Italian countryside, one that drives itself almost entirely by what’s hidden underneath the surface. It’s an approach that doesn’t necessarily work all the time, but it certainly establishes Rohrwacher as a rising talent.

The family at the center of Rohrwacher’s film appears to be run by 12 year old Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu), who helps run the family business of beekeeping and honey-making with her dad, Wolfgang (Sam Louwyk). She also looks after her three sisters, Marinella, Caterina and Luna, when her mother, Angelica (Alba Rohrwacher, Alice’s sister), can’t, and also relies on the help of family friend Coco (Sabine Timoteo). Rohrwacher keeps exposition to an absolute minimum, but her script drops several hints of the family living a purposely isolated existence (at one point, Coco implies they lived in some sort of commune in the past). And as Gelsomina starts growing into a young woman, her desire for independence and exploration clash with her family’s self-contained lifestyle, creating a slow, underlying tension.

That tension gets amplified through two developments which make up most of The Wonders’ plot. The first comes in the form of the arrival of a TV production around the area. Gelsomina continually eyes the show’s host (Monica Bellucci, rocking a ridiculous white-haired wig) with curiosity and amazement, and when she learns that the show is offering a cash prize to the “most traditional family” in the area, she jumps at the chance to put her family on the show. Wolfgang wants no part in Gelsomina’s plan, but the growing animosity between them suggests it has to do with everything but the program. The other addition of stress to the family comes when new farming regulations threaten to put an end to the farm’s honey business. In order to get cheap labour to help bring the farm up to standard, Wolfgang signs up for a service that lets him hire young delinquents. But once the quiet, handsome 14 year old Martin (Luis Huilca Logrono) shows up to work, Angelica freaks out, wondering if he will be a bad influence on the girls.

It’s to Rohrwacher’s credit that she manages to introduce these elements without succumbing to the temptation of melodrama. That winds up being Rohrwacher’s biggest strength, as her well-observed, warm eye for her characters infuse the film with a naturalism that feels truly special. It takes a lot of skill to portray this family’s quirks, like Wolfgang’s penchant for sleeping in a bed outdoors, without it falling into caricature. It’s because Rohrwacher never shows an ounce of judgment towards her characters, or the way they choose to live their lives. Almost every moment feels real and unrehearsed because the characters’ specific qualities work inward rather than outward. They combine to form a distinct, yet completely believable portrait of one family, instead of being used as an easy joke to compare their strange behaviour to people’s idea of a “normal” family unit. It’s a breath of fresh air that radiates throughout every frame.

That’s why The Wonders’ first half, primarily focusing on establishing Gelsomina and her family’s routines, works wonderfully. The plotline involving the TV show, one of the film’s biggest faults, suffers from having too much time dedicated to it. Once Gelsomina gets interesting in auditioning for the program, it’s apparent that they’ll end up on the program somehow, making the build-up a bit of a drag to get through. But right when it looks like Rohrwacher might have overstayed her welcome, her film takes a surprising turn for the enigmatic. It’s a bold move, and yet it blends seamlessly within the world Rohrwacher creates. That successful change-up summarizes what makes The Wonders a film that can, at times, turn into something magical. In this low-key tale of a close-knit family, Rohrwacher makes it feel like anything can happen.

Originally published on March 27th, 2015. The Wonders opens in select theaters on October 30.

Another year, another Halloween, another batch of horror films coming out in theatres and festivals all over the world. Last year turned out to be a pretty interesting year for horror films, with titles like The Babadook and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night earning high praise from both genre and non-genre fans alike. This year the field seems to have gotten stronger, and with 2015 coming close to an end, I wanted to highlight the best horror films of the year. This list may come a little early, but with only a handful of horror films coming out soon and the strength of these nine movies, I don’t think it’s too outrageous to consider these the best of 2015 (but just in case, I promise to come back and add in Krampus if it turns out to be awesome). And besides, it’s all subjective anyway. Take this as a list of 9 really good horror films from this year that any self-professed genre fan should check out as soon as they can.

