There are two movies playing out in the Norwegian film Pioneer. The first is a gritty procedural of a deep-sea dive, and the second, and more dominant, is a tense thriller. While at first glance these two separate stories of the film feel markedly different, even potentially at odds, they are two parts of a whole. Each shares a feeling of claustrophobia, physically and psychologically, that carries the film and makes it an engrossing experience.

Back in the late 1970’s, Norway discovered oil off its coastline and sought to build a pipeline. But the government would only agree to the pipeline’s construction on the condition that test dives were made to ensure the safety of the program. This required co-operating with an American company–here represented by Wes Bentley and Stephen Lang–that had the necessary equipment to successfully manage the dive. This makes for more than a simple cultural clash. First, it allows writer-director Erik Skjoldbjærg to play up the pernicious international interpretation of the United States as a domineering, empire-building bully. Second, it enables Skjoldbjærg to reference his debt to 1970’s American conspiratorial thrillers.

Little about the start of Pioneer’s initial premise suggests what it will turn into. Petter (Aksel Hennie) and his brother Knut (André Eriksen) are two of the Norwegian divers tasked with performing the test dive. Skjoldbjærg sketchily lays out their relationship, antagonistic but ultimately loving. They stand in stark contrast: Knut is a family man with a wife (Stephanie Sigman) and son; Petter is the slovenly uncle. Here the film finds some melodrama worthy of a very poorly written soap opera (and I say that as an apologetic fan of soaps). The film never convincingly establishes these relationships, but then again its real interests seem to lie elsewhere.

However, the film excels in other regards. During the dive, inexplicably something goes wrong, leaving Knut unconscious and his diving mask smashed open. In a fantastic, nerve-wracking scene, Petter gives Knut his oxygen tank and swims back up with his brother’s body, under threat of getting decompression sickness.

Skjoldbjærg’s manner for shooting this scene is one he takes for the rest of the film. He situates the viewer both in the psychological head space of his protagonist and the physical space of the environment. Both confining and paranoia-inducing.

At this point–about 40 minutes in–the film shifts gears. Knut doesn’t survive the incident, and Petter suspects foul-play. As Petter’s superiors and government agencies systematically deflect his concerns and questions, he becomes further convinced of his suspicions. But almost to the end of its runtime, Pioneer continues a sense of skepticism around Petter’s reliability. For one thing, prior to the dive, Petter and the other Norwegian divers were placed in a pressure chamber to test their ability to withstand the deep ocean pressures. The chamber had a hallucinatory effect on them. This element calls into question Petter’s credibility, and his obsession with discovering the truth becomes all-consuming as he grapples with his own grasp on reality.

A favorable opinion of Pioneer depends entirely on one’s response to the presentation of the plot. A favorable assessment might politely describe it as convoluted. The film’s plot is, centered as it is on a conspiracy, needlessly self-involved and complicated. But I think criticizing it for this misses the point. As previously mentioned, Skjoldbjærg draws inspiration from 1970’s American thrillers. These films–like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor–arose out of disillusionment after Watergate and the Vietnam War. While a few of these films have really great plots, they were more interested in a sustained feeling of paranoia and distrust, and they often had their conspiracies encompass just about everyone imaginable, including the highest reaches of government.

Pioneer does not attempt anything quite so vast and far-reaching, but does play around in that same convention of thrillers. Plot matters less here than a constant sense of dread and obscure mystery. Trying to pick apart the film and its plot is easy to do. The focus should be on the nervy, tension-filled pleasures of the film. (After all, The Parallax View, for example, does not make a lick of sense and is a standard of the genre). In its back-half, Pioneer holds an adrenaline-fueled single-mindedness: Petter is an everyman caught up in something even he does not quite fully understand. His investigation involves plenty of double crosses, reveals, counter-reveals, and moments of misdirection. Eventually the plot ceases to matter.

It helps that the film has such a strong visual design to support this shaky plot. Cinematographer Jallo Faber does an excellent job of creating a moody, anxious atmosphere. He nicely plays around with lights and shadows to capture the insidiousness at hand. Skjoldbjærg’s shoots a number of scenes in close-ups that emphasize the tight spaces and the feeling of being trapped. But every so often he will pull back and show a character dwarfed by their environment, as just another pawn in the game at hand. This is smart, involving filmmaking that elevates a premise that has only so much momentum to it. By its end, Pioneer drags out, running out of avenues in its loopy storytelling. After all, even the best conspiracies have their limits.