Backcountry

Review
Interview with director Adam MacDonald

Adam MacDonald’s directorial debut can feel like watching the first act of Funny Games in the wilderness. After an ominous opening, Backcountry establishes that its two leads (Missy Peregrym & Jeff Roop) will meet some sort of awful fate, but MacDonald takes his sweet time to reveal how and when these characters will suffer. Unfortunately, the film’s marketing took a less mysterious approach, so one look at the poster or trailer will let people know what to expect once MacDonald finally lets loose. But it’s a fun journey getting there, and once the film goes into survival thriller mode it has its fair share of legitimately horrifying moments. Watch Backcountry and you’ll probably steer clear of the woods for a long, long time.

Availability: Currently available on DVD, Blu-Ray, and VOD.

Green Room

Review

A punk band, a room, a dead body, and a bar full of neo-Nazis. That’s all Jeremy Saulnier needs to set up his latest film, which finds the band barricading themselves in the eponymous green room once they witness a murder at the bar. The bar’s staff (including Patrick Stewart, pulling off an understated yet intimidating performance) starts launching one attack after another to kill the witnesses, and the band simply tries to survive. Saulnier’s biggest achievement here is how realistic the film feels; no one makes any stupid moves, and that makes it easy to put yourself in these characters’ shoes. It makes things unbearably tense, especially when things get violent. Even the most hardened horror fan might find themselves having a hard time handling Green Room, which is low on gore but extremely high on ruthless brutality.

Availability: A24 plans to give Green Room a wide release in early April, but expect it to pop up at different film festivals until then.

The Harvest

John McNaughton, director of the horror classic Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, returns to the genre with something very different. A surgeon (Samantha Morton) and her husband (Michael Shannon) take care of their ailing son Andy (Charlie Tahan), but the arrival of Maryann (Natasha Calis), a new neighbour around Andy’s age, causes Andy’s parents to irrationally freak out when she tries to befriend him. McNaughton and screenwriter Stephen Lancellotti have crafted a horror film that feels surprising in today’s landscape, preferring slow-building tension and character development to shocks and violence. The presence of hugely talented actors like Morton and Shannon helps too, with Morton having a ball chewing up scenery in such an unhinged role (this might be the closest thing we get to Morton starring in a Mommie Dearest remake). It’s a straightforward film, one dedicated to telling a good, entertaining story more than anything else, and on that front The Harvest is lots of fun.

Availability: Out now on Blu-Ray, DVD, VOD and Netflix Instant.

The Invitation

Karyn Kusama’s first film in 6 years (and her first indie since 2000) is one gloriously twisted treat, the kind of movie that delights in shredding your nerves one by one before it unleashes its full power. After divorcing his wife (Tammy Blanchard) and not hearing from her for several years, Will (Logan Marshall-Green) gets an invite from his ex to a party at her house. Once he arrives Kusama starts gleefully tightening the screws, slowly revealing one piece of information after another as the party’s vibe goes from awkward to “Get me the hell out of here.” Will doesn’t know if his suspicions of something sinister going on are real or fake, but Kusama makes it obvious that the situation is a ticking time bomb. And unlike a lot of films that fail to deliver when the bomb finally goes off, The Invitation’s visceral finale will have people covering their eyes and shouting at the screen in equal measure. Horror movies this exhilarating don’t come along too often.

Availability: After premiering at SXSW earlier this year, Drafthouse plans to release The Invitation in early 2016.

It Follows

Review

Just as the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west, no best horror of 2015 list is complete without David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows. By now, you’ve either seen it or know the gist: young adult Jay (Maika Monroe) has sex with a guy and contracts some sort of curse that makes a shapeshifting entity slowly but surely follow her. Only she can see it, the thing can take the form of any person (including some severely creepy people), and if it catches up to her she’s dead. I may not be as crazy about It Follows as others who are already hailing it as the next horror classic, but it’s been a long time since a US genre filmmaker came up with a concept this good, and Mitchell’s direction—using 360 degree pans to heighten the paranoia and intensity—elevates the film well beyond most low-budget horror films from this year (the distributor was so surprised by the film’s critical and financial success it decided to bypass a planned VOD release for a wide theatrical run, an unprecedented move). To put it bluntly: if you’re a horror fan and you haven’t seen It Follows yet, what’s wrong with you?