Pioneer trailer

Anthologies are by their very nature uneven, hitting creative highs in one installment before becoming all too grating in the following one. The hit-and-miss nature of anthologies is not necessarily a bad thing though. If enough entries are hitting their mark, than it makes for an exciting experience. After all, when anthologies are on their game they can ably adapt from one entry to the next, enticing us to return from one episode to the next.

The real problem with anthologies comes when their hit-to-miss ratio falls more heavily on the latter, as is the case with The ABCs of Death 2. This might not be excessively terrible if the film only had a handful of entries, like Creepshow or the V/H/S films. ABCs of Death’s gimmick, however, involves having a short film slotted for every letter of the alphabet. Filmmakers were assigned a letter and then given total creative freedom to do what they wanted. It is an exciting proposition, especially for some of the filmmakers lined up, but it ceases to matter with such little screen time to tell a story.

Recognizing this, more than a few directors aim, instead, for total, disorienting weirdness. Indeed, though ostensibly a horror anthology, the film leaves a lot to be desired in terms of actual horror. Several entries would not qualify as horror at all. In some instances, this is okay because there are enough ideas and perspective to make them interesting. “F is for Falling”, for example, is only horrifying insofar as it relates to real world horrors. It concerns itself with Israeli-Palestinian relations. While it is a timely, well-intentioned story, it is also woefully underdeveloped, especially for its heavy subject. But most of the time, the lack of scares just means that these short films feel haphazardly strung together. There is almost no thematic overlap or other types of connections between narratives, and that means when an entry is more seriously toned — as a few too many are — it really begins to drag.

The film suffers from similar problems to the first ABCs of Death. Namely that it is aggressively juvenile. Cheap, crass jokes, gory kills for their own sake, and a casual misogyny all pervade many of the entries. But it would be too simple to write off the entire film as being filtered through gross male fantasy. If anything has been improved upon from the last ABCs of Death, it is that these new shorts show at least a glimmer of being thoughtful and incisive. “A is for Amateur” may embrace the male gaze whole-heartedly — using slick camerawork to cover for its needless ogling of naked female bodies — but “T is for Torture Porn” very decisively attempts to upend the male gaze (I should say that I do not think it is entirely successful, but its larger goal is still admirable). Take yet another short, “J is for Jesus,” which tries to make a pointed critique of homophobia while also indulging in some grisly bloodletting. Not all of this works, but it feels so much more even-keeled and contemplative, if not especially more ambitious, than its predecessor.

While on the whole too many of these short films feel unexceptional – or, worse still, are straight up bad — there is some true brilliance buried here. “O is for Ochlocracy (Mob Rule)” functions as a smart deconstruction of zombie movies and our current cultural obsession with the ambling monsters. A woman finds herself on trial for murder after a cure is discovered for the zombie disease and all of the former zombies she killed are revived. It is a funny and knowing work. “W is for Wish” is another standout. It begins as a toy commercial for a dumb 80’s tv show/action figure, and then it becomes a send-up of so many awful, phoned-in animated children’s shows. Two kids are transported to their favorite show and soon discover it is a terrible place. Steven Kostanski’s direction lovingly captures the kitschy, low-budget aesthetic of much of the ’80s kids programming.

To be sure, this is a lot of the same of what the first film provided, and that means it feels largely disappointing, half-baked, and, at times, over-long. But, it is also far less belligerently, off-puttingly weird — and, more importantly, less dull — and that is a welcome relief. The ABC’s of Death 2 is more consistent than it’s predecessor, and occasionally genuinely entertaining. But two hours of unremarkable, infrequently inspired short films ensures that any marginal improvement feels negligible. To put it plainly, you are better off getting your October scares elsewhere.

Sci-fi thriller Automata’s obvious parallel – so obvious that it has dominated press publicity — is with I, Robot, both the film and the Isaac Asimov novel it was adapted from. But it is instructive to consider where the two works deviate. Automata is a flawed film, but it succeeds – or, at least, tries to succeed – in a number of places where the I, Robot film fails significantly.