Availability: Currently available on DVD, Blu-Ray, and VOD.

The Nightmare

Review

The Nightmare might not be the scariest film on this list, but it’s certainly the one that will linger with people the longest. Rodney Ascher, the director of Room 237, sets his sights on the unique (or not-so-unique, depending on how you look at it) phenomenon of night terrors. Ascher interviews different people in America and the UK suffering from intense, vivid nightmares, but instead of delving into medical or scientific explanations, Ascher strictly focuses on each subject’s individual experience. Ascher’s re-enactments of the nightmares are lacking to say the least (think of the cheesy re-enactments from Unsolved Mysteries and you’ll get an idea), but it’s the testimonials that get under the skin. Even if the nightmares aren’t real, it certainly feels real for these people, and hearing the conviction in their voices (along with some of the downright eerie similarities between different stories) makes it easy to take their word. Ascher closes his film on a brilliant note too, suggesting that viewers might get start getting their own night terrors after watching The Nightmare. You have to give kudos to any director who can make people dread falling asleep.

Availability: Currently available on DVD, Blu-Ray, and VOD.

They Look Like People

Review
Interview with director Perry Blackshear and cast

The problem with low-budget horror is that a filmmaker’s reach can get bigger than their grasp. On the other hand, directors like Larry Fessenden or Ti West can make the most of their limited resources, proving that sometimes it doesn’t take much to freak people out. Perry Blackshear’s directorial debut They Look Like People is yet another example of taking the smart approach to a small budget. Wyatt (MacLeod Andrews) gets a phone call from someone saying that a war is coming; hideous creatures have slowly assimilated the human population Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style, and in several days they will shed their human form to take over the world. Wyatt flees to New York City in order to save Christian (Evan Dumouchel), his old (and still human) friend trying to make a life for himself. Blackshear’s film can get severely intense and unsettling, but it’s also a remarkable story about friendship, independence and the need to belong (or, at the very least, finding someone to connect with). It’s rare to see a horror film, especially a directorial debut, feel this intimate, and it’s well worth celebrating.

Availability: They Look Like People is seeking US distribution at the moment, but it’s screening at plenty of film festivals. Check out the film’s website to see if it’s screening near you.

Unfriended

Unfriended is not the first horror movie to take place entirely on a computer screen, but it’s the first film that really uses the format to do something that feels groundbreaking. On the one year anniversary of a high school student’s suicide (the result of intense bullying, both on and offline), a group of her “friends” get forced to join a Skype call from an account claiming to be the dead girl’s ghost. The classmates don’t believe it until the ghost starts picking them off one by one. Director Leo Gabriadze lets everything play out on the computer screen of main character Blaire (Shelly Hennig), and the film’s intense commitment to accuracy (no fake software here, every program Blaire uses is the same thing any average PC/Mac owner works with on a daily basis) makes it easy to get immersed. But beyond the film’s relatability (all by computer programs!), Gabriadze does an incredible job crafting a narrative entirely through watching someone browse their Macbook, and at certain points—like long stretches of silence as Blair clicks around—the film can feel downright radical in its approach. It’s a thrilling film, both as a straight up horror movie and what feels like an entirely new approach to narrative filmmaking. It’s probably the first time since Spring Breakers that a film this experimental snuck its way into thousands of theatres.

Availability: Currently available on DVD, Blu-Ray, and VOD.

We Are Still Here

I won’t lie: when I first saw Ted Geoghegan’s debut feature We Are Still Here, I wasn’t sure what to think. Yet now, months after seeing it, out of the hundreds of movies I’ve seen this year, this one hasn’t left me. Taking place in the late ’70s in New England, a couple (Barbara Crampton and Andrew Sensenig) grieving the loss of their son move into a new home. Things start going bump in the night, but this is no ordinary haunting, and soon things get wildly out of control. Part of We Are Still Here’s appeal is that Geoghegan operates on an entirely different wavelength than any other genre director in the US right now. Its slow build up and ’70s setting will draw comparisons to Ti West’s House of the Devil, but the hilarious, splatter-happy final act feels more in line with Lucio Fulci and European horrors from several decades ago. It’s a fascinating mix of influences, combined with a mythology that Geoghegan uses to increase the scale of his film without sacrificing its claustrophobic atmosphere. And it has two great performances by Barbara Crampton and Larry Fessenden, two horror legends who get nice, big roles here. It’s a fun film that, despite its clear love for retro horror, is one of the more singular genre efforts to come out this year.

Availability: Currently available on DVD, Blu-Ray, and VOD.

Honourable Mentions

Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario isn’t a horror film by any means, but it’s one of the most intense experiences I’ve had this year in a theatre. On the opposite end, The Editor and What We Do in the Shadows are absolutely hilarious (one a Giallo throwback, the other a mockumentary about vampires), but they’re comedies first and horrors second. Sion Sono’s Tag also fell into the “not horror enough” category, even though its opening act could easily fit on this list. And this year at the Toronto International Film Festival I had a fun time with anthology horror Southbound and Sean Byrne’s The Devil’s Candy, which will hopefully find their way to a screen near you in the future. Also worth mentioning: The Blaine Brothers’ Nina Forever, which should go down as one of the most demented horror films of the year.

Ramin Bahrani makes a loud return with 99 Homes, his follow-up to the disappointingly received At Any Price. Taking his aim at the U.S. housing crisis, Bahrani tells a gripping story that extends out to a damning statement on American capitalism and the exceedingly wealthy one percent. It’s a big step towards the mainstream for Bahrani, boasting a terrific cast and a relevant, necessary subject. And even with a problematic final act, one threatening to sink the entire film, its dramatic strengths end up winning out.

From the first frames, Bahrani blatantly expresses his intentions to generate ire from viewers. Real estate shark Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) looks at a bathroom covered in blood with a body on the toilet. Carver came to evict the homeowner for defaulting on his mortgage, and the owner decided to take his own life rather than vacate. Carver doesn’t care; he tells police the man’s suicide is a selfish act, one that leaves the homeowner’s family to fend for themselves. Within minutes, Bahrani establishes the cruel, emotionless world of his film.

Carver’s next person to evict is Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield), a construction worker down on his luck. With the housing market crashing, no one has any interest in building homes, meaning little to no construction work. Due to issues with the bank, Nash loses the family home, leaving his mother Lynn (Laura Dern) and son Connor (Noah Lomax) with nowhere to go. Eventually Rick and Dennis’ paths cross again, and Rick ends up hiring Dennis to help clean out vacated homes for him. Dennis resists the idea of working for the man who kicked him out of his home at first, but the high paychecks prove to be too tempting.

Bahrani’s point, along with co-writer Amir Naderi (taken from a story by Bahrani and Bahareh Azimi), is to show the way capitalism has morphed into something monstrous. Nash represents the average hard-working American earning their own success, while Carver symbolizes the way success now defines itself as profiting off the suffering of the less fortunate. Carver’s philosophy on life leaves no room for sentiment or emotions. Dennis continually finds ways to get his family home back, something Carver finds ridiculous. “They’re just boxes,” Carver says to Nash. Bahrani uses Nash and his family to keep the human story elements at the forefront, making Carver’s soulless statements look all the more horrifying.

Garfield does a great job as Nash, giving a believable and emotional performance, but the real highlight is Michael Shannon. Playing a character written as a total villain, Shannon exudes a level of charisma that, combined with having to say most of the film’s more memorable lines, actually makes Carver enjoyable to watch. And even though he’s a cruel, unsympathetic character, his motivations and back story are fleshed out to make his behavior understandable. Carver, like Nash, simply does what he can to survive and prosper, except one of them is willing to go much further than the other to ensure their security.