Automata starts in a similar setting to its film twin, establishing a dystopian future where automatons have become an essential, natural part of human life. Additionally, the film also has these robots start to slowly gain consciousness – to the simultaneous fear and puzzlement of the humans. The robots are governed by a set of protocols that are highly reminiscent of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. Robots can’t intentionally cause harm to humans and they can’t alter themselves or other robots. Automata’s central dramatic tension arises out of the robots somehow finding a way to avoid following the latter of these two rules.

I, Robot used a similar premise to create an action film, featuring Will Smith as the hero who wards off a robot uprising. Automata has its moments of action, but it’s more fundamentally philosophical. As directed by Gabe Ibáñez, and written by Ibáñez, Igor Legarreta, and Javier Sánchez Donate, Automata has Big Questions to pose about identity, technology, and humanity.

Granted, the film poses these questions in blunt, on-the-nose ways. There are too many elements that exist purely as reductive symbolism. Protagonist Jacq Vaucan’s (Antonio Banderas) wife (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) is pregnant with a child who represents hope for humanity’s future and fear of our inescapable decline. Dialogue like “Life finds a way” or “Self-repairing implies some kind of conscience,” painfully underline the themes of the film – themes that are fairly easy to discern even without the extra nudge. But, that said, these themes remain interesting even if they feel a little overdrawn. The multiplex is lacking in not only good science fiction, but is sci-fi without any original ideas or relative ambition. It is to the film’s credit that its ambitions fall short of its grasp, rather than never being there in the first place.

This begins with the narrative tact the film takes to contextualize these themes. Solar storms have destroyed the majority of humanity and turned the Earth’s surface into an inhospitable, radioactive desert. The robots have been created in order to build and maintain barriers and defenses for one of Earth’s last remaining cities. The company that has constructed the robots, ROC Robotics, has come to dominate society, and outside of its workers and shareholders, humanity lives just above the poverty line. This has been exacerbated by humanity’s exponential reliance on the company’s robots. The robots have insinuated themselves into all elements of human life, making it difficult to survive without owning one.

Jacq Vaucan works as an insurance agent for the company. He investigates possible criminal activity related to the robots. Some of this turns out to be people lying to get a desperately needed cash payout, but increasingly Jacq finds himself dealing with inexplicable cases where manipulated robots attack humans. Jacq plays a Rick Deckard-like role — a cynical and skeptical man thrown into a complicated investigation of rogue robots, revealing dark truths about human limitations.

Automata borrows heavily from Blade Runner for much of its visual design. Its cityscape is a dark, crowded tangle: equal parts grime, smoke, and neon glow. The way Ibáñez, specifically, films the city at night heavily evokes Ridley Scott’s vision, sleek and luminous yet sinister – especially in regards to the famous shots of Deckard in a ship flying past the skyscrapers and digital billboards. The films of Neill Blomkamp appear to be another source of visual inspiration. Beside the class divides that connects their works, the other noticeable parallel is the gritty, burnt-out way Ibáñez shoots the film.

Ibáñez’s visual sensibility is easily the film’s best feature. Ibáñez began his career as an animator, primarily for a few gruesome films —The Day of the Beast deals with cannibalism and the anti-Christ, among other things – and it shows. The film looks really good, especially for its estimated budget of $15 million. It has polish and even manages some grandeur. But Ibáñez is also able to imbue wonderful, idiosyncratic touches – like an indistinguishable Dylan McDermott as a corrupt cop straight out of some pulp novel.

These notable flourishes often come from the film existing in a post-apocalyptic world with a regression in technology. That requires the robots to be advanced but also slightly retrograde. Their design is wonderful. They are slow and clunky, and they don’t have proper faces, just two lights to suggest eyes. Ibáñez allows us to see their full movement – in a manner not quite seen since Pacific Rim. Their voices come out like the speech generating device that Stephen Hawking is known for. Even Javier Bardem, who plays an important robot credited as Blue Robot, has his voice made somewhat unrecognizable.

In the early proceedings, the film does some nice world building, filling it with all sorts of these weird, specific touches. It’s here where the film uses a subtler, gentler hand in depicting just how similar the robots and humans are. Robots exist in all corners of this place and in all various manners of ways. There are homeless robots, robot beggars, disabled robots. There are even robot prostitutes in brothels created to satiate humanity’s odd fetishes.