Sadly, Bahrani feels the need to up the ante of his dramatic stakes, using a major plot point in the latter half to shift things into thriller territory. As the intensity builds, or at least tries to, so does the unsubtle political commentary. It’s an unfortunate move because the last thing the film needs is more emphasis. For that reason the climax falls flat, a stale effort to go out strong turning into poorly misguided melodrama.

Bahrani’s 99 Homes is still a success, even if it’s a small one. Its great cast and effective drama, at least for the majority of the film, are undeniably compelling. If At Any Price is Bahrani’s failed attempt to break into the major leagues, 99 Homes corrects that mistake.

Originally published as part of our coverage for the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival.

The slasher film is one of the few types of movies with the honour of having its own deconstruction be just as stale as its own genre. Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson more or less opened and closed the book on self-aware slashers with Scream back in 1996, a film that’s almost two decades old (yes, Scream is now older than today’s average college freshman, but don’t think about it that way). But it wasn’t too long ago that Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard showed that the meta approach still had some life in it with The Cabin in the Woods, although it targeted the horror genre as a whole rather than one specific subgenre. Now, director Todd Strauss-Schulson and writers M.A. Fortin & Joshua John Miller try their hand at lovingly taking down slasher tropes with The Final Girls, a glossy horror/comedy that’s severely lacking in both horror and comedy.

Max (Taissa Farmiga) still hasn’t gotten over the death of her mother Amanda (Malin Akerman), an actress who got her break playing a piece of cannon fodder in the cheesy ‘80s slasher Camp Bloodbath. A tragic car accident took Amanda’s life several years ago, and for Max the film, and her mother’s death scene in it, is more traumatizing than entertaining. But her personal issues don’t matter to Duncan (Thomas Middleditch), the stepbrother of her best friend Gertie (Alia Shawkat). Duncan bribes Max to attend an anniversary screening of Camp Bloodbath and she accepts his offer, taking Gertie and her classmate/romantic interest Max (Alexander Ludwig) along. A freak accident at the screening causes a fire to break out, and Max, Gertie, Duncan, Chris and Chris’ ex-girlfriend Vicki (Nina Dobrev) find themselves literally transported into Camp Bloodbath as they try to escape the theatre. With no idea how to get out of the movie, they decide the best way for them to get back into the real world is to play along, hoping to survive by the time the credits roll.

It’s hard to get a sense of what exactly The Final Girls wants to be. Is it a slasher with meta elements? A deconstruction? A satire? No matter what it is, the fact that it’s aware of its own tropes, formulas and clichés means it has to bring something to the table that’s smarter or better than the old familiars it’s lampooning. But The Final Girls really doesn’t have any ideas, preferring to just plop modern-day characters in a sleazy 1980s slasher and make sitcom-esque jokes about their cultural differences (just wait until you see how these camp counsellors react to an iPhone!). A lot of The Final Girl’s jokes feel lazy, as if the mere mention of a trope will generate laughs because of viewers’ familiarity with it. It’s tame at best, and reminiscent of the way a show like Family Guy will make an obscure pop culture reference both the set-up and punchline to a joke.

That laziness runs throughout The Final Girls, which never bothers to set up any consistency or logic once it enters Camp Bloodbath. The movie within the movie, which looks like your standard piece of ‘80s schlock (based on the fake trailer that opens The Final Girls), becomes a colourful fantasy land once Max and her crew enter it, and their decision to “play along” and let the movie play out doesn’t make much sense. Neither does the ‘80s setting itself, with Camp Bloodbath characters like the dumb, horny “jock” (Adam Devine) playing like a deleted scene from a Judd Apatow movie. And Strauss-Schulson’s style, with the camera whirling and moving all over the place, doesn’t mesh with the visually bland looks of the film(s) he’s taking inspiration from. The camera’s eccentricity is reminiscent of Sam Raimi and The Evil Dead, but its pointless purpose and showiness puts it more in line with Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and American Horror Story.

So it comes as a surprise that The Final Girls’ biggest success is how well it establishes a strong emotional core. For Max, entering Camp Bloodbath gives her another chance to meet her mother, or more accurately her mother’s character Nancy. Max and Nancy’s relationship turns out to be the most captivating part of the film, largely due to the talents of Farmiga and Akerman (especially Akerman, a terrific comedic actress who uses her equally strong dramatic skills effectively here). And the rest of the cast give it their all too, and despite having little material to work with they make The Final Girls watchable. But a game cast can only take things so far, and the tired inconsistency of Strauss-Schulson’s film makes all of its attempts to wink, nod and nudge at the audience ring hollow. The Final Girls isn’t the first film to simultaneously indulge in and upend the rules of horror films, so it’s disappointing to watch it coast along on its own concept rather than try, well, anything remotely interesting or subversive. Films designed to call out its own genre’s traditions shouldn’t feel this safe.

It only takes a few minutes before (T)ERROR grabs viewers, pulling them right into its riveting story as it unfolds in real-time. What gives (T)ERROR its sense of immediacy and high level of tension is that directors Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe have done something no other filmmakers have done before: they somehow managed to get involved in an FBI counter terrorism operation, following an informant as he goes on a mission for the US government.

The informant is Saeed “Shariff” Torres, a 63-year-old man working as a cook in a school cafeteria. Despite his long working relationship with the FBI, one that gave him 6-figure paychecks, money is hard to come by, and when the government offers him another job he accepts, hoping it will be his last. With Cabral and Sutcliffe in tow, Shariff parts from his young son, heading off to Pittsburgh. A title card informs that, although Cabral and Sutcliffe intend to film Shariff’s investigation, his FBI superiors have no idea of their involvement.

The FBI orders Shariff to investigate Khalifah Al-Akili, a white man who converted to Islam. Shariff’s mission: Find out if Khalifah intends to leave the country to join a terrorist training camp. At this point, with Shariff’s objective laid out, (T)ERROR doesn’t have many places to go. Shariff winds up spending most of his time at his safe house, smoking marijuana to take the edge off while waiting for the right opportunity to get acquainted with Khalifah.

With the present investigation stagnant, Cabral and Sutcliffe venture into Shariff’s past. They learn about his work with the Black Panthers, how he came to work for the FBI, and one of the biggest cases he worked on as an informant. Cabral and Sutcliffe try their best to paint a portrait of Shariff, but their attempts wind up dragging the film down, largely because of their subject’s resistance. Shariff proves to be a tricky subject, as he’s constantly reluctant to speak on camera or answer any questions. He’s simply too unsympathetic and standoffish to invest in, making Cabral and Sutcliffe’s attempts to paint him as a tragic figure periodically effective.

But just when (T)ERROR looks like it’s about to fall into a dull portrait of Shariff, Cabral and Sutcliffe introduce a new element that suddenly kicks things into high gear again (Warning: spoilers from here on out). Without telling Shariff, the two directors set up an interview with Khalifah, who has no idea that the filmmakers interviewing him are simultaneously following the man investigating him. Once Khalifah gets involved with the proceedings, (T)ERROR dives head-first into murky waters, but with a direct purpose. By getting entangled in the case, Cabral and Sutcliffe expose a problem that’s been allowed to go on for too long because of its secrecy.

As Cabral and Sutcliffe begin crosscutting between Shariff and Khalifah, a horrifying truth begins to emerge; Khalifah doesn’t turn out to be a threat, but the FBI continues putting pressure on Shariff to provide “results,” whatever they may be. And when the film uses this story to comment on how this sort of injustice is rampant around the country, it paints a chilling picture. By the end, (T)ERROR turns into a portrait of two men trapped and exploited on both ends of the same system, with Cabral and Sutcliffe expertly extrapolating their subject matter to a broader, more systematic level. If last year’s Citizenfour showed that the government can get whatever they want, (T)ERROR presents a message that might be even more unnerving: the government will always get what it wants, even if it has to make it up.

Originally published as part of our 2015 Hot Docs coverage.