This last robot, Cleo (voiced by Melanie Griffith), is eventually retrofitted by Dra. Dupre (also played by Griffith) with technology Jacq discovers from altered, self-aware robots. Late in the film, Cleo saves Jacq’s life and brings him into the desert surrounding the city. The second half of the film finds Jacq crossing the desert with reconfigured robots. This is where the film decidedly slags. Ibáñez plays up how long and miserable the journey is for Jacq, who is in such bad physical condition that he needs to be dragged by the robots in a former car-seat. This probably goes on longer than it needs to.

It’s here where being the thoughtful man’s I, Robot does a disservice to Automata. The film wants to be both philosophical and thrilling, and doesn’t always quite know how to effectively split the difference. It’s never exciting enough to make up for how simplistic it feels and it isn’t insightful or contemplative enough to smooth over how lacking in action it is. There are some interesting ideas being considered here, but they are no more compelling or complexly engaged than their uncited, but not-so-secret, source material.

Automata trailer

Fans of the terrific cult British teen drama Skins have long suspected that it was only a matter of time before Jack O’Connell rose to star status. Fantastic as many of the young actors of that series were, O’Connell always stood a cut above the rest, elevating even the most contrived material through sheer conviction and passion. The show made it clear that if O’Connell was only given a more mature, nuanced story, he would be an actor to look out for. Thankfully, provided a platform to fully demonstrate the considerable range of his talents, O’Connell ably rises to the occasion in the brutal, riveting prison drama Starred Up.

O’Connell stars as nineteen-year-old Eric Love. We first see Eric being transferred from a youth prison to an adult prison for being “starred up” – or being too high-risk to still be treated as a juvenile offender and thus given an early transfer. He has already been hardened by the time of his arrival. A troubled life has prepared him, to an extent, for his stint in this new prison. He carries himself with the attitude of someone who has already seen it all. But he is also still young, and he only acts like he is smarter and more in control than he actually is.

Yet the system doesn’t faze him – even as it starts to throw right hooks that probably ought to cause him to bide his time and “play by the rules,” as one person describes it. His initial arrival tells us volumes about who Eric is and what he has been through. After going through processing with a bleary look of boredom, his first act upon arrival is to masterfully, efficiently craft a razor-blade shiv. Eric is a veteran of this world, not a newborn babe up for the slaughter.

Director David Mackenzie shoots the film with a keen sense for purely visual storytelling. The majority of pertinent information is provided largely through images, and Mackenzie patiently allows us to slowly grasp the complex order of this world. He trusts that even when we don’t understand specifically what is taking place that we will get the general gist and pick up what we didn’t quite catch later (Mackenzie packs the margins of the narrative with an exceptional amount of detail that he never feels the need to call too much attention towards). This is valuable because the dialogue is thick with heavy, sometimes indecipherable, working-class British accents. Mackenzie aims for immersion, and he shoots the film in a docu-realistic style. Cinematographer Michael McDonough, best known for his work on the similarly understated yet vibrant Winter’s Bone, matches the handheld shots with cinematography that subtly drains the color to emphasize the bleaknesss and realism.

Eric is volatile, looking everywhere for an excuse to lash out. His emotional instability is exacerbated by the presence of his father Neville (Ben Mendelsohn), a prison lifer and the second-in-command of the prison’s drug trade. Neville was absent from Eric’s life growing up, and he has no clue how to act as a father to his child, even as he draws himself closer – initially to stop Eric from disrupting the drug trade and later out of a real but misplaced concern. An alternative father figure for Eric arrives when counselor Oliver Baumer (Rupert Friend) saves him from a harsher sentencing for severely beating up a fellow inmate on his first day. Oliver has Eric join his therapy group, filled with younger inmates, to try to work through his issues. The film’s central struggle centers on the pull-and-tug between Neville and Oliver over Eric. Despite how stereotypical and familiar that conflict and these characters sound on paper, the performances, the writing and the direction invest every moment with a sense of ruthless psychological realism. Oliver may be idealistic but his resolve is brittle and his optimism has its limits.

Starred Up’s script is based on writer Jonathan Asser’s actual experiences volunteering as a counselor for the HM Prison Wandsworth, and Oliver is plainly a stand-in for Asser and his perspective on the prison system. Starred Up may not be a social problem film, but in its piercing, untarnished depiction of the prison system, it becomes a powerful indictment of the institution’s many failings. Asser isn’t just interested in the prisoners and their day-to-day struggles – although that is his primary focus. Rather, he wants to build up the entire ecosystem of this world, including the guards and administrative staff, and how the system fails every person that is part of it. Starred Up makes the compelling argument that incarceration is simply easier than rehabilitation, even if in the long-run the latter would probably be more successful – but it would also be prohibitively time-consuming and less profitable.

Like the television series Orange is the New Black, the film wishes to find the humanity hidden within the institutional structure and spread empathy to the under-examined figures who are stuck there. But that’s where the parallels between these two works end. For one thing, Starred Up is set at a maximum security prison with some of England’s worst criminal offenders. For another, it’s unsparingly unsentimental in its look at the prison system. Perhaps most crucially, it concerns itself with masculinity and the corrosive way it is practiced in the prison system. Traditional masculinity defines the behavior and interactions of every inmate. During therapy, individuals make slights about other members’ mothers and the integrity of their heterosexuality (tellingly, Neville secretly has a relationship with his cellmate that he is desperate to keep under wraps). It constantly threatens to boil over into fighting, or worse. Everyone is posturing: they have appearances and reputations to maintain — ones that matter for the largely career criminal make-up of the prison who have no other options or hopes for control or power beyond these prison walls.

However, for all its cutting social commentary, Starred Up is not only a well-observed psychodrama. It is also an intense thriller. Eric’s arrival shakes up the social order of the prison. This is coupled with his unpredictable behavior. His actions ripple out to effect the whole prison hierarchy. When he runs afoul of the prison’s lucrative drug trade, he puts his life greatly at risk, both from above and within. But Eric welcomes it, needling people to see how far he can push them and jumping to violence as a first response to conflict. Mackenzie ratchets up the tension until it becomes unbearable and destruction feels all but inevitable.

If the way Starred Up is never showy, that owes partly to having a number of big performances that more than make up for the visual sparseness. There are three tremendous performances, from Mendelsohn, Friend, and especially O’Connell. O’Connell is remarkable, matching his co-stars beat-for-beat and occasionally even out-classing them. He has the charisma of a leading man, but he also has the committed rigor of a method actor. It’s at once a huge, explosive performance and also a deeply interior one. O’Connell commands the space around him in ways that actors twice his age have no clue how to do. Notice the way he carries himself. There is a full-bodied physicality to his acting – even just furrowing his brow or shifting his eyes, O’Connell is able to convey a surprising amount of information. Eric exudes restless energy. He knows no other way of life and he has resigned himself to his fate. But there is more than just weariness and barely suppressed rage here. There are hints of genuine fear. He is just a kid somewhere underneath it all. O’Connell shows this layer while also making Eric more formidable than just about every person surrounding him. It’s a fearless, mesmerizing performance. If this doesn’t make O’Connell a star, I’m not sure what will.

Juliette Lewis is an actress who seems to get relegated to supporting roles. It makes sense though. There is a wounded quality to her. Her performances are often comic, but there is regularly something sad, desperate and manic to them. Kelly & Cal asks Lewis to be slightly more reserved than usual. Yet she still brings with her the signature, quiet melancholy that defines her best performances. It is this underlying darkness and sadness brought to the film that elevates its meager story.

Kelly & Cal won the 2014 SXSW Gamechanger Award, given to a female director for a narrative film. Many of the films that are nominated for and win the award are distinguished by their desire to place women’s stories front and center – in this case, director Jen McGowan and writer Amy Lowe Starbin tell the under-told story of the early months of maternity after childbirth (though they occasionally, unfortunately lose sight of that story thread). These Gamechanger films are typically character studies that can be scathing and dark. For example, fellow 2014 nominee Obvious Child paints within certain romantic comedy lines, but it is also an uncompromising film about abortion.

Kelly & Cal also draws within some familiar genre boundaries. The film falls into the subgenre of what Rodrigo Perez calls the “‘unlikely friendship’ genre”. These are films where two disparate individuals begin an oddball friendship, one which might be skeptically received in real life but finds acceptance in the film’s reality.

Kelly (Lewis) is an ex-punk rocker turned suburban mom. She finds herself disconnected from everyone around her but, most troubling, her newborn child, as well as her husband (Cougar Town’s Josh Hopkins). Desperate to shake her miserable detachment, Kelly befriends smartass, wheel-chair-bound high school neighbor Cal (Jonny Weston).

Kelly and Cal bond over their outsider statuses and the fact that they are kind of terrible people. It is easy to imagine pre-disability Cal as a jaded loner who believed himself to be better than everyone else. The accident has only given him a convenient excuse to gripe about how awful everyone is. Kelly also carries a holier-than-thou attitude that similarly borders on grating. Kelly & Cal’s real strength draws from how dark and weird it is willing to be. Like earlier 2014 indie release Adult World, Kelly & Cal finds unexpectedly offbeat and bleak notes within conventional narrative limitations. Unlike other “unlikely friendship” films, there is no whimsy or a sense of doomed beauty to the events on display. Up to a certain point, the film makes just about every character deeply unsympathetic and unlikable. Kelly is selfish and narcissistic, and her funk stems as much from arrested development as it does from postpartum depression. However, her husband is often an inattentive, emotionally unavailable asshole, and this makes Kelly’s bizarre relationship with Cal all the more plausible.

Will they/won’t they tension hangs over Kelly and Cal’s strange relationship. Lewis and Weston have significant chemistry and the film gets a lot of mileage out of their charged scenes. At all times though, the film is aware that this relationship is questionable, and it recognizes that it is unhealthy and unnatural. Kelly pursues the relationship in spite of her knowledge that it is fundamentally icky. But Cal’s awareness is more limited, and he pursues Kelly with romantic inclinations. Kelly knows these feelings exist, but she still pushes the relationship further towards deeper intimacy and inevitable consequences.

Closed off from meaningful connection since the pregnancy, Kelly needs someone in her life. But she finds herself incapable of striking up more appropriate friendships. She tries to befriend a group of new moms, but they are dismissive and obnoxious. When she was younger, Kelly used to play in a riot grrrl band. She thinks this makes her a little cooler and wiser than everyone else around her. Never mind that she seems less attuned to the politics of punk than the privileges the aesthetics encourage.

Kelly is so caught up in her own problems that she ignores those of the people in her life. Kelly’s seemingly more put-together sister-in-law (Lucy Owen) reveals her own self-loathing over life not panning out as planned. Kelly & Cal sees nostalgia as a vice, and it views dwelling on the past as a foolish act. Kelly keeps discovering time and again that the past was not as rose-colored as she presumed. Yet she keeps returning to her memories like a junky looking for an impossible high. One night, Kelly goes out for drinks with old friends she has not seen in ages. She finds herself bored and disinterested. She is not the same person who fell in with these people. Cal also yearns for the past, one where he could walk. There is a sense of aching dissatisfaction and unfulfillment hanging over everything.

Kelly & Cal is somewhat reminiscent of Young Adult, another film about a female refusing to grow up with self-destructive relish. Kelly & Cal is not nearly as bold or daring. The film has an ending that feels pat and tacked on, and its conflicts and characters are, at times, too thinly sketched. However, for good stretches of its runtime, the film allows its protagonist to be reckless and unpleasant, and it also lets an unexpected level of sadness and ugliness linger under the surface.

For each of these films, the underlying question is about whether its central character can change. We are meant to understand in Young Adult that Charlize Theron’s Mavis Gary will never achieve change. Kelly, on the other hand, appears to have taken some steps towards growing up. She has settled down, bought a home, and had a kid. This proves to be a death sentence for her though. She was an edgy free-spirit, and this lifestyle is stifling. Up until the inescapable, inorganic final moment where Kelly happily embraces selling out, Kelly & Cal acutely mines the uglier, soul-rotting side to refusing to change.

About Alex is very much a film of its time. For starters, the film is occasionally hyper-aware, in the Chris Miller-Phil Lord vein, of its architecture as a film imbued with tropes. The film also feels like a clichéd indie where characters gather together and reveal secrets and grievances. But what truly makes About Alex a film of its moment is its intense but clumsy interest in the way recent cultural changes such as the Internet and social media have altered relationships of Millennials.

As noted through casual meta-jokes, About Alex is essentially The Big Chill for a new era: a group of college friends spend a weekend together rehashing the past after one of their own attempts suicide. The meta-ness ends at the passing references to the film’s familiarity though (“This is like one of those ’80s movies,” one person says at one point). From there on out, About Alex falls into the traps associated with its subgenre. Jesse Zwick’s script (Zwick also directed) is laboriously constructed to the point where the summer home the gang goes to feels like it has more personality and well-worn history.

Alex (Jason Ritter) has fallen out of touch with his friends, and it has heightened his depression, causing him to attempt suicide. In a lifeless montage, his old friends receive the news. Journalist Ben has failed to write a book and dodging Alex’s calls. Ben is dating Siri (Maggie Grace; yes, there are, indeed, iPhone jokes made), who fears she might be late. Overworked lawyer Sarah (Aubrey Plaza) still can’t resist the douchey charms of brash PhD candidate and resident truth teller Josh (Max Greenfield, in the meatiest and funniest role). However, Sarah secretly still pines for straight shooting financier Isaac, who brings along a much younger plus one (Jane Levy) to the event.

This is a lot of information to set up but as overwrought as it is, Zwick does a good job of managing it fleetly and quickly. After its belabored introduction, the film settles into a more comfortable, but still far too affected, rhythm. About Alex feels worked over, and this strains its ability to feel natural and lived in. The conflicts are seen from a mile off, and they tend to resolve themselves exactly as one might expect them to – writer’s block ends, quarreling couples make up, etc. At a certain point, the revelations stop feeling like revelations and begin to feel like carefully doled out dramatic beats. As if what the film was trying to say were not spelled out clearly enough, Ben provides a voice-over in two separate instances to lay out the film’s themes and messages. The blandness and familiarity of the story is matched with a drab cinematographic scheme, shot by Andre Lascaris. Lascaris emphasizes muted, autumnal colors, which only adds to the film’s sense of lifelessness.

And yet, when the action lacks a feeling for spontaneity or the dialogue begins to sound too much like dialogue (as it all too often does), the film is saved by its likable, strong cast. The film gives the faintest impressions of why these individuals would have become friends and why they would enjoy one another’s company. In its best moments, the film nicely provides us with the desire to hang out with these people, to get drunk and stoned, and swap jokes and stories. A number of these actors have done some fine work in television (Plaza on Parks and Recreation, Greenfield on New Girl, Levy on Suburgatory) a medium far better suited to low-key hang outs where we learn to like and understand a large group of people. The performer’s easygoing chemistry and the general likability of all involved only gives a glimmer of why we should care. But the characterization and plotting is so thin and dull that it’s still hard to get invested.

There is promise and occasional kernels of wisdom buried in About Alex. But it’s lost in execution. As a Millennial, I have a larger stake in the cultural dialogue of my generation. The claims of solipsism lobbed at us will not be alleviated by a film like About Alex. These are narcissistic, selfish people who turn the well-being of one friend into an excuse to make everything all about themselves. Unlike The Big Chill’s characters, who had been out of college for many years, these characters are just a brief five years removed. Their nostalgia, crises, and bitterness feel a little too unearned. Unlike another Millennial-marked work, television series Girls — which is about the self-entitlement and delusion of people in their twenties — About Alex has no real interest in showing its characters’ actions and behaviors as wrong-footed or dissecting its characters to better understand their psychology.

At one point, in a terribly written scene, Josh tells everyone that his dissertation is on the way texts, emails, etc. are shaping our lives and will become biographical information for history. It’s the film’s clumsiest scene, revealing the gap between the film’s ambitions and what it actually accomplishing. At a number of points, About Alex notes the way we’re more connected and in touch due to social media but how that’s a poor substitute for actual social interaction and connection. It’s not a bad observation, it’s even one that would be interesting to explore further. But the film has such a poor handle on the inherent realities of this new media age that it feels glib and shallow.

However, the film is’t entirely shallow. For instance, when Zwick forces characters to confront Alex’s suicide, the film finds some emotionally authentic moments. When About Alex’s characters remember to not be characters in an indie dramedy, the slow dissolution of their friendships are relatable, if no less contrived.

Director Manuel Martín Cuenca’s Cannibal won the 2013 Goya Award (the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars) for best cinematography. It’s not hard to see why. Pau Esteve Birba’s cinematography is eerie and elegant, and it helps set the mood for Cuenca’s dark, unsettling story about a quiet tailor who harbors the secret double life of a man with a taste for human flesh.

Considering its lurid premise, Cannibal is oddly reserved in how it tells its story. The film begins with a striking opening shot, a long, unbroken scene, shot from a distance, of a couple at a gas station at night. It’s a slow and ponderous scene that ends with the point of view of protagonist and titular cannibal Carlos (Antonio de la Torre). The shot is reminiscent of the incredible shot in The Bling Ring when the hapless teen criminals rob Audrina Patridge’s glass, steel cube house as the building’s light emanates out through the nighttime shadows. Like that film, and even more closely aligned with Michael Haneke’s directorial coolness, Cannibal is detached and distant from its subject matter. This makes the film often frustrating, but it also leads to some of its most disturbing moments where the uncertainty and ambiguity leaves us with startling horrors.

Carlos stalks the couple from the gas station and veers their car off the road. From the wreckage, he pulls out only the woman (tellingly, he only eats women), and he proceeds to bring her to a cabin tucked away in the mountains. Gruesome as what takes place is, Cuenca shows restraint in how he films this and later scenes. While it’s implied that Carlos butchers the woman, his actions take place off-screen with only a single rivulet of blood shown to suggest the horrors just out of sight. The film elides the Grand Guignol visions of fiction’s most famous cannibal Hannibal Lector. Instead, Cannibal plays more like psychological horror, placing Carlos under a microscope and asking us to try to understand him.

In its interest in the banality of evil, the film has more than a few things in common with The Vanishing. Much of the film’s first hour is so utterly mundane, showing the details of Carlos’ day-to-day life. At times, this can make it easy to forget that Cannibal is at its core a horror movie that just happens to have a lot of art house rigor. From what we see of Carlos’ life, we come to realize that he leads a solitary, hermit-like existence. This is shaken up by the arrival of new neighbor Alexandra (Olimpia Melinte), a flighty woman who recently moved from Romania. Carlos yearns for her but is too fearful to make a connection. His encounters with Alexandra, needless to say, do not end well.

But this is just the beginning of Carlos’ troubles. Soon after her disappearance, Alexandra’s twin sister Nina (also Melinte, doing some great work delineating the two parts) arrives and starts asking questions. Much as Carlos tries to resist getting drawn in, he ends up slowly insinuating himself into Nina’s life and her investigation. The film never makes it clear whether Carlos does this due to an unexpected second chance opportunity at the previously botched relationship or in hopes of covering up his involvement in the disappearance. Honestly, motivations are thin in the film. While initially this is intriguing and engaging, the opaqueness wears itself thin. Unlike the psychological puzzles of, say, Morvern Callar or Under the Skin — and despite how good de la Torre is at compellingly revealing Carlos’ inner emotional turmoil — Cuenca just doesn’t have enough command of his material for this be consistently tantalizing and rewarding.

At the film’s center is the suggestion of the possibility that the beauty Nina might tame the beast Carlos. This Beauty and the Beast tale has more Jean Cocteau than Walt Disney in it, filled as it is with sinister and Freudian undercurrents (The film begins with the epitaph “IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER”, and it’s heavily implied that Carlos has some serious mommy issues). The one concrete answer to Carlos’ behavior is his periodic church attendance. Carlos is a deeply repressed individual, especially sexually, and much of this likely stems from his devout Catholic background. Carlos uses murder and cannibalism as a substitution for actual sexual experiences, which he has never actually had. The film hints at Carlos’ actions being a kind of transubstantiation. The consumption of the flesh is tantamount to being able to possess that flesh in a way Carlos is incapable of within the purview of traditional, polite society. Carlos has taken Catholicism’s complicated relationship of conflating guilt and desire and turned it into his whole unsteady mental foundation.

It’s fitting that Carlos’ profession is that of a tailor. He, like the film surrounding him, is buttoned down to seem more substantial and wholly good than he is. Cuenca stretches the film’s premise out beyond what it’s capable of withstanding (even only at nearly two hours it feels its length, and it probably should have been cut down about a half hour shorter). Occasionally this pays off in disquieting scenes that cut through the film’s chilly demeanor. But more often it makes the film feel indulgent and not completely conceived or thought through. Birba’s impressive, alluring surfaces cannot hide that there is too much lacking at heart. If we are, forgive the lame use of the idiom, what we eat, Cannibal is all too human, flawed and imperfect but occasionally worthy of admiration and appreciation.

Cannibal Trailer