Much like the heist at the centre of the film, Victoria is a bit of a risky, high-wire act in and of itself. The film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, where its audacious gimmick earned the film’s cinematographer an award: the entire 140-minute film plays out in one take, with no cuts or digital trickery involved. This inevitably lumps Victoria into a group of recent films that utilize digital filmmaking to push duration and shot length to new extremes (one of the first examples of this, and probably the most notable one, was Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark). But once again, like with Birdman and this year’s The Tribe, the praise lavished upon director Sebastian Schipper is less about the quality of his film than the quantity of work put into it. As a piece of stunt directing, Victoria is easy to admire; as a film it’s an overlong drag, with its one take gimmick serving as a distraction from its inept story.

Opening on the titular character (Laia Costa) partying it up in a nightclub, she eventually leaves to go open up the café she works at. On her way, she bumps into Sonne (Frederick Lau) and his three friends, who drunkenly ask her to hang out with them after failing to steal a car in front of her. She (inexplicably) accepts their offer, and as they walk through the streets of Berlin, she tells Frederick about herself: She’s an immigrant from Spain, having just arrived in the city several weeks ago without any friends. For some reason, Schipper and co-writers Olivia Neergaard-Holm & Eike Frederik Schulz think that being an immigrant in a new city means losing one’s ability to think; after watching Sonne steal from a corner store, and then learning his hot-tempered friend Boxer (Franz Rogowski) just got out of jail, Victoria happily follows them to hang out on a rooftop for drinks. By this point, logic has all but vanished, and Victoria’s actions are more like transparent moves by the filmmakers to sustain a narrative than realistic bad choices of an actual human being.

The only excuse given for Victoria’s dismissal of the figurative danger signs flashing over these four men is her attraction to Sonne, which gets little development before Schipper drops it to get the real story going. After one of Sonne’s friends passes out from drinking too much, he asks Victoria to help drive him and his friends to some sort of meetup. She (once again, inexplicably) agrees to drive and winds up aiding in a bank robbery when a crime lord orders Boxer to steal a bunch of money to pay off his debts. And so these four idiots drive off, hoping to score some cash from their barely thought out scheme. Will their robbery turn out unsuccessful? Follow up: Does a bear shit in the woods?

There’s no denying that Victoria is one dumb movie, but its stupidity is far more tolerable than the likes of Birdman or The Tribe, which use their penchant for long takes to give themselves the appearance of being serious art. Victoria doesn’t really aspire to be anything more than a self-contained genre piece, and that makes its silliness both easy to swallow and easy to make fun of at the same time. Yes, these characters are so incompetent it’s easy to think they were home schooled by their own pets, but this makes it perversely enjoyable to watch their plans (rightfully) fall apart.

But maybe it’s a little unfair to pick apart the screenplay since little effort went into it (due to the nature of the production, dialogue had to be largely improvised—making the screenplay only a few pages). There should be a special mention for cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, since he pulls off a superhuman feat (indeed, in the end credits his name gets acknowledged before anyone else’s). It’s easy to marvel at what he pulled off, but it also goes to show why the one-take gimmick is difficult to sustain. By unfolding in real time, the ability for elliptical editing goes away, meaning that a large chunk of Victoria is made up of interludes, with characters traveling from point A to point B. All the time spent walking to another location, or waiting around in one area for the next story beat to come along, exposes the weak structure and mechanics of the whole operation. Nils Frahm’s score provides some nice music during these “down” moments, but it’s hard to shake the feeling of being stuck in some sort of cinematic waiting room.

Still, as always, the technical fortitude on display from pulling off a successful feature-length take makes Victoria not without merit. And Laia Costa does a great job too, fighting off her poor characterization with a charisma that helps when she goes into full-on survival mode post-heist. Her presence certainly helps when Victoria seemingly doesn’t know what to do with itself. There’s something funny about the single take—a choice usually meant to make it easier to immerse oneself into a film—as it actually shows off the artifice of this film. Which isn’t surprising given how thinly drawn out Victoria feels. There’s little else appealing here aside from this singular gimmick, and once people stop being impressed by that, it’s not likely to stay memorable. One-take wonder indeed.

Originally published as part of our coverage for the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